Audience & Agency

    This week’s articles raise some complications and point to opportunities for classroom applications as well.  Principal are the notions of audience and agency -- what they imply generally and specifically for FYC writing.  As Michelle notes, Goffman goes on for many pages about various forms and functions of talking.  While I, too, found this less than fascinating (am I his intended audience?), I have to concede that complicating our thought on audience, to some degree, is exactly what our students need.  Initially, I feel, most novice writers tend to have either no perception of audience, or perhaps a vague, simplistic concept, which can lead to vague, simplistic compositions.  On the other hand, while it’s healthy to stretch our minds to consider the 31 flavors of speaker and audience, I’m actually more reticent to push students too far in this direction, to the extent that they freeze up -- exactly the opposite of where I want to take them.
    The more I read Goffman, the more it occurs to me that we both talk far less and far more these days.  Increasingly, we have less occasion to speak face to face with colleagues, friends or even adversaries, in part due to electronic media, in part because we’re all so busy.  Even in Congress, where a few years back they installed closed-circuit television cameras, I understand that representatives more and more are avoiding debate on the congressional floor, opting instead to receive speech summaries from assistants who take notes from the CCT.  At the same time, nowadays, everyone’s multitasking, returning phone calls or texting while driving; makes you wonder how Western Civilization ever got along without the smart phone.  Is all that purposeful talking or are we hooked on them like sex addicts chasing sex?  Potentially, all this intercourse (!) could be positive for our students, ever mindful of audience on some level.
    When Goffman downplays the legitimacy of TV audiences, calling them merely “vicarious” because they cannot interact in real time, I feel the writer does his own theory a disservice.  His article is truncated at best if his intentions are limited to speaking.  Certainly this is exactly the scope of his paper, but, for our purposes, his thoughts merit broader application for the classroom, which begs our re-imagining the his points for the written word.  If he calls the TV audience vicarious, this is only one step better than those out of earshot, relegated, as he says to “unratified” listening.  For the student writer, considering audience means considering the ratified as well as the unratified, that is, if we’re willing to truly lead them down that rabbit hole.  As general communicators, this notion of the unratified raises the sobering subject of uninvited readers taking in social media -- like this blog! -- though, the more we know about government surveillance, the more likely it is that the uninvited invite themselves on a regular basis.
    Kershbaum raises the thorny issue of feeling like a failure in communication when our audience rejects, not only what we’re saying, but who we are as agents.  He refers to Hockenberry’s misadventure with a woman who rejected the way he represented himself as disabled: “I did not realize I was part of her own confrontation with the experience of disability.”  At first, his urge is to foist his agency upon his audience: “...I am John!...You must deal with me as I think of myself.”  (58) At length, he sees that communication is not so simple.  This again complicates things for our students.  Just when they were settling into a solid understanding of the writer/audience relationship, the author defines rhetorical agency as “a negotiation in which individuals do not have full control of their own identity.” (60)  Like Kershbaum, students are apt to find this disturbing at first, but it may be useful as a pre-lesson to peer review work, where some students are often dismayed by their peers’ apparent misinterpretations.  Ultimately, language and meaning are never neutral, but are socially constructed.  As a teacher, I need to take this as a caution as well, when reading a student paper, not to jump to conclusions about the content in writing simply because, initially, it represents “facts” differently than I’d preconceived them.
    Cooper offers a similar lesson, namely not to presume that we have the answers, though I feel she shoots herself in the foot by using Obama as the personification of this concept.  Cooper’s perspective of refraining from a rush to decision can be richly instructive for student brainstorming and, again, for me to keep myself open to options in the classroom.  I like the way she makes her point by citing Cass Sunstein, a close friend of Obama in law school, who says of her pal, Barack, “with Obama, it’s like Learned Hand when he said, ‘The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’” This is a spirit worth emulating, from the science lab to the English class to the floor of Congress.  For young writers, it forces them back to seriously re-consider their opponent’s counterpoints, an essential step for successful argumentation.  In the case of the president, however, especially now, as this former anti-war candidate marches into battle while flatly ignoring the polls that overwhelmingly decry such bloodshed, it’s truly difficult to imagine a character who has turned his back on Cooper’s idea of open-minded dialog more than Barack Obama.