A Generic Web of Citation/The Necessity of Consensus, A Blog in Two Parts

When Anna and I first set out to design our tool, we at once felt the shadow of our last build-a-tool assignment looming over our shoulder. I can’t speak for Anna, but I feel like the tools we built last time were a constraint on this assignment, limiting our invention of new or unique tools. Alternatively, I think we might have a limited number of genres in mind when it comes to research tools, since research is such a goal-directed and constrained endeavor to begin with. Together, these two constraints led to the two of us hemming and hawing about the tool we designed, for fear that what we designed would be too similar to what came before. And to a degree, what Anna and I decided upon was similar to the tool Joe and I designed way back when, in that it focuses on creating and visualizing an intertext of citation centered around a certain concept. But instead of coming up with threshold concepts related to a turn, we arbitrarily took Dr. Graban’s selection of articles as the genre canon that would be the locus of our tool. With these as our focal point, we wanted to trace the ancestry and subsequent influence of this turn and visualize it in such a way that the app could be generative to a user. Navigating either forward or backward in time, a scholar could return to the early genre theorists like Bakhtin to potentially find a different point of intellectual departure; or alternatively, one could trace citations into the future to see how the ideas of the “genre-turn” have evolved and been adopted by others in the field.

Looking at this week’s readings and the scholars they draw upon, I’ve seen lots of familiar names—some I expected and some that surprised me. Bitzer, Burke, and Bakhtin were no surprise, as they figure so heavily into what we do in rhet/comp. Even Halliday has a connection to linguistics. But two names I didn’t expect to see in relation to genre and community were Kuhn and Rorty. Evoking Kuhn in relation to community makes sense because his Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a sociological/social psychological study of the scientific community; implicit within that work are scientific genres, as uniform methods of reporting experimental results are part of the initial construction of a scientific paradigm. Kuhn ultimately concludes that scientific epistemology is inherently social, despite its pervasive claim to truth—a “truth” we see in scientific views of writing as just a means of transmitting results, not inflected with ideology at all. Rorty attempts to take up Kuhn and expand him to all discursive communities, and I think actually falls short by suggesting that abnormal discourse acts in ignorance of or willingly flouts genre conventions. And maybe Rorty is being misrepresented here in Trimbur, but that doesn’t align with my understanding of Kuhn. While “revolutionary” scientists are trying to change fundamental beliefs about the universe, they keep some consistency with conventions so experiments can be replicated or they work under some of the same procedures and assumptions as the rest of science—a far cry from abandoning the conventions of a community completely.

What I’m getting at here is that even in scientific revolutions—a space of active rhetorical dissensus that generates new consensus—there must remain some underlying consensus among the participants of a group. There remains in that social system an element of stability, and there will inevitably be excluded discourses. Given that, I’m not sure if I follow Trimbur’s idea that consensus should be considered unattainable. Kuhnian epistemology calls for periods of de-stabilized discourse, but ultimately a balance is restored. In science, its fairly easy to see how “abnormal” discourses are suppressed because empirical evidence doesn’t support the Othered discourse; its obviously not as easy to reach stability when we are dealing with people and different ways of speaking/writing/knowing, but embracing dissensus in the name of an unattainable consensus seems just as utopian as the consensus Trimbur proposes. So, I guess ultimately I’m coming down on the side of collaborative learning that is indeed collaborative. Introducing students to a discourse community—whether the Academy or the realm of writing as a whole—providing some guidelines or genre conventions, or even the notion of genre itself, and tasking students with working through these discourses together; both with each other and with the teacher.