Finding the Funk: Rhetoric and Composition as Disciplinary Center

According to Foucault, discipline is “a principle which is itself relative and mobile; which permits construction, but within narrow confines” (1466). For my group's project, Foucault’s section on disciplinarity helped us to consider the context of Banks’ speech within academia. Banks’ funk, flight, and freedom trope is rooted in cultural identification though his call to “value other voices” within academic scholarship, pedagogy, and service (273). As a field, rhetoric and composition was “transformed” and re-created through “work” accomplished by feminist rhetorics, queer rhetorics, black rhetorics, Latino/a rhetorics, first-generation students, and people from all backgrounds (271). Accordingly, Banks believes rhetoric and composition exists in a unique, intermediary space between “disciplinary maturity and yet remains undisciplined” (270).

Through an academic lens, Foucault’s definition of disciplinarity as “relative and mobile” would certainly seem fitting, but Banks calls for the CCCC’s audience to extend their figurative gazes past the “narrow confines.” In expanding our research, service, and pedagogy, Banks encourages the discipline to “color outside the lines” and incorporate voices “outside of the academy” (278). For these reasons, Banks notes the field has the potential to be an “intellectual hub” and an interdisciplinary center for campus culture. Through Banks’ conception of “funk,” which draws from the musical genre and scholars such as Tony Bolden, he centers rhetoric and composition’s discourse in disciplinary mess.  

“Funk” extends across methodologies (e.g., postcolonial self-reflexivity), across ideologies, and across cultures. Related to Muckelbauer’s concept of truth, “as the product of multiple discursive codes and multiple distinct practices,” funk represents an approach to truth. Funk, as Banks notes, “is worthy of sustained scholarly attention” which “signifies not only honest expression, exertion, and integrity, but acumen, celebration, commitment to one’s work” (270). Funk as a discursive mentality allows scholars and instructors to construct the messy, complicated layers of scholarship, pedagogy, and service. In doing so, the discipline has the opportunity to work toward freedom (intellectual, justice), flight, and, referring to Muckelbauer, truth. Similar to Banks’ text, Muckelbauer’s notion of freedom is centered around “power relations … to oneself, to others, and to institutions” (89).

On one level, our group’s discourse analysis reflects an effort to touch on the larger, transtextual concepts within Banks’ text. In order to reach that point, we conducted a detailed, sentence-level analysis to examine the intratextual, contextual, and transtextual elements at play. Our visualization is based on our understanding of these terms, which are defined as follows:

Intratextual: sentence- or paragraph-level terms, themes, or tropes (funk, flight, freedom).

Contextual: direct references that range from outside sources to ideologies that Banks reinforces throughout his text.

Transtextual: what the audience brings (e.g., broader ideologies, experiences) to their understanding of the text. The transtextual elements influence contextual and intratextual elements.

We pulled patterns of smaller terms repeated over the course of our selected pages, and we considered the broader ideologies (e.g., race and gender), or transtextual elements, the terms alluded towards. Through our visualization, we attempted to convey the ways Banks’ speech is rooted in cultural identification, particularly through his concept of “Funk, Flight, and Freedom.” Within his speech, he refers to Bolden’s definition of funk as a “kinetic epistemology” and an “archive of cultural memory” (270). Although our group’s section focused on Banks’ call to action, the basis of his speech is embedded in the discipline’s need for more voices outside of the academy.

Our visualization helped us to understand the major concepts at play within Banks’ text, notably the presence of culture and identity, and how the concepts link to our work within academia. In order to depict the terms, “Funk, Flight, and Freedom” represent our visualization’s point-of-entry. Although these concepts are placed in the middle of our visual, it sits between transtextual and contextual terms (top half) and intratextual terms (bottom half). By distinguishing these two halves, we are able to depict Banks’ most important points within the discipline (e.g., from the evolution of technology to pedagogy) to his text’s larger implications for academia (e.g., community and literacy activism).

After many hours of reading, analyzing, and visualizing, I believe our group has created a thorough, detailed discourse map. Yes, the end result looks a little complicated, perhaps a little funky, but this is in line with Banks’ notion of discourse. This is in line with what Banks calls rhetoric and composition “in all its messiness” (269).