November 3, 2016

Funk and Freedom take Flight in new compositional discourses

In reading through Adam Banks 2015 CCCC Chairs Address titled ““Ain’t No Walls behind the Sky, Baby! Funk, Flight, Freedom,” our group tackled this project in two steps. The first step in our discourse analysis was to break up our five pages into individual paragraphs and even further, into single sentences. We then created specific columns for intratextual, contextual and transtextual references. Subsequently, each paragraph and sentence were broken down and examined for any of the three themes. Our second step (using the program draw.io) allowed us to explore the overarching themes that we saw present within the last five pages of Banks speech. These themes included connections to culture, audience, agency, communication, and technology as we saw theme playing a big part in the creation of Banks’ argument for the use of Funk, Flight and Freedom in the evolution of contemporary composition. Through these two explorations, I was able to see connects to our readings in terms of historical contexts, which are complicated through McGee’s concept of Audience, Foucault’s discipline and Muckelbaur’s descriptions of freedom.

Within Banks speech, he appears to be calling the audience to action for their communities and to change the way they should be looking at composition. He wants them to “worry a little less about being neat and clean, a little less about respectability inside our departments, programs, and universities,” (Banks, 272). Meaning that he wants his audience to forget the social formalities that they know that have been established within their institutions and communities so that they can, “embrace boldness, complexity, and even a little irreverence and messiness that we will be able to take flight into intellectual, pedagogical, and programmatic places that we might partially see” (Banks, 272). This established audience in this sense of Banks as an advocate for change   has then been transformed into what McGee would describe as “the people” who are  “a function dreamed by an advocate and infused with an artificial, rhetorical reality by the agreement of an audience to participate in a collective fantasy” (McGee, 240).
However, as the audience forms a collective, they cease to exist as a “people” due to the prevailing Marxist ideology that history plays a role in the reactions that people have had to large social events (in reference to McGee, 248).

The historical context in which Banks was speaking allowed him to argue for the expansion of rhetoric beyond what we know and rather to explore other minority voices (such as Hispanic, African, Queer, and Asian authors). Banks puts this in context of new technologies and literacies that need to be brought into classrooms in order to expand on topics of “intellectual freedom and racial and social and sexual and economic justice because the only way to gain the freedom we so desperately need as a society and as a discipline is through the very problems that threaten and seem so intractable” (Banks, 277). For Banks, it appears that discipline is more in terms of Rhetoric as a field of study that needs to be re-examined while for Foucault the concept of discipline is “a principle which is itself relative and mobile; which permits construction, but within narrow confines”(B/H, 1466).

Banks also discusses the role that technology plays in new composition in terms of a new digital field and media literacies. These evolutions of digital environments has allowed for a larger exploration within the fields of gender and race as well to create new connectiosn with other varied disciplines. Banks connects this to the concept of freedom as “freedom in this unfree world because the only freedom we will see, the only freedom we will get, is the freedom we take.” (Banks, 276). This connects to Muckelbauers concept of Freedom as a something could be seen as oppressive due to higher institutions placing their will on what freedom could be thus, limiting the expressions “multiple practices of freedom” (Muckelbauer, 88).



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