aspie rhetor

Entry tale

As does any stressed out grad student, I’ve been questioning my decisions. Why am I an English major? How on earth did I come to enjoy rhetoric and composition in the first place? How can I stay up later without abusing caffeine?

This past fall, in a composition theory course, we were asked to compose our “entry tales” into the field. I decided to focus my narrative on the intersections I saw between my experiences as an Asperger’s autistic and my experiences as a compositionist wannabe. As I reread what I wrote nearly one year ago, I’m struck by how much I’ve learned since then — “then” being a moment when I thought I knew lots. And I realize that I’ve got lots more to learn… which makes me want to stick around in academia for another fifty years, even if it does mean that I have to socialize.

What I wrote, October 2007:

I have in my stockpile two narratives for describing my entry into composition studies. The first, and most often used, relies on metaphor and describes my aspirations to become a computer programmer when, lo and behold, I “saw the light” and realized, via divine inspiration, that English studies held my salvation. This first story often makes for wonderful application fodder: it lumps my previous computer science background and my newfound love of writing into a realization of spiritual proportions, thereby opening up the digital communication doorway in composition studies. Through this story, I have somehow become the mediator of two discourses, the champion of writing/communication and technology or writing/communication as technology—anything dealing with both words, as long as the emphasis remains on writing or communication.

My second narrative, however, does not meld the right-brain/left-brain worlds quite so fluently. In fact, of the few times I’ve dared to disclose it, my audience has probably doubted the existence of any “mediating” corpus callossum. Like many an interesting story, this one begins with the lost me seeking to be a saved me—a high school drop-out attempting a technical college. There’s a stock character, Professor Dan, the pony-tailed English teacher with a penchant for hacky sack and Donald Murray truisms. At one point, as with all stock conversations, an exchange occurs between the outside-the-box hipster and the conservative, inexperienced student, an exchange meant to spark conflict and radical new ideas, man, an exchange meant to so totally blow minds—except, this exchange results in all of the wrong things. After reading several of my essays, Professor Dan tells me that I’m in the wrong major and that I should switch to English. And I, horrified that I could be in the wrong major, visit the English department head and switch majors that day. Later, I learned from a mortified Professor Dan, after one of his close-your-eyes-while-freewriting techniques, that he was merely complimenting me, not really suggesting that I must go change my major that instant. He had wanted me to “think about it,” to muse and question, not to take immediate action. I recall thinking, in a bemused and irritated manner, Why didn’t he just say so?

Literally speaking, story number one occurs after story number two: after I’d already done the deed, I began to question being a student of English. There have been other notable misunderstandings on my part along my path toward grad-student-hood, but all theoretical perceptions of writing and communication began, for me, the moment I failed to understand the subtext of an important conversation: I could not register the simple genre of “the compliment,” and yet there I was, an English major. As a composition scholar wannabe, issues of understanding, of perception versus reception, strike me as most paramount. As a student-teacher with Asperger Syndrome, a mild variant of autistic disorder, I supposedly cannot communicate appropriately: I am what some (but not what I) might label as idiot savant, social retard, or male-brained. In everyday situations, I fail to meet the aims of the English 110 text, Writing Analytically, to make the implicit explicit, to root out the subtext from the apparently literal, or the literal from the apparently subtext. And somehow, I am a person with a communication disorder teaching first-year students how to communicate. This paradox used to trouble me, therefore keeping me closeted and guarded—until very recently.

During my first year as a Master’s student in (creative) writing at DePaul University, requirements forced me into a composition theory course, my first explicit introduction to studies of rhetoric and composition. Our professor divulged a useful heuristic for reading articles—marking and noting instances of epistemology, axiology, pedagogy, and procedure, this method borrowed from Richard Fulkerson’s “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century”—which inadvertently captured reading in such a mechanistic, quantifiable light that I began to perseverate on the course readings, treating articles like word searches rather than theories. This method worked for a time, and my left-brained brain rooted out keywords and synthesized them with keywords from other articles, thereby allowing me to mimic understanding and reception. As we plowed through process and post-process pedagogy, eventually landing at social epistemics, one class member began critiquing David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” referencing ideas beyond the scope of our pristine Fulkerson-derived heuristic: he began comparing discourse communities to his seven-year-old Aspergian son.

My classmate, R, began describing the plight of the high-functioning autistic, this inability to grasp issues of nuance and audience. Bartholomae, he complained, was all bunk for people with Asperger’s. How could they, as writers or speakers, grasp the values of a discourse when they lack a theory of mind, when they lack empathy, when they lack the ability to understand any appropriate social convention? They could only anticipate and emulate—not reciprocate meaningfully. I did not respond to my classmate and his insistence that his son would never be a good writer or speaker. I had, at this point in time, been determined not to disclose unless absolutely necessary, instead preferring the labels of eccentric or neurotic to high-functioning and autistic. Moreover, how could I presume to speak for his son? And how could he or his son presume to speak for me? I fumbled with my Bartholomae text and my neat little “axiology” markings in the margins. At this very moment, were we shaping a discourse on autism, or were we letting that discourse—that discourse of medical statistics and manuals, of parents and suffering and hopelessness—shape us?

This conversation of which I was not visibly a part, I think, steered me into composition studies. I had long viewed writing in terms of detail and pattern, loving stylistics courses more than workshop courses, where expression and individuality usually reigned. R’s musings jettisoned me out from my pattern funk, so to speak, causing me to grapple with something far more abstract—what/who makes certain forms of writing and speaking socially appropriate? And why, did he feel, that these forms were unattainable for certain people?

Regardless of (dis)ability, I think that we all experience communication breakdown, lapses and gaps in understanding and intention. While R described his son’s obsession with baseball statistics, I immediately recalled my childhood obsessions with New Hampshire roadmaps and the governors of Montana—but in relating his rants to myself, in taking things so personally, I was ignoring his intent, ignoring his message. If, as Bartholomae argues in “Inventing the University,” a dominant academic discourse prescribes what student writing needs, then how are individual students, each with her own unique cognitive makeup, to infer what those needs are? Somehow, I must have inferred these needs: while my speaking abilities are lacking, and while I routinely fail to interpret subtext and humor, I can still discover patterns, even figurative patterns. Even if we, autistics and non-autistics, are able to deduce the “how” of communication, then how are we to surmise the why—and how are we to change discourses, to make rhetorical practices and conventions more explicit and malleable, more attainable to those that desire them? I’m not so sure that we can even answer these important questions—but we certainly can try.

What we relegate to common sense is, in reality, constructed. To say that I or R’s son, as autistics, lack common sense, is really to say that we lack the means or power to have a common sense that is constructed by others, a common sense that is perhaps not so common. If something is created, then somebody must create it, and it somehow must be distributed or regulated. In the composition classroom, in my role as teacher, if I desire for my students to receive and distribute this creative power, then I should aim for them to be cognizant of ideology and how it functions in a given discourse, an area that Bartholomae decidedly leaves out of his argument. To just tell students that something is “accepted” is to merely teach regurgitation: I see little difference between this and Applied Behavorial Analysis, a treatment for autism that involves rewarding socially acceptable behavior and punishing socially unacceptable behavior—which bears a remarkable likeness to grading. (This is not to say, of course, that grading is as awful of an experience as ABA, or that it’s “bad”—but it can certainly seem this way.) Rather than teaching others to merely accept conventions that are “accepted,” we should have them explore the ideologies that shape discourse and the discourses that shape ideology. If Aspergian children are taught to clone neurotypical or “normal” mannerisms, for instance, then they are merely relegated to a life of mimicry.

Mimicry is not communication on any level—not that of autistic or of writer. Communication involves conflict and contending for legitimacy. If we are to have others understand our intent, our personal nuances and contexts, then we must strive for middle ground rather than accepted ground. As James Berlin, in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Process,” maintains, “Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed” (697). Like Berlin, my current approach to teaching involves a lens through which we view writing as “historically bound,” as a construct that has been shaped by certain discourses and beliefs (695). In this vein, I feel that my responsibility is not confined merely to the teaching of writing, the how; I must also encourage students to examine discourse conventions, the accepted axiologies that govern writing, the why. I am of the frame of mind that, no matter how perspicuous we try to be, we can never exactly capture, communicate, or think our thoughts through language—but we can realistically hope for some shared understanding, some idea of intent, context, purpose, and audience, if we only foreground ideology and power dynamics and present communication in a way that is more accessible, more explicit. After all, isn’t this what we really strive for—to understand and to be understood?