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Articles Conference Reviews |
Octalog IIISession A Featured Session - Octalog III: The Politics of Historiography in 2010 If my experience is any indication, historians of rhetoric must have been shuddering with barely contained delight at the prospect of a third Octalog at the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Louisville, KY. If attendance is any indication, the crowded ballroom suggests my experience was widely shared. And if my experience was widely shared, a majority of the attendees can’t help but to have felt a little disappointed. The promise of “Octalog III” was substantial. Eight speakers, some of whom have published impressive and important additions to a third wave (or fourth wave, depending on how you count) of rhetoric and composition histories, would present five-minute statements about “what ‘counts’ in rhetorical studies and histories.” Of note especially were Jessica Enoch and Malea Powell, who have produced important histories of contributions made by women and Native Americans to the rhetorical tradition; the other panelists were recognized scholars in the field who have done important work as well. To boot, Victor Vitanza, “the great epistemological anarchist in the field” and a member of the first Octalog in 1988, was conscripted as a respondent (Vitanza 20). There was no shortage of intelligent, thoughtful scholars lined up for Octalog III. The echoes of Octalogs past were evident throughout the panel introduction as chair Lois Agnew situated the work of the 9 featured panelists (including the respondent) in relation to the previous 22 years of work emanating from the first Octalog. Nevertheless, it quickly became apparent that Octalog III was Octalog in name only. Because my space here is limited, and also because the position statements are to be published in a forthcoming issue of Rhetoric Review, I will not attempt to recount what each speaker said. Rather, it seems more appropriate to present my sense of why Octalog III did not represent well the lineage it was supposed to extend. As an audience member and an aspiring historian of rhetoric, Octalog III’s most striking deviation from the Octalogonal tradition was that panelists seemed not to be expected to discuss history or historiography. In fact, at least two panelists (and maybe more, though my memory escapes me) did not even mention history or historiography. Ralph Cintron, for example, was the second presenter and made a rousing statement about the need for extra-disciplinarity and political action. Nevertheless, his talk left me and the people sitting at my table with just one question: “What does this have to do with historiography?” The same question might reasonably have been asked about the statements given by Ron Jackson and LuMing Mao (and no doubt some audience members would suggest Victor Vitanza, although I would disagree). This is not, of course to say, that Cintron’s, Jackson’s, and Mao’s presentations were not interesting, important, or smartly presented. Quite the opposite. And it is reasonably clear in the description of the panel that speakers were asked to address “rhetorical scholarship” broadly. But the fact that they did not address historiography as part of a panel titled “Octalog III: The Politics of Historiography in 2010” raises some notable questions, chiefly, “Why did organizers of a panel presumably about historiography, which extends a tradition of theoretical discussions about how and why historians do historical work, include so many scholars who are not principally historians (and in some cases, not historians at all)?” In large part, the failure of Octalog III seems to be that organizers determined that representation, rather than historiography, was the paramount concern. For example, the previous Octalogs were well represented, by Agnew who helped organize Octalog II, by Vitanza who was a member of the original panel, and by generations of scholars and students sitting in the audience (including Thomas Miller, the respondent for Octalog II, who asked a question during the discussion period). In addition, Agnew opened the session by announcing that James J. Murphy, chair of the original Octalog, was in attendance. Sadly, she lamented, the chair of Octalog II, Richard Enos, could not be present (or re-present, as Vitanza might write). The panel, also, was a picture of representation: six men; four women, including the chair; multiple cultures, races, and nationalities; and multiple research specialties, including disability studies, Non-Western rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, and Native American rhetorical practices, among others. Of course, widely representing previous conference panels and multiple subject positions is not in and of itself problematic; but the elision of history in Octalog III suggests that representation was given precedence over historiography. Rather than debating the political, ideological, and epistemological grounds for writing histories of overlooked communities (the politics of historiography), the panel instead made the case for representing the multitude of voices and subject positions that have collectively constituted the history of rhetoric (the politics of representation). In other words, panelists were not so much engaged in a discussion about why and how to write histories—the central concern of previous Octalogs—as they were wrestling over who should get historicized about next. For example, Malea Powell and Ron Jackson were concerned with recovering Non-Western histories of rhetoric, but the political issues raised were more about Western and Non-Western traditions than they were about the kinds of history that can or should be brought to bear on that project (although Powell did make a powerful argument for re-envisioning what kinds of materials can and should count—one of the few statements in the whole panel that actually addressed historiographical concerns). Likewise, Arthur Walzer, who represented the most traditional political position among the speakers, made an argument for why historians need to continue to focus closely, though not necessarily exclusively, on the Western rhetorical tradition. And Jay Dolmage exhorted historians to look for the most tense and contested subjects to write histories about (for him, the body and representations thereof), because changing the frames of our historical lenses also changes epistemologies, ideologies, etc. While all the panelists were interested in recovering the lost voices, it seems no one’s project revolved around examining the tool—history—used to do so. A generous reading might be that panelists were historicizing previous attempts at rhetorical history, but that project still ignores the politics of historiography. In essence, even the majority of the panelists who did discuss history did not discuss historiography or its politics. Instead, panelists represented the possibilities for representing underrepresented communities. The decision to compose a panel to represent multiple communities in rhetorical theories and histories is fraught with complications. First, as many theorists and scholars have been noting at least since Octalog II, representation is itself a contested and problematic term and concept (e.g., Hall). But even if we ignore for a moment the theoretical implications of representation, there are still problems to consider. By collecting together a group of non-historians to discuss the politics of historiography, the organizers have made one of two points: 1) historians of rhetoric are not a diverse group—or, at least, not diverse enough to compose a panel of eight or nine historians of rhetoric and manage to represent multiple subject positions at the same time; and/or 2) rhetoric and composition historians have figured the politics of historiography out, and therefore the questions and discussions that drove the first two Octalogs are no longer necessary for historians in the field. The first point is worth considering (Octalog IV anyone?). The second point, I believe, is decidedly untrue. Still, either or both of these questions would have been really important topics to consider in a politics of historiography, as would direct attention to the problems of representation raised in critical theory, applied to rhetoric and composition histories, and embodied by the panel. For all its faults, Octalog III was not a total disaster for historians of rhetoric. Vicki Tolar Burton began the morning with a reasoned statement about broadening historians’ attention to archives; Jessica Enoch renewed and extended historians’ attention to the feminist projects of rhetorical histories; and Malea Powell gave a stirring call for historians to attend to rhetoric beyond “The Rhetorical Tradition.” And for those of us who still might not have been moved, Victor Vitanza enacted and performed a warning to “Beware of chronologic!” which was the strongest link to the first Octalog, and which left an equal number of attendees baffled as energized. Finally, while all of the presenters lived up to their reputations as intelligent scholars and presented interesting work, and while many attendees I talked with reported being invigorated by the talks that did not address historiography—especially those given by Cintron, Jackson, and Mao—I’m left thinking that this panel would have been much better served by not pretending to carry on the legacy of the Octalog. It was a disservice to the participants who were not historians and therefore could not be reasonably expected to discuss the politics of historiography. And it was a disservice to those of us in the audience who are still left waiting for the actual discussion of historiography promised by the title, “Octalog III.” Works Cited Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage: London, 2003. Print Vitanza, Victor J. Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric. SUNY Press: Albany, 1997. Print. |