Susan Miller, in her book Textual Carnivals, recognizes that composition is an institutional way of creating a high/low binary within the discipline of English Studies. At present, composition's "low" status within departments stems from its connection to an infantilized student body whose unclear, grammatically awkward writing provides a carnivalesque "Other" allowing Literature to define itself in a "high" position as masterful writing. Miller initially wants to engage in a negative deconstruction by viewing composition" in an imagined position of agency" (19). Rather than using composition as a tool for indoctrination into reading the Bible, or into reading great works of literature that promote national values and identity, Miller argues for seeing composition as an end in itself that allows someone to step outside of their designated position in literacy. In the 19th century, literacy was a social responsibility embraced by the public at large. "Articles, pamphlets, and broadsides 'advertised' ordinary information about farming, mechanical necessities, and health" to a readership conceived of "as individuals, not a readership....Periodicals published numerous such missives, often addressed to 'Mr. Editor,' an indication that these publications were clearing houses or bulletin boards transmitting this written conversation" (33). However, this public discourse began to be repressed in favor of experts who had a proper command of written language and audience. "Writing began to be appropriated as a formal school subject....Public writing consequently took on 'authorized' as well as illegitimate aspects..." (34). Writing gets taken out of its social context and appropriated for literary "national, race, and universal ideals" and "religious aims in elementary education." Writing well, i.e. properly, "stresses upward mobility... stringent mores...." and "depoliticizes" writing into abstractions of proper grammar, rhetorical universals, and universal curriculums (35).

This is precisely Lawrence Levine's critique in The Opening of the American Mind of recent conservative criticisms of the multicultural and social trends in academia. People like Alan Bloom promote a universal curriculum that takes education away from popular uses and forms of inquiry. According to Levine, they evoke a static curriculum that never existed to begin with. Levine provides a historical critique of these positions by tracing the canonical changes in American Universities over the past two centuries. If anything, education is becoming more democratic. It is making a move back toward popular literacy. This is Miller's hope as well. She wants to repoliticize writing and "bring it back to the people." But we must beware. If high and low switch, as Miller seems to be arguing for, literacy will still be the outcome of composition's new identity. Both literature and composition gained status together in the late 19th century, each with the goal of literacy. As the weeding out test for literacy, composition can still "repress and commonly assimilate the majority of American writers who obtain credentials in higher education, indoctrinating them into openly middle class values of property, politeness, and cooperation" (Miller 7). These values are the values of both composition and literature. It should be no surprise that a change to privilege composition will simply re-shuffle literacy. And Miller acknowledges this, claiming that composition is "always in a state of becoming, of reinventing itself to compensate for its perceived lack of fixed goals and methods. But it is nonetheless in many ways a ritualistic performance that does not change except by substituting new rituals and codes for old ones" (12). But by becoming self conscious about their political position, compositionists can ultimately use the high against itself. Once the negative deconstruction is made, once we can throw out the "first-year" status designated for composition, we then use the higher status to break apart the binary of high/low into a multiplicity of discourses. Rather than embrace its side show, carnivalesque status, composition needs to reject it, and then celebrate multiple literacies as an accessible part of the social body. If we merely celebrate composition as "low," we support current literary hegemony and subjectivity. If we celebrate it from a position of higher agency, we can disperse the notion of literacy into multiple forms (of which this project may provide a simple example). 

We can not discount rhetoric as one of these forms. Even though Miller characterizes rhetoric as originally a male centered activity used to promote the status quo, rhetoric can now be employed by composition to decompose literature's status. In the 19th century, composition and literature were allied as literacy against the oral basis of classical rhetoric. Sharon Crowley notes that this separation from rhetoric begins as early as Descartes and worked its way through the 18th century. Rhetoricians like George Campbell (1776) and Hugh Blair (1783) followed Descartes' move to the isolated individual and subsequently removed invention from rhetorical concerns in favor of arrangement and style--two modes that fit the isolated textual document well. This amputation from the social lead to possibly an all time low for rhetorical studies. The years 1850-1900 saw very little work in rhetoric, while literature and composition prevailed as the discourses of the isolated literary subject. But today, composition has brought rhetoric in to give it the legitimacy of an ancient tradition in hopes of breaking away from literature's dominance. Unfortunately, the binary of rhetoric/composition simply places composition in a new relationship to the "low." For the "Politics of Composition" the binaries between high/low (literature/composition) and orality/literacy (rhetoric/composition) need to be broken down to allow composition a central role in integrating all three forms of communication and the multiple possibilities the integration will engender. But the question remains, if composition is the center then what gets relagated to the margin? We must try to get out of this system--as Deleuze and Guatarri note. But again. Getting out of a binary way of seeing the world does not get us out of the larger systems of which we are a part.