Conference on College Composition and Communication
Chicago, April 1998

Figuring out what the teacher wants and performing the role expected is often an expedient strategy for students. In fact, it happens so often that it seems the Normal thing to do. Jim Berlin told this story of how he learned to play the academic identity game.

O.K., when I was an undergraduate, I was told in my 101 course that I must "reveal more of myself," I must present "my feelings." At the time, I remember, we were reading The Catcher in the Rye, writing about Holden Caulfield. And so what I did was, I said that I identified with Holden Caulfield, that I often felt the way he did, and I presented this persona that I was manufacturing because my professor said that I was supposed to "tell more about myself." But I knew that what he really wanted was for me to sound like Holden Caulfield, not like myself at all. That was his notion of a sensitive adolescent, and if I was going to please him, I was going to have to do that. Now, I was a working-class, somewhat streetwise kid from Detroit, and I knew that I wasn't revealing myself to him. I was creating a persona. I wasn't going to tell that guy what I really felt. If I'd told him what I really felt about Holden Caulfield at that time, I probably would've gotten an F -- and he would have been deeply hurt. [laughter] Really, I mean, here I was a working-class kid, a Catholic, and the things that Holden Caulfield did really upset me. But I told him what he wanted to hear. (interview with McDonald, 34)

Berlin's story prompted memories of an essay about male and female roles that I wrote in my 101 class, long before gender became an issue in the academy, before the formation of the National Organization for Women, even before the publication of Ms. Magazine. To my surprise, my essay gained enough positive attention that one of my classmates, an editor for the college newspaper, wanted to publish it. It was an "if -- then" piece: reacting against the cultural assumptions of the times but unable to think beyond them, I argued that if women were expected to assume subservient roles, then men better learn to be more assertive. To this day the essay still embarrasses me. I was supposed to write an argument, and it was clear that my teacher liked strong conclusions. Although I used incidents from my experience to produce the essay, my conclusion was far removed from what I believed. None of the meandering, unfocused, and contradictory pieces that I had written previously in that class received the positive attention that this piece did. I learned that writing well meant projecting certainty and confidence and clarity. Shortly after, I changed my major from journalism, where I was expected to write confident accounts of events, to English literature, where I could hide behind experienced critics.

Thirty years later I find myself directing a writing center and still wrestling with composition's efforts to regulate not only a white middle-class identity but also a coherent and unconflicted identity. Composition seems to function like the kits designed to keep children occupied on rainy afternoons. Whether a paint-by-numbers kit or a cross-stitch kit or an airplane model kit, the packaged deal says: "Here are the materials, the task, the correct colors: now you do it." Composition is bit more subtle and indirect. We don't put pictures on the boxes, and we don't label the colors, but the tacit instructions on the box tell students to, in Linda Brodkey words,

display knowledge of and fealty to middle-class values. If you are middle class, you must convince the teacher (reader) that someone you met or something you did on vacation made you appreciate your family and/or country. And if you are working class, you must convince the teacher (reader) that by working hard or reading the right books you acquired a taste for things middle class and/or American. ("Designated" 219)

In this chapter, which is part of a book-length project aimed at rethinking writing center practice in the face of postmodern challenges to long-familiar notions about literacy and identity, I examine some of the social pressures that keep the identity kit intact. My aim is not to rescue agency and identity from postmodern challenges, but to move further into them and reckon with the realization that literacy learning is often far from the liberating experience that we like to imagine.

As a writing center tutor, I have worked with many students who have struggled with the prepackaged identity kits tucked inside their assignments. Kari, a white working-class rural student from a conservative religious background, makes up lies about her experience to conform to the subjectivity offered by the feminist anthology and the teacher's assignments; Hajj, an African American, whitens the dialect in his narrative to earn the grade he needs; Joe, the son of a mink farmer, removes all traces of his background in order to make his analysis of animal rights activists "unbiased" and therefore more convincing; Rebecca distrusts her teacher's encouragement to write from her experience because too often her working-class experience has prejudiced teachers against her; Nancy, a Latina in a dominantly Anglo institution, struggles to write a masters thesis because she is not comfortable positioning herself as an insider, nor is she comfortable drawing on the "outsider" cultural knowledge that informs her interpretations. When students cannot find ways to express their nonmainstream perspectives, academic writing becomes a game of matching the picture on the box, and often their prose assumes a passive lifeless quality. When students learn that the hidden picture on the identity box is not someone who looks, acts, thinks, talks, values, and believes like they do, the system seems to leave little opportunity to negotiate. They are forced to construct writing positions they do not believe in. If they treat the kit like a set of legos, constructing something different from what is imagined by the kit designers, they encounter the teacher's frustration. Because universities reward and punish academic behaviors with grades and because corporations later use grades to make hiring decisions, students seem to have no choice but to conform. If students decide to resist regulation, teachers say they will "hurt themselves in the long run" because they will "earn" poor grades.

Constructing a position to match the one in the teacher's head is not in itself a bad thing to do, just as building a model airplane on a rainy summer afternoon is sometimes a pleasant way to pass the time. The strategy of figuring out what the teacher wants sometimes serves students well, particularly when they are writing under the pressure of a deadline and with no compelling reason to disagree with the picture on the box. People often decide to conform to others' expectation, or, to put a more positive spin on it, to "play the game." However, when this strategy is the only one available to students, our classrooms and writing centers are not places where students are learning the arts of the contact zone. As Mary Louise Pratt observes, when the legitimate moves, strategies, games, scripts are always defined by those in power, then the classroom becomes "a world homogenized with respect to the teacher' (38). When teachers succeed in unifying the classroom in their own image, Pratt asks "Who wins when we do that? Who loses?" (39). The answer to Pratt's question depends a great deal on how literacy is defined. If literate ability is learning to write like the middle class, then teacher and students win. If literate ability is defined as the ability to negotiate differences, to juxtapose different languages, discourses, and styles, to translate across boundaries, to communicate with awareness of the history of differences that structure our interactions with one another, then neither teacher nor students win in a homogenized classroom. (see Brandt, Myers, New London Group for redefinitions of literate ability).

My aim in this chapter is to move writing center practice in the direction of a literacy of the contact zone by focusing on the two biggest conceptual stumbling blocks to that move: the modernist understanding of the Individual and the belief in the Normal. This chapter has three major sections. In the first section, I show how American educational practices have been built up around middle-class notions of what is Normal. Inability to see that what is normal is really cultural prevents the white middle class from entering the contact zone. In the second section, I examine an essay about a tutorial interaction written by Anne DiPardo to illustrate the extent to which individuals internalize the Normal and the habits of social regulation. Raymond Williams reminds us that regulation "is never only the setting of limits; it is also the exertion of pressures." As these pressures are internalized, they create "a compulsion to act in ways that maintain and renew" the social mode (87). In the third section, I reexamine the same essay to show how postmodern theories of subjectivity can suggest possibilities for changed relationships in which students "see themselves as active participants in social change... active designers... of social futures" (New London 64). A literacy of the contact zone is dependent on a relational view of reality, a view that allows the worldviews of others to shift our intellectual and emotional borders. A postmodern understanding of subjectivity helps us conceptualizes ourselves as limited in freedom by our particular worldview and conversely made more free by incorporating the worldviews of others.

My desire for change in the way literacy is practiced in the writing center is not motivated by pity for the predicaments of students who are not mainstream but rather by concern about the impoverished sense of ourselves that comes from not listening to voices outside our own realities. In my work with students like Kari, Hajj, Joe, Rebecca, and Nancy, I have learned to see the culture that informs my thinking, a culture previously invisible because of the processes of naturalization. Because I no longer believe in the innocence of the picture on the box or the inherent usefulness of school writing, I would like to replace the static picture on the cover of the kit with ones like those dappled- surfaced squares of cardboard in the Cracker Jack box (cheap precursors of the hologram) that offered an image capable of changing with a slight move of the hand, an image of self and other that is fluid and capable of moving among different realities.

1. The Layers of Protection

My aim in this section is to cause a bit of an identity crisis for white middle-class people who work in writing centers. Because the picture on the box looks like the people who designed the kit, cultural power keeps the kit intact. The kit contains a set of tightly linked expectations about beliefs, thoughts, and values that are assumed to be not only "right" but also "normal." These beliefs about identity are always embedded within a Discourse, a word that is often capitalized and used to signal "the inescapably political contexts in which we speak and work" (Apple in Lather vii). As James Gee puts it, "Each Discourse protects itself by demanding from its adherents performances which act as though its ways of being, thinking, acting, talking, writing, reading, and valuing are right, natural, obvious, the way good and intelligent and normal people behave" (190-91). When someone writes or talks in ways that do not conform to those expectations, those inside the Discourse think of them as "not normal" or "wrong." Thus, literacy teaching often functions in hegemonic ways to maintain a social order that includes unjust discriminating practices based on differences of race, class, and ethnicity. The process of "normalization" is one of its most insidious features. Foucault calls "The Normal" the "principle of coercion in teaching" (Discipline 184). Normalization works by "impos[ing] homogeneity" (184). Foucault would see writing center work as an intensification of discursive power because writing centers use procedures of individuation which intensify the power of the normal. The problem is that the Normal in composition is not a culturally neutral standard but a white middle-class standard.

Because so much in America depends on our cultural belief in individual freedom, we deny the extent to which we are regulated by internalized social pressures. In composition teaching many of our practices depend on understanding the individual students and the teacher as completely autonomous, unaffected by unconscious needs, the desires of others, or social regulation. When composition students are imagined as freely choosing individuals, the cultural conflicts that they experience as they attempt to comply with the expectations of the identity kit are not acknowledged. Because of our intensely individualistic culture, we often deny the mutual interdependence of the individual and the social, the ways we constitute one other intersubjectively and relationally. This cultural denial creates many contradictions in writing center work. As representatives of the university, tutors posit the "individual" as the center of their work, and then they attempt to indirectly "regulate" that individual to conform to the expectations of the academic identity kit. If the individual "resists" efforts at regulation, they become frustrated because he or she is not accepting their help. On the other hand, if students avoid the writing center, they try to convince them that they need the help. But if the individual signs up for an excessive number of appointments or "tries to get the tutor to do his work for him," they worry that this excessive use of the writing center might not be ethical, and they complain that the student is "not taking responsibility" because he or she is taking advantage of "too much" social regulation.

Many layers of normalized practices and the belief in individual autonomy protect literacy workers from looking too closely at how much composition teaching and tutoring is a process of regulating a white middle-class identity. Even when we acknowledge that class forms the basis for much of what we do in composition, the tendency is to defend this as a good and inevitable practice. Lynn Bloom's recent College English essay entitled "Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise" provides an excellent example of the rationale teachers use to justify the normal way of teaching composition. With good wit and good scholarship, Bloom acknowledges that freshman composition is "an unabashedly middle-class enterprise" that has the worthy aim of enabling students "to think and write in ways that will make them good citizens of the academic (and larger) community, and viable candidates for good jobs upon graduation" (655). Bloom believes that most of the time, this middle-class orientation operates for the better because middle- class values and virtues promote the well-being of America's "vast middle class." They operate for the worse when "middle-class teachers punish lower-class students for not being, well, more middle class" (655). Through an analysis of rhetorical history and composition and style texts, Bloom illustrates how virtues promoted by Benjamin Franklin (self-reliance, respectability, decorum, moderation, thrift, efficiency, order, cleanliness, punctuality, and delayed gratification) have become a template for the aims of composition teaching. According to Bloom, freshman composition functions like the "chlorine footbath" at the neighborhood swimming pool; it is an enterprise in which "students' vices must be eradicated" and where they are "indoctrinated against further transgressions" (656).

After illustrating the extent to which middle-class values saturate the pedagogy of composition teaching, Bloom concludes her essay by examining the argument that literacy practices alone do not account for a rise in status to the middle class. John Trimbur, for example, argues that narratives about the transformative power of literacy reproduce the myth that the unequal distribution of goods is a matter of individual effort and talent rather than systematic inequality. After considering Trimbur's argument, Bloom decides that the way one reads a literacy autobiographies is "as much a matter of one's politics as of one's social class" (668). She observes, "The views of Trimbur, Stuckey, France, and other academic Marxists notwithstanding, such stories [inspiring literacy autobiographies by authors such as Mike Rose, Frederick Douglass, Maya Angelou, Maxine Kong Kingston] embody what American education has historically been dedicated to -- not putting the finishing' veneer on an elite class, but enabling the transformation and mobility of lives across boundaries, from the margins to the mainstreams of success and assimilation on middle-class terms"(668). In spite of her awareness of the critiques of the literacy myth, Bloom clearly prefers linking literacy with meritocratic success. She comments "like it or not, despite the critiques of academic Marxists, we are a nation of Standard English" (670). Bloom hopes that teachers will make it an ethical and cultural obligation "to respect the world's multiple ways of living and speaking" while they are teaching the dominant standard (671).

Most white middle-class people would find Bloom's argument to be quite reasonable. She acknowledges that this nation values Standard English; she believes students are well- served by learning the standard; she believes that people who learn the standard can move from the margins to the mainstream; and she insists that teachers respect their students no matter what variety of English they speak as they learn. Readers can identify with the patriotic middle-class "we" of her essay or take up the more unpopular "academic Marxist" position at the end of the essay. Because Bloom weaves memories of her middle- class childhood into the essay, I cannot identify with her "we" nor am I willing to accept the "academic Marxist" label simply because I have a working-class background. From the time we were children and well into our professional lives, both Bloom and I have been aware of the way class manifests itself in the clothes people wear, the language they speak, the choices they make, yet Bloom lived within the naturalized world of the material comforts of the middle class with the sense of entitlement that all those Franklinesque virtues belong to her class, while I always believed that money, not virtue, determined social class.

Bloom appears to be claiming for her class many of the values that were practiced in my working-class family. The socks in my family were worn too thin not because we were slovenly but because my mother practiced "thrift," buying our shoes a size too big, stuffing cotton in the toes so they would last longer before we outgrew them. (In spite of the cotton, the shoes rubbed the back of our socks.) It took a great deal of "efficiency" and "order" on my mother's part to sew school clothes for three daughters. We went into debt during holidays so that our family could arrive at church dressed in "respectable" and "decorous" fashion. "Self-reliance," drilled into me, my brother, and two sisters from the time we were old enough to apply for a work permit, is what got all four of us through college. "Punctuality" cannot be fudged when fourteen-year olds are slipping their punch cards into a time clock. "Delayed gratification" is what enabled us to pay off government loans after graduation. Those virtues recommended by Ben Franklin were not only enacted in lifestyle, but both my parents, although neither had more than a high school education, also regularly applied them to written work -- letters to family and friends, notes to teachers, family memoirs, personal poetry and journal entries. In other words, literacy (and what some consider its attendant virtues) was valued in my family, and we were still working class.

Bloom notes that although class forms the basis for much of what is expected of composition, until very recently it has been an invisible issue. She tells how when she was chair of the MLA Division of Teaching Writing in 1993, she issued a call for papers on race, class, and gender in composition studies, and "received only one proposal on class -- in comparison with a dozen on race and ninety-four on gender" (657). She does not note, however, that MLA has been traditionally associated with high culture or that it is an expensive conference held during the Christmas holidays, a time of budget strain for families that are not middle class. One of the assumptions that Bloom seems to make is that all college teachers are protected from the material realities of class. And to some extent she is right. Because of my education, I no longer punch a time clock nor do I hesitate to buy well-fitting shoes and new socks. My husband (also of working class origin) and I have raised two children who are just as middle class as Bloom is. Nevertheless, the educational discourse that now permeates my life is not so powerful that it erases memory. Bloom's stories about her middle-class upbringing as the daughter of a college professor in the small town in New Hampshire stir up my neighborhood and school memories. Like Bloom, I went to an elementary school where the social classes came in contact with one another, but unlike Bloom, I was not a member of the vast middle class. Bloom says that in her family class was never an issue until she "started dating boys her parents didn't approve of" (657). Those kids that Bloom's parents disapproved of (such as the one-time boyfriend who "said ain't', and wore too-tight jeans" (658) could have been my neighbors. Class was never an issue in my family either until the middle-class parents of my school friends raised concerned eyebrows when I responded to their questions about where I lived. Although Bloom and I may be near the same age (I too wore full skirts and Peter Pan collars -- mine were homemade, even the one with the felt poodle applique), Bloom writes her essay from a full-professor position in a chair underwritten by an insurance company, and I write mine from an untenured assistant professor position, having earned a doctorate in middle age.

"Watch it," I tell myself, "You may be projecting too much of your own baggage onto Bloom." Certainly, the humor of Bloom's essay comes from her refusal to be apologetic for her middle-class values, and the chippiness of my reaction comes from my experience of growing up in a working-class family. Nevertheless, the material circumstances of one's childhood have a strong impact on identity formation, and the assumptions of the identity kit rarely take those circumstances into consideration. The cultural denial of class memory exemplifed in Bloom's categories of "we middle class teachers" and "academic Marxists" which excludes those of us whose approach to composition informed by working class memories, memories reinforced perhaps by "academic" perspectives, but memories rooted in experience that Bloom and other middle-class teachers haven't shared. The argument that composition as a middle-class enterprise intends the best for students and their future success doesn't make room for the cultural conflicts created when class, racial, or ethnic memories meet up with assumptions about the Normal middle-class way of doing things.

Unfortunately the history lessons offered in school function in the same way as the identity kit; many students never learn the historical context of their personal memories. Historian James W. Loewen speculates "If the we' in a [history] textbook included American Indians, African Americans, Latinos, women, and all social classes, the book would read differently, just as whites talk differently (and more humanely) in the presence of people of color" (296). In Lies My Teacher Told Me, Loewen argues that the familiar cultural theme of history textbooks -- America as the Land of Opportunity -- is responsible for the ignorance of many Americans about the existence of class and social structure. Class is kept secret because it contradicts the "our great country" story. Loewen's research shows that history books rarely mention social class even when they discuss labor history (195). Loewen observes that even though Americans like to think we have less class stratification than other countries, "in Japan, the average chief executive officer in an automobile-manufacturing firm makes 20 times as much as the average worker in an automobile assembly plant; in the United States he (and it is not she) makes 192 times as much" (203). According to Loewen, portraying America as a hero without faults means leaving out the fact that 1 percent of our population controls 40 percent of our wealth.

When he interviewed the social studies and history editor in one of the biggest textbook publishing firms about this omitted topic, Loewen was told, "You always run the risk, if you talk about social class, of being labeled Marxist" (205). Loewen concludes that the America-as-land-of-social-equality-and-opportunity story creates the false impression that "folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps" (201). Because alternative narratives are not offered in school, working-class students have no way to explain their family's position, and they can develop a "subculture of shame." The opinions of working class students are often silenced with the "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" assumption, sometimes unspoken and sometimes not. To illustrate the effect that truncated versions of history have on affluent white children, Loewen uses what he calls the "Vietnam exercise." He has invited more than a thousand college students, generally members of his audiences, to indicate their beliefs about which kind of adults, by educational level, supported the Vietnam war. He usually finds that 10 to 1, audiences believe that educated Americans were more likely to have supported withdrawal based on their hypotheses that educated people are more critical, informed, and tolerant. In fact, polls taken during the war showed again and again that college-educated Americans were more hawkish. Richard Hamilton is another historian who has shown that many outbreaks of authoritarianism and intolerance such as Nazism, lynchings in the American South, and McCarthyism, were initiated by the wealthy and better educated (reported in Ehrenreich 110).

To explain why so many believed that educated Americans would not have supported the Vietnam war, Loewen identifies two social processes that occur in school, allegiance and socialization. As he explains it, educated adults usually have higher incomes than those without education but in America, we are taught in school to believe that one earns successful positions through virtuous behavior and individual characteristics rather than through one's parents' social position. As a result, educated adults "have a vested interest in believing that the society that helped them be educated and successful is fair" and thus they "are more likely to show allegiance to society" than to be critical of it (301). Education socializes us to believe in the rightness of our society, so "the more school, the more socialization, and the more likely the individual will conclude that American is good" (301). As Loewen indicates, the social processes of schools make it difficult for the middle class to think critically about their own positions. Their perceptions have been dominant for so long that they are naturalized. It becomes difficult for them to be aware of their own "otherness;" whiteness and middle income seem to be the norm and everything else is "cultural."

As Loewen hints and Barbara Ehrenrich confirms in her book Fear of Falling, denied anxiety is also at stake. As Ehrenrich explains, the only capital' of the middle class is "knowledge and skill, or at least the credentials imputing skill and knowledge. And unlike real capital, these cannot be hoarded against hard times" (15). Ehrenreich theorizes that the middle class has become a tenuous position beset by "fear of inner weakness, of growing soft, of failing to strive, of losing discipline and will"(15). Because these fears are not openly acknowledged, they become inner anxieties that are projected onto the working class. The middle class is prone to depict the working class as tacky, slothful, and ignorant people who eat white bread and Twinkies, drink Budweiser, and live in tract houses. In my local grocery store, Budweiser costs $3.85 a sixpack compared to $7.19 for imported beers like Heineken and Corona but rarely is the cost of things a factor in judgments the middle class makes about taste, including judgments about too-tight clothing and worn socks. Professional middle-class people display their status through consumption, and because capitalism encourages endless consumption, the middle class must consume more to maintain their status. Increased consumption threatens the necessary middle-class virtues, especially delayed gratification and thrift, and so the inner anxiety is perpetuated and seeks relief in displacement.

According to Ehrenrich, the university operates as the "core institution" of the middle class; it is "the employer of its intellectual elite and producer of the next generation of middle-class, professional personnel" (58). The routines of university life create structures that prohibit the contributions of outsiders, and university life becomes infused with "the delusion of knowing it all'" (140). Because the professional middle class is based on expertise, much of what universities produce are people in the helping professionals -- teachers, doctors, social workers. Ehrenrich observes, "Within its fortress of expertise,' the middle class imagines it is the sole repository of useful information -- even information about the lives of those who dwell outside the moats." She illustrates with an observation in a sociology text that "the working-class person often fails to realize that his story is neither understandable nor interesting to the other person'" (140). Although middle-class professionals are often generous-spirited people, Ehrenrich notes that their roles

confer authority and the power to make judgments about others. The teacher will determine whether your child's difficulties stem from a behavior problem, a learning disability, or a simple lack of effort. The social worker, who may have vastly different notions of what constitutes normal' family life, will scrutinize and diagnose your intimate problems. The physician will pass judgments on your habits and life style; he or she will very likely also treat you (if you are poor or working-class patient) in an unconsciously patronizing or condescending manner. (139).

Ehrenreich observes, "There is simply no way for the working-class or poor person to capture the attention of middle-class personnel without seeming rude or insubordinate. In the imposed silence of working-class life, hostility thrives" (139). Reading this, I remember Rebecca telling me about her frustration with a particular math course. Her attention at lectures, her use of the math tutoring center, and her own diligence had not resulted in increased understanding, so she went to office hours, and said to the professor, "Look, I don't understand this and you've got to teach it to me!" The ensuing interaction did not go well as the professor interpreted Rebecca's intense desire to learn as a rude demand on him. The hard-earned tuition money that Rebecca exchanged for her education might never have entered the teacher's mind, but in Rebecca's mind she was paying in order to learn, and she wanted the teacher to explain the concept in a way that she could understand it. She was not behaving like a Normal student, content to walk through the chlorine footbath.

Because schools are run by the professional middle class, because Americans believe in individual freedom and equal opportunity, because class is a hidden issue in America, because fears are denied and projected, the white middle class practices of school seem to be just the Normal way of things. The middle-class assumptions of American schools protect the picture on the box, allowing it to function like a flattering mirror, reflecting back a comforting image of "people like us."

2. "Lessons from Fannie"

I turn to "Lessons from Fannie" to reflect on the consequences of the middle-class enterprise of schooling and composition teaching. In this evocative and haunting writing center story, Anne DiPardo focuses on the tutorial relationship between Fannie, a Navajo student, and Morgan, an African American tutor. Given that Fannie and Morgan are both what John Ogbu would call involuntary minority students, one might expect some evidence in their interactions that their non-Anglo identities affect the parameters of their negotiations. Instead, as DiPardo examines their work together, it is easy for most of us to identify with Morgan, the well-intentioned idealistic tutor eager to "spark" something in Fannie. If not for DiPardo's careful weaving of demographic data and personal detail, one could assume that Fannie was a quiet anglo student and Morgan a well-intentioned white middle-class tutor in the Anywhere Writing Center. Morgan is motivated by a desire to make a difference in Fannie's academic work, and she struggles with her impulse to take over Fannie's work and with her frustration when Fannie fails to respond to her coaching. The story is haunting because DiPardo allows us to see how much doesnÕt happen in these well-intentioned efforts and how well the identity kit functions.

The story takes place in a basic writing tutorial program at a west-coast university. The semester-long relationship was not particularly helpful to Fannie, who barely passed her basic writing course and who expected to experience even more difficulty in her composition class. Morgan, who was in the process of preparing to become an English teacher, was full of good intentions and idealism, yet she missed many subtle clues and subtexts in Fannie's sparse and reluctant contributions. She learned too late, for example, that Fannie's first language was not English and that Fannie had been raised on a reservation. It seems that many of the missed opportunities occurred paradoxically because Morgan wanted to be effective, to be mainstream, to apply strategies she learned in her classes and at a CCCC conference and workshop. She was so strongly interpellated by the professional role that she was, as DiPardo writes, "insufficiently curious" about Fannie (138). Morgan could see the picture on the identity box but she couldn't see Fannie. Morgan had internalized the process of social regulation and felt compelled to renew the status quo.

DiPardo speculates that Morgan's own racial ambivalence (she responded to more politically motivated students that she was "first and foremost a member of the human race"), combined with her desire to be helpful contributed to the many missed opportunities for learning more about Fannie(133). When Fannie failed to respond to her well-intentioned efforts, Morgan attributed Fannie's writing block to her cultural background, stating assumptions about Navajo women that DiPardo shows are contrary to published accounts of Navajo life and even to Fannie's demeanor when interacting with other Native students. It doesn't seem fair to blame Morgan, an undergraduate herself, for not having more knowledge or curiosity. Under institutional pressure to perform, to be a good tutor, to use effective strategies advocated in professional workshops, to be a member of the human race, Morgan's enthusiasm was channeled in a predictable direction. But what if Morgan had been prepared differently? What if her tutor training and her preprofessional education had insisted on conceptual and theoretical understanding over strategic know-how? What if she had been provided the support for sustaining anxiety and questioning her effectiveness, for turning the lens back on herself at moments of frustration? What if she had been taught to first ask if her desire to be a good teacher/tutor was being projected onto the student in ways that foreclosed learning for both of them? Because social pressures are internalized, our first response to frustration should be to look inside rather than direct the gaze externally, but usually we don't. White middle-class practices are so Normal, we are incapable of regarding ourselves as Other.

Within institutions, the gaze of the teacher/tutor works in the same way that Norman Bryson describes the gaze in Western painting, as an effort to coopt the student/viewer, to narrow and control the focus, to limit agency. According to Bryson, the restricted gaze is motivated by the fear that the viewer will overturn the representation. Perspective in painting is designed to eliminate movement, to provide a synchronic viewing that distances, disengages, minimizes flux (94-95). Madeline Grumet writes that "by arranging students in rows, all eyes facing front, directly confronting the back of a fellow's head, meeting the gaze only of the teacher, the discipline of the contemporary classroom deploys the look as a strategy of domination" (111). Even though we sit next to our students in writing centers and form the chairs into a circle in our classrooms, we and our students have internalized the institutional gaze as "endorsed with an authority that disclaims history, motives and politics" (112). Under that gaze, "we expect to grow into a self within [the teacher's] look. But we always suspect that he is actually looking not at us but at another whom we do not know but who is finally more powerful and compelling than we" (125). Grumet argues that to teach well, teachers must first study the transferences they bring to their work rather than "compel students to recite the history and future of our desire" (128). She challenges teachers to "come to terms with [their] own versions of truth and with the designations [they] reserv[e] for those accounts that contradict the current wisdom" (163).

Because the power of institutional regulation is internalized and because we are most susceptible when we are anxious raw beginners like Morgan, tutor and teacher development programs need to work hard to cultivate the psychic space that encourages tutors to turn away from the institutional gaze, to question institutional interpellation, to develop awareness of the ways they have internalized the belief that a particular form of discourse is "right" or "natural" or "better," and that those who depart from this form are "wrong" or "not normal" or "culturally deprived." DiPardo concludes "Rather than frequent urgings to talk less,' perhaps what Morgan most needed was advice to listen more -- for the clues students like Fannie would provide, for those moments when she might best shed her persona and become once again a learner" (140).

DiPardo's sage advice is difficult to achieve because we live in what philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara describes as a "non-listening culture." According to Fiumara, authentic listening occurs only when "an embryonic thought is protected from the restrictive interference of over-zealous classification" (161), yet in tutoring interactions, listening is often done under the pressure of time, usually with a desire to be helpful, and almost always with a notion of what is a normal academic essay. As Fannie struggled to connect her class assignments with her Native American heritage, she decided to write about the environment. In the following transcript, Fannie looks for words to express her connection with the land, and Morgan, unable to restrain her desire to be helpful, misses clues to her meaning as she encourages Fannie to focus:

Morgan: What would you say your basic theme is? And sometimes if you keep that in mind, then you can always, you know, keep that as a focus for what youÕre writing. And the reason I say that is cause when you say, "well living happily wasn't...."

Fannie: (pause)... Well, America was a beautiful country, well, but it isn't beautiful anymore.

Morgan: Um hm. Not as beautiful.

Fannie: So I should just say, America was a beautiful country?

Morgan: Yeah. But I dunno -- what do you think your overall theme is, that youÕre saying?

Fannie: (long pause)... I'm really, I'm just talking about America.

Morgan: America? So America as... ?

Fannie: (pause)... Um ...(pause)

Morgan: Land of free, uh, land of natural resources? As, um, a place where there's a conflict, I mean, there, if you can narrow that, "America." What is it specifically, and think about what you've written, in the rest. Know what I mean?

Fannie: (pause)... The riches of America, or the country? I don't know...

Morgan: I think you do. I'm not saying there's any right answer, but I, I'm -- for me, the reason I'm saying this, is I see this emerging as, you know, (pause) where you're really having a hard time with dealing with the exploitation that you see, of America, you know, you think that. And you're using two groups to really illustrate, specifically, how two different attitudes toward, um the richness and beauty of America, two different, um, ways people have to approach this land. Does that, does this make any sense? Or am I just putting words in your mouth? I don't want to do that. I mean that's what I see emerge in your paper. But I could be way off base.

Fannie: I think I know what you're trying to say. And I can kind of relate it at times to what I'm trying to say.

Morgan: You know, I mean, this is like the theme I'm picking up... (pause) I think you know, you've got some real, you know, environmental issues here. I think you're a closet environmentalist here. Which are real true, know what I mean. (pause) And when you talk about pollution, and waste, and, um, those types of things. So I mean, if you're looking at a theme of your paper, what could you pick out, of something of your underlying theme.

Fannie: (pause)... The resources, I guess?

Morgan: Well I mean, I don't want you to say, I want you to say, don't say "I guess," is that what you're talking about?

Fannie: Yeah.

Morgan: "Yeah?" I mean it's your paper.

Fannie: I know, I want to talk about the land...

Morgan: Ok. So you want to talk about the land, and the beauty of the land...

Fannie: Um hm.

Morgan: ...and then, um, and then also your topic for your, um, to spark your paper... what values, and morals, right? That's where you based off to write about America, and the land, you know. Maybe you can write some of these things down, as we're talking, as focusing things, you know. So you want to talk about the land, and then it's like, what do you want to say about the land? (135-136)

Morgan, in her desire to "spark" something, pushes Fannie toward writing about commonplace environmental concerns; she doesn't connect with the theme Fannie wants to write about (even though Fannie asserts it twice), and she knows what sorts of themes are usually addressed in an academic essay. Morgan was quick to classify Fannie's subtle clues into a general set of concerns about the environment. In order to clear a space in herself to hear Fannie, Morgan would have had to move aside some of her own tacit assumptions about the land. Perhaps if Morgan had been able to articulate her naturalized relationship (for many of us a nonrelationship) to the land, Fannie might have gained a better understanding of what she needed to articulate, of what tacit beliefs she needed to unpack to convey her thinking about the land. Listening, Fiumara explains, has nothing to do with a tendency to "assent, consent, or submit" (183). Authentic listening is non- hegemonic in that it requires, as Heidegger insists, a "dwelling" in another's thought with a part of our mind suspended, recognizing "that we share in both the problem and the solution without being able to escape into neutral and unrelated spaces" (189-190). Authentic listening is experiential. "It is almost as though in order to listen one had to "become" different, since it is not so much a question of grasping concepts or propositions as of attempting an experience" (191). As DiPardo's study illustrates, without authentic listening, the very programs designed to address social inequality inadvertently reproduce it, "unresolved tensions tugged continually at a fabric of institutional good intentions" (126).

Discursive regulation is powerful because responses are often automatic. Institutional representatives have been convinced that they know what is good, what is natural, what is necessary, and what is right. Authentic listening doesn't occur because the mental categories have already been formed and verified and certified. Morgan knew that being focused matters; she knew what topics she was accustomed to seeing in academic essays. Fannie herself knew the importance of focus and she worked hard to understand Morgan's efforts. But I doubt if either Fannie or Morgan could articulate the differences in cultural and linguistic experience that contributed to Fannie's "writing block."

To imagine a training program that would provide Morgan (and all of us who identify with her) the encouragement, support, and scaffolding to "listen more" we need to understand the psychological processes by which we internalize social norms. In the narratives I read about socialization into language, anxiety reactions seem to be the primary motivators. In Lacan's story of language development, we arrive in the world as infants in an undifferentiated psychological state, incapable of regarding ourselves as separate from others. Our first recognition of our separateness comes at what Lacan calls the mirror stage. The mirror stage, the moment of recognizing the self as other, as at once over there, in the mirror, and also separate from our caregiver, is traumatic. Linda Brodkey summarizes the import of this recognition: "This moment of split or divided consciousness, literally experienced as a trauma . . .motivates the child to learn language, for only language (specifically, personal pronouns) promises to reunify the now divided self -- as an I'" ("Articulating" 302). I remember years ago trying to distract my fussy daughter by holding her in front of the bathroom mirror. While at first the baby in the mirror made her smile, as soon as she recognized herself as the baby, she turned stubbornly away, crying harder than before, reaching for the doorway. According to Lacan, this unity offered by language is paradoxically both illusory and necessary. We become anxious when we recognize our split and divided consciousness, and we assume a position within discourse to "heal" the anxiety. We operate more confidently in a field of power when we align ourselves with one position (an "us" or a "them"). Morgan's confidence seems to depend on her alliance with educational discourse rather than an alliance with Fannie.

Althusser adds another complication. Through language we not only find relief from the instability of our divided selves, but we also inherit a view of the world, an ideology. According to Althusser, institutions "interpellate" us by hailing or calling us in flattering ways, offering us discursively constructed subject positions like the helpful teacher or the responsible writing center tutor or the good student. Because disunity, incoherence, and fragmentation are unpleasant conditions, our desire for unity, rooted in anxiety, makes us susceptible to what Althusser calls ideological interpellation. Teachers and students and writing center tutors respond to institutional hailing by readily assuming the constructed positions. Because we see others in the institution respond in similar fashion to interpellation and because we are rewarded for assuming certain positions, we come to accept this process as normal -- even good. We even believe we have freely chosen the positions offered to us. Thus we become the constructed effects of discourse.

Foucault observes that many people would like to find themselves "on the other side of discourse":

Inclination speaks out: I don't want to have to enter this risky world of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and truth emerging, one by one. All I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck.' Institutions reply: But you have nothing to fear from launching out; we're here to show you discourse is within the established order of things, that we've waiting a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set aside for it...' (Discourse 215-16)

Anxiety is provoked on all sides -- by concern about what discourse is, by fear that we are destined for oblivion without a position within discourse, by awareness of the dangers and the conflicts that lie behind words. Pretending that we are on "the other side of discourse" in the writing center or affirming that we are doing the right thing by justifying our practices according to the way things are "in the real world" are only ways of denying the psychic effects of social regulation. To imagine writing center interactions that do not simply reproduce the status quo, I turn to postmodern theories of subjectivity.

3. Reimagining Subjectivity in Composition

Postmodern theorizing has undermined many assumptions about the individual as autonomous, rational, and existing as an agent in opposition to regulation. According to theorist Judith Butler, agency is dependent on culture; we cannot hope for some bizarre escape from social regulation. We can, however, negotiate with the process of discursive regulation if we stay in anxiety long enough to consider multiple options for responding, ways of negotiating with the positions offered to us in discourse. Berlin, for example, recognized the way he was being hailed by his teacher's assignment, and decided to give the teacher what he was asking for. Today, we could imagine a student like Berlin making a meta-move, calling attention to the script he was offered in the assignment and announcing his intention to depart from the picture on the kit. Rather than believing we are operating according to right principles or some essentialist notion of who we are and "how things are supposed to be" in institutions, we need to understand ourselves as fluid subjects, as people who are interpellated, constructed, and motivated by conscious as well as unconscious needs. According to Butler, the subject "deriv[es] its agency from precisely the power it opposes, as awkward and embarrassing as such a formulation might be, especially for those who believe that complicity and ambivalence could be rooted out once and for all" (Psychic 17).

Agency is fundamentally rooted in paradox. It is our very dependence on a discourse that "we never chose" that "paradoxically initiates and sustains our agency" (Psychic 2). As Butler explains it, the discursive power that presses us into subordination "assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject's self-identity" (Psychic 3). Butler explains that cultural fields are regulated by binary frameworks that reward or punish certain performances. She focuses in particular on the cultural field of gender identity. As noticeably gendered people, she says, we are required to imitate certain performances. If we don't, we get "in trouble." Because gender is an imitative performance regulated by compulsive repetition, Butler sees agency as resulting from the inevitable failures to repeat. She recommends focusing on redescribing these moments that were previously considered unintelligible. For Butler, agency is a matter of revealing the discontinuities that were previously concealed. Composition, like gender identity, requires a repeated regulated performance of a required subjectivity for students. To apply Butler's performative notion of agency, writing center workers need to be able to redescribe what appear to be failed performances, and for this to happen, they will need awareness of the ways they have internalized social norms. According to Butler, "there is no self that is prior to the convergence or who maintains integrity' prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural field. There is only the taking up the tools where they lie, where the very taking up is enabled by the tool lying there" (Gender 145).

Butler insists on the inescapable and ambivalent psychic effects of social power. "The power imposed upon one is the power that animates one's emergence, and there appears to be no escaping this ambivalence." (Psychic 198). Butler emphasizes the need to "affirm complicity" as a basis of political agency (29). In "Professing Multiculturalism," composition theorist Min Zhan Lu works a similar theme when she observes, "appropriately mobilized, a sense of ambivalence might be put to constructive uses in writing" (448). Rather than pretending the kit doesn't exist or pretending that the kit is simply the most normal and productive way of doing things or pretending that individuals freely chose positions in relationship to the kit, a better way to address social regulation is to mobilize the ambivalence that it generates. To do this, we need a more fluid understanding of subjectivity, one that allows us to account for our differences but also allows us to reorganize ourselves in relationship to others, thus avoiding the problem of insisting we have only one true essential self to which we must at all times be true.

I rely on Jane Flax's theorizing for such an account of subjectivity. Flax is a professor of political science at Howard University and a practicing psychotherapist. Flax's theorizing appeals to me because she weaves together three strands of theorizing (feminist, postmodern, and psychoanalytic), allowing one to compensate for the weakness of the other, and because she grounds her theorizing in considerations of her practice as a therapist and in her triple minority status (white, Jewish, female) at Howard, a historically black college where she has taught since 1978 (22). With Flax, I believe that the ability of those of us who are white and middle-class to regard ourselves as Other, to recognize that we too are raced, gendered, and classed subjects rather than "normal" people, is essential to our ability to tutor and to listen in ways that do not simply reproduce relations of domination. As a therapist, Flax knows how easy it is to collude with dominant beliefs, even when those beliefs harm patients. Dominant beliefs, she observes, impede our ability to accept randomness, contingency, and the paradoxical effects of our own psychic processes.

In theorizing her understanding of subjectivity as multiple, fluid, process-oriented, yet capable of coherence, Flax rejects two extreme accounts of subjectivity -- the modernist unified self and the postmodernist fragmented self. She uses two categories of dysfunctional organization, the "schizoid" and the "borderline" constructs to illustrate the problems with these two extreme alternatives. Flax regards the Cartesian unitary self as an "unnecessary, impossible, and a dangerous illusion" (93). She comments, "In the process of therapy, in relations with others, and in political life we encounter many difficulties when subjectivity becomes subject to one normative standard, solidifies into rigid structures, or lacks the capacity to flow readily between different aspects of itself" (93). The schizoid form is remarkably similar to the Cartesian self that prevails in composition. We expect students like Kari, Hajj, Rebecca, Joe, Nancy, Fannie, and Morgan to be able to separate their lived experiences from the roles they assume in institutions. If they succeed in this split, they can present a unified position in their papers. This illusion of the unitary self, according to Flax, is an effect of relations of domination. "It can only sustain its unity by splitting off or repressing other parts of its own and others' subjectivity" (109). Flax calls the dysfunctional schizoid form of subjectivity "an exaggeration of a kind of subjectivity currently valued in the West. The instrumental, split subject can adapt behavior to achieve predetermined ends while appearing to be an authentic person who is also genuinely concerned for the welfare of others." Flax wryly observes that "the capacity to split reason and feeling, attachment and destruction is highly useful in certain occupations, for example, managing large corporations, designing smart bombs,' or defending dangerous chemical plants" (102). We can see a version of this institutional split self operating in Morgan's ability to separate her ethnic and racial ambivalence from her attempts to intervene in Fannie's literacy efforts. Certainly most of us can see it in many of the daily ways we ignore the felt contradictions at the heart of our practices. Because the schizoid person's thoughts and feelings are isolated and separated from each other, he or she cannot moderate childish ways of understanding the world with adult ones.

Flax contrasts this schizoid subjectivity with the borderline subjectivity, one in such a fragmented and inconstant state that it cannot create meaning or move into action. While this form of subjectivity, the fragmented self, is sometimes celebrated by postmodernists, Flax reminds us that people who truly cannot sustain some sort of internal coherence slide into "the endless terror, emptiness, desolate loneliness, and fear of annihilation that pervade borderline subjectivity" (103). Because the borderline person's affective states are so fragmented, he or she lives in constant "emotional vertigo" with a "profound sense of loneliness and emptiness" (105).

According to Flax, both of these extreme forms of subjectivity hold one thing in common: "Neither can experience simultaneously the distinctiveness of different aspects of subjectivity and their mutuality" [italics hers] (103). Between these unhealthy and dysfunctional extremes, Flax defines her third more positive form of subjectivity. She theorizes a fluid, multiple, web-like subjectivity, capable of being organized for one action and reorganized for another, formed and reformed by familial, political, gendered, somatic, unconscious and conscious processes, a subjectivity capable of a "less grandiose view of the extent of one's own powers and a more workable sense of responsibility," capable of detaching and distancing from affective experience enough to "enter empathically into the experiences of others or to respect their differences" (106). Flax comments that the task of therapy (and I would suggest composition teaching and tutoring) is not "the discovery (or construction) of a solid, unitary, pristine, and undistorted self lying somewhere deep down inside" but rather the development of multiple ways of organizing subjectivity (107). Like other postmodernists, Flax understands subjectivity as a discursive effect which operates under regulative ideas. A category like "Normal" "functions to create and justify social organization and exclusion" and "as the rationale for creating new groups of experts' whose function is to sort people" (96-7).

Flax insists that a multiple and fluid conception of subjectivity is essential for the work of social justice in a time when recognition of differences is the most pressing political problem. She observes "Since discussions about justice implicitly or explicitly assume and generate assumptions about who we' are and why we are living together, discourse about justice cannot do without concepts of subjectivity" (111). The same holds true for understanding writing in the contact zone. A postmodern notion of justice, which Flax conceives of as a process rather than a set of rules and principles, is dependent on the construction of transitional spaces, spaces that depend on our ability to be fluid, multiple subjects. To explain her concept of transitional space, Flax relies on the work of D.W. Winnicott and other object relations psychoanalysts who stress the importance of relations with others in the constitution of identity. According to Winnicott, humans live simultaneously in three realities: inner, external, and transitional. The transitional space is a space of play and creative transformation, a place that grows in richness, if we are healthy, throughout life, not one we discard as adults. Transitional space is where we deal with the loss of omnipotence, with the pressures of the outer world and the conflicts of the inner world. Importantly, it is a space that can emerge only with "neither too much nor too little impingement from either the inner or outer world" (121). In transitional space, we engage in symbolization, creatively transforming culture. Because we are never free of the conflict between inner and outer realities, transitional spaces are part of the life-long process of reconciling self and other. Transitional spaces are where we might conceptualize a redesign of the academic identity kit.

Flax connects a postmodern understanding of justice to the need for transitional space. Otherwise, justice would be submission to the regulation of the outer world, a submission to anxiety. "Transitional spaces serve as defenses against the fear of multiplicity, ambivalence, and uncertainly. This fear often tempts us to try to collapse all our worlds into one... [rather than] challenge or play with the limits or restrictions required by the outer world" (122-23). Flax outlines four aspects of the process of justice that I would like to use to reconsider the work between Fannie and Morgan and to imagine other directions their work might have taken.

1. Reconciliation. According to Flax, justice "requires a unity of differences," not a unity based on a uniform standard, but a "new multiple unity" based on "mutuality and "incorporation" rather than "annihilation of opposites and distinctions" (123-4 ). If writing centers are imagined as transitional spaces where we extend the play of differences rather than preserve a mainstream standard, Fannie and Morgan might begin by talking about the life experiences they bring to writing experiences at the university: the languages, the cultures, the personal history of schooling that has shaped the identities they bring to school. This possibility may sound intrusive, perhaps even ridiculous to some, a sure sign of how split between outer and inner realities we expect writing in school to be. When students are encouraged to write from their own experience, we seem to expect that experience to assume some sort of white middle-class homogeneity, and we certainly expect them to write coherent essays about their experiences as though the transition from their home experience to school experience was a smooth, carefully paved highway operating in one direction only. Carol Severino has observed that when we imagine the student moving from home culture to school culture: "the assumption is that after the student, with the help of the guide, crosses the bridge, s/he burns it" (8). Unfortunately, as Severino observes, "usually, when we speak of crossing boundaries, it is the student who is on the journey, not the teacher, and the implication is that the student has only a one- way ticket" (8). What if instead, as Severino suggests, we imagine the bridge as providing a means for student and tutor to move back and forth between cultures? What if we instead imagined the possibility of negotiating with the academic identity kit?

Tutorials could focus on the often non-contiguous worlds of public and private life and on the means of negotiating between the inner and outer realities of our multiple selves. Can we expect eighteen- or nineteen-year-old college students to generate these discussions? Well, we now expect them to pretend the gaps between home and school don't exist, so inviting them to discuss the gaps seems a more honest gesture. Can we expect Fannie to have the vocabulary, the self-awareness, the self-confidence to carry this conversation? No, not initially. But we can expect it of Morgan; in fact we can give Morgan practice thinking of herself as a raced, gender, classed, multiply-situated self during her training to become a tutor and a high school English teacher. Because of her race, Morgan no doubt has more practice thinking about her multiple and fluid subjectivity than many white middle-class tutors. The white middle-class tutors (and their directors) may need more practice with recognizing themselves as raced, classed, gendered rather than simply "normal" humans. By developing and demonstrating awareness of the formation and reformation of their identity, writing center tutors, no matter how awkwardly they do this, can encourage the creation of transitional space where they can play with and challenge cultural expectations, reimagining social futures.

2. Reciprocity. According to Flax, reciprocity "connotes a continuous though imprecisely defined sharing of authority and mutuality of decision" (124). In theory, reciprocity is supposed to characterize writing center interactions, but the regulatory project of composition inevitably pushes tutorial sessions toward objective standards and normative practices. Morgan, for example, "never really surrendered control; somehow, the message always came across that Morgan knew more than Fannie about the ideas at hand" (138). Yet, DiPardo observes, "As [Morgan] struggled to come to terms with her own ethnic ambivalence, to defend herself against a vociferous chorus proclaiming her not black enough,' Morgan had reason to take heart in Fannie's dramatic and rather trying process of transition," particularly since Fannie was "learning to inhabit both arenas" (141). Transitional spaces characterized by reciprocity "press us to resist false accommodation to ill-fitting demands" (Flax 124). Reimagining writing centers as transitional spaces characterized by reciprocity means that writing center training programs would not mirror the outer reality of "objective" or "normative" standards but rather hold those in tension with inner realities, sustaining space to imagine possibilities for transformation.

Nancy Welch's "excess-ive theory of revision" is based on a similar notion of reciprocity. She asks, "what will happen when we begin to read, write, and teach at that tense, problematic, and fascinating boundary between individual and society -- reading, writing, and teaching with an excess-ive and pluralized understanding of these terms and of the intricate braids that make it impossible for us to distinguish between the two?" (167). Revision of culture, of the identity kit, of a single paper must move into reciprocity, beyond a either/or choice between repudiation or identification with the culture of power. Tutoring, as Aaron Schutz and Anne Ruggles Gere recently argue, must also move beyond a caring for the private and the individual and into a reciprocal understanding of the relationship between social forces and individual "problems."

3. Recognition. Recognition involves "acknowledging the legitimacy of others" (124), a task made difficult by the tension of accepting the difference of others while at the same time identifying with them. As children, recognizing ourselves as separate from and connected to the caregiver "enables us to experience separation as other than abandonment or domination" (125). Without recognition, we cannot imagine ways to remake our relationships with others, with authorities, with rules. Morgan, like many tutors, struggled with her frustration at Fannie's silence. DiPardo quotes an end-of-term interview in which Morgan recalled her lasting impression of Fannie

"I just remember her sitting there," Morgan recalled, "and taking to her, and it's like, "well I don't know, I don't know" ...Fannie just has so many doubts, and she's such a hesitant person, she's so withdrawn, and mellow, and quite... A lot of times, she'd just say, well I don't know what I'm supposed to write... Well I don't like this, I don't like my writing'. (133).

Understandably but regrettably, Morgan's sense of her effectiveness is merged with Fannie's responses. "Are you learnin' anything from me?" she'd asked. Morgan's training, reinforced by an opportunity to attend the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) gave her expertise, strategies, methods, but it did not encourage to separate her need to perform well from Fannie's reluctant response. It did not teach her to be curious about Fannie's reluctance. Instead, she was frustrated by Fannie's failure to benefit from her helpful intentions. Rather than recognize Fannie as distinct, rather than risk identifying with her voicelessness, Morgan performed the social norm, trying to apply the expectations of the academic identity kit to fix Fannie.

4. Judgment. Flax defines judgment not as the application of an external reality but as a balancing act, the "capacity to see things from the point of view of another" (125). Judgment calls not only on logic and objectivity but also on empathy and imagination. Judgment involves movement between evidence and reflection, the self and other, the individual and the collectivity, the past and the future (125). Because just practices require us to move back and forth between multiple realities, they "encourage us to tolerate ambiguity and ambivalence without losing a sense of individual location and responsibility" (125). Morgan did not see from Fannie's point of view because she didn't know Fannie. Rather, she saw from the point of view of the university, the institution, from the panopticon, the universal gaze of regulation. She knew the tasks Fannie was expected to perform and from this monofocal perspective she did not feel the need for redesign of the identity kit. Instead, the problem appears to be Fannie; Fannie needs to remake herself.

Readers may wonder just how fair is it to expect so much from a writing center, so much from undergraduates. When I first read DiPardo's essay, my reaction was similar. I felt uneasy when I recognized in Morgan some of my own reactions to nonmainstream students, and I translated that into thinking how unfair it was to expect more of her, given her position in the institution and all of the constraints operating on that position. Yet I think DiPardo was right to shine the light on Morgan because it is Morgan and others who hold her position who work on the front lines with nonmainstream students. We have transferred responsibility to them, yet we are responsible for the programs that recruit and train them, for the budgets that support that important work. Morgan, like many undergraduate tutors, had only a few hours of training and little supervision. DiPardo concludes by challenging those who are responsible for such programs to think more realistically of the kinds of support and guidance that new tutors and teachers need, particularly "the need to monitor one's ethnocentric biases and faulty assumptions" (142).

A training program that creates an identity crisis for white middle-class students and teachers by inviting them to scrutinize their entitlements and denaturalize their merits will certainly generate resistance. Flax consistently confronts resistance from women studies' scholars for her use of postmodern theory. Postmodernism, destabilizes the conceptual grounds on which many intellectual pursuits and programs are based. Flax observes, "If one takes some of its central ideas seriously, even while resisting or rejecting others, postmodernism is bound to induce a profound uneasiness, or threatened identity, especially among white Western intellectual. Our consciousness and positions are among its primary subjects of critical analysis" (133). The paradox of postmodernism is that while we may try to ground our claims to truth in a particular discourse "there is no trump available that we can rely on to solve all disputes" (138) and "no transcendental standpoint or mind unencumbered by its own language and stories (139) and no "neutral rules that could provide certain guarantees" (145). The redesign of the academic identity kit relies on the ability of the designers to remake themselves, to imagine themselves as multiple fluid subjects.

Will my suggestions for rethinking writing center practice result in complete anarchy? Will institutions withdraw funding from writing centers because they are not doing what they are supposed to be doing? I don't think so. I am not recommending that tutors tell students to repudiate all routine practices and authority. Rather, I am recommending that they be able to tell students how these authoritative practices work in ways that they are not automatically endorsing them, in ways that denaturalize the practices so that students can then make decisions about the extent that they want to conform to the design, to acknowledge the norm encoded in the design and announce an intention to depart from it, or to create a new design. Flax reminds us "without pregiven structures and systems of signification, no creativity would be possible. On the other hand, the individual can creatively transform what is given, including language, texts, and games of various sorts, in part by bringing something of inner reality into the process" (121)

I conclude by turning to a quintessential postmodern subject, Irish singer and songwriter, Sinead O'Conner, whose shape shifting in response to social regulation launched her career. On her Universal Mother CD, Sinead's last cut is called "Thank You for Hearing Me." The songs on this particular CD are about her multiple identities as Irish woman, mother, singer and songwriter, lover, sister, friend. Like the rest of the CD, this last song is addressed to the Goddess, to her son, to Ireland, to her listening public, to lovers, friends, family, to us. In the final stanza she sings

Thanks for silence with me
Thank you for holding me
And saying I could be
Thank you for saying Baby
Thank you for holding me
Thank you for helping me
Thank you for breaking my heart
Thank you for tearing me apart
Now I've a strong strong heart
Thank you for breaking my heart

60-second wave file clip of "thank you for hearing me"

Initially, only half-listening and confused by the repetition and message of this song, I remarked to my daughter, who was home for the holidays, "Why would she be saying thank you to someone who broke her heart?" "Listen," Kristin said, with a slight smile, herself recently wiser about matters of the heart, "Now she has a stronger heart." Sinead's thank you song surprises listeners with its abrupt shift from expression of gratitude for the supportive gestures (the "normal" things our friends, family, coworkers do that shore up our identity) to expression of gratitude to whoever has inflicted pain and conflict (what we typically think of as blows to our identity). In this paradoxical embrace of seemingly contradictory emotions and experiences, Sinead identifies a theme common to postmodern theorists in their discussion of agency. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler writes, "Ambivalence is at the heart of agency" (18). Just as Sinead professes paradoxical gratitude for a broken heart so does Butler emphasize the need to "affirm complicity" as a basis of political agency (29).

Unlike Sinead, most of us, particularly in our institutional roles, do not call attention to what "hurts us," and thus we avoid giving credit to the conflicts that shape our identity. We ignore the ambivalence at the heart of our practices. Rather than explore and verbalize contradictions, we elide them, drooping the "dic" syllable from contradiction, leaving a contraction, a shortened form, cleansed of the inconsistencies and discrepancies -- and possibly also the paradoxical truths -- from the identities we present in our interpersonal interactions and in our written arguments. In the writing center, for example, students and their tutors work to make papers match the assignments constructed by teachers. These carefully constructed papers -- Berlin's, mine, Kari's, Joe's, Hajj's, Rebecca's, Nancy's, Fannie's -- often leave out the conflicts and thus reproduce the status quo. As Marilyn Cooper has observed, it is really quite irrational to believe that in matching the specifications of the assignment, students are learning to exercise agency in writing or taking ownership of texts (102). Cooper argues that writing centers, because of their close contact with institutional regulation and with students' lived experiences are well positioned "to develop new templates for texts" and to identify "what spaces are left open" for the construction of different subject positions (109).

To cultivate the arts of the contact zone, to coax people out of their safe houses into mediation of differences, we need to first cultivate the psychic space for negotiation to occur. Because of social regulation, we have internalized social norms. Externalizing and rethinking those norms, negotiating with them, requires a willingness to talk frankly about the pictures on the box. It requires a willingness to scrutinize our own implication in the cultural power that keeps the kit intact. This is not as simple as developing new tutoring strategies or a new code of ethical principles; rather, it is as difficult as regarding themselves as Others. When we learn to do this with some degree of facility, students may decide, in some cases, to match the picture on the box; in other cases, they will teach us how to redesign the kit.

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