Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing: How Composition’s Social Construction Reinstates Expressivist Solipsism (And Even Current-Traditional Conservatism)

Abstract

T he main premise of this article is that social construction, under the guise of being the radical wolf that will empower teachers and students alike, has in-stead promoted a pervasive sheepishness, a passive disinterest in large-scale progress in composition studies. While social construction ostensibly offers a contextually-sensitive open field for scholars and teachers, its practical effect has been to fragment composition studies by encouraging ultra-specific scholarship that does not readily cohere into shared knowledge. We believe that social construction is fundamentally a form of Romanticism, enabling not only the solipsism of which its advocates once accused " expressivists, " 1 but also the conservatism for which expressivists once excoriated current-traditionalists. And while some scholarship has clearly turned away from social construction in recent years, we believe that its influence continues—most obviously in the durable arguments against the " positivism " of data collection. We believe that reframing social construction through a Romantic/Classic lens might clarify the roots and the lasting consequences of the theory's enduring appeal. Composition's long-standing resistance to data-rich research approaches, fully explored by Richard Haswell (" NCTE/CCCC's "), is one of the most prominent signs of social construction's Romanticism, and our essay aims to untangle both the philosophical causes and practical effects of this orientation. Finally, we invoke a different line of thinking available from the beginning of these disputes, Robert Pirsig's " metaphysics of quality, " as a compelling example of one possible way out of the feedback loop of current social construction and into a more progressive and responsive philosophy. We pause here for an important preliminary note. During the course of trying to publish this article, here and in other journals, we met with criticism from several reviewers for not outlining social construction theory with complete care before forwarding our own argument. We want to make clear that this perceived omission is by design. While it might be academic custom to sum up previous studies to prove one's credibility, there are two reasons why we have streamlined that part of our article. First, we contend that social construction is such a nebulous theory that attempting to pin it down would take an article in itself. That is indeed one of the problems with social construction that we directly 1