Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear 457

Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear:

Impediments to Multimedia Production

S t e v e We s t b r o o k

et me begin with two images:

On the left is a photograph: an ordinary image of an ordinary adhesive that took on

a new, unexpected meaning after February 11, 2003. On this date, Tom Ridge, then
Secretary of Homeland Security, advised Americans to prepare themselves for po-
tential attacks of biological terrorism by purchasing duct tape, which Ridge instructed
should be used to seal off windows and doorways. At best, the motive for this advi-
sory was questionable, the durability of duct tape exaggerated. Shortly after Ridge’s
announcement, the Washington Post revealed financial links between the White House

Steve West bro o k is assistant professor of English at California State University–Fullerton, where he
teaches courses in composition, creative writing, and cultural studies. His articles have appeared most
recently in Language and Learning Across the Disciplines and New Writing: The International Journal for the
Practice and Theory of Creative Writing; his poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

College English, Volume 68, Number 5, May 2006

Copyright © 2006 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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and Jack Kahl, contributor of over $100,000 to the Republican Party’s 2000 presi-
dential campaign and founder of Henkel Consumer Adhesives, a company that manu-
factured 46 percent of all duct tape sold in U.S. markets (Kamen). Wary of potential
lawsuits, other duct tape manufacturers offered public disclaimers about their
product’s inability to withstand exposure to certain chemical agents. But the ethical-
ity and efficacy of Ridge’s suggested mode of protection (which provided fodder for
satirists everywhere) are really less important than the immediate effect of the former
Secretary’s announcement. By February 15, 2003, before caricatures of Ridge wrapped
head to toe in silver sticky stuff had flooded the Internet, rolls of duct tape had
disappeared from store shelves throughout the country; in fact, demand for the prod-
uct had grown by 5,000 percent from the previous week (Potts). Motivated by fear,
Americans put their trust in the advice offered by a government official and, in do-
ing so, convinced themselves that a silver-lined adhesive might save them from un-
predictable acts of terror. Fear affected their behavior so strongly that, for a brief
time at least, they were willing to consider utterly absurd advice—because it was
offered by a recognized cultural authority—as perfectly commonsensical.
On the right is an image that I will have to ask you to imagine, for the ambigu-
ous definition of “fair use” under current copyright law prevents me from showing
it. This absent text is a feminist counter-advertisement or “spoof ad” that an under-
graduate named Sara created while enrolled in a course on multimedia rhetoric and
poetics. Akin to the advertisement parodies produced by Adbusters, it is a compli-
cated text that responds satirically to a Maybelline advertisement through a combi-
nation of appropriated digital images and original poetry. The parody’s source text,
a portion of which Sara includes on the right side of her page, contains a dual por-
trait of model Adriana Lima. Dominating the appropriated ad is a large and heavily
airbrushed close-up of Lima’s face, which showcases the glossy pink Maybelline lip-
stick the model wears on her suggestively parted lips. Lima’s eyes are covered by
thickly mirrored sunglasses, and reflected within these sunglasses is the second por-
trait. Here, Lima is shown from head to waist in a silver and black stretch shirt that
highlights her breasts; she is walking in front of skyscrapers that tower above and
behind her in a somewhat phallic and futuristic cityscape. White text placed beneath
the large image of Lima’s face reads “MAYBE: Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s
Maybelline.” Around this appropriated section of the Maybelline advertisement winds
Sara’s visual poem, titled “The Product I May Be.” In this text, Sara takes on the
persona of a disillusioned model (presumably Lima’s alter ego) who has grown weary
of her own sexual objectification within visual culture. In the second, third, and
fourth stanzas, the narrator complains:

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 Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear 459

My skin feels heavy with extra coating.

Aware that I cannot be recognized,
Is it me or product I’m promoting?
I’ve become the feature advertised:
Commodity of beauty made to last
When only appearances are prized.
My parted lips are made free and fast,
Open for service . . .

Sara supplements the words of her poem with collaged images that appear in the
four corners of her counter-ad: opaque pink lipstick smudges, neon blue and red
“Open” signs, and a silver lipstick container that appears behind an enlarged (prison-
like) barcode.
Overlooking, for the time being, the problem of absence, we might ask what
defines the relationship between these two images or, more precisely, what they
represent: a photograph of duct tape, a sign of fear, desperation, and perhaps delu-
sion, and a student’s multimedia ad parody, a visual text that offers a critique of
consumer culture’s sexism. I suggest a rather unlikely connection that concerns the
symbolic contexts within which the images were produced. As a strange combina-
tion of pragmatism and absurdity defined a frightened American public’s reaction to
Ridge’s security briefing, a similar fusion currently defines the pedagogical treat-
ment of visual rhetoric within writing studies. Uncertain of how the transition from
print to digital cultures will ultimately affect education in writing and, perhaps, threat-
ened by the pace of developments in multimedia composing technologies, those of
us in composition and creative writing tend to rely, sometimes too readily, on the
common sense of our fields. That is, we redeploy the lore and paradigms that we
have inherited—the advice, warnings, or ways of knowing that the authorities of
print culture have given us—whether or not these are entirely appropriate for and
ultimately beneficial to writing students of the twenty-first century. In this essay I
argue that our inheritance—and here I refer to traditions both inside and outside
the academy—sometimes leads us to devalue students’ experiments with visual rheto-
ric and multimedia composition, regardless of our intentions. More specifically, I
use the case of Sara’s missing text to explore how and why institutional ideologies
particular to the historical development of composition and creative writing—espe-
cially when viewed in conjunction with current copyright law—render students’
multimedia compositions illegitimate. To this end, I seek to reveal connections be-
tween how the ideological apparatuses of writing instruction and the legal statutes
of U.S. culture at large combine to radically restrict the production and circulation
of students’ multimedia texts and, hence, inhibit students’ power as writers.

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VISUAL RHETORIC IN COMPOSITION STUDIES:

WRITING RESTRICTIONS

A multimedia parody like Sara’s seems to lend itself quite readily to the aims of
composition, especially since the advent of critical pedagogy and the relative comple-
tion of what John Trimbur has identified as the field’s social turn. That is, the dia-
logic and dialectical writing process required for producing an ad parody—or any
multimedia text that relies on practices of sampling—might encourage students to
understand “composing as a cultural activity by which writers position and reposi-
tion themselves in relation to their own and others’ subjectivities” (109) precisely
because it requires students to write back to others’ texts through discursive prac-
tices of appropriation, incorporation, and transformation. While this process may
not offer the kind of liberation that defined the early promises of Freirean pedagogy,
it does allow students to explore, firsthand, the direct relationship between manipu-
lations of text, however subtle or radical, and contestations for social power. For
instance, when students themselves redesign a logo and transform “Gap Athletic” to
“Apathetic” or “Hilfiger” from a glorified brand name to the unlikely combined
subject and verb of a campy feminist punch line—“Maybe someday Hilfiger it out”—
or when they engage in larger transformations as Sara does by altering inherited
images and inventing a poem that sabotages the intention of the original text from
which it developed, they are reminded of both the interestedness and pliability of
verbal and visual language. In other words, they may experience how easily major and
minor textual changes can be made to serve radically different persuasive, economic,
and political agendas.
However, students are rarely offered this experience firsthand, for as visual rheto-
ric emerges as a distinct subject of study within composition it is being defined,
rather ironically, through a pedagogy of viewer- or reader-reception. In other words,
to “do” visual rhetoric in composition too often means not to work with students on
authoring multimedia visual texts that combine words and images but, rather, to
work on critically reading visual artifacts and demonstrating this critical reading
through the evidence of a print essay. A number of educators have identified the lack
of production-based pedagogies as a problem and begun to argue vocally for teach-
ing multimedia composition (see, for example, David Buckingham’s Media Educa-
tion; Anne Frances Wysocki and others’ Writing New Media; and Diana George’s
“From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing”).
However, their arguments represent a minority position, for at present a consumer
orientation pervades the professional scholarship of the field. This orientation is
revealed in the work of interdisciplinary scholars who have influenced composition’s
understanding of visual rhetoric as well as the work of compositionists who have
sought to define visual rhetoric from within their own enterprise. For instance,

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Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, whose work is often cited by compositionists,
locate the genealogy of their scholarship within semiotic traditions of reading (Reading
5). In Literacy in the New Media Age, Kress claims that his forays into “multimodal
literacy” and “the grammar of visual design” begin with questions about how readers
produce meaning. He writes, “My own starting point is this: [. . .] to rethink our
notions of what reading is [. . .] to explain how we derive meaning from [visual]
texts” (141). In Practices of Looking, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright offer an
interdisciplinary, cultural studies approach to visual rhetoric concerned exclusively
with “viewers’ practices of looking, and the various and specific ways people regard,
use, and interpret images” (6; emphasis added). Both of these approaches treat visual
artifacts as if they have always already been produced and confine the visual rhetor
to the role of respondent, who uses a variety of semiotic strategies to understand the
effect of the preexisting visual image. I do not mean to suggest that these reader-
based systems lack valuable implications for producers of multimedia texts but that
these implications are rarely pursued.
Explaining the significance of preexisting visual artifacts is the primary task of
the visual rhetor, according to Marguerite Helmers and Charles A. Hill. In their
introduction to Defining Visual Rhetorics, the authors claim that scholars of visual
rhetoric are concerned with “explicating the image through verbal media” (18). Al-
though Hill and Helmers explore a diverse range of epistemologies in their effort to
define visual rhetoric within the field of composition, they offer viewer-based defini-
tions and clearly extricate the rhetor from visual discourse, placing him or her within
the familiar realm of verbal explication. Furthermore, when offering what they con-
sider “the primary question” that underlies their quest to define visual rhetoric—
“How do images act rhetorically upon viewers?” (1)—the coauthors strip the
producers of visual texts of their agency, literally rendering them absent, for accord-
ing to this conceptualization, the preexisting image acts and the viewer responds to
this action. Taken superficially, the last criticism here may seem to concern a small
grammatical quibble, but it reflects a larger cultural absence, for within the dis-
course of composition, visual rhetoric is being defined repeatedly as a “frame of
analysis for looking and interpreting” (Helmers 65) but not often enough for pro-
ducing. This phenomenon might be said to reflect Robert Scholes’s contention in
Textual Power that within our educational institutions, we “privilege consumption
over production, just as the larger culture privileges the consuming class over the
producing class” (5).
The consumer bias not only dominates the professional scholarship of compo-
sition but also the pedagogical materials of the enterprise; here, it has its most direct
impact on students. A survey of recently published textbooks reveals the paucity of
opportunities for students to engage in the production of visual texts. Ten of the
more popular textbooks concerned with visual rhetoric—Beyond Words (Ruszkiewicz,

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Anderson, and Friend); Seeing and Writing 2 (McQuade and McQuade); Frames of
Mind (DiYanni and Hoy); Picturing Texts (Faigley, George, Palchik, and Selfe); Prac-
tices of Looking (Sturken and Cartwright); Ways of Reading Words and Images
(Bartholomae and Petrosky); Everything’s an Argument (Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz);
Reading Culture (George and Trimbur); Writing in a Visual Age (Odell and Katz); and
Designing Writing (Palmquist)—contain a total of 2,620 prompts. Of these 2,620
prompts, only 143, or roughly 5 percent, require students to engage in multimedia
or visual production, which I define here rather generously to cover a broad range of
activities that includes basic endeavors like experimenting with font color or includ-
ing a picture in an essay, and more substantial exercises that integrate alphabetic and
imagistic modes of text-making (designing digital posters or arranging words and
images through photo-manipulation software, for example). The percentage of ex-
ercises in visual production, of course, varies from book to book. At the lower ex-
treme, Seeing and Writing 2 and Frames of Mind encourage students to compose
visual texts in approximately 1 percent of their prompts; on the high end, Picturing
Texts asks students to engage in visual production in 24 percent of its prompts, and
Designing Writing in 28 percent of its prompts. With one exception, all of the re-
maining textbooks offer between 1 percent and 8 percent of prompts as exercises in
visual production. Only Writing in a Visual Age offers students consistent and flex-
ible opportunities to produce visual texts in the majority of its large-scale assign-
ments.
The 95 percent of prompts that position students solely as consumers of visual
rhetoric may not offer any ultimate conclusions or reliable predictions about a sub-
ject of study that is quickly evolving, but the prompts themselves reveal discernible
tendencies. Most position students as consumers of visual rhetoric through one of
three methods of restriction. The first and most common method is simply to ex-
clude possibilities for visual production by treating students as quasi academics who,
following the trend of composition scholarship outlined above, establish the author-
ity of their critical reading/viewing abilities by responding to visual texts in a quasi-
academic discourse. This discourse most frequently takes the form of an analytical
or expository essay. Examples of this sort of restriction range from Lunsford and
Ruszkiewicz’s instructions to view a “contemporary ad that sells ‘dreams and hope’
rather than goods, and write an expository essay in which you explain what the ad is
selling and how” (416) to Bartholomae and Petrosky’s instructions to “[w]rite an
essay about the photographs, about how you understand them” (132). The second
and slightly less obtrusive method of restriction presents students with hypothetical
scenarios that require them to imagine—but not actually produce—a visual text of
their own creation. As the following example demonstrates, this sort of prompt re-
quires students to write in traditional print media about what they might do were
they actually permitted to compose a visual or multimedia text: “Imagine you’ve

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been asked to create a self portrait. What physical medium or media would you
choose and why? What aspects of your identity would you want to emphasize in
your portrait, and how do you think this particular medium would help you do that?
Write a paragraph explaining your choice” (Ruszkiewicz, Anderson, and Friend 81).
To be clear about context, I should explain that this prompt—reproduced here in its
entirety—does not form one section of a more complete writing sequence; nor does
it function as a prewriting exercise used as an initial step in the actual composition of
a self-portrait. Rather, the assignment, like others in this genre of prompt, begins
with a hypothetical scenario and ends with a paragraph of descriptive prose.
To be fair, textbook authors occasionally make concessions that enable students
to transform hypothetical scenarios to actual opportunities for visual composition,
but these concessions appear rarely, most often as afterthoughts or asides, and tend
to include conditional criteria. For instance, in one prompt, John Ruszkiewicz, Daniel
Anderson, and Christy Friend ask students to imagine that they are going to pro-
duce a graphic novel and write a prospectus (in words) for this imagined text. (As in
the assignment mentioned above, this activity of writing does not lead into any larger
project: the prospectus does not lead to the production of a graphic novel, for ex-
ample). Most of the prompt focuses on the prose description of the (hypothetical)
graphic novel as it will appear in the prospectus; however, in the last sentence, the
authors write, “If you have the talent, offer a few panels to illustrate the story” (313).
The authors thus treat visual composition as a peripheral component of the exer-
cise—an option outside the real scope of the assignment (to write a prospectus)—
and, more significantly, as an activity that, as their qualifying phrase suggests, is
external to actual processes of writing instruction. Here, the ability to combine im-
ages and text depends on “talent” rather than “learning,” and this perceived depen-
dency reveals how foreign many of us in composition consider visual production to
be to our enterprise.
The third method of restriction, one encountered less frequently than the pre-
vious two, appears to increase students’ interaction with multimedia texts but limits
the kinds of mark-making activities in which students may engage. This method
may be found in Comp21, the CD that accompanies Robert DiYanni and Pat C.
Hoy’s textbook Frames of Mind. As DiYanni and Hoy state in the preface to their
book, the CD and its onscreen exercises permit students to “interact with verbal and
visual texts,” but only from the perspective of a consumer and only in two ways: by
“highlighting certain elements of the text and writing annotations” (viii). Here, the
authors apply conventional reading habits of print culture to digital arenas, transfer-
ring the practices of highlighting passages of text and making marginal notes from
the page to the screen. The highlighter tool allows students to make three kinds of
temporary marks—arrows, lines, and boxes—all of which serve the function of call-
ing attention to the preexisting features of an inherited visual text; the annotation

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box, which appears as a discrete pop-up window divorced spatially from the visual
text under study, allows them to take notes that explain the reason for their high-
lights. This form of technological interaction may thus foster the development of
active, critical reading/viewing practices, but it does not permit students even to
substantially alter another’s preexisting multimedia text (as they might if using a
program like Photoshop or iMovie). When applied to the realm of textual produc-
tion, students’ digital highlighting and annotating serve ultimately, as DiYanni and
Hoy suggest, as prewriting exercises. The authors consistently treat their offerings
of multimedia “interaction” as subservient to what they construct as the more valu-
able process of writing a print essay, for they suggest that students’ “annotations”
can be “collated and printed as notes for a paper” (viii), and their CD provides a
separate word processor for the composition of this paper.
Despite their variations, all three methods of restriction permit students to re-
spond as critical readers/viewers or essayists to reproductions of others’ multimedia
and visual texts but prevent students from engaging in their own multimedia and
visual composition. In other words, the vast majority of textbook prompts promote
the kind of mark-making that reinscribes students’ identities as consumers.
Having up to this point deployed the terms production and consumption rather
freely, I want to clarify two issues regarding my treatment of these terms and their
relationship. First, I do not intend to suggest that encouraging students to become
critical consumers is a bad idea, especially since they are living in a capitalist culture
in which their identities as target consumers have largely been prewritten by corpo-
rations, ad agencies, and marketing demographics. In fact, like most compositionists,
I advocate approaches to visual rhetoric that promote critical citizenship in a heavily
mediated democracy, one in which approximately 3,500 hours a year or, as John P.
Davies’s summary of a UCLA study suggests, “about 56% of one’s waking hours”
are spent consuming media (63). And, in this sense, I understand how the dominant
reader/viewer-based paradigm that we have come to deploy might coincide with the
inherited goal of critical pedagogy: to create critical respondents or, perhaps by ex-
tension, empowered citizens who may choose to accept or resist the ways in which
their identities are constructed by the persuasive visual discourses of consumer cul-
ture. Second, although I refer to their radical differences, I do not mean to catego-
rize textual consumption and production as necessarily oppositional activities. Various
articulations of what we have come to call reader-response theory have clearly dem-
onstrated the ways in which consumers of texts “write” or construct meaning through
their individual and communal consuming activities within particular social con-
texts. In short, I view reading as a constructive or “productive” activity and recog-
nize, as Kress articulates in Literacy in the New Media Age, “reading as sign-making”
(140).

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That said, let me articulate the specific problem with what I have identified as a
consumer-based paradigm, however “productive” it may, in fact, be. This approach
does not position students as genuine agents of change precisely because it places
them outside of the discourses that they are examining. Under this model, even if
students are actively “producing” meaning, they must always remain the inheritors
of that visual culture which already exists, and they must do so regardless of how
conformist or resistant their practices of reading may be. When students are taught
how their own methods of critical reading or how others’ manipulations of words
and images might offer, as Diana George and John Trimbur explain in Reading Cul-
ture, “a forceful tool of resistance to the messages that go unquestioned and unno-
ticed in the public sector” (170), they remain limited in at least two major ways.
First, as Wysocki suggests in “Opening New Media to Writing,” they are effectively
prohibited from articulating their own identities with the materials of visual culture
and, thereby, prohibited from asserting their own positions not only as subjects but
also as agents within this culture. Wysocki writes,
people in our classrooms ought to be producing [new media] texts using a wide and
alertly chosen range of materials—if they are to see their selves as positioned, as building
positions in what they produce [. . .]. [W]hen someone makes an object that is both
separate from her but that shows how she can use the tools and materials and tech-
niques of her time, then she can see a possible self—a self positioned and working
within the wide material conditions of her world, even shaping that world—in that
object. (20–21)

This is not to say that students have any ultimate control (the last word—or image,
as it were) over the identities that they create, assert, and perhaps share publicly
through multimedia production but, rather, that as producers they have the ability
to better and more actively negotiate their positions in on- and offline public spheres.
In short, positioning students to author texts in the kinds of media that dominate
these spheres provides them with more initial power and responsibility to shape,
recognize, and claim their social-textual identities. Furthermore, as Wysocki im-
plies, the process of composing in new media better enables students not only to
construct their “selves” but also to recognize how their constructed and negotiated
“selves” might effect change in the material world.
Students’ relationship with the materiality of visual culture brings up the sec-
ond issue at hand. Imagining the production of hypothetical texts in response to
assignment prompts might engender “critical thinking,” but it does not permit stu-
dents to participate in shaping public culture on anything more than the level of
abstraction. In contrast, as I have suggested, positioning students to author multi-
media texts—particularly by sampling and transforming existing material from the
public sphere—allows them to actually experience how their mark-making activities

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change, on an immediate, literal level, the physical design—and hence meaning of—
visual culture. This experiential activity of text-making then provides, on a broader
level, a more empowering understanding of just how readily they can reconstruct
the material world, particularly if their textual products are allowed to circulate in
larger cultural spheres—something imaginary texts simply cannot do. Students’ con-
tributions to visual culture as producers or reconstructors may or may not necessar-
ily be dramatic or effective, but their activities at least position them not simply as
viewers of culture (and its evolution) but as participants in the continual re-creation of
this culture.
Many reasons, from concerns over the availability of technological resources to
fears of writing’s perceived devolution, can be said to account for the resistance to
multimedia production. Cynthia Selfe’s “Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up the
Challenges of Visual Literacy” offers a thorough discussion of these issues; here, I’d
like to focus on the institutional and historical factors that account for the strange,
hegemonic, and yet, within the enterprise of composition, commonsensical depen-
dence on the essay at the expense of other multimedia and multimodal genres, a
dependence that leads to the marginalization of multimedia writing activities. As
many of composition’s historians have explained, the essay has enjoyed a position of
privilege since it became established as the preferred form of student writing over a
century ago (see, for example, Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality; Connors’s Composition-
Rhetoric; and North’s Refiguring the Ph.D. in English Studies). As the transition from
oral to print culture began to redefine education in late-nineteenth-century America,
the earliest models of composition instruction—particularly Harvard’s—offered the
five-paragraph theme, prototype of the “student essay,” as the ideal form for under-
graduate writers. As Harvard and other institutions developed into modern univer-
sities by restructuring themselves according to disciplinary paradigms and adopting
the German research model, they began relying heavily on the essay as default genre.
As David Russell suggests in Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History,
this reliance effectively marginalized other potential forms for student writing and
established the essay as the standard for academic discourse. He writes, “The re-
search ideal thus narrowed the possibilities for written discourse in the modern cur-
riculum by casting suspicion on genres that were not ‘academic’” (74) and enabled
the essay to become the “one genre [that] defined extended student writing in mass
secondary and higher education” (78). At present, “the essay” might serve as a ge-
neric term that glosses over a number of highly diverse and variegated forms of
prose writing endorsed by a number of different disciplines; whether or not it is
more than superficially defined, it continues to render other forms of discourse infe-
rior or unacceptable.
Furthermore, a reliance on the essay appears to fall “naturally” in line with the
perceived goal of composition instruction when “composition” is defined largely by

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first-year English, a university-wide service course responsible for preparing stu-

dents to write so-called academic discourse. Because this first-year course remains
largely unconnected to other, discipline-specific curriculum, it may not be capable
of preparing students to write within the myriad of disciplinary contexts they face
and may, in fact, introduce them to composition’s greatest fiction, or what Sharon
Crowley has deemed a “superdiscourse [that] does not exist” (28). However, the
efficacy of this curricular arrangement and the bona fide value of the academy’s pre-
ferred form matter less to my purposes here than the perception that composition
needs to fulfill this supposed primary function. This perception leads to a seemingly
inevitable (and paradoxical) reliance on the essay, a form that is so imprecisely de-
fined that its very vagueness makes it capable of being considered the appropriate (if
ineffective) template for radically different kinds of “academic” writing. As a result,
those of us who teach first-year composition often feel institutional pressure to ef-
fectively prohibit students from experimenting with “other” forms because, accord-
ing to our ideological inheritance, students must use their time to prepare themselves
for other courses, and writing essays (we think) is synonymous with this preparation.
Furthermore, because the essay has enjoyed such a longstanding tradition as
composition’s preferred genre and, in turn, because we have grown so accustomed
to grading the essay, we tend to feel more secure evaluating this form of writing than
others even though our criteria may too often remain tacit and the codes and con-
ventions that govern essay-writing may be no more sophisticated or complex than
those governing writing in other genres.

C R E AT I V E W R I T I N G , A R T I S T I C V I S I O N , AND THE

HEGEMONY OF GENRE

One might think that if opportunities for producing a multimedia text like Sara’s do
not appear regularly within the field of composition, they might appear more fre-
quently in creative writing. However, the treatment of visual rhetoric within the
enterprise of creative writing suffers a similar fate. Although the enterprise does not
deploy the term “visual rhetoric”— “rhetoric” being too often considered anathema
to creative writing’s proposed “poetic” mission—it has demonstrated increasing in-
terest in potential relationships between the verbal and the visual, particularly when
the “visual” is conceptualized as “art,” as it is in the journal Ekphrasis and the anthol-
ogy Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art. This anthology, like most of
creative writing’s pedagogical materials, tends to require students to respond to vi-
sual art by conforming to the print genres that have historically defined the enter-
prise: fiction, poetry, drama, and more recently “creative nonfiction,” however
problematically defined. The dominance of these genres, like the dominance of the
essay in composition-rhetoric, leads to a positioning of students as primarily readers

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and interpreters of the visual, who use their writing practices not to combine images
and words in their own texts but rather to compose strictly verbal texts—poems,
stories, monologues—about their processes of “seeing” and experiencing others’
visual art. The particular relationship between visual text and verbal response func-
tions a bit differently in creative writing than in composition, for here the visual
serves less as a prompt for ideology-critique and more as a practical muse, providing
students both inspiration and material for exercises in what is largely descriptive
writing.
Gary Hawkins’s “Unfamiliar Ground: Inspiring Students with Abstraction” re-
veals this function. In his essay, Hawkins discusses his experience of taking poetry
students to view Cy Twombly’s Cattalus, an enormous piece that contains the artist’s
characteristic “scribbled” combinations of words, pencil, and paint. Hawkins offers
the following instructions to students who have been assigned to write poetry in-
spired by Twombly’s work: “Look at your section of the painting and tell me what
you see” (22). In this example, the poet, like the rhetor, is relegated to the role of
respondent, but here the act of viewing is underwritten by a Romantic concept of
vision that has been associated with the institution of creative writing at least since
its early days at Iowa. Discussing the Workshops in 1941, Wilbur Schramm stressed
creative writing students’ need to develop aesthetic discrimination by cultivating
what he called their “artistic vision,” claiming quite simply that students “must learn
to look at art with an artist’s eyes” (195). Although Hawkins offers a slightly more
complicated transference from visual to verbal media than does Schramm (who was
concerned strictly with the “fine art” of writing), he appears to preserve the tradi-
tion of cultivating aesthetic vision through art appreciation for his twenty-first-cen-
tury students. Whether or not they are meant to represent this tradition, Hawkins’s
instructions for viewing and writing about art are designed to elicit a descriptive
response that conforms to the standards of transparent mimetic poetry. The words
themselves are to offer representative description but not necessarily to be arranged
according to any particular visual design other than the default poetic arrangement
of lines along the left margin of the page. Even when creative writing practitioners
move beyond descriptive tendencies and ask students to find “some verbal analogue
to the visual” or to “construct a verbal artifact commensurate with the visual one”
(122), as Marjorie Welish suggests in “The How and the Why: John Taggart’s ‘Slow
Song for Mark Rothko,’” the results tend to take the form of what Welish calls a
“meditative lyric” (129). The intended response does not, like a concrete poem or
hypermedia presentation, showcase its own material design in an effort to be read
and seen; both the assumed composing process and the completed textual product
reinforce the discrete status of verbal and visual registers.
This separation might be challenged by writers and artists on a regular basis;
we need only turn to the visual texts of Clark Coolidge, Johanna Drucker, Barbara

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 Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear 469

Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Shirin Neshat, or Tom Phillips for recent examples. How-
ever, this separation continues to define creative writing’s pedagogical treatment of
the visual. The construction of separate realms for the verbal and visual and the
dominance of creative writing’s preferred genres effectively prevent students from
producing visual texts like Sara’s, for such a multimedia parody conflates these realms
and contests the genre-based organizational structure upon which the enterprise of
creative writing was founded. Sara’s text might fulfill a poetic function in that it
appropriates and transforms an everyday artifact and thereby defamiliarizes seem-
ingly “ordinary” visual and verbal arrangements of language, making them appear
strange within their immediate discursive contexts; however, it does not conform to
the requirements of the genre-based system that has historically defined the creative
writing enterprise.
The positioning of students outside of visual discourse contains particularly
ironic undertones when the original impetus for the development of the enterprise
is taken into consideration. Creative writing, or “imaginative writing” as it was deemed
in the late 1930s and early 1940s, came about as a reaction to the excessive restric-
tions of a philologically disposed form of literary scholarship. As D. G. Myers sug-
gests in his history of creative writing, The Elephants Teach, literature was treated as
“a mere corpus of knowledge” under a model of philology that was characterized by
extreme pedantry (4). The normative approach to study enabled students to write
about “literature” from a historical and linguistic perspective but prohibited them
from actually writing “literary” texts. Alan Tate’s rather famous complaint, “We study
literature today from various historical points of view, as if nobody ever intended to
write any more of it” (qtd. in Schramm 179), anticipated what would become one of
the more radical proclamations of the New Critics: students should have the right to
compose “literature” as if it were a living art (that is, study poetry, fiction, and drama
from the perspective of a poet, fiction writer, or playwright). Today, although we
may demonstrate increasing interest in “the visual,” we maintain a tendency to treat
visual texts as if others will always be producing them while we and our students
fulfill the role of viewer and respondent.

IN AND O U T O F T H E A C A D E M Y : B E H AV I O R A L R E G U L AT I O N S ,
IDEOLOGICAL SUBJECTS, AND COPYRIGHT LAW

To this point, I have presented the issue of multimedia production in composition

and creative writing largely as a conflict of genre, but this framework offers only a
superficial analysis of a much larger problem. Underlying the bouts of essay versus
counter-ad and poetry versus Photoshop experiment is one of the less-frequently
recognized functions of teaching writing: not only to encourage fluency in a given
genre or a particular kind of text making but, through this encouragement, to effec-

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tively regulate behavior. It is the teaching of behavior that underwrites the restric-
tions on genre and media that I have outlined above.
The teaching of behavior has perhaps always accompanied writing instruction
and was practiced without apology during the earliest days of composition. Accord-
ing to Russell, as education in writing was being developed in nineteenth-century
America, “Faculty enforced [. . .] complex schemes for regulating behavior; there
were points given and taken for ‘deportment,’ with class rankings based on them”
(36). In contemporary practice, we may rarely discuss behavior overtly or consider
consciously its role in our evaluative practices; however, if we consider that writing
itself, whether immediately classified as composition or creative writing, is, as John
Trimbur and Terry Eagleton have separately suggested, a form of cultural activity
and, further, that education in writing is ultimately “socialization in a community”
(Russell 16), then we recognize our inevitable roles as legislators of appropriate and
inappropriate forms of social-textual behavior. Furthermore, as Susan Miller has
argued in Textual Carnivals, we tend to discourage behaviors that might challenge
the status quo or disrupt current balances of power, usually by unwittingly ensuring,
through our default practices, that students do not produce writing that might have
serious “social and economic consequences” (197). Often we do so by requiring
assignments that provide students little or no opportunity to produce texts that have
potential to circulate widely among public audiences. Kay Halasek reminds us in A
Pedagogy of Possibility that the radically limited audience we provide for our writing
students does not adequately represent a reading or viewing public but is “usually in
the person of [a] writing instructor or a panel of placement evaluators” (102).
Despite historical changes, restrictions on students’ behavior continue to de-
fine composition pedagogy and appear frequently in the teaching materials of cre-
ative writing. In fact, behavioral restrictions appear regularly in even those progressive
handbooks that offer self-conscious ruptures with the enterprises’ traditions. In What
Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies, Katharine Haake offers
strategies for synthesizing feminist theory and textual practices, and yet she discour-
ages students from producing what she calls “dangerous writing,” texts that attempt
to unify art and action largely by subverting dominant conventions. She states “writing
dangerously is not so much a truly dangerous act as it is just not behaving yourself on
the page [. . .] however much we might wish that we could change the world through
our writing, it isn’t very likely” (263; emphasis added). In Beyond the Writers’ Work-
shop, Carol Bly expresses a similar desire to prevent students’ writing from address-
ing issues of social power and its inequitable distribution. Addressing her audience
directly, Bly states that students of creative nonfiction should avoid thinking and
writing about social and economic injustices, referred to here euphemistically as
“wildly unfair occasions”: “Occasions come up in writing that are so unfair that we
would do best to simply agree to ourselves aloud or in our journals, ‘That is wildly

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 Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear 471

unfair,’ and not think about them anymore. Unless you mean to give up your writing
to become the leader of a major psychosocial rebellion, thousands of horrible social
situations can’t be cured” (186). If the logic of Bly’s advice were taken seriously, a
writing student would not only avoid the prospect of cultural intervention but actu-
ally abandon the practice of writing in order to change culture, for these two pur-
suits are treated here as incompatible: one might write creatively, but one might not
use creative writing to do activist work.
Although considered left of center within traditional creative writing circles,
these two examples of twenty-first-century handbooks echo the more conservative
and isolationist formalism of New Critical thought, particularly Cleanth Brooks’s
1939 argument against the production of so-called “propagandist” writing “preoc-
cupied with the inculcation of a particular message” (49). But this taboo against
direct interventionism reveals more than New Criticism’s “art for art’s sake” legacy
within creative writing pedagogy and reflects not the individual biases of two anoma-
lous teachers but what is arguably one of the dominant ideological functions of edu-
cation, whether categorized immediately as creative writing or composition. If we
consider the college or university as something akin to what Louis Althusser has
called the “Ideological State Apparatus” (ISA), an institution that “teaches ‘know
how,’ but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology” (133), we might
consider how education creates, through behavioral regulation, a kind of passive
subject. In Composition in the University, Sharon Crowley deems this subject the “docile
student,” one whose behavior might not remain bound entirely to the norms estab-
lished by a single ruling ideology but whose learned respect for authority tends to
prevent him or her from challenging or questioning this authority, or recognizing
how behavioral norms may function to maintain hierarchies of dominance and sub-
ordination. As Sara’s case suggests, the neglect of multimedia production within the
institution may have more to do with a kind of behavioral and ideological transgres-
sion than any concerns with genre; in fact, these very concerns are symptomatic of a
larger problem of power.
As the author of the advertisement parody under discussion here, Sara may
have refused the role of docile student in the sense that her behaviors run counter to
those deemed ideologically acceptable not only by the academic institution but also
by some of the most powerful authorities of contemporary U.S. culture: multimil-
lion-dollar corporations and media conglomerates. Although Sara’s bricolage of words
and images may not appear immediately “dangerous” within the context of the class-
room, a place where consequences are usually doled out in the form of letter grades,
it may be perceived as more threatening in the larger public sector, for here its
critique of a corporation’s normative marketing practices might effect material change,
however substantial or slight. I do not mean to exaggerate the efficacy of Sara’s
subversive text; it may or may not attract readers’ attention, let alone persuade them

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 472 College English

to advocate nonsexist representational practices. In brief, Sara’s text may not change
the world overnight, but it has at least more potential to disrupt distributions of
power within this larger publication context precisely because it can be easily circu-
lated among masses of people. It can be posted on the street or uploaded to a Web
site, places that many academic texts and student essays do not reach, places where
the economic and social consequences for writing are more immediately apparent,
and places where words and images have profound effects on commerce. My rather
belabored point is this: the ideological and behavioral regulations that deem multi-
media production—or, more specific to the case at hand, the production of a multi-
media parody that critiques corporate consumerism through processes of image
sampling—unnecessary or illegitimate may be found both inside and outside of the
academy. And the connection between these contexts becomes increasingly impor-
tant to considerations of our own and our students’ rights as writers, especially when
we consider how the Ideological State Apparatus of the educational institution and
the State Apparatus (SA) of copyright law function in tandem to regulate behavior.
Before I delve into the specifics of copyright law, let me qualify my use of
Althusser’s ISA and explain the challenges the combination of ISA and SA presents.
By relying on these terms, I do not mean to invoke the sense of determinism often
associated with Althusserian thought. I do not find the school, the institution of law,
or the corporation inevitably oppressive; critical pedagogues, lawyers, and corpora-
tions working toward social justice challenge such blanket categorization on a daily
basis. That said, I do find that we often underestimate the real restrictive capacities of
these institutions and find in the vocabulary that Althusser provides a convenient
way for naming and understanding the restrictions often imposed upon multimedia
producers inside and outside the academy. Let me demonstrate this problem by
returning to my immediate example. For her part, Sara may have been able to over-
come the ideological restrictions that often define acceptable writing behaviors within
the institution. In fact, with her input, my colleagues and I created a new curricular
space (in the form of a class on multimedia rhetoric and poetics) that enabled her to
legitimately produce her multimedia parody. In short, we were able to successfully
restructure the mechanisms of our particular institution and refigure what we un-
derstood about its ideological biases, albeit to a limited degree. Despite this small
victory, I remain unable to share the work Sara produced in this class with a public
audience because of the restrictions of a larger governing State Apparatus. Neither
Sara nor I can circulate the absent parody to which I have been referring because it
relies on a practice of image appropriation that may be considered actionable under
U.S. copyright law, particularly since the passing of the Digital Millennium Copy-
right Act (DMCA).
Let me be perfectly clear: Sara has provided me with written permission to
share her multimedia parody with the readers of College English in what might be

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 Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear 473

construed as a public, albeit educational, performance. However, I have not been

able to secure the rights to share her text from L’Oreal, the corporation that pro-
duced the original Maybelline advertisement from which Sara sampled images and a
phrase. In fact, the L’Oreal representative to whom I spoke claimed that the com-
pany does not approve what she called “viral” ads since they portray the company in
a negative light. It might seem that despite objections from L’Oreal, Sara’s rights—
if not NCTE’s—should be protected under the doctrine of “fair use,” Section 107 of
the 1976 Copyright Act. After all, as the language makes clear, this doctrine was
originally developed to promote the goal of learning: according to the legal text, the
consideration of infringement depends upon whether a work is used for “nonprofit
educational purposes” and permits reproduction for “purposes such as [. . .] teaching
(including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” (17 U.S.C.
sec. 107). However, determining the meaning of these terms—especially in the af-
termath of the Internet’s blurring of educational and commercial venues—has be-
come increasingly difficult; ultimately, their definition comes down to the issue of
context. In all practicality, if Sara and I were to restrict the circulation of the counter-
ad to the classroom, we would most likely remain within the realm of lawful publish-
ing. If we were to reproduce it here or online—even if doing so for what are ultimately
educational and scholarly purposes—we would expose it to a larger public audience,
and therefore risk becoming liable for infringement. Here, the fair use exemption
would most likely be inapplicable, for in public contexts Sara’s text is considered a
“derivative work,” and Section 106 of Title 17 provides the original author—in this
case L’Oreal—exclusive rights to public performances of derivative work. As Stanford
University law professor Lawrence Lessig explains in Free Culture, derivative rights
give
the copyright owner of [a] creative work not only the exclusive rights to “publish” the
work but also the exclusive right of control over any “copies” of that work. And most
significant for our purposes here, the right gives the copyright owner control over
not only his or her particular work, but also any “derivative work” that might grow
out of the original work. (136)

In other words, because the law does not distinguish between “republishing someone’s
work on the one hand and building upon or transforming that work on the other”
(Lessig, “Intellectual” 19), L’Oreal may have legal rights to Sara’s text even though
the appropriated elements from the original advertisement have been transformed
and now make up only a portion of the overall text. As absurd as this logic may seem,
it has become the common sense of copyright law—whether or not commercial
profit is involved.
As Lessig explains, in our twenty-first-century culture, “the law now regulates
the full range of creativity—commercial or not, transformative or not—with the

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474 College English

same rules designed for commercial publishers” (172). Under the logic of this regu-
lation, Lessig asserts, “‘copy and paste’ and ‘cut and paste’ become crimes” (144).
Although the differences between the law’s application to print and digital texts re-
mains somewhat nebulous, the law appears to distinguish between acceptable modes
of appropriation within verbal/print and visual/multimedia discourses. For instance,
in this print essay, I am permitted to quote relatively freely from the alphabetic text
of Maybelline’s advertisement, Sara’s counter-ad, and most print sources, provided I
do so in words and explicitly for purposes of review, comment, or criticism. If I meet
these guidelines and conform to a particular publisher’s required length limitations
on quoted material (usually under several hundred words), refrain from reproduc-
ing any texts in whole, and rely on a documentation system recognized as authorita-
tive within print culture, then I am most likely engaging in lawful composing
behaviors. Similarly, if Sara remains in a verbal, print genre like the expository essay
and conforms to these same guidelines, she might produce a lawful critique of
Maybelline’s ad. Although even this sort of citation may theoretically be considered
infringing if it has a harmful effect “upon the potential market value for or value of
the copyrighted work” (17 U.S.C. sec.17), it tends to fall relatively frequently within
the domain of “fair use” and remain protected by the First Amendment. Appropria-
tions of multimedia visual material, however, present more complications.
In Controlling Voices, TyAnna K. Herrington argues that producers of multime-
dia texts are especially vulnerable to committing acts of copyright infringement. She
writes, “it is very difficult to create a noninfringing multimedia work” (137) because
the combinatory nature of the technological composition process often requires the
appropriation and transformation of others’ nonalphabetic works. And the ability to
reproduce even appropriated and transformed portions of these works requires gain-
ing permissions from license holders and paying licensing fees. Raymond L. Ocampo
and David S. Shellenhase describe the problem this way: “A would-be multimedia
producer must obtain permission from scattered writers, musicians, photographers,
and artists at a cost that is impossible to predict. Any rights holder may veto an
entire production simply by refusing to grant a license” (qtd. in Herrington 137).
The very production of a multimedia text that relies on “sampling” is thus, in many
cases, contingent upon the agreement of multiple copyright holders. Because these
holders have exclusive rights to “derivative works,” any one of them may ultimately
prevent the public existence of a multimedia text such as Sara’s. In fact, one of L’Oreal’s
representatives warned me that because the Maybelline ad from which Sara appro-
priated material contains a representation of a model, even if I were to receive per-
mission from L’Oreal I would still need to secure publication rights from the model
depicted: Lima herself. The appropriation and transformation of any portions of
the human images from the Maybelline ad are subject not only to federal copyright

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 Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear 475

but also to the model’s right of privacy and publicity, which varies from state to state.
Outlining my vulnerability to claims by not only L’Oreal’s photographers and graphic
designers but also Adriana Lima, this representative advised me to seek counsel im-
mediately if I planned to pursue publishing Sara’s counter-ad.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I should state that L’Oreal’s representative was
in no way contentious; her suggestion to obtain counsel was a rather gracious at-
tempt to protect me and Sara. That said, the situation as a whole reveals the radical
limitations the law places on would-be multimedia producers who are not already
enfranchised within corporate environments. Even though Sara did not expect to
receive any financial gain from the publication or distribution of her text (and, in
fact, signed a permission agreement with me that explicitly acknowledges she will
receive no payment from me or this journal), and even though she did not attempt
to “steal” the work of L’Oreal’s graphic designers and present it as her own (and, in
fact, credits L’Oreal in the notes page that accompanies her counter-advertisement),
neither she nor I can freely reproduce her visual text here or on a Web site. In this
case, the law—or, more precisely, the fear of litigation and the accompanying price
tag of defense—reinforces the academy’s preference for positioning writers to re-
main consumers of visual texts, permitting them to write about the kind of visual
arguments that circulate among large public audiences without actually authoring
such texts and, hence, without potentially intervening directly in the flow of capital-
ist culture.
Because judgments about copyright law are determined on a case-by-case basis,
I have no way of ultimately knowing whether the reproduction of Sara’s particular
text would be found infringing. Parody has often been deemed a protected genre of
political commentary, at least within print culture. However, as Herrington argues,
the institution of law, which tends to consider copyright primarily an issue of eco-
nomics, has of late prioritized financial interests over larger cultural concerns: “Con-
gress intended that the fair use exceptions guarantee that copyrighted materials could
be used as the subject of commentary and parody [. . .] but protecting economic
rights in the copy has been the main focus of recent [legal] battles over these issues”
(133). She goes on to list cases in which producers of parody were sued and found
guilty of copyright infringement (133–35). But the legitimacy of copyright holders’
potential legal claims is less significant than the very threat of litigation, for the
problem I am attempting to reveal does not reside within copyright law itself but in
the use and application of this law both inside and outside of the courtroom. The
sheer cost of legal representation (easily absorbed by a large and successful corpora-
tion but not necessarily by an individual citizen or educational organization) is often
persuasive enough to dissuade multimedia producers and publishers from dissemi-
nating texts when the issue of infringement remains even questionable. As Rose-

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 476 College English

mary Coombe writes in The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties, “Hegemonic power
is operative when threats of legal action are made as well as when they are actually
acted upon” (9).
David Bollier discusses this hegemonic power in Silent Theft: The Private Plun-
der of Our Common Wealth, claiming that recent uses of copyright law represent
transparent efforts to control the cultural means and modes of production. He states
that many corporations and media conglomerates are using copyright and intellec-
tual property law “as an instrument of monopoly and censorship,” which enables
them to “thwart criticism, parody, and other fair uses of creative work” (120–21). In
this case, Sara’s glaringly absent text is testament to Bollier’s assertion, but more
than an individual student’s text is at stake here, for, as Bollier continues, conglom-
erates and corporations are asserting copyright and intellectual property rights to
disable large numbers of would-be producers in an effort to control markets and
promote consumption:
Owners of intellectual property want their Barbie dolls, cartoon characters, corpo-
rate logos, and software programs to be ubiquitous in the culture, but never to be freely
usable by the culture. They want to sanction only a controlled, consuming relation-
ship with the products introduced into commerce, not an open, interactive one of the
sort we associate with a democratic culture. (121)

Echoing Sharon Crowley’s description of institutional writing instruction’s “doc-

ile student,” Bollier depicts the ideal subject of American culture—one that the ap-
plication of copyright law helps to create—as the docile consumer. This parallel
illuminates connections between the ideological function of higher education and
the larger distribution of cultural power at the same time that it complicates Scholes’s
argument that the academy’s preference for consumption over production simply
reflects a widespread cultural privileging of the consuming class over the producing
class. It would appear that the correlation has less to do with the valuing of upper-
middle-class affluence and devaluing of producing- or working-class culture and
more to do with restricting access to the means of both market and marketing pro-
duction. That is, the educational ISA’s positioning of students as consumers effec-
tively prevents the disruption of dominant corporations’ and media conglomerates’
control of a supposedly free market as well as the textual apparatuses like advertising
that define and sustain the norms of this market. In other words, education in writ-
ing instruction too often teaches students to accept their subjection within a culture
of corporate consumerism. If the educational-ideological lesson doesn’t take, stu-
dents become subject to prosecution under the State Apparatus of the law. Ulti-
mately, the consequence of creating this docile, consuming subject through a
combination of ISA and SA is, as Bollier suggests, both a devaluing of visual dissent
and a weakening of democracy, for it places the decision of whose representations

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 Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear 477

and arguments will be visibly present in the public sphere in the hands of the already
powerful.
On a more immediate and personal level, the kind of censorship promoted by
this arrangement teaches students to consider their own appropriative composing
behaviors as illegitimate even though these behaviors have defined both academic
and nonacademic writing practices and methods of writing instruction for at least a
century. As one cultural critic suggests, if contemporary copyright law were applied
to even the recent historical past, “whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop
Art may never have existed” (McLaren). At present, if Sara and other students seek
to join vast cultural traditions of creative and critical output that fundamentally de-
pend upon appropriations and transformations of discourse—as nearly all forms of
textual production do, whether or not they are officially licensed by the apparatus of
law—their visual work will likely be forced into a kind of virtual nonexistence or
suspended absence, as is the case here. Alternatively, if they resist Ideological and
State Apparatuses and ignore corporate lawyers’ cease-and-desist letters (which are
becoming more and more ubiquitous in our culture), they might, at best, join the
ranks of unwittingly countercultural figures like Bill Barminski, Michael Hernandez
de Luna, Kieron Dwyer, and Noel Tolentino, whose work violates or remains on the
“legal fringes of intellectual property” in the traveling exhibit “Illegal Art: Freedom
of Expression in the Corporate Age” (McLaren). Of course, most of the visual, mixed
media, and multimedia producers whose work is displayed in this exhibition have
been sued by corporations and thus experienced financial jeopardy. In some con-
texts “subversive artist” and “degenerate art” might resound with the kind of maver-
ick, academic sexiness that we often seek in the titles of our articles and conference
papers; however, when these titles are forced by the state upon our students and
their pieces of visual rhetoric, we find ourselves encountering a serious political—
and personal—problem.

P E R S O N A L M AT T E R S : P O S S I B I L I T I E S FOR REFORM

Although I remain frustrated by my inability to display Sara’s piece of visual rheto-

ric, I hope that my polemical presentation of Sara’s case demonstrates how and why
our considerations of the ideological and legal issues that I have mentioned inevita-
bly concern more than theoretical problems of originality, authorship, or the owner-
ship of ideas—and more than a problem of law external to the university. As the case
of Sara’s missing text demonstrates, the problem of copyright affects us and our
writing students personally on the level of daily practice and, to some degree, under-
writes the fundamental norms of our enterprise. In other words, it affects us whether
or not we are consciously aware of the ideology that governs our tacit codes of

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478 College English

conduct or the issues of power that guide our default preference for the consump-
tion over the production of texts. In brief: copyright law is our problem because it
has the power to silence our students and us.
Recognizing this problem, along with its personal and political effects, is of
course only the beginning of a much larger process guided by a much larger ques-
tion: what can we do? The issue of action becomes increasingly difficult the more
we consider its various implications. On the one hand, if we choose to ignore the
tenets of copyright law in an effort to resist succumbing to unjust pressures of cor-
porate intimidation, we risk encouraging students to produce texts they cannot share
with public audiences or, worse yet, making them liable for prosecution. On the
other hand, if we allow fears of litigation to govern our practices, we risk sacrificing
our democratic rights, our visible presence in the public sphere, and a great deal of
our freedom and power as teachers, writers, and citizens. The difficulty of our deci-
sion increases when we remind ourselves that our actions affect our students, and
they—the people in our classrooms—are more than cases to be represented in an
essay like this one or named in the title of a court stenographer’s transcript. What,
then, is the appropriate trajectory for reform?
In his presentation at the 2005 Conference on College Composition and Com-
munication, Lessig invited us to join a collectivity that advocates the use of generous
“some rights reserved” copyright licenses through the Creative Commons project.
This alternative licensing system offers a compromise that allows producers of mul-
timedia texts to articulate flexible conditions under which their work may be “cop-
ied” free of charge and without fear of litigation. Under this system, license holders
may allow the production of “derivative works” based on their source material for
commercial or noncommercial uses; they may also opt to retain or forfeit rights of
attribution. For our immediate and practical purposes, Lessig’s Creative Commons
project offers a partial solution to the problem of copyright law by creating an archive
of free, appropriable material. While it does not prevent corporations and media
conglomerates from continuing to use standard copyright law to prohibit the pro-
duction of multimedia texts that they consider “viral” critique, it creates a necessary
alternative on the way to more substantial reform. I propose that as we make use of
Lessig’s project, we use other resources—from CCCC’s Intellectual Property Cau-
cus to local indymedia centers—to lobby for further change with an increased sense
of urgency. It has become clear since the advent of the Internet and the proliferation
of multimedia software not only that the technology of writing is changing dramati-
cally, but also that we cannot afford to delay addressing these changes by reverting
to the standards of print culture or pretending that classroom writing is divorced
from public, legal, and economic consequences. Doing so—as I hope to have dem-
onstrated concretely—enables a quite real kind of silencing. If we want creative writing
and composition to remain relevant to students’ heavily mediated public lives and,

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 Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear 479

more important, if we want their own writing to matter to public audiences, we need
to protect their rights as producers. Otherwise, we risk complicity in forming some-
thing akin to what David Buckingham calls a “privatized educational dystopia” (203),
a sphere in which we strive unwittingly and fruitlessly to undo the connections be-
tween educational and public sectors that our new technologies have already cre-
ated.

WORKS CITED

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