Utopia: Not my class

Read James Berlin for today. Again. Reminded me why I left Rhet/Comp for pure theory. If pragmatic rhetoric is a theory, that is.
They pay me a little over 12,000 per year (plus tuition) to mold young minds. No, that's not quite true. They pay me to produce students. I am a student factory. The students enter my class, use up my resources, and then use those resources to form their studentness. I am not a teacher or a coach, I am their fodder.
Berlin wants (wanted?) composition classes to "teach" resistance to ideology. This is, of course, a ridiculous concept. No one can resist ideology completely, no one can teach resistance, and even if you could, you'd have to teach them to resist your teaching, which would become problematic. But others have said this before me. I leave the circular reasoning to those Marxists (like Allen) who can think about ideology for an extended period of time without making themselves dizzy with regret and guilt.
What bothers me about any composition pedagogy, any teaching theory, is the subsequent classroom the theories imagine being created. They imagine a pocket universe, a utopia in a white walled room, student-citizens emerging bright and motivated. The "radical" pedagogies particularly still see writing and reading through the Romantic rhetoric lens, even those like Berlin who categorically reject "Expressivism." Teach a man to fish, and he eats for life. Teach a man to read and write and he can take down the structures that have him eating only fish.
I loved 1984 because of this Romantic rhetoric that flows through it and other dystopias. As a writer, I want to believe I am acting. No wonder I have taken to Burke's theory of symbolic action so much--if it's not true, I really have no hope. I can't act, not in this cultural context, not given my various limitations. At first glance I should like Berlin because he wants to create whole universities of freshmen resistance through writing/reading/rhetoric. He wants us to use the classroom as a space for protest. He wants the English department to save us all.
And there have been cases of writing as savior. And Burke is right--moving problems and responses into the symbolic realm will most likely purify war, which is very very very good.
And if my students gave a damn, I could almost believe that my silly little ENGL 106 class could change the world.
But they don't give a damn--for the most part. Those who do give a damn about ideology and capitalism and myth and hegemony are too few, and like me, too weak to make a revolutionary stand in West Lafayette. And, from one theoretical perspective, the one I've been working with for three years now, that classroom utopian rhetoric is exactly what I should not be teaching toward.
If I'm right--or rather, if Burke is right--both dystopian and utopian rhetorics are conservative. More frightening is that dystopian rhetorics might be even more conservative than utopian ones. If I teach resistance in class, if I am able to create a utopian space amid the dystopian university (and beyond) then things can't be all that bad. And I am creating that space only in a university that is, frankly, far more egalitarian than much of the corporate world. As long as my students see that I am still around to make these dystopian claims, then the exigency toward action is lessened. No one really rebels until it's too late. The American Revolution is said to start with the "shot heard round the world," not a symbolic shot in a pamphlet from Thomas Paine. Symbolic action is, for the moment, not recognized.
Remember the protests before the war? Yeah, neither does Bush. Because symbolic action is not valued. If I teach my students in my utopian classroom how to resist symbolically I may be doing more harm than good. Especially if they start to believe that resistance is the job of flaky English professors and their hippie friends in the College of Liberal Arts.
And "job" is an interesting word here the Berlin wouldn't use. I am getting paid by and institution to teach "writing"--not resistance, not ideology formation. If I pretend I have a utopia in my class, I am not only invoking my own ideologies, but I am lying -- the class is just a class, entrenched in a university which is run by the state and tax payers' dollars; their Calculus TAs get more money than I do because my knowledge has less cultural capital.
So what do I do? Make them read 1984? Show Fahrenheit 451 like I did in class today? Create assignments that force them to action? Remind myself I've only got 16 weeks per set of students?
Hide out in some little liberal arts college in New England?
And if I actually don't attempt to produce utopia, if I ignore my instincts to teach awareness of hegemony, then I am failing myself. I study the rhetoric of dystopian fiction because I believe these fictions can show us how to act and how not to act. The books tell me I should start resisting now, do all I can to avoid Big Brother or book burning or the Benefactor (so many B words in my world).
Dystopias are normative, utopias are revolutionary. Don't teach the negative, then, teach toward the possibilities. It's not that we are in a dystopia now (for that's certainly not what Plato or More were saying) but that we are not in a utopia. Plato (damn him) and More and later Bellamy saw possibility, hope, in what could be and wrote in hope that we would not, perhaps, achieve heaven on earth, but that we would do what we could to be the most human we could be, to achieve as much as we can, given our various flaws (see Burke's "Definition of Human").
Berlin, in other words, imagines not only utopia, but asks that we implement it, whereas the utopian treatises and the dystopian fictions ask only that we act in the present. There are various dangers in this rhetoric--we always run the risk that our students will still see this project as only belonging in one space, the English studies space, or that they will not see the class beyond a set of assignments--but if I am to act responsibly as a "teacher," as a pacifist, I have to do something.
So as contradictory as it seems, if I want to encourage social justice in my students, I cannot create my classroom as a utopia where ideologies are abolished and egalitarianism reigns. I also cannot create the outside world as an evil dystopian land where the government is controlling us and corporations own us. Both rhetorics seem to fail to encourage future action on the part of the students.
And none of these seem to have anything to do with creating good writing.
Which is why I'm going to go read my theory like a good little Composition studies drop out, and hope that my colleagues will find a way to reconcile the two ideas of the job of the composition classroom without me.