The Uses of Binary Thinking

Peter Elbow
Chapter Three in Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of
Writing and Teaching Writing. Oxford UP 2000. It is slightly revised from the
version in the Journal of Advanced Composition 13.1 (Winter1993).

There is an ancient tradition of binary or dichotomous thinking--of framing issues in terms

of opposites such as sun/moon or reason/passion. G. E. R. Lloyd speaks of “the remarkable
prevalence of theories based on opposition in so many societies at different stages of
technological development.” He goes on to give these reasons:
[M]any prominent phenomena in nature exhibit a certain duality: day alternates with
night; the sun rises in one quarter of the sky and sets in the opposite quarter; in most
climates the contrast between the seasons (summer and winter, or dry season and
rainy season) is marked; in the larger animals male and female are distinct, and the
bilateral symmetry of their bodies is obvious. . . . Antithesis is an element in any
classification, and the primary form of antithesis, one may say, is division into two
groups--so that the simplest form of classification, by the same token, is a dualist one.
(80)
This tradition of binary thinking is still strong and forms a kind of foundation for the many
varieties of structuralism. We see this tradition illustrated, for example, in Lévi-Strauss’ classic
structuralist title, The Raw and the Cooked.
But in recent years, especially with the deconstructive reaction against structuralism, we
have seen strong criticism of binary thinking. Hélene Cixous is one of many voices arguing that
wherever there are polar oppositions, there is dominance: some classic terms are day/night,
sun/moon, reason/passion--and of course lurking behind all of these pairs is usually gender:
male/female. According to this critique, binary thinking almost always builds in dominance or
privilege--sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly. (For a strong example of this critique, see
LaCapra 23-24).
Even when people try to overturn or reverse the traditional dominance in a polar
opposition--proclaiming for example that dark is better than light, passion than reason, female
than male--it just means that the underdog is redefined as overdog, and we are still left with
thinking in terms of dominance or hierarchy. One side is privileged. Furthermore (so goes this
critique), we don’t get away from the problem even when we avoid giving victory to one side
and instead work out a compromise or else a Hegelian synthesis into a new, third term. When
the Hegelian bulldozer pushes toward “higher” order or unity--even if the compromise is really
“fair” and the synthesis doesn’t favor either the thesis or antithesis--difference and diversity are
eliminated. Jonathan Culler neatly pinpoints this large critical position in his summary of Paul
de Man’s thinking:
Deconstruction seeks to undo all oppositions that, in the name of unity, purity, order,
and hierarchy, try to eliminate difference (278).

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 Even though Culler and de Man are complaining about binary thinking and I am defending
it, I want to take this quotation as a kind of foundation for my essay. For I am defending only
one kind or mode of binary thinking. I think I can show that binary thinking, if handled in the
right way, will serve as a way to avoid the very problems Culler and de Man are troubled by:
“purity, order, and hierarchy.” That is, binary thinking can serve to encourage difference--indeed
encourage nondominance, nontranscendence, instability, disorder.
In making this point, I’m also calling on a venerable tradition. For there are really two
traditions of binary or dialectical thinking. The better known is the Hegelian tradition. It uses
binary thinking as a motor always to press on to a third term or a higher category that
represents a transcendent reconciliation or unity: thesis and antithesis are always harnessed to
yield synthesis. Since Hegel, the ancient and broad term dialectic has tended to be narrowed to
connote this three-termed process.
The lesser noted but older tradition of binary thinking that I am calling on used the term
“dialectic” long before Hegel. This tradition sees value in accepting, putting up with, indeed
seeking the nonresolution of the two terms: not feeling that the opposites must be somehow
reconciled, not feeling that the itch must be scratched. This tradition goes as far back as the
philosophy of yin/yang. In the West we see it in Socrates, Plato, and Boethius. This tradition of
the “coincidence of opposites” was strong the middle ages (Peter Abelard, Sic et Non). Perhaps
the most common recent champion of this approach is Jung with his emphasis on paired forces
in the collective unconscious and the need always to strengthen the weaker in any pairing.
Coleridge rides this tradition a bit: how the poet “brings the whole soul of man into activity”
with “opposite or discordant qualities” such as sameness/difference, idea/image,
general/concrete, manner/matter (II, 12).*
------------------------------------------------
*
Here are some formulations deriving from this tradition:
Blake. “Without contraries is no progression.” “Opposition is true Friendship.”
Keats. “. . . capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason.” (Letters)
Bakhtin. “Not a dialectical either/or, but a dialogic both/and” (Clark and Holquist 7).
Dewey. “Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in
terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities” (17). Dewey could
be said to structure his whole philosophy around the rejection of either/or thinking and the
development of both/and thinking.
Niels Bohr. “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound
truth may well be another profound truth.”
Yeats. “No mind can engender until divided into two.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at
the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
Mary Belenky et al: “[Constructed knowers] show a high tolerance for internal contradiction and
ambiguity. They abandon completely the either/or thinking . . . [and] recognize the inevitability
of conflict and stress . . . “ (137). (William Perry’s Intellectual and Ethical Development in the
College Years sounds the same theme.)

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----------------------------------------------
Chaucer was deeply indebted to Boethius, and it was during my work on Chaucer that I
first became aware of this tradition of binary thinking. Since then I’ve repeatedly seen the value
of this approach: noticing oppositions or conflicts, even seeking them, but leaving them
unresolved. Practice with this approach has led me to suspect that when we encounter
something that is difficult or complicated or something that tangles people into endless debate,
we are often in the presence of an opposition that needs to be made more explicit--and left
unreconciled. (See my Oppositions in Chaucer and, more recently, Thomas Reed, Middle English
Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution. I broadened the scope of this theme in my
book of essays, Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching.)

Why Dichotomies?

I hear an obvious objection at this point. “You say you are interested in complexity, but it
sounds as though your real goal is to save binary thinking. If you really want complexity, why
keep everything in neat pairs?”
Yes, two is not a very large or complex number. Having three or more options is lovely.
Nothing in this paper argues against framing issues in terms of more than two sides. As long as
there’s more than one! Seeing three or five sides is fine, but it is often just a way to talk about
one of them as right and the others as wrong. The argument against binaries and for
multiplicity is often a cover for letting one side be the real winner--in short for hierarchy and
singleness of truth. Thus my deeper goal in this paper is not to preserve pairs or binaries in
themselves so much as to get away from simple, single truth: to have situations of balance,
irresolution, nonclosure, nonconsensus, nonwinning.
So multiplicity may be fine, but I focus this paper on the problem of binary thinking
because in fact there is no hope of getting away from it in some form or another. Binary
thinking is the path of least resistance for human perceiving, thinking, and for linguistic
structures. To perceive is to notice a category over against difference, and the simplest path is
in terms of simple opposition. The easiest way to classify complex information is to clump it
into two piles. Indeed the most instinctive and tempting clumps to use for complex data are the
old favorites: ours/theirs, like/don’t like, right/sinister, sheep/goats. This is why dichotomies
tend to come packaged with positive and negative poles (see Herrnstein-Smith 122). It may be
that the very structure of our bodies and our placement in phenomenal reality invite us to see
things in terms of binary oppositions, e.g., right/left, up/down, front/back, near/far,
male/female (see Lakoff and Johnson). The very same poststructuralists who are so unhappy
about too many binary oppositions in structuralism seem to invite far more of them into their
very model for how human language and meaning function:
[E]lements of a text do not have intrinsic meaning as autonomous entities but derive
their significance from oppositions which are in turn related to other oppositions in a
process of theoretically infinite semiosis.

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 To speak of the concept of ‘brown,’ for example, is, according to semiotics, a way of
referring to a complex network of oppositions which articulates the spectrum of colors
on the one hand and the spectrum of sounds on the other (Culler, Signs 29, 41).
The question, then, is not whether to deal with dichotomies but how to deal with them.
We have five basic options:
1. Choose one side as right or better. This is “either/or” thinking.
2. Work out a compromise or a dialectical synthesis, i.e., find a third term.
3. Deny there is any conflict (e.g., “There is no difference between form and content” or
“There is no conflict between teaching and research”).
4. Affirm both sides of the dichotomy as equally true or necessary or important or correct.
This is the approach I argue in this essay.
4a. Same approach with an emphasis on mystical unity in the duality.
5. Reframe the conflict or analyze it in more detail so there are more than two sides. This,
is of course another good path. It is not the focus of this essay, but it is exactly the
method I use in making this list. And it is the central intellectual tool I use in my two
most ambitious pieces here: my essay about voice (10 in Part III of this volume) and my
essay about private writing (12 in Part IV).
The first three options are the most common and habitual ways we deal with dichotomy
or conflict because humans seem to be uncomfortable with what is unreconciled or
incompatible. When we are presented with conflicting data, our organism itself seems to want
somehow to find some kind of harmony or unity. Psychologists can explain the most diverse
range of human thinking, feeling, and behavior in terms of our instinctive resistance to
“cognitive dissonance.” Even in the simplest act of visual perception, the retina and brain are
both presented with swiftly, constantly shifting inputs or data, but what we “see” is virtually
always a stable object or category (see Peckham).
In short, even though binary oppositions tempt people to oversimple, black/white
thinking, binary oppositions also present us with uniquely valuable occasions for balance,
irresolution, nonclosure, nonconsensus, nonwinning. So I will celebrate and explore here the
approach to binary oppositions that seems to go against the human grain and that requires
some conscious discipline: affirming both sides of a dichotomy as equally true or important--
even if they are contradictory.
I’m not going so far as to say that we should balance every dichotomy we encounter.
Sometimes one side is right and the other one wrong. Indeed when we need to make difficult
value judgments or sort out slippery distinctions, pairings are an enormous help. Opticians
harness this process to help us figure out which lens is best when there is a multiplicity of lenses
to choose among. You could sum up this whole essay as an exercise in saying, “There are two
kinds of binary thinking, the good kind and the bad kind.” In truth all five ways of dealing with
oppositions that I just listed above are valid and useful methods in one situation or another. But
I write this essay because I see a need for more effort in noticing the many situations where the

4
easy, good/bad distinction gets us in trouble and where the multiplicity of options is a cover for
simply trying to win--and where instead we need balance and nonresolution.

Binary Thinking in Action: Seven Cases

I will apply this balancing kind of binary thinking to a diverse set of cases: writing,
teaching, thinking/learning, teaching/research, form/content, reading/writing, private/social. I
hope to show that this kind of thinking will have useful explanatory power.

(1) Writing
To write well we need to call on two opposite abilities or activities: generating and
criticizing. That is, on the one hand we need to come up with lots of words and thoughts--
something that is easiest if we adopt a noncritical, nonevaluative mentality of welcoming yea-
saying. But on the other hand, we can’t write well unless we evaluate, criticize and reject--
something that is easiest if we adopt a mentality of tough-minded, skeptical, nay-saying.
In recent years, some people have called this view an outmoded piece of dichotomous
thinking, arguing that the opposition between generating and criticizing breaks down: There is
no difference between generating and criticizing or rejecting. To generate one word is to reject
a host of other words we could have put down. Every piece of generating is by the same token
also a piece of criticizing. The dichotomy between generating and criticizing is an accident of
words--a case of being fooled by our categories.
This objection is a logical quibble. Even though generating X may seem the same as
rejecting Y and Z in the realm of logic, the two acts are crucially different in the realm of human
experience. It can happen that in generating X I also rejected or criticized Y and Z, but if so, it
means that I actually generated all three--X, Y, and Z all came to mind. But often enough when
we generate X, it’s the only thing that comes to mind; Y and Z are nowhere in mind to be
rejected or criticized. The point of the dichotomy is to distinguish between the experience of
writing down X when it’s the only thing in mind and the very different experience of writing it
down when you also have Y and Z in mind. What I’m pursuing here is the difference between
two different experiences or abilities, generating and criticizing. What’s important about them
is that they are both variables. At any moment of writing, we may be generating a great deal or
not very much; at any moment we may be criticizing a great deal or not very much.
The same criticism can be framed in terms of criticizing: Every act of criticism is
simultaneously an act of generating or creating. Here again, this can happen: the act of
criticizing X causes Y to pop into mind. And here again my model insists that both mental
events occurred: criticizing and generating. Excellent. But far too often it works the other way:
criticizing X makes nothing at all pop into mind. Generating and criticizing are variables that can
occur together, but they often occur apart. Most commonly, they occur more vigorously in each
others’ absence because they tend to get in each other’s way.
If we honor the binary opposition between generating and criticizing, we get a model with
considerable explanatory power. By noticing how generating and criticizing get in each other’s
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way, we can see some of the difficulties of writing more clearly, and understand why the
scenarios often play out as they do. People’s characteristic way of getting things written often
represents their way of negotiating the conflict between generating and criticizing.
 When writing goes very badly, we are stuck or blocked. It’s a case of being tied in
knots by trying to be generative and critical at the same time. Some writers are
characteristically blocked. Their writing method is the famous one of staring at the
paper till blood breaks out on their foreheads.
 When writing goes passably but not very well, it is usually because we are having to
negotiate a compromise between these conflicting mentalities. Sometimes generating
gets the upper hand. We manage to pour out a lot of material but we cannot prune
and shape it well for lack of cogent criticism. Writers who habitually fall into this path
tend to produce work that is rich but undisciplined. In contrast, sometimes criticizing
gets the upper hand. Then we end up a with good result but very little of it, because
we saw so many faults in every thought and sentence as we were engaged in trying to
write it. Writers with this habit produce work that is cramped or tight. (Because
editors specialize in vigilant criticism, many of them have difficulty writing themselves.
Teachers often have the same problem since they spend so much time criticizing
student writing.)
 When writing goes very well (as it occasionally does), we seem able to reach out for
just the right word and yet at the same moment (seemingly without effort or even
awareness), we put aside countless possibilities that aren’t just right. Generating and
criticizing are going on simultaneously. A few excellent writers have learned to operate
this way consistently; they have learned magic integration.
Commentators have always had a hard time explaining what it is that wonderful writers
do--ascribing it to genius or magic or the muses or whatever. Writers themselves give
remarkably contradictory accounts of what they’re doing: “It’s all inspiration!” “It’s all
perspiration!” “It’s all system!” “It’s all magic and serendipity!” This is just what we can expect
if people are trying to explain a complex skill which they happened to have learned, but which
violates normal patterns of thinking. Their skill represents the ability to be magically extreme at
both skills. Transcendence is probably the right word and it is a worthy goal to keep in mind.
But somehow it’s not very helpful advice to say, “If you want to write well, just transcend
opposites.” Note, however, that many odd but in fact traditional pieces of advice for writing are
really aids in transcendence--e.g., take walks, wait humbly, abnegate the self, pay homage to the
muses, relinquish agency and control, meditate--or drink!
Note the social dimension that often lies behind these patterns. When we are more
critical, it is often because we have a particularly critical audience in mind. When we are
particularly generative or even magically integrated, it is often because of a particularly inviting
or facilitative audience (see my Writing with Power, Section IV).
The path to really good writing, then, is seldom the path of compromise or the golden
mean. If we are only sort of generative and sort of critical, we write mediocre stuff: we don’t
have enough to choose from, and we don’t reject ideas and words we ought to reject. We need
6
extremity in both directions. Instead of finding one point on the continuum between two
extremes, we need as it were to occupy two points near both ends.
There’s a second way to argue against the dichotomy between generating and criticizing:
Sure, of course there’s a difference between them, but spare us all your advice about separating
them. That puts us back to the dark ages--back to the rigid ‘stage’ theory of writing:
prewriting / writing / rewriting. No writers do that. Haven’t you heard of all the research
showing that writing is recursive?
I’m not trying to deny that writing is often recursive--or even usually so. Of course
generating and criticizing are often going on more or less together, all mixed up; that’s the
default mode for lots of people. My point is that they don’t always go on at the same time:
they don’t have to go on at the same time, and in fact it’s helpful sometimes consciously to
separate them since they get in each other’s way. In short it can pay to learn to make writing
less recursive.
Notice that I am introducing the dimension of time. What is paradoxical in logic--”being
both generative and critical--occupying two spots on a single continuum”--is ordinary in the
realm of time. Thus the easiest and most practical way to negotiate the conflict between
generating and criticizing is temporally to separate them and engage in them one at a time. It
may seem natural to try to find words and thoughts and scrutinize them at the same time to see
if they are the right ones; but we can get skilled at doing these two things one at a time--thus
separating the two mentalities. (Notice, for example, how in most speaking situations, we don’t
put much energy into scrutinizing the words as they come to mind or to mouth. And on those
occasions when we do scrutinize our words as we speak, our speaking tends to be more halting
and tangled.) And in fact many writers have gradually learned to pour down words and
thoughts helter-skelter and then come back to work on them later in a specially vigilant,
detached, and critical frame of mind--that is, to hold off revising and editing till the end. The
time dimension helps us heighten the conflict, not minimize it--permitting us to clear an arena
in which each side can operate unhampered to an extreme.
This, then, is the approach to heightening and separating opposites that I gradually
learned--and I find I can teach it to students and teachers with helpful results. It is a skill.
People often have an easier time taking risks, turning off all criticism, and thereby coming up
with words and thoughts they didn’t know they had, when they know they will have a time later
to be wholeheartedly critical and get rid of foolishness. And people often have an easier time
being fiercely critical if they have first had a chance to generate too many ideas and hypotheses.
(I have found it helpful, by the way, to notice a link between this generating/criticizing
dichotomy and two others: planning/not planning, and controlling/relinquishing control.
Writers commonly talk about the need for periods of relaxed planning or control.)

(2) Teaching
The same kind of conflict lies at the heart of the teaching process. Good teaching calls on
two conflicting abilities or stances: positively affirming and critically judging. That is, on the one
hand we benefit if we can function as allies and supporters to students--welcoming them and all
7
their thinking--assuming they can learn, that they are intelligent, that they have what it takes.
(Teachers’ expectations about student abilities, positive or negative, probably have more
influence on how well students learn than actual differences in teaching techniques. See
Rosenthal and Jacobson.) Yet on the other hand, we also need to be on guard--to judge,
scrutinize, evaluate, examine, and test. We have a loyalty not just to students but to the body
of knowledge we are teaching and to society. We have to evaluate and to criticize what is
wrong, reject what is unsatisfactory. In short, to teach well we need skill as host and bouncer,
as ally and adversary. Teaching, like writing, may often be recursive, but it is a recursive
blending or alternation of two conflicting dimensions: opening the gate wide and keeping the
gate narrow.
This conflict explains some of the difficulty most of us experience in teaching, but the
difficulty is unavoidable because, again, compromise or reconciliation is not the answer. Look at
the options. A happy medium is pretty sad: being only sort of helpful or inviting to students
and only sort of vigilant as to whether they do decent work. Similarly, it’s no good only
welcoming students and never critically examining their work; nor only criticizing wrong
answers and never praising their weak starts or welcoming their risk taking. Thus most teachers
are stuck at one point along a continuum that students know so well: at one end are the “tough
teachers” and at the other end are the “easy teachers”; in the middle are “so-so teachers” and
“inconsistent teachers.” Inconsistency is understandable since any single position is so
unsatisfactory: most teachers find themselves muttering these two different phrases to
themselves at different times: “Oh, dear, I must have been too harsh” and “From now on, no
more Mr. Nice Guy.”
This conflict between contrary teaching roles or mentalities is illustrated in the way
students often skitter ungracefully between confiding in us as allies and guarding against us as
adversaries. And they are right; we are usually both. And these two teaching roles are
sometimes institutionalized into separate people. The tutor’s function, for example in a writing
center, is to be wholly ally, and the examiner’s function is to be wholly judge or adversary. Since
the middle ages, Oxford and Cambridge, like many European universities, have institutionalized
the roles of teacher/tutor and examiner.
But really skilled teachers somehow find ways to do justice to these opposed binaries in
all their irreconcilability. Again we see two ways to do this. The harder and rarer path is one of
mysterious finesse or transcendence. That is, a few remarkable teachers are extremely tough
and inviting at the same time--remarkably welcoming to students yet remarkably discriminating
in saying, “I won’t take anything but the best.”
The easier and more ordinary path to good teaching involves finding ways to separate the
two stances: choosing certain times to be inviting and encouraging and choosing other times to
be especially discriminatory and vigilant. We tend to be more inviting at the beginning of a
course or in our opening explorations and explanations of something, and more vigilant at the
ends of courses and as we test. Somewhere toward the middle or end of a course, students
often feel, “Hey, what happened? I thought this teacher was my friend.” Individual conferences
can function as a time for being particularly supportive--though also, occasionally, a time for

8
reading the riot act. (More on this whole issue in my “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching
Process.”)

(3) Thinking and learning--doubting and believing

We see the same contradiction at the heart of the intellectual process itself: a conflict
between doubting and believing. The centrality of doubting is obvious. The ability to find flaws
or contradictions has been foundational in the development of logic and in the critical tradition
running from Socrates through Descartes and undiminished to the present. Criticism and
skepticism are usually identified with intelligence itself. People tend to assume that real
thinking or good thinking is critical thinking.
Less noticed, however, is the central need in the intellectual process for skill in believing:
the ability to enter into, experience, or try on ideas or points of view different from the ones we
presently hold. Since “credulity,” the tendency just to go along with whatever seems attractive
or appealing or persuasive, is often a problem in the thinking of children or unsophisticated
adults--and since schooling and careful thinking seem to consist of the process of giving up
credulity in favor being more critical minded or skeptical--people have tended to see belief as a
problem in the intellectual life. Intellectuals and academics often overlook the fact that few
people are genuinely skilled at thinking and learning unless they are also skilled at entering into
and even believing ideas and points of view that are different from what they are used to and
difficult to take on. In short, we need skill both at doubting even what looks right, and at
believing even what looks crazy or alien. This is one reason why good thinking and learning are
so hard.
Of course most thinking involves some kind of combination or recursive intertwining of
these mental activities, and it feels artificial to most people to try to separate them. But that
feeling is misleading. It stems from the dominance of criticism in our culture’s model of thinking
and learning. In fact we are all perfectly accustomed to one form of trying to separate doubting
and believing: trying to remove all credulity or believing in order to clear a space for
unimpeded, dispassionate criticism or doubting. Intellectuals are not accustomed, however, to
trying to remove all doubting and criticism in order to clear a space for unimpeded, focused
entering in or believing.
So here is the same kind of dichotomy I’ve applied to the activities of writing and
teaching. Intellectual skill represents skill at opposites: both accepting and rejecting, both
swallowing and spitting out, both letting oneself be invaded and keeping oneself intact. And
similarly, at moments of consummate skill in thinking, we seem to be able to manage what is
paradoxical: we can take on what is alien, odd, and unknown--yet we are acute in our
discriminating rejections.
Let me summarize these three cases before going on to others. I’m arguing the benefits
of one kind of binary thinking for a better understanding of writing, teaching, and thinking: the
process of heightening opposites but holding them unresolved--giving equal affirmation to both
sides. This model explains much of the difficulty of these three activities, and the natural
patterns of distribution of skills in them. Most commonly, people negotiate a kind of zero-sum
9
compromise between conflicting skills or mentalities: they are strong at generating, being
open, and believing and correspondingly weak at the opposite side; or strong at criticizing,
being on guard, judging, and doubting, and weak at the opposite side; or else middling at both.
Excellence is difficult because it requires doing justice to conflicting demands--somehow getting
out of the zero-sum economy. Meeting those demands simultaneously is especially rare--and
mysterious. What’s easier and more feasible is to meet the conflicting demands one at a time,
though this leads to a process that is less seamless and graceful--more bumpy, back and forth,
and artificial. It is thus a recursive process. However, if we switch back and forth too rapidly, we
often find it harder to become productively extreme at one mentality or the other.
In these three examples I have been emphasizing oppositions or conflicts that are often
unnoticed or overlooked. I turn now to dichotomies that are much-noticed--binaries that are
traditional and prominent.

(4) Teaching vs. research

“No problem. Teaching and research reinforce each other.” This is the latest doctrine--and
a prime case of unclear, wishful thinking. Of course research can help teaching and vice-versa--
just as generating can reinforce criticizing if handled well. Research can improve teachers by
making them more intellectually lively. (But what about the deadly dull teachers who loved
research?) Teaching can improve researchers (this is a bit of a stretch) by helping them be more
aware of the relationships between what they are investigating and how most people see and
learn things. But it is weak thinking to slide from there into the ever-recurring pious doctrine
that there is no conflict between teaching and research.
The two activities conflict in the most obvious and concrete way by competing for our
time, attention and loyalty. The extensive time I’m spending on this essay is time I cannot spend
on my teaching. I get completely preoccupied as I am writing it and find myself putting off the
preparation or reading I ought to do for my classes. When I’m engaged in a piece of writing and
research, I tend to think about it in my free time. When I’m not so engaged, I tend to think
about my students and my teaching in my free time. What I do in my research may make me a
smarter more thoughtful teacher, but I can scarcely apply this work to my teaching--even
though this essay has remarkably strong links to teaching. Few faculty members can bring their
research directly into their undergraduate teaching.
But it’s not just a matter of wishful thinking. When people claim that there is no conflict
between teaching and research, they are usually, consciously or not, papering over a deeply
entrenched hierarchy or dominance of research over teaching at universities and most four-year
colleges. Teachers and administrators at two-year colleges and in the schools don’t seem so
tempted to proclaim that there is no conflict between teaching and research.
Because this has become a political matter, it’s particularly important to try to think
carefully about it. Yes, it is a benefit if teachers also research and researchers also teach. But it
is simply wrong to say that people can’t do one well without doing the other. However, this is
no argument that people can teach well without relief--without time for reading, thinking, and
discussion with colleagues. Teaching is an intellectually and personally draining process of
10
putting out. To teach well requires time for taking in and reflecting. But it’s sloppy thinking to
assume that research is the only way for teachers to think and reflect and intellectually renew
themselves.
The important point illuminated by my model is this: teaching and research don’t need
each other. It’s only a certain model of being an academic that needs both teaching and
research. Let me illustrate this structural point from the previous topics I’ve treated.
 To write well requires skill in both generating and criticizing; but generating and criticizing
in themselves have no need of each other.
 To teach well requires skill in both supportively affirming and critically judging; but
affirming and judging have no need of each other.
 To think well requires skill in both doubting and believing, but those two activities do fine
on their own.
Thus teachers can be outstanding without doing research--just as researchers can be
outstanding without teaching. Before World War II, few academics did much writing or
research, nor was it expected of most. Only the few research universities of the era demanded
research. Since then, the university model has been spreading throughout all of higher
education.
So what does this model of binary thinking tell us about how to improve the relationship
between teaching and research? We can follow the same principles here as above. A few really
gifted people can make teaching and research work together simultaneously. But most people
need to take steps to keep the two from getting in each others’ way--which usually means
finding times to give full attention and commitment to each one separately. Full attention is
important because what we want is extremity in both sides. We don’t want half-hearted
teaching and half-hearted research, we want deeply committed teaching and research. Some
people can give full attention to research for a few hours each day and switch their full attention
to teaching for the rest of the day. Most people can’t switch back and forth so quickly and need
longer periods to commit themselves to one or the other. The most pressing question now is
how to nurture what is usually the weaker or shadow side of the dichotomy, teaching. We’ll
never improve it by blithely proclaiming that there is no conflict and that research always helps
teaching--meanwhile continuing to give most incentives to research and few to teaching. We
have to decide whether we are willing to give the incentives to teaching without which it can
never thrive.
But there is a larger and trickier question lurking here. Should we preserve and enshrine
the research university model for all academics? Should we insist that people cannot be
academics unless they teach and do research? The model of binary thinking does not give an
answer to this essentially political question. A promising suggestion, however, comes from the
Carnegie Commission (Boyer): a conception of “research” that isn’t so much at odds with
teaching because it doesn’t necessarily involve conventional competitive publication. The
essential point here is to allow “research” to involve input and reflection, and not require it
always to mean output in the form of competitive publication.

11
(5) Form vs. content
“Form and content are indissoluble. We can’t distinguish them or judge one apart from
the other. Surely you don’t want to be associated with old fashioned school teachers who give
split grades!”
This view is intriguing in light of the history of fashion in English studies. In recent years,
there’s been a kind of bandwagon attempt to disown everything connected with New Criticism,
yet here’s a New Critical doctrine that has somehow stayed enshrined.
Of course form and content are linked--indeed they are often functions of each other.
Change in one requires change in the other--at least to some degree. But mathematicians
would be startled to hear anyone claiming that we cannot distinguish between entities that are
functions of each other. The idea that we cannot distinguish or even evaluate form and content
separately also flies in the face of careful thought--not to mention common sense and common
practice.
It’s the same here as with the other contraries: opposites do fuse or magically interact
when everything is going perfectly. That is, in the ideal poem, form and content function just as
the doctrine proclaims they should: we can’t tell the dancer from the dance. But in ordinary
sublunary texts, we have no trouble telling which is the dancer. The reason the text is not
magical is that dancer and dance don’t perfectly realize each other. When we look at imperfect
texts or texts in progress or nonliterary texts--e.g., student texts and our own texts and most
published texts as opposed to Keats’ best poems--we can usually tell that the content is working
better than the form, or vice versa. Most of what we say about texts implies a recognition of
the difference between form and content, and most of the changes we make in any text are
changes we make because we can palpably feel how the form and content don’t work as well
together as they should.
When people deny an opposition or distinction that exists, we need to ask if the denial
serves to mystify something. In the realm of grading, when people say, “I can’t distinguish
between content and form,” they are often refusing to name or figure out--or be consistent in--
the hidden criteria that determine their grades. In the realm of literary studies, the doctrine
that form and content are indistinguishable has often served to give special honor to form--to
enshrine the superiority of poetry over prose, and the inferiority of texts that are easily
paraphrased or summarized compared to those that are not.

(6) Reading vs. writing

Reading and writing would seem marry nicely and reinforce each other without conflict.
And this is exactly the case when all is going optimally--just as teaching and research can
reinforce each other. Input can serve output, and vice-versa. We want our readers to be writers
and our writers to be readers. But the idea that there is no conflict here is a classic case of
doctrine shielding the privilege of one spouse over the other. (This is a large subject that I have
treated at length in my “War Between Reading and Writing,” printed in this volume.) What
could be more different than the two root processes: trying to fit your mind around and take in
words someone else chose, and trying to choose your own words and put them out and get
12
others to fit their minds around them? What interests me are the differences in agency and
control for the learner in both processes.
Between readers and writer, there is an obvious conflict of interest about who gets to
decide the meaning and interpretation of a text. It’s in the interest of writers that they should
decide what their own text means; it’s in the interest of readers to say that only they can
decide. There’s no right answer. Either/or, zero-sum arguments are a trap. Both points of view
must be given full or even extreme validity. At the present critical moment (a moment that has
lasted rather a long time), dominance rests more with readers than writers. Most critical work
assumes that readers get the last word about the meaning of texts--and indeed that writers
must not be trusted on the matter.
At the most material and political level, we see the dominance of readers in the vastly
superior working conditions given to teachers of reading or literature in higher education
compared to conditions for teachers of writing (Slevin). As a writing program director, most of
the talk I hear about the harmony between reading and writing and their mutual need for each
other is used to support proposals for scrapping what is virtually the only writing course in
college (first year writing), in order to change it into a reading-and-writing course. Meanwhile,
virtually all the other courses in the curriculum are tacitly invited to remain as they are, namely,
committed primarily to reading. In sum, reading and writing can and should reinforce each
other from a position of parity, but talk about happy harmony can be viewed with suspicion if it
masks the current dominance of reading.
If we look back at the earlier dichotomies I explored, we can see the same dynamic.
When people claim that there is no real conflict between teaching and research, they are
reinforcing an imbalanced status quo. When people say there is no dichotomy between
generating and criticizing in writing, or between believing and doubting in thinking and learning,
they are reinforcing the present dominance of criticism and critical thinking in the academic or
intellectual realm. They are reinforcing the prevailing set of assumptions that tell us that it is a
good thing to clear space for nonstop, unrelieved criticism or doubting while people write or
think; but it is a bad thing to clear space for nonstop, unrelieved generating or believing or
making a mess. Periods of extreme planning and control are currently felt to be fine, but not
periods of nonplanning or relinquishing control. Extremity in doubting is fine, but extremity in
believing is bad. This attitude toward belief is so ingrained in our academic and intellectual
culture that people don’t realize that what they are afraid of--namely, fanaticism or closed-
mindedness--represents not extremity of belief but poverty of belief: the ability to believe only
one thing.

7. Private vs. social

My theme here--and throughout this essay--is to beware happy harmonies and mystical
unions; look out for declarations of no conflict. For my last case or example, however, I turn to
an opposition that the field of rhetoric and composition has highlighted or foregrounded--
almost to the point of hypnosis. Yet this too is a case of a binary that tends to enshrine
hierarchy--in this case the dominance of the social. The problem again is either/or thinking.
13
 Clearly humans are both inherently connected and intertwined with others and also
inherently separate. We can focus on either dimension of human existence. When we look
from a distance we can see that everything we say or write comes from outside--we don’t make
up words. But when we look from close up, we can see that every word we speak and write
comes to our lips and our pens from the inside.
If we take the trouble to step outside the doctrinal bickering, we can easily see that it is a
good thing to be more than usually social--but also to be more than usually private. The more
we connect and communicate with others, the more . . . well, who needs to argue this point
these days? But a moment’s thought will also show us that we are clearly better off the more
we can hold commerce with ourselves, pursue trains of thought through inner dialogues even if
no one else is interested, resist or tune out the pressures of others, keep our selves separate.
(Pascal: “. . . all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay
quietly in their own chamber” Pensee 139.) We have good reason to value social discourse--and
see social interrelatedness everywhere, even where we don’t notice it at first; but we have
equally good reason to value the cultivation of private, desert-island discourse and
individuation.
So again, my argument is for affirming both sides equally--not a compromise but a push
for extremity in both directions--and to resist attempts at priority or hegemony by either side.
The best way to achieve this goal, to fight clear of the trap of partisans on each side fighting to
stamp out the other, is to remember what rhetoricians sometimes forget though it was
Aristotle’s favorite phrase (not so much in the Rhetoric, however): “There is a sense in which . . .
.” There is a sense, currently much emphasized, in which all language is social. This was part of
what Aristotle meant in saying humans are “social animals”: an entirely unconnected human is
not a human; an entirely solipsistic mind is not a mind. But just as clearly, there’s another
sense in which all language is private. Nothing that anyone says or writes can ever be
understood by others in the full senses in which it is experienced or intended. Language is the
tapping on prison walls by individuals in solitary confinement, with only slight chances of being
heard much less understood. Not either/or but both/and. (For more on this issue, and on the
implications for theory of “in a sense,” see my “In Defense of Private Writing.”)
When both/and is the goal, it follows that the weaker or neglected dimension needs to be
strengthened. Thus, it’s obviously a problem when persons are only private and always hold
themselves apart and unrelated to others and don’t know how to connect or function socially.
But it’s equally problematic when people are only social and can only think and use language
when there are others around to interact with, and can only think thoughts that others are
interested in or agree with. Such people are too subject to peer pressure; we use the
expression, they “have no mind of their own.”
As with the other binary oppositions I’ve considered, when all goes well the opposed
sides can work together and reinforce each other. The more of a social life one has, the richer
one’s private life can be. As Vygotsky and others point out, our private life is often a folding in
of what was first social. But it goes the other way too: the more private life one has, that is, the
more one is able to have conversations with oneself and follow thoughts and feelings in
different directions from those of people around one, the more richly social a life one can have.
14
Putting it yet another way: someone with no private life at all is in one sense completely social--
is nothing but social; but in another sense this person is less richly social for bringing less of her
own mental amalgam to the colloquy. As Dewey puts it: “The very idea of education is a freeing
of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims” (98). Interpreting Bakhtin,
Clark and Holquist write: “And unlike other philosophies that oppose radical individualism in
the name of the greater primacy of socially organized groups, Bakhtin’s philosophy never
undercuts the dignity of persons. . . . Inasfar as we are all involved in the architectonics of
answerability for ourselves and thus for each other, we are all authors, creators of whatever
order and sense our world can have” (348).

The Epistemology of Experience vs. The Epistemology of Propositions

The kind of binary thinking I’m advocating here--an approach that tries to heighten
dichotomies yet maintain the balance and affirm both sides equally--involves, it seems to me, a
special link or even commitment to experience. There is a phenomenological bias; perhaps
even a bias toward narrative.
My own story is paradigmatic. That is, I came to this approach through my experience of
writing--primarily an experience of perplexity or even bafflement. I quit graduate school when I
got so blocked I couldn’t write. When I finally came back five years later I was scared and self-
conscious about writing, so for four years I scribbled notes to myself--short ones and long ones--
about what was happening to me as I wrote--especially when things went particularly badly or
well. It was from these experiential, often narrative notes that I developed the hypothesis that
writing was hard because of the conflicting needs to generate-yet-criticize, control-yet-
relinquish-control, say yes-and-no. My thinking grew out of a process of trying to be true to my
experience and to find a theory that didn’t violate it.
I've come to think that this approach to dichotomies honors the complexity of experience
and the wandering narrative of events. The approach invites experience to precede logic. And
here too of course there is a tradition: an empirical, inductive, pragmatic tradition that favors
Aristotle's science over Plato's, Bacon over Descartes--and that we see in William James and
John Dewey.
You can't say what I've just said, however, without someone quickly objecting, "But there
is no such thing as experience without theory. That's naive American Romanticism. Theory is
always already in everything we do. No act can be innocent of theory." But here again this
claim--and it has become a doctrinal chant--papers over a another binary distinction: theory vs.
practice. (Boethius pictures Dame Philosophy with two prominent letters embroidered on her
robe, Theta and Pi.) The claim that there is no dichotomy or conflict between theory and
practice is sloppy thinking and tends to champion theory over practice.
Of course it's true that no act is innocent of premises and implications. But it is a failure
of clear thinking to let that fact blind us to a crucial difference--especially in the realm of
experience: the difference between coming at a piece of experience with a conscious and
explicit theory in mind vs. coming at it as openly as possible--making an effort to try to hold
theory at bay and trying to notice and articulate what happens.
15
 It is true that we open ourselves to self-deception when we try to hold theory at bay and
not articulate our tacit theories: the theories we "find" are liable to be the ones we are already
pre-disposed to believe. But when people spend all their time wagging their finger at this
danger, they tend to miss a crucial experience. We increase our chances of seeing more
complexity and contradiction in our experience--and finding new theories or theories that
surprise us--if we make an effort to honor and attend to experience as closely as possible and
hold off theorizing for a while. This process can even lead us to theories we are predisposed not
to believe--theories we don't like. We can notice these two approaches in two textures of
research. In classroom research, for example, one can start with a position or hypothesis and
consciously look at everything through that lens; or one can try to take notes about what one
is seeing and feeling from moment to moment, and wait to see what concepts or gestalts
emerge.
Donald Schön has recently articulated and celebrated the tradition of research that starts
by trying to pay as close attention as possible to one's experience. He talks about "reflective
practice" in a movement from practice to theory--an approach with a debt to Dewey and Lewin.
Developed even more carefully, this tradition has become the discipline of phenomenology,
involving the attempt to "bracket" or hold to one side the preconceptions derived from
language or theory. One can never fully succeed in this attempt, but one can get better at it.
Like the discipline of holding off critical thinking or holding off awareness of audience, people
mustn't say it can't be done just because they haven't learned how to do it. If we want to get
better at attending to experience, it helps to notice the competing demands of theory and logic.
Let me stress again that my enthusiasm for experience and induction is not a claim that
they are superior or prior or privileged. I don't claim that induction is better than deduction,
Aristotle than Plato, Bacon than Descartes, Dewey than Derrida. I am simply resisting a counter
claim of priority, an assumption of privilege. I'm simply jostling for fifty percent of the bed. I am
trying to maintain a balanced and unresolved opposition in order to prevent either side from
being slipped into the margin by means of a haughty denial of oppositional thinking.
In fact I acknowledge that the very position I am arguing for in this paper has attained
such a degree of generality as to become a theoretical bulldozer itself. To the degree that I fall
in love with my theory of opposites, I'm liable to use it to bludgeon experience. But I don't
shrink from this recognition. I have no hesitation about turning around and celebrating theory
too. Sometimes it is only by bludgeoning experience--for example through being obsessed with
something--that we can make experience give up secrets that we don't get by innocent
observation. (See Burtt for the classic account of how the advances of modern science
depended on the ability to bludgeon experience.) Therefore, to the degree that I am committed
to experience, then I will struggle sometimes to hold off my preoccupation with binary thinking
and try to keep my eyes and pores open to experience that doesn't fit on the saddle of my
hobby-horse.
I want to call attention to a connection between this emphasis on experience and the
work of some of the earlier figures in the field of composition: Macrorie, Britton, Murray,
myself, and others. What these figures had in common--and what seems to me to characterize
that moment in the history of composition--was a burgeoning interest in the experience of
16
writing. There was a mood of excitement about talking about what actually happens as we and
our students write. Thus, there was lots of first person writing and informal discourse. And
thus the overused term for the movement: the "process approach." People wanted to talk
about their experience of the process of writing--not just about the resultant text or product.
"Process" means experience.*
-------------------------------------
*
It had become more or less commonplace in rhetoric of the 18th and 19th centuries to say, "We can't
really teach invention. We can't fathom the mystery of where words and ideas come from. We must remain tacit
about that. But we can teach about the other dimensions of rhetoric." These latter were matters of product (e.g.,
style and arrangement). But starting in the nineteen sixties people began to say, "Well let's do talk more about
invention. We can say something about the experience of finding words and ideas and what it's like when we
write."
More recently those figures in composition (Britton et al) have begun to be referred to as "expressive" or
"expressionists." That term seems to me a problem and I sometimes wonder if it is not hostilely motivated. For
the prime originators and theorists who use the term (e.g., James Berlin and Jeanette Harris) have tended to use it
as a term of disapproval. None of the "expressionists" use the term "expressive" with any centrality, except
Britton--and the term does not well describe or sum up his views or his work. I rarely see the term used except by
people who identify themselves as not expressive. I don't recall using the term, and I'm not comfortable with it--
partly because of its negative connotations, but especially because I can't get it to stand still and mean something
definite and useful. If we define it narrowly--"writing that expresses how I feel"--it's fairly clear, but no one seems
to use it that narrowly any more. If we define it more broadly to mean "writing that expresses what I feel--and see
and think," then suddenly it is indistinguishable from any other kind of writing. Thus it seems thankless to try to
defend "expressive writing." Chris Burnham is one of the few scholars who has shown himself willing to take on
the job. See his "Expressive Rhetoric: A Source Study."
----------------------------------------------------
I see a correlation between this emphasis on the experience or process of writing and a
willingness to articulate contraries and leave them unresolved. To be open and honest about
experience leads to unresolved and conflicting propositions. This opening period of the
"process" movement in composition corresponds, I'd say, to the moment when literary critics
were interested in reader response criticism: "Let's try to tell what actually happens to us as we
read." (I called this "giving movies of the reader's mind" in Writing without Teachers in 1973).
But since then, scholars in both literature and composition (with the notable exception of some
feminists) have tended to back away from this interest in talking honestly and personally about
their own experience. An autobiographical openness about one's own experience doesn't seem
to fit comfortably with our current model of academic scholarship.
Thus I call the approach to binaries that I'm talking about an epistemology of experience--
whereas an insistence on logical coherence is more an epistemology of propositions.

Epistemology and Rhetoric

The kind of binary thinking I am celebrating here seems to suggest an epistemological
skepticism: a distrust of language and of the possibilities of knowing (see Gibson for a good
collection of pieces about the limitations of language). But actually, I think the epistemological
17
picture is a bit more sunny. For this tradition of binary thinking actually suggests a world of
things outside us and our language that we can have a kind of commerce with--even though our
minds and language and our system of logic are not ideally fitted to them. If we can learn to
balance irreconcilable propositions in our minds (at least if they are helpful propositions), and
not rush for closure, dominance, or hierarchy, we can make some sort of approach to
knowledge of a complex world that exists outside our minds.
There is an important link here between binary thinking and metaphor. Just as new
metaphors are always created out of a conflict or contradiction (a contradiction between how
the word or phrase is being used and the right or literal meaning of the word or phrase), and
just as new metaphors often point at something which is not yet signified by words (see my
"Nondisciplinary Courses" 22-32), so too a well-maintained, unresolved opposition can point at
something that cannot be or has not yet been otherwise articulated. The physicists have gotten
used to this sort of thing with their conclusion that light must unavoidably be described as both
wave and particle. Both models or descriptions must be upheld despite their mutual
contradiction.
What interests me for this essay is the paradoxical relationship between this epistemology
of contradiction and rhetoric. Even though I'm arguing throughout for more difference, more
contradiction--more of what Boethius called "war" between truths--I think I'm opening a door
to a rhetoric that is less warlike or adversarial.
Look at how rhetoric and persuasion and argument usually work. When people argue and
call each other wrong, they tend to assume that only one side can be right. Or putting this the
other way around (as Graff does), when people assume that only one answer can be right, they
tend to engage in more conflict: they are struggling for a single prize in a win/lose arena.
But if we celebrate binary thinking of the sort I've been describing, there's every chance
of discovering that both parties to the argument are right--despite their disagreement. Their
two claims, even though completely contradictory, might both be accurate and useful views of
the complex phenomena they are fighting about. If they were more open to the epistemology
of contradiction, they might come closer to a full description and understanding of the complex
issue by affirming and entering into each others' propositions (without having to give up
allegiance to their own). After all, none of the blind men in the fable were wrong when they
gave contradictory descriptions of the elephant. But their views were seriously flawed by
narrowness of perspective. In the tradition of binary thinking, there is less need to try to force
people to agree. Thus John Trimbur's essay celebrating dissensus or the limits of consensus has
been extremely fruitful and influential in the profession--coming as it does out of the tradition
of Bruffee and his consensus-based model of social construction.
My interest in affirming oppositions, then, connects with my interest in nonadversarial,
nonviolent, nonoppositional rhetoric: rhetoric as believing game (see my "Methodological
Believing"). More and more people are noticing the problems with either/or rhetoric: the
assumption that in order to argue for a position, we must argue against the contrary position as
wrong. Conventional argumentative and persuasive discourses so often start out by trying to
show that the other view is wrong. Lakoff and Johnson, in their exploration of the tacit

18
"metaphors we live by," show how deeply enmeshed our culture is in the assumption that
"argument equals war."
Apart from any epistemological considerations, this conventional warfare approach tends
to backfire on psychological grounds. If I want you to consider my point of view, I will have a
harder time if I first try to get you to confess you are stupid or mistaken for holding yours. And
I'll increase my chances of success if I, in turn, am able to see the truth of your view.
Many conditions in the world have conspired to help us see more clearly than ever the
limits of an either/or model for dealing with conflict. Even in the highly adversarial realms of
warfare and litigation, it turns out that mediation and negotiation are more and more sought
out. In rhetoric itself then, we should not be surprised to find more explorations of alternative
models for handling conflict. (See the extensive exploration of "Rogerian rhetoric," for example
in Brent and Teich. For feminist explorations of non-adversarial rhetoric, see Frey and Lamb.
Also Ong has a fascinating exploration of the long history of the adversarial and irenic traditions
in our culture.) It's my contention, then, that the kind of binary thinking I describe here--an
epistemology of contradiction--will help people get unstuck from either/or, zero-sum,
adversarial models of rhetoric.
At this point, some readers will be itching to accuse me of not practicing what I preach.
For if I am so interested in nonadversarial rhetoric and the believing game, why am I fighting so
hard in this essay--using the very kind of good/bad binary thinking that I profess to be against?
And why in my career have I so often seemed to take partisan stands?
For I have certainly been partisan. I've always written more excitedly about generating
than revising, and been preoccupied if not obsessed with freewriting. I've certainly celebrated
private writing and the ability to turn off awareness of audience during certain points in the
writing process. I've made more noise about teachers as allies than as critical, evaluative
adversaries. And I've campaigned my whole career for the believing game.
But there are two goals for fighting: fighting for the sake of being heard vs. fighting for
the sake of keeping the other person from being heard; fighting to create dialogue vs. fighting
to insist on monologue. I am fighting here to make a case for binary thinking in a climate that
considers it a cardinal sin. I'm not fighting to wipe out the sometimes necessary practice of
good/bad binary thinking, or to prevent the often useful practice of framing issues in terms of
multiple positions. And as for the practice of fighting itself, here is a case where I want to break
out of binary thinking. That is, it's not an either/or choice between fighting and not fighting--
between trying to exterminate the enemy or her position or else going into a kind of nonviolent
limpness. There is an important third option. We can fight with someone to try to get them to
listen to us to or to consider our view--fight hard--and yet nevertheless not press them at all to
give up their view. (Of course it sometimes seems as though the enemy's only "view" is that our
view must be stamped out--and so we feel we have no choice but to try to stamp out theirs.
But mediators and negotiators have learned to be skilled in this situation: helping people to
articulate the positive goals or views or needs that lie behind their merely negative goal of
wiping out the enemy's goal.)

19
 I've always made it clear that my partisan behavior was grounded in my epistemological
commitment to binary thinking. Because there has been such a one-sided tradition in the
teaching of writing--a tradition that says, "Always plan, maintain vigilance, use critical
thinking"--I've seen a clear need to make a louder noise in favor of clearing away time for non-
planning, generating, freewriting, and holding off critical consciousness. But in all of my fighting
for the generative, I've never argued against critical consciousness, doubting, criticism, or
radical cutting--only for an equal emphasis on both sides--a stronger contradiction--what D. H.
Lawrence called the "trembling instability of the balance" (172). I've always been explicit about
my commitment to subject matter and even evaluation in teaching; and to doubting in thinking
and learning. And when it comes to the opposition between the private vs. the social
dimension in writing, I would claim some credit (with my Writing Without Teachers in 1973) for
helping the profession become interested in the social and collaborative dimension of writing in
the first place.
Thus I would invite readers to compare the rhetorical shape of my writing with that of
people who are extremely critical of my work (e.g., James Berlin and Jeanette Harris). I may
permit myself unabashed enthusiasm and open partisanship; they use more modulated tones
of alleged judiciousness. But compare the rhetorical goals to see who is trying to silence and
who is trying to sustain a dialogue.
In fact, what really needs explaining is why there has been such a tendency to see me as
one-sided and extreme--to see me as someone only interested in generating, making a mess,
and the private dimension--to be blind to my support for critical thinking, revising, doubting,
and the social dimension in writing--when I preach over and over this theme of embracing
contraries and of trying to get opposites into unresolved tension with each other. That is, I'm
criticized for being narrow or one-sided, sometimes on epistemological grounds, but really the
criticism itself represents an epistemological poverty of thinking. It is fashionable now to
celebrate indeterminacy and epistemological doubt, yet even radical theorists often fall into
assuming that if anyone argues in favor of feelings, private discourse, or the relinquishing of
control, she must by definition be against thinking, analysis, logic, and the social dimension--
whatever they say to the contrary. I can't help believing, then, that an epistemology grounded
in the tradition of binary thinking highlighted here can lead to more large mindedness.
So how do we learn or develop this kind of epistemology or this habit of dialectical
thinking? One important way we learn it is through interaction with others: through dialogue.
After all, that's the original link that Socrates and Plato had in mind in their original conception
of "dialectic": bring people into conversation in order to create conflict among ideas. Dialogue
leads to dialectic.
So just as we learn to talk privately to ourselves by internalizing social conversation with
others (as Mead and Vygotsky tell us), so we can learn this useful kind of binary or dialectical
thinking from conversation. That is, our greatest source of difference and dichotomy is when
people of different minds come together. So in addition to calling for an "epistemology of
contradiction," I could also call it an "epistemology of dialogue" or (to be fashionable) a
"dialogic epistemology." But it's not enough to have dialogue between opposing views if the
dialogue is completely adversarial. The dialogue we need comes when participants can
20
internalize both views--can enlarge their minds and their assumptions--instead of just digging in
and fighting harder for their own view. So it's a question of what kind of dialogue we have. The
views may clash, but can the parties cooperate or collaborate in the dialogue? We learn
rhetorical warfare from dialogue with rhetorical warriors, but we learn dialectical large
mindedness from dialogue with people who have learned an epistemology of dialogue or
contradiction.
The epistemology that tends to be dominant today among scholars and academics in the
humanities is dialectical in one sense: It says, in effect, "I believe X and you believe Y, and there
is no real truth or right answer in the back of the book to tell us who is right. So we can keep on
fighting." What I'm looking for is a dialectical epistemology that is more generous and hopeful--
an epistemology that says, "I believe X and you believe Y, yet by gum we may well both be right--
absolutely right. If we work together we might well get a richer understanding than either of us
so far has."
Notice finally, then, two different relationships here between epistemology and rhetoric.
In the dominant tradition, we have eternal warfare between people (rhetoric) because the
people don't maintain eternal warfare between concepts inside their heads (epistemology). It's
possible to have it the other way around: eternal warfare between concepts in the head,
resulting in more cooperation and less zero-sum warfare between people. (Readers not
interested in theoretical issues in the fields of rhetoric and composition might skip to my
concluding paragraph.)

Dialectic and Rhetoric

In the previous section, I focused on the role of people and rhetorical structures. In this
final section I will focus on language. I will suggest that there is a realm of language use or
discourse that is a particularly useful site for encouraging the kind of binary thinking that helps
concepts and ideas to live in fruitful tension. I see this realm as different from rhetoric and I
suggest that we might call it dialectic. Dialectic and rhetoric represent contrasting if not
absolutely conflicting uses of language.
The dichotomy between dialectic and rhetoric was central to Plato and Aristotle, but now
it is widely neglected or denied--mostly because dialectic is enormously unfashionable and
rhetoric is the dominant term. Some say indeed that rhetoric covers all language use (see
Eagleton for a prominent instance). I wonder if there might be a link between three current
attitudes I am seeing in many rhetoricians and literary critics: a neglect of dialectic as a realm or
category of language use, a knee-jerk criticism of dichotomies and dichotomous thinking, and
an attraction to rhetoric as the master term.
To deny the dichotomy between rhetoric and dialectic represents yet again the papering
over of a power imbalance--an aggrandizing move by rhetoric. When people say everything is X
(e.g., all language use is rhetoric) they are making a move to push difference and opposition off
the map: no conflict. I would sound the warning again: beware proclamations of no conflict.
My aim is to show the fruitfulness of a conflict between dialectic and rhetoric as two uses of
language.
21
 The easiest way to dismiss dialectic and claim that everything is rhetoric is to deny the
very grounds given by Plato and Aristotle for the distinction between the two realms of
discourse. Plato saw dialectic as the realm of truth and correct reasoning, and rhetoric as the
realm of deception. Aristotle saw dialectic as the realm of certain knowledge, and rhetoric as
the realm of probable knowledge. (They too, of course, were making a power play and claiming
superiority for dialectic.) But now, since "everyone" agrees that there is no such thing as truth
or certain knowledge (do we have certainty about the lack of certainty?), it would seem obvious
that there is nothing left but rhetoric. All language use is interested or partisan--and thus
ultimately an act of persuasion.
It's not easy to fight this claim; in a sense I agree with it. Yet I think I can argue usefully, if
speculatively, for a realm of language use called dialectic that differs from rhetoric. What is
"rhetoric"? The term is rubbery, but I think it's fair to define it as language designed to have an
effect on an audience. More traditionally and narrowly, it has been defined as language to
persuade. And "dialectic"? I am not defining it as the realm of truth or certain knowledge, but
rather as the realm of language whose goal is not to persuade or not even for the sake of having
an effect on audience. Putting it positively, dialectic is the use of language where the prime goal
is to make meaning rather than deploy that meaning toward an effect: to get meanings,
concepts, and words to interact with each other in order to see where they go; to "figure out"
or "figure." (With the term "figure" I am thinking of the activity of doing calculations with
numbers. Would aggrandizers for rhetoric claim that all mathematical calculations are
rhetoric?) We might even think of dialectic as the realm of language as play--language for its
own sake rather than for effect. The central thing, then, is that we are using language in such a
way that there is not the pressure of trying for an effect on an audience--the pressure of
rhetoric.
In the present critical climate, this is a slippery and controversial notion. And there is
overlap between the categories (more about that below). So it will help to give some examples:
(a) There is a clear contrast in the realm of law between a legal brief and a legal
memorandum (or more precisely an office memorandum). A brief lies squarely in the
realm of rhetoric: its goal is to persuade the court; to win. In contrast, an office
memorandum sits squarely in the realm of language use that I call dialectic. A legal
dictionary defines the office memorandum as "an informal discussion of the merits of a
matter pending in a lawyer's office; usually written by a law clerk or junior associate for
the benefit of a senior associate or partner" (Gifis 296). The "benefit" spoken of here is
not to argue or persuade or plead for one side, but rather to figure out everything that
can be said on both sides or--as some people put it, to figure out how a perfect judge or a
legal God would rule. The difference between rhetoric and dialectic is intriguingly
highlighted by material or procedural ruling: under the law, an office memorandum is
legally "protected from discovery" (296) so that the other team cannot see it. The fact
that the memorandum is legally "private" helps it be an act of figuring out rather than an
act of rhetoric.
(b) I think we most often use language for dialectic in a more private way--writing or talking
or verbally thinking for ourselves. I'm not claiming that all private discourse is dialectic.
22
 As Burke and others point out, we often address language to ourselves for the sake of
having an effect or being winning towards that audience of "me." Still, privacy is a realm
that at least invites dialectic: not trying to have an effect on ourselves but to explore or
follow a train of thought.
For example, when I am dealing with an issue where I have a position and disagree
with others, I find I have a better chance of understanding the issue if I leave the
rhetorical realm, stop addressing them, take myself out of their hearing, and speak to
myself in private. ("What if I'm wrong? Let's see what happens if I consider such and such
evidence more seriously. Could I admit that I'm wrong?") Someone might object that this
kind of private language for making meaning or figuring something out is nevertheless
language designed to have "an effect" on my audience of self--namely the effect of
clarifying my thinking or my position. But this is clearly not what Burke or most of us
mean when we talk about "language designed to have an effect on an audience." To
stretch the word rhetoric to cover all discourse--by definition--is to lose the word.
When I am engaged in the rhetorical task of writing to persuade and I get confused or
stuck, I've learned sometimes to take a fresh sheet or open a temporary file and start
exploring my perplexity for myself. "What am I really trying to say here? I think X but I
feel Y" and so on. Up till that point I had been addressing my language to readers for the
sake of making a point or having an effect. But in order to make this move into the realm
of dialectic, a crucial internal event must happen. I have to make a little act of letting go
and giving up full commitment to my position--to my hunger to persuade. Of course I
reserve to myself the right to go back afterwards and battle for X--no matter what I
discover in my little fishing trip. Indeed, as an incentive to practice dialectic or binary
thinking, I can even console myself on pragmatic or rhetorical grounds: "I'll probably do
better at fighting for X and increase my chances of 'winning' if I take this detour into the
realm of dialectic and figure out whether the position I want to win with is right or
wrong." I've got to write myself a little office memorandum.
(c) When naive scientists say they stay objective and write nothing but facts, current critics
and theorists reply, "Haven't you read Thomas Kuhn? There is no objectivity or factuality--
even in science. All language is interested and biased." But that reply again papers over
an important distinction in the interests of a power play, and it is a move that explains
why so many scientists, even very sophisticated ones, resist the uses that many humanists
and social scientists make of Kuhn. Of course most scientists know that genuine
objectivity, truth, or factuality is not attainable: certainty cannot be had. Yet for some
pieces of discourse--even some very public pieces--they nevertheless and unabashedly
measure their success by how close they come to exactly those goals: objectivity, truth,
factuality, even certainty! Even though the goal is unattainable, it is still possible to
measure the value of discourse by how close it comes. In short, there is a crucial
difference between using language to have an effect or make a case and using language to
try to come as close as possible to objectivity or facts.
This is a complex and controversial issue, and I don't mind admitting that I am trying to
work it out for the first time here. It seems to me that this is a issue where we need to be smart
23
enough to use Aristotle's formulation, "In a sense, . . ." That is, in one sense--or through one
lens or to some degree or another--all language is addressed and for an effect: all language has
a rhetorical dimension. But in another sense, all language is meaning-making, figuring out, or
the play of meaning: all language has a dialectical dimension. This way of talking helps us call
attention to a spectrum of language uses. At one end are discourses in which the rhetorical use
predominates. Rhetoric was developed in response to speech making and public writing--
language uses where there is a natural emphasis on having an effect on an audience. But there
is another end to this spectrum where we find discourses in which the dialectical use
predominates. Much of our private writing and verbal thinking is discourse of this sort.
Therefore it is not only helpful to use both terms; it would be a distortion and an
oversimplification (and a power play) to restrict ourselves to just one term or "sense" or lens for
observing and describing the whole spectrum of language use. At this cultural moment when
the rhetorical lens is in the ascendant, I see a need to pay attention to those times when we use
language with more open curiosity, more interest in mere figuring out, more willingness to let
things turn out any which way. It might be that most of our language use is heavily rhetorical--
addressed and for effect; it might be that the rhetorical is the path of habit. But it makes no
sense to call all language rhetorical just because there's always a trace of pressure or effect, or
because one hasn't learned to use (or notice using) language in a more dialectical fashion.
And course these pieces of discourse produced under the goals of dialectic--figuring-
outs--can slide into or be developed into or indeed be used as they are for rhetorical goals: as
address to audience for an effect. It seems to me that some of my forays into the dialectic uses
of language in the process of writing this paper have helped me create--and sometimes even
been used--in the rhetoric here.
* * *
Let me close by trying for a quick summary overview of this ambitious essay. I am
exploring and celebrating one kind of binary thinking: the affirmation or nonresolution of
opposed ideas. I'm arguing that this kind of thinking often yields a better model for
understanding complex activities like writing and vexed oppositions like teaching/research. If
we sophisticate our epistemology by recognizing that contrary claims can both be right or
accurate, we can encourage a less adversarial rhetoric. We can invite people to emphasize
positive arguments for their position and de-emphasize negative arguments against the
opposed position--since it may also be valid or correct. In short we can encourage more
productive warfare in our heads and less destructive warfare between people. Finally
(maintaining yet another dichotomy that people tend to run away from), we will probably do
better at encouraging productive binary thinking if we acknowledge a realm or motive of
language use that particularly invites it, namely dialectic as opposed to rhetoric.*
-----------------------
*Many people over the years have given m helpful responses and suggestions on this thinking—too many to name
or even remember. But I’m particularly grateful to Charles Moran, John Trimbur, Robin Varnum, and Elizabeth
Wallace for their help.

24
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