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Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear 457

College English, Volume 68, Number 5, May 2006

Steve Westbrook is assistant professor of English at California State UniversityFullerton, where heteaches courses in composition, creative writing, and cultural studies. His articles have appeared mostrecently in Language and Learning Across the Disciplinesand New Writing: The International Journal for thePractice and Theory of Creative Writing; his poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear:Impediments to Multimedia Production

Steve Westbrook

L

et me begin with two images:

On the left is a photograph: an ordinary image of an ordinary adhesive that took ona new, unexpected meaning after February 11, 2003. On this date, Tom Ridge, thenSecretary 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 Ridgesannouncement, the Washington Postrevealed financial links between the White House

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 Partys 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 potentiallawsuits, other duct tape manufacturers offered public disclaimers about their

products inability to withstand exposure to certain chemical agents. But the ethical-ity and efficacy of Ridges suggested mode of protection (which provided fodder forsatirists everywhere) are really less important than the immediate effect of the formerSecretarys announcement. By February 15, 2003, before caricatures of Ridge wrappedhead to toe in silver sticky stuff had flooded the Internet, rolls of duct tape haddisappeared 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 brieftime at least, they were willing to consider utterly absurd advicebecause it wasoffered by a recognized cultural authorityas 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 showingit. 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 andpoetics. 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 parodys 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 heavilyairbrushed close-up of Limas face, which showcases the glossy pink Maybelline lip-stick the model wears on her suggestively parted lips. Limas eyes are covered bythickly 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 thathighlights her breasts; she is walking in front of skyscrapers that tower above andbehind her in a somewhat phallic and futuristic cityscape. White text placed beneaththe large image of Limas face reads MAYBE: Maybe shes born with it. Maybe its

Maybelline. Around this appropriated section of the Maybelline advertisement windsSaras visual poem, titled The Product I May Be. In this text, Sara takes on thepersona of a disillusioned model (presumably Limas alter ego) who has grown wearyof her own sexual objectification within visual culture. In the second, third, andfourth stanzas, the narrator complains:


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My skin feels heavy with extra coating.Aware that I cannot be recognized,Is it me or product Im promoting?

Ive become the feature advertised:

Commodity of beauty made to lastWhen 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 thefour corners of her counter-ad: opaque pink lipstick smudges, neon blue and redOpen 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 theyrepresent: a photograph of duct tape, a sign of fear, desperation, and perhaps delu-sion, and a students multimedia ad parody, a visual text that offers a critique ofconsumer cultures sexism. I suggest a rather unlikely connection that concerns thesymbolic contexts within which the images were produced. As a strange combina-tion of pragmatism and absurdity defined a frightened American publics reaction toRidges security briefing, a similar fusion currently defines the pedagogical treat-ment of visual rhetoric within writing studies. Uncertain of how the transition fromprint to digital cultures will ultimately affect education in writing and, perhaps, threat-ened by the pace of developments in multimedia composing technologies, those ofus in composition and creative writing tend to rely, sometimes too readily, on thecommon sense of our fields. That is, we redeploy the lore and paradigms that wehave inheritedthe advice, warnings, or ways of knowing that the authorities ofprint culture have given uswhether or not these are entirely appropriate for andultimately beneficial to writing students of the twenty-first century. In this essay Iargue that our inheritanceand here I refer to traditions both inside and outsidethe academysometimes leads us to devalue students experiments with visual rheto-ric and multimedia composition, regardless of our intentions. More specifically, Iuse the case of Saras missing text to explore how and why institutional ideologies

particular to the historical development of composition and creative writingespe-cially when viewed in conjunction with current copyright lawrender studentsmultimedia compositions illegitimate. To this end, I seek to reveal connections be-tween how the ideological apparatuses of writing instruction and the legal statutesof U.S. culture at large combine to radically restrict the production and circulationof students multimedia texts and, hence, inhibit students power as writers.


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VI S U A L RH E T O R I C I N C O M P O S I T I O N S T U D I E S :

WR I T I N G RE S T R I C T I O N S

A multimedia parody like Saras 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 fields social turn. That is, the dia-logic and dialectical writing process required for producing an ad parodyor anymultimedia text that relies on practices of samplingmight encourage students tounderstand composing as a cultural activity by which writers position and reposi-tion themselves in relation to their own and others subjectivities (109) preciselybecause it requires students to write back to others texts through discursive prac-tices of appropriation, incorporation, and transformation. While this process maynot 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. Forinstance, when students themselves redesign a logo and transform Gap Athletic toApathetic or Hilfiger from a glorified brand name to the unlikely combinedsubject and verb of a campy feminist punch lineMaybe someday Hilfiger it outor when they engage in larger transformations as Sara does by altering inheritedimages and inventing a poem that sabotages the intention of the original text fromwhich it developed, they are reminded of both the interestedness and pliability ofverbal and visual language. In other words, they mayexperience how easily major andminor 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 notto work with students onauthoring multimedia visual texts that combine words and images but, rather, towork on critically reading visual artifacts and demonstrating this critical readingthrough the evidence of a print essay. A number of educators have identified the lackof production-based pedagogies as a problem and begun to argue vocally for teach-

ing multimedia composition (see, for example, David Buckinghams Media Educa-tion; Anne Frances Wysocki and others Writing New Media;and Diana GeorgesFrom Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing).However, their arguments represent a minority position, for at present a consumerorientation pervades the professional scholarship of the field. This orientation isrevealed in the work of interdisciplinary scholars who have influenced compositionsunderstanding of visual rhetoric as well as the work of compositionists who havesought 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 (Reading5). In Literacy in the New Media Age, Kress claims that his forays into multimodalliteracy and the grammar of visual design begin with questions about how readers

produce meaning. He writes, My own starting point is this: [. . .] to rethink ournotions of what reading is [. . .] to explain how we derive meaning from [visual]texts (141). In Practices of Looking, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright offer aninterdisciplinary, cultural studies approach to visual rhetoric concerned exclusivelywith viewerspractices of looking, and the various and specific ways people regard,use, and interpret images (6; emphasis added). Both of these approaches treat visualartifacts as if they have always already been produced and confine the visual rhetorto the role of respondent, who uses a variety of semiotic strategies to understand theeffect 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 thatthese implications are rarely pursued.

Explaining the significance of preexisting visual artifacts is the primary task ofthe visual rhetor, according to Marguerite Helmers and Charles A. Hill. In theirintroduction to Defining Visual Rhetorics, the authors claim that scholars of visualrhetoric are concerned with explicating the image through verbal media (18). Al-though Hill and Helmers explore a diverse range of epistemologies in their effort todefine visual rhetoricwithin the field of composition, they offer viewer-based defini-tions and clearly extricate the rhetor from visual discourse, placing him or her withinthe familiar realm of verbal explication. Furthermore, when offering what they con-sider the primary question that underlies their quest to define visual rhetoricHow do images act rhetorically upon viewers? (1)the coauthors strip theproducers of visual texts of their agency, literally rendering them absent, for accord-ing to this conceptualization, the preexisting image acts and the viewer responds tothis action. Taken superficially, the last criticism here may seem to concern a smallgrammatical quibble, but it reflects a larger cultural absence, for within the dis-course of composition, visual rhetoric is being defined repeatedly as a frame ofanalysis for looking and interpreting (Helmers 65) but not often enough for pro-ducing. This phenomenon might be said to reflect Robert Scholess contention in

Textual Powerthat within our educational institutions, we privilege consumptionover production, just as the larger culture privileges the consuming class over theproducing 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 directimpact on students. A survey of recently published textbooks reveals the paucity ofopportunities for students to engage in the production of visual texts. Ten of themore popular textbooks concerned with visual rhetoricBeyond Words(Ruszkiewicz,


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Anderson, and Friend); Seeing and Writing 2 (McQuade and McQuade); Frames ofMind(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); Everythings an Argument(Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz);

Reading Culture (George and Trimbur); Writing in a Visual Age (Odell and Katz);andDesigning Writing (Palmquist)contain a total of 2,620 prompts. Of these 2,620prompts, only 143, or roughly 5 percent, require students to engage in multimediaor visual production, which I define here rather generously to cover a broad range ofactivities that includes basic endeavors like experimenting with font color or includ-ing a picture in an essay, and more substantial exercises that integrate alphabetic andimagistic modes of text-making (designing digital posters or arranging words andimages 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 Mindencourage students to composevisual texts in approximately 1 percent of their prompts; on the high end, PicturingTextsasks students to engage in visual production in 24 percent of its prompts, andDesigning Writingin 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 invisual production. OnlyWriting 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 visualrhetoric may not offer any ultimate conclusions or reliable predictions about a sub-ject of study that is quickly evolving, but the prompts themselves reveal discernibletendencies. Most position students as consumers of visual rhetoric through one ofthree 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 analyticalor expository essay. Examples of this sort of restriction range from Lunsford andRuszkiewiczs 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 isselling and how (416) to Bartholomae and Petroskys instructions to [w]rite anessay about the photographs, about how you understand them (132). The secondand slightly less obtrusive method of restriction presents students with hypotheticalscenarios that require them to imaginebut not actually producea visual text oftheir 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 werethey actually permitted to compose a visual or multimedia text: Imagine youve


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been asked to create a self portrait. What physical medium or media would youchoose and why? What aspects of your identity would you want to emphasize inyour 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 promptreproduced here in itsentiretydoes not form one section of a more complete writing sequence; nor doesit function as a prewriting exercise used as an initial step in the actual composition ofa self-portrait. Rather, the assignment, like others in this genre of prompt, beginswith a hypothetical scenario and ends with a paragraph of descriptive prose.

To be fair, textbook authors occasionally make concessions that enable studentsto transform hypothetical scenarios to actual opportunities for visual composition,but these concessions appear rarely, most often as afterthoughts or asides, and tendto 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 inthe assignment mentioned above, this activity of writing does not lead into any largerproject: 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, theauthors 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-cisean option outside the real scope of the assignment (to write a prospectus)and, more significantly, as an activity that, as their qualifying phrase suggests, isexternal 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 tobe 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 limitsthe kinds of mark-making activities in which students may engage. This methodmay be found in Comp21, the CD that accompanies Robert DiYanni and Pat C.Hoys textbookFrames 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 andvisual texts, but only from the perspective of a consumer and only in two ways: byhighlighting certain elements of the text and writing annotations (viii). Here, theauthors apply conventional reading habits of print culture to digital arenas, transfer-ring the practices of highlighting passages of text and making marginal notes fromthe page to the screen. The highlighter tool allows students to make three kinds oftemporary marksarrows, lines, and boxesall 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 visualtext 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 ofactive, critical reading/viewing practices, but it does not permit students even to

substantially alter anothers preexisting multimedia text (as they might if using aprogram like Photoshop or iMovie). When applied to the realm of textual produc-tion, students digital highlighting and annotating serve ultimately, as DiYanni andHoy suggest, as prewriting exercises. The authors consistently treat their offeringsof multimedia interaction as subservient to what they construct as the more valu-able process of writing a print essay, for they suggest that students annotationscan be collated and printed as notes for a paper (viii), and their CD provides aseparate 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 multimediaand visual texts but prevent students from engaging in their own multimedia andvisual composition. In other words, the vast majority of textbook prompts promotethe kind of mark-making that reinscribes students identities as consumers.

Having up to this point deployed the terms production and consumption ratherfreely, I want to clarify two issues regarding my treatment of these terms and theirrelationship. First, I do not intend to suggest that encouraging students to becomecritical consumers is a bad idea, especially since they are living in a capitalist culturein 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 heavilymediated democracy, one in which approximately 3,500 hours a year or, as John P.Daviess summary of a UCLA study suggests, about 56% of ones waking hoursare spent consuming media (63). And, in this sense, I understand how the dominantreader/viewer-based paradigm that we have come to deploy might coincide with theinherited 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 whichtheir 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. Variousarticulations 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 throughtheir 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 aconsumer-based paradigm, however productive it may, in fact, be. This approachdoes not position students as genuine agents of change precisely because it placesthem outside of the discourses that they are examining. Under this model, even if

students are actively producing meaning, they must always remain the inheritorsof that visual culture which already exists, and they must do so regardless of howconformist or resistant their practices of reading may be. When students are taughthow their own methods of critical reading or how othersmanipulations of wordsand 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 effectivelyprohibited from articulating their own identities with the materials of visual culture

and, thereby, prohibited from asserting their own positions not only as subjects butalso as agents within this culture. Wysocki writes,

people in our classrooms ought to be producing[new media] texts using a wide andalertly chosen range of materialsif they are to see their selves as positioned, as buildingpositions in what they produce [. . .]. [W]hen someone makes an object that is bothseparate 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 selfa self positioned and workingwithin the wide material conditions of her world, even shaping that worldin thatobject. (2021)

This is not to say that students have any ultimate control (the last wordor image,as it were) over the identities that they create, assert, and perhaps share publiclythrough multimedia production but, rather, that as producers they have the abilityto 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 dominatethese 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 toconstruct their selves but also to recognize how their constructed and negotiatedselves 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 toassignment prompts might engender critical thinking, but it does not permit stu-dents to participate in shaping public culture on anything more than the level ofabstraction. In contrast, as I have suggested, positioning students to author multi-media textsparticularly by sampling and transforming existing material from thepublic sphereallows them to actually experience how their mark-making activities


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change, on an immediate, literal level, the physical designand hence meaning ofvisual culture. This experiential activity of text-making then provides, on a broaderlevel, a more empowering understanding of just how readily they can reconstructthe material world, particularly if their textual products are allowed to circulate in

larger cultural spheressomething 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 asviewers ofculture (and its evolution) but as participants in the continual re-creation ofthis culture.

Many reasons, from concerns over the availability of technological resources tofears of writings perceived devolution, can be said to account for the resistance tomultimedia production. Cynthia Selfes Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up theChallenges of Visual Literacy offers a thorough discussion of these issues; here, Id

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, adependence that leads to the marginalization of multimedia writing activities. Asmany of compositions historians have explained, the essay has enjoyed a position ofprivilege since it became established as the preferred form of student writing over acentury ago (see, for example, Berlins Rhetoric and Reality; Connorss Composition-Rhetoric;and Norths Refiguring the Ph.D. in English Studies). As the transition fromoral to print culture began to redefine education in late-nineteenth-century America,the earliest models of composition instructionparticularly Harvardsoffered thefive-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 adoptingthe 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 andestablished 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 masssecondary 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 ofprose writing endorsed by a number of different disciplines; whether or not it ismore 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 theperceived 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 remainslargely unconnected to other, discipline-specific curriculum, it may not be capableof preparing students to write within the myriad of disciplinary contexts they face

and may, in fact, introduce them to compositions greatest fiction, or what SharonCrowley has deemed a superdiscourse [that] does not exist (28). However, theefficacy of this curricular arrangement and the bona fide value of the academys pre-ferred form matter less to my purposes here than the perception that compositionneeds to fulfill this supposed primary function. This perception leads to a seeminglyinevitable (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 (ifineffective) 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 themselvesfor other courses, and writing essays (we think) is synonymous with this preparation.Furthermore, because the essay has enjoyed such a longstanding tradition ascompositions preferred genre and, in turn, because we have grown so accustomedto grading the essay, we tend to feel more secure evaluating this form of writing thanothers 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 thanthose governing writing in other genres.

C R E A T I V E WR I T I N G , AR T I S T I C VI S I O N , A N D T H E

H E G E M O N Y O F G E N R E

One might think that if opportunities for producing a multimedia text like Saras donot appear regularly within the field of composition, they might appear more fre-quently in creative writing. However, the treatment of visual rhetoric within theenterprise of creative writing suffers a similar fate. Although the enterprise does notdeploy the term visual rhetoric rhetoric being too often considered anathemato creative writings proposed poetic missionit has demonstrated increasing in-

terest in potential relationships between the verbal and the visual, particularly whenthe visual is conceptualized as art, as it is in the journal Ekphrasisand the anthol-ogyThird Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art. This anthology, like most ofcreative writings 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, howeverproblematically defined. The dominance of these genres, like the dominance of theessay 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 imagesand words in their own texts but rather to compose strictly verbal textspoems,stories, monologuesabout their processes of seeing and experiencing othersvisual art. The particular relationship between visual text and verbal response func-

tions a bit differently in creative writing than in composition, for here the visualserves less as a prompt for ideology-critique and more as a practical muse, providingstudents both inspiration and material for exercises in what is largely descriptivewriting.

Gary Hawkinss Unfamiliar Ground: Inspiring Students with Abstraction re-veals this function. In his essay, Hawkins discusses his experience of taking poetrystudents to view Cy Twomblys Cattalus, an enormous piece that contains the artistscharacteristic scribbled combinations of words, pencil, and paint. Hawkins offersthe following instructions to students who have been assigned to write poetry in-

spired by Twomblys work: Look at your section of the painting and tell me whatyou see (22). In this example, the poet, like the rhetor, is relegated to the role ofrespondent, but here the act of viewing is underwritten by a Romantic concept ofvision that has been associated with the institution of creative writing at least sinceits early days at Iowa. Discussing the Workshops in 1941, Wilbur Schramm stressedcreative writing students need to develop aesthetic discrimination by cultivatingwhat he called their artistic vision, claiming quite simply that students must learnto look at art with an artists eyes (195). Although Hawkins offers a slightly morecomplicated transference from visual to verbal media than does Schramm (who wasconcerned 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, Hawkinssinstructions for viewing and writing about art are designed to elicit a descriptiveresponse that conforms to the standards of transparent mimetic poetry. The wordsthemselves are to offer representative description but not necessarily to be arrangedaccording to any particular visual design other than the default poetic arrangementof lines along the left margin of the page. Even when creative writing practitionersmove beyond descriptive tendencies and ask students to find some verbal analogueto the visual or to constructa verbal artifact commensurate with the visual one

(122), as Marjorie Welish suggests in The How and the Why: John Taggarts SlowSong for Mark Rothko, the results tend to take the form of what Welish calls ameditative lyric (129). The intended response does not, like a concrete poem orhypermedia presentation, showcase its own material design in an effort to be readand seen; both the assumed composing process and the completed textual productreinforce 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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Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Shirin Neshat, or Tom Phillips for recent examples. How-ever, this separation continues to define creative writings pedagogical treatment ofthe visual. The construction of separate realms for the verbal and visual and thedominance of creative writings preferred genres effectively prevent students from

producing visual texts like Saras, for such a multimedia parody conflates these realmsand contests the genre-based organizational structure upon which the enterprise ofcreative writing was founded. Saras text might fulfill a poetic function in that itappropriates and transforms an everyday artifact and thereby defamiliarizes seem-ingly ordinary visual and verbal arrangements of language, making them appearstrange within their immediate discursive contexts; however, it does not conform tothe requirements of the genre-based system that has historically defined the creativewriting enterprise.

The positioning of students outside of visual discourse contains particularly

ironic undertones when the original impetus for the development of the enterpriseis taken into consideration. Creative writing, or imaginative writing as it was deemedin 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 asa mere corpus of knowledge under a model of philology that was characterized byextreme pedantry (4). The normative approach to study enabled students to writeabout literature from a historical and linguistic perspective but prohibited themfrom actually writing literary texts. Alan Tates rather famous complaint, We studyliterature today from various historical points of view, as if nobody ever intended towrite any more of it (qtd. in Schramm 179), anticipated what would become one ofthe more radical proclamations of the New Critics: students should have the right tocompose literature as if it were a living art (that is, study poetry, fiction, and dramafrom the perspective of a poet, fiction writer, or playwright). Today, although wemay demonstrate increasing interest in the visual, we maintain a tendency to treatvisual texts as if others will always be producing them while we and our studentsfulfill the role of viewer and respondent.

I N A N D O U T O F T H E AC A D E M Y : B E H A V I O R A L RE G U L A T I O N S ,

I D E O L O G I C A L S U B J E C T S , A N D C O P Y R I G H T L A W

To this point, I have presented the issue of multimedia production in compositionand creative writing largely as a conflict of genre, but this framework offers only asuperficial analysis of a much larger problem. Underlying the bouts of essay versuscounter-ad and poetry versus Photoshop experiment is one of the less-frequentlyrecognized functions of teaching writing: not only to encourage fluency in a givengenre 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 instructionand was practiced without apology during the earliest days of composition. Accord-

ing to Russell, as education in writing was being developed in nineteenth-centuryAmerica, Faculty enforced [. . .] complex schemes for regulating behavior; therewere points given and taken for deportment, with class rankings based on them(36). In contemporary practice, we may rarely discuss behavior overtly or considerconsciously its role in our evaluative practices; however, if we consider that writingitself, whether immediately classified as composition or creative writing, is, as JohnTrimbur and Terry Eagleton have separately suggested, a form of cultural activityand, 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 hasargued in Textual Carnivals, we tend to discourage behaviors that might challengethe status quo or disrupt current balances of power, usually by unwittingly ensuring,through our default practices, that students do not produce writing that might haveserious social and economic consequences (197). Often we do so by requiringassignments that provide students little or no opportunity to produce texts that havepotential to circulate widely among public audiences. Kay Halasek reminds us in APedagogy of Possibility that the radically limited audience we provide for our writingstudents does not adequately represent a reading or viewing public but is usually inthe 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 progressivehandbooks that offer self-conscious ruptures with the enterprises traditions. In WhatOur Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies, Katharine Haake offersstrategies for synthesizing feminist theory and textual practices, and yet she discour-ages students from producing what she calls dangerous writing, texts that attemptto unify art and action largely by subverting dominant conventions. She states writingdangerously is not so much a truly dangerous act as it is just not behaving yourselfon

the page [. . .] however much we might wish that we could change the world throughour writing, it isnt 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 audiencedirectly, Bly states that students of creative nonfiction should avoid thinking andwriting about social and economic injustices, referred to here euphemistically aswildly unfair occasions: Occasions come up in writing that are so unfair that wewould do best to simply agree to ourselves aloud or in our journals, That is wildly


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unfair, and not think about them anymore. Unless you mean to give up your writingto become the leader of a major psychosocial rebellion, thousands of horrible socialsituations cant be cured (186). If the logic of Blys advice were taken seriously, awriting 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 notuse 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 conservativeand isolationist formalism of New Critical thought, particularly Cleanth Brookss1939 argument against the production of so-called propagandist writing preoc-cupied with the inculcation of a particular message (49). But this taboo againstdirect interventionism reveals more than New Criticisms art for arts 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 weconsider the college or university as something akin to what Louis Althusser hascalled the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), an institution that teaches knowhow, but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology (133), we mightconsider how education creates, through behavioral regulation, a kind of passivesubject. In Composition in the University, Sharon Crowley deems this subject the docilestudent, 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 toprevent him or her from challenging or questioning this authority, or recognizinghow behavioral norms may function to maintain hierarchies of dominance and sub-ordination. As Saras case suggests, the neglect of multimedia production within theinstitution 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 alarger problem of power.

As the author of the advertisement parody under discussion here, Sara mayhave refused the role of docile student in the sense that her behaviors run counter tothose 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 Saras bricolage of wordsand 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 itscritique of a corporations normative marketing practices might effect material change,however substantial or slight. I do not mean to exaggerate the efficacy of Sarassubversive text; it may or may not attract readers attention, let alone persuade them


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to advocate nonsexist representational practices. In brief, Saras text may not changethe world overnight, but it has at least more potential to disrupt distributions ofpower 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 wherethe economic and social consequences for writing are more immediately apparent,and places where words and images have profound effects on commerce. My ratherbelabored point is this: the ideological and behavioral regulations that deem multi-media productionor, more specific to the case at hand, the production of a multi-media parody that critiques corporate consumerism through processes of imagesamplingunnecessary or illegitimate may be found both inside and outside of theacademy. 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 andthe 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 ofAlthussers 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 oftenassociated 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 dailybasis. That said, I do find that we often underestimate the real restrictive capacitiesofthese institutions and find in the vocabulary that Althusser provides a convenientway for naming and understanding the restrictions often imposed upon multimediaproducers inside and outside the academy. Let me demonstrate this problem byreturning to my immediate example. For her part, Sara may have been able to over-come the ideological restrictions that often define acceptable writing behaviors withinthe institution. In fact, with her input, my colleagues and I created a new curricularspace (in the form of a class on multimedia rhetoric and poetics) that enabled her tolegitimately produce her multimedia parody. In short, we were able to successfullyrestructure 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 publicaudience because of the restrictions of a larger governing State Apparatus. NeitherSara nor I can circulate the absent parody to which I have been referring because itrelies on a practice of image appropriation that may be considered actionable underU.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 toshare her multimedia parody with the readers ofCollege English in what might be


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construed as a public, albeit educational, performance. However, I have not beenable to secure the rights to share hertext from LOreal, the corporation that pro-duced the original Maybelline advertisement from which Sara sampled images and aphrase. In fact, the LOreal representative to whom I spoke claimed that the com-

pany does not approve what she called viral ads since they portray the company ina negative light. It might seem that despite objections from LOreal, Saras rightsif not NCTEsshould be protected under the doctrine of fair use, Section 107 ofthe 1976 Copyright Act. After all, as the language makes clear, this doctrine wasoriginally developed to promote the goal of learning: according to the legal text, theconsideration of infringement depends upon whether a work is used for nonprofiteducational 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 termsespecially in the af-

termath of the Internets blurring of educational and commercial venueshas be-come increasingly difficult; ultimately, their definition comes down to the issue ofcontext. 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 onlineeven if doing so for what are ultimatelyeducational and scholarly purposeswe would expose it to a larger public audience,and therefore risk becoming liable for infringement. Here, the fair use exemptionwould most likely be inapplicable, for in public contexts Saras text is considered aderivative work, and Section 106 of Title 17 provides the original authorin thiscase LOrealexclusive rights to public performances of derivative work. As StanfordUniversity law professor Lawrence Lessig explains in Free Culture, derivative rightsgive

the copyright owner of [a] creative work not only the exclusive rights to publish thework but also the exclusive right of control over any copies of that work. And mostsignificant for our purposes here, the right gives the copyright owner control overnot only his or her particular work, but also any derivative work that might growout of the original work. (136)

In other words, because the law does not distinguish between republishing someoneswork on the one hand and building upon or transforming that work on the other(Lessig, Intellectual 19), LOreal may have legal rights to Saras text even thoughthe appropriated elements from the original advertisement have been transformedand 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 lawwhether or not commercialprofit is involved.

As Lessig explains, in our twenty-first-century culture, the law now regulatesthe full range of creativitycommercial or not, transformative or notwith the


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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 laws 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 textof Maybellines advertisement, Saras counter-ad, and most print sources, provided Ido so in words and explicitly for purposes of review, comment, or criticism. If I meetthese guidelines andconform to a particular publishers required length limitationson 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 composingbehaviors. 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 ofMaybellines ad. Although even this sort of citation may theoretically be consideredinfringing if it has a harmful effect upon the potential market value for or value ofthe copyrighted work (17 U.S.C. sec.17), it tends to fall relatively frequently withinthe 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. Shewrites, it is very difficult to create a noninfringing multimedia work (137) becausethe combinatory nature of the technological composition process often requires theappropriation and transformation of others nonalphabetic works. And the ability toreproduce even appropriated and transformed portionsof these works requires gain-ing permissions from license holders and paying licensing fees. Raymond L. Ocampoand David S. Shellenhase describe the problem this way: A would-be multimediaproducer must obtain permission from scattered writers, musicians, photographers,and artists at a cost that is impossible to predict. Any rights holder may veto anentire 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 manycases, contingent upon the agreement of multiple copyright holders. Because these

holders have exclusive rights to derivative works, any one of them may ultimatelyprevent the public existence of a multimedia text such as Saras. In fact, one of LOrealsrepresentatives 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 LOreal I would still need to secure publication rights from the modeldepicted: Lima herself. The appropriation and transformation of any portions ofthe human images from the Maybelline ad are subject not only to federal copyright


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but also to the models right of privacy and publicity, which varies from state to state.Outlining my vulnerability to claims by not only LOreals photographers and graphicdesigners but also Adriana Lima, this representative advised me to seek counsel im-mediately if I planned to pursue publishing Saras counter-ad.

To avoid any misunderstanding, I should state that LOreals representative wasin 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 radicallimitations the law places on would-be multimedia producers who are not alreadyenfranchised within corporate environments. Even though Sara did not expect toreceive any financial gain from the publication or distribution of her text (and, infact, signed a permission agreement with me that explicitly acknowledges she willreceive no payment from me or this journal), and even though she did not attemptto steal the work of LOreals graphic designers and present it as her own (and, in

fact, credits LOreal 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 thiscase, the lawor, more precisely, the fear of litigation and the accompanying pricetag of defensereinforces the academys preference for positioning writers to re-main consumers of visual texts, permitting them to write aboutthe kind of visualarguments that circulate among large public audiences without actually authoringsuch 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 Saras particulartext would be found infringing. Parody has often been deemed a protected genre ofpolitical 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 couldbe used as the subject of commentary and parody [. . .] but protecting economicrights 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 foundguilty of copyright infringement (13335). But the legitimacy of copyright holders

potential legal claims is less significant than the very threat of litigation, for theproblem I am attempting to reveal does not reside within copyright law itself but inthe use and application of this law both inside and outside of the courtroom. Thesheer cost of legal representation (easily absorbed by a large and successful corpora-tion but not necessarily by an individual citizen or educational organization) is oftenpersuasive 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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mary Coombe writes in The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties, Hegemonic poweris operative when threats of legal action are made as well as when they are actuallyacted 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 representtransparent efforts to control the cultural means and modes of production. He statesthat many corporations and media conglomerates are using copyright and intellec-tual property law as an instrument of monopoly and censorship, which enablesthem to thwart criticism, parody, and other fair uses of creative work (12021). Inthis case, Saras glaringly absent text is testament to Bolliers assertion, but morethan an individual students text is at stake here, for, as Bollier continues, conglom-erates and corporations are asserting copyright and intellectual property rights todisable 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 ubiquitousin the culture, but never to be freelyusable 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 thesort we associate with a democratic culture. (121)

Echoing Sharon Crowleys description of institutional writing instructions doc-ile student, Bollier depicts the ideal subject of American cultureone that the ap-plication of copyright law helps to createas the docile consumer. This parallel

illuminates connections between the ideological function of higher education andthe larger distribution of cultural power at the same time that it complicates Scholessargument that the academys preference for consumption over production simplyreflects a widespread cultural privileging of the consuming class over the producingclass. 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 andmore to do with restricting access to the means of both market and marketingpro-duction. That is, the educational ISAs positioning of students as consumers effec-tively prevents the disruption of dominant corporations and media conglomeratescontrol of a supposedly free market as well as the textual apparatuses like advertisingthat 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 cultureof corporate consumerism. If the educational-ideological lesson doesnt 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 acombination of ISA and SA is, as Bollier suggests, both a devaluing of visual dissentand a weakening of democracy, for it places the decision of whose representations


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and arguments will be visibly present in the public sphere in the hands of the alreadypowerful.

On a more immediate and personal level, the kind of censorship promoted bythis arrangement teaches students to consider their own appropriative composing

behaviors as illegitimate even though these behaviors have defined both academicand nonacademic writing practices and methods of writing instruction for at least acentury. As one cultural critic suggests, if contemporary copyright law were appliedto even the recent historical past, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and PopArt may never have existed (McLaren). At present, if Sara and other students seekto join vast cultural traditions of creative and critical output that fundamentally de-pend upon appropriations and transformations of discourseas nearly all forms oftextual production do, whether or not they are officially licensed by the apparatus oflawtheir 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 andState Apparatuses and ignore corporate lawyers cease-and-desist letters (which arebecoming more and more ubiquitous in our culture), they might, at best, join theranks of unwittingly countercultural figures like Bill Barminski, Michael Hernandezde Luna, Kieron Dwyer, and Noel Tolentino, whose work violates or remains on thelegal fringes of intellectual property in the traveling exhibit Illegal Art: Freedomof Expression in the Corporate Age (McLaren). Of course, most of the visual, mixedmedia, and multimedia producers whose work is displayed in this exhibition havebeen 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 conferencepapers; however, when these titles are forced by the state upon our students andtheir pieces of visual rhetoric, we find ourselves encountering a serious politicaland personalproblem.

P E R S O N A L M A T T E R S : P O S S I B I L I T I E S F O R RE F O R M

Although I remain frustrated by my inability to display Saras piece of visual rheto-ric, I hope that my polemical presentation of Saras case demonstrates how and why

our considerations of the ideological and legal issues that I have mentioned inevita-bly concern more than theoreticalproblems of originality, authorship, or the owner-ship of ideasand more than a problem of law external to the university. As the caseof Saras missing text demonstrates, the problem of copyright affects us and ourwriting 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 whetheror not we are consciously aware of the ideology that governs our tacit codes of


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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 ourproblem because ithas 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 morewe consider its various implications. On the one hand, if we choose to ignore thetenets 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 sharewith public audiences or, worse yet, making them liable for prosecution. On theother hand, if we allow fears of litigation to govern our practices, we risk sacrificingour democratic rights, our visible presence in the public sphere, and a great deal ofour 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, andtheythe people in our classroomsare more than cases to be represented in anessay like this one or named in the title of a court stenographers 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 generoussome 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 holdersmay allow the production of derivative works based on their source material forcommercial or noncommercial uses; they may also opt to retain or forfeit rights ofattribution. For our immediate and practical purposes, Lessigs Creative Commonsproject offers a partial solution to the problem of copyright law by creating an archiveof free, appropriable material. While it does not prevent corporations and mediaconglomerates from continuing to use standard copyright law to prohibit the pro-duction of multimedia texts that they consider viral critique, it creates a necessaryalternative on the way to more substantial reform. I propose that as we make use ofLessigs project, we use other resourcesfrom CCCCs Intellectual Property Cau-

cus to local indymedia centersto lobby for further change with an increased senseof urgency. It has become clear since the advent of the Internet and the proliferationof 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 revertingto the standards of print culture or pretending that classroom writing is divorcedfrom public, legal, and economic consequences. Doing soas I hope to have dem-onstrated concretelyenables a quite real kind of silencing. If we want creative writingand composition to remain relevant to students heavily mediated public lives and,


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more important, if we want their own writing to matter to public audiences, we needto 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.

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