Practical Wisdom and the Geography of Knowledge in Composition

Abstract

A few thinkers in composition studies, Stephen North among them, are beginning to treat tensions between theory and practice as a philosophical dilemma for the field, and not simply a transitional phenomenon in a young discipline. In one interpretation, my own, teachers' continued hostility or indifference to composition theory offers a tacit critique of the utopian faith that formal knowledge can definitively guide human conduct, which has motivated the disciplinary project to study writing as a basis for teaching (Toward a Human Science). Teachers are not merely afraid of theory, or impatient with its abstractions and irrelevance; their intractability argues implicitly that practice is not an applied science, and they are not technicians. This inarticulate critique-eloquent with its ironic glances, silence, subversive humor, skepticism, and anger-remains unanswerable because it doesn't enter into the critical discourse of theory itself. Practitioners cannot easily translate their problems into that discourse; theorists, who could, have not. In the silence of theoretical texts about this resistance, the unspoken cannot be made unintelligible, its significance weighed. Still less has the discipline confronted, as a critical problem for theory itself, the radical incompleteness of formal knowledge as a set of practical instructions. Yet we know intuitively that, despite its pretensions, theory can never tell people directly to do. Knowledge about what things mean or happens, to use North's phrase (25), does not recursively embed within itself rules for how to apply it. The more fundamental the inquiry, the less theory has to say about conduct; and the more mediation is required to translate it into practicalmoral choices. The ineluctable gap between formal knowledge and wisdom can-

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