As practitioners of cultural studies pedagogy with a strong emphasis on rhetoric (or vice versa) in an interdisciplinary writing program, we argue for a common project of cultural studies and rhetorical studies in the current conjuncture. Within the current institutional context of writing programs, we support pedagogy and scholarship that is aligned with what Lisa Coleman calls "writing, intervention, and civic engagement." Our work at the nexus of cultural studies and rhetorical studies that is informed by a Freirian tradition in composition can be a point of communication. A progressive politics that values intervention, activism, and agency emerges from an attention to the social and material conditions of the classroom vis-à-vis Freire and Raymond Williams, as well as active analysis of the social and material circumstances in which texts are produced vis-à-vis Williams and Susan Miller.

This common interest in a progressive politics that emerges from the nexus of cultural studies, composition, and rhetorical studies can, therefore, be the beginning of a pedagogical project that draws from all three fields. Instead of locating the burden of political work within rhetorical studies, a tradition in composition studies that is allied with cultural Marxism can invigorate those efforts. In the field of composition studies, Paolo Freire and his followers in the United States have developed the idea of critical literacy as an investigation of classroom practices that challenges the knowledge (and thus the power) of the bourgeoisie class. Freire locates his pedagogical practices in a capitalist context, asking "how is systematic education constituted and constructed in the overall picture of capitalist development?" (35). Capitalism as a context is essential for understanding Freire's ideas about critical literacy and his pedagogical strategies; he is interested in creating classroom practices that give students the critical capacity to understand exploitation and to challenge both capitalist culture and the authority of the bourgeoisie class.

Furthermore, Gayatri Spivak places this sort of cultural studies work in direct relation to the activities of rhetorical inquiry. In "Thinking Cultural Questions in 'Pure' Literary Terms," an essay included in a collection honoring Stuart Hall, Spivak argues, "I find myself insisting on restoring rhetorical reading practices because I believe, in an irrational, utopian, and impractical way, that such reading can be an ethical motor that undermines the ideological field" (335-336).

Spivak is interested in pursuing rhetoric and cultural studies concomitantly because they both engage a cultural studies practice that focuses on rhetoric, opens up inquiry into political and ethical study, and struggles over meaning. The study of rhetoric with cultural studies, in other words, can be an opening to the sort of pedagogy of contestation and even agency that Freire advocates. Similarly, in Spivak's work, a study of literature, if imagined as a rhetorical inquiry, is a site for struggle as it gestures outside of a text to the world. As Spivak argues:

if what happens in the literary text is the singularity of its language and that singularity is in its figuration, that figuration can point to the depth of the content by signaling that the content cannot be contained by the text as receptacle. To note this is not to say that the text has failed. It is to say that the text has succeeded in signaling beyond itself. It is high praise for the book, no dispraise. (350)

This emphasis on the outward impulse of literature at once suggests different meanings within language, recognizes language as site of social struggle, critiques existing social and political order, and gestures towards a more complete, complex, and alternative meaning. For example, as Spivak writes about Jamaica Kincaid's novel, Lucy (citing Hall who in turn is citing Gramsci), "I feel that a rhetorical reading of Lucy can be expanded into 'the criticism to which such an ideological complex is subjected by the first representatives of the new historical phase' " (354).

This response, then, represents more than a call for interdisciplinarity; it is a call to anti-disciplinarity. By this we mean:

• Teaching and scholarship that challenges the borders and boundaries of disciplines by attending to how and on whose authority cultural texts are written and valued (as Susan Jarratt asks: "who speaks? On behalf of whom? Who is listening? And how?" (57));
• Teaching and scholarship that actively analyzes the identities and possibilities for citizenship that these disciplines produce;
• Teaching and scholarship that analyzes the social conditions of labor that are produced within and outside of disciplines;
• Teaching and scholarship that gives critical attention to politics that challenge hegemony (as Robert McRuer asks: "What would happen if, true to our experiences in and out of the classroom, we continually attempted to reconceive composing as that which produced agitation?" (49)).

We accomplish these goals in part by drawing upon a more radical tradition within composition studies, one with activist, multi-vocal affinities and histories that intersect with the materialist traditions that we can locate in cultural studies and rhetorical studies.

We offer as an example of this conjuncture the courses we teach within the First-Year Writing Program at The George Washington University. We (like so many compositionists) are working under a number of administrative constraints, and must note that the administration constructs us as a program, and not a department, or within a department. This limits resources and self-determination to a degree, but also frees us from a variety of disciplinary strictures. While we can talk about various administrative expediencies here, we instead prefer to talk about potentials. The program is divided into a "pre-disciplinary" first-year course (UW20), and several Writing in the Disciplines (WID) courses housed within the academic departments, of which each student must take two.

We have struggled against conceiving of the pre-disciplinary course as one that prepares students to enter into certain specified, disciplined modes of thinking, since this model privileges the same disciplinary discourse that we argue needs to be critiqued more rigorously and more thoroughly. We've also resisted views of composition as producing efficient, well-composed documents that, we would argue, enable the university to produce technically proficient middle-class workers for the neo-liberal system. Instead, we use the space opened up by pre-disciplinarity to reveals ways that disciplinary thinking is limited. We offer students critical research paper topics as opportunities to explore with more intellectual latitude than later WID projects will allow, constrained as they are by the conventions of their own disciplines. Cultural studies work informs this, as does rhetorical analysis. This approach prompts us to ask important pedagogical questions that a focus singularly on rhetorical studies or cultural studies doesn't give us easy access to: how do we get students to recognize language as a contested site? How do we encourage language as a strategy for contesting social and political meaning? How do we illuminate language as it is used to mystify and demystify the circuit of capital? How do we advocate for critical reading as a strategy for entering into social and political struggle? How do we encourage students to recognize counter-publics, communities that construct through their language oppositional ideas about voice, authority, identity, writing, and even democracy? How do we empower students to construct language strategically in the service of social and political struggle?

On the one hand, these are questions that emerge from rhetorical studies because they tap into what Susan Jarratt calls a "discursive act that also simultaneously configures a material relationship of power and difference" (58). These are simultaneously cultural studies questions because, like Raymond Williams' work in Keywords and Marxism and Literature, they are grounded in culture as a site of intervention, and they foreground language as a signifying practice that is an opening into culture. James Berlin who has written on the intersection of both fields argues for a social-epistemic rhetoric that is centered on the signifying practices of a text that can lead to an understanding and an intervention in cultural practices:

The work of social-epistemic rhetoric, then, is to study the production and reception of these historically specific signifying practices. In other words, social-epistemic rhetoric enables senders and receivers to arrive at a rich formulation of the rhetorical context in any given discourse situation through an analysis of the signifying practices operating within it. Thus, in composing or interpreting a text, a person engages in an analysis of the cultural codes operating in defining his or her subject position, the positions of the audience, and the constructions of the matter to be considered. (84)

Berlin's work brings together an analysis of language and audience that is rhetoric's strength with an analysis of the material, cultural conditions that cultural studies scholars have developed.

To return this discussion to our own pedagogy, let us offer up an example of how we advance students' thinking through this nexus. Take, for example, five critical activities we developed with our colleagues Robert McRuer and Carol Hayes and that we teach alongside the long research paper. Ryan's final position paper assignment contains the following language:

We write in part because we want to contribute to the world, and audiences read our work in the hopes of finding a new perspective. Therefore, make your perspective new, stake out a territory that requires your voice. Accordingly, below are five paths to help you reach beyond the boundaries of the traditional college paper.

The description goes on to suggest 1) historicizing the debate and 2) questioning power relations (both activities associated with cultural studies), 3) employing theoretical self-reflexivity and 4) engaging in critical interventions (which can be read through both cultural studies and rhetoric), and finally, 5) engaging in anti-disciplinary inquiry.

Rachel's reading and writing assignments participate in these same modes of critical inquiry, positioning writing as a way of thinking outside the authorized (state, university, disciplined) locations. Writing projects in her class emerge from readings of the Zapatistas, a revolutionary group based in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico who, in their written communications to the outside world, challenge common sense ideas about voice, agency, and even democracy itself. These writing projects push students to rigorously investigate authorized versions of writing and of language use and to investigate how activist writing is used to challenge these authorized versions.

In both of these composition classes, students are doing work informed by both cultural studies and rhetorical studies as they are asked to recognize boundaries of disciplines and other sites of authority. As critical intervention goes in writing and research projects, students use both fields to think through the public dimensions of their writing even as we encourage them to question the power relations invoked in doing so. Furthermore, by promoting an anti-disciplinary space prior to, but not subordinate to the disciplinarity that they will later be taught, we are enacting our own critical intervention against the disciplining processes of the university. Such an anti-disciplinary pedagogy is itself a political gesture, one that implicates labor structures even as it addresses audiences both in our classrooms and within the university.

Notes