Interdependence and Rhetoricity
Taken together, “Death of an Adjunct” by Daniel Kovalik and “Death of a Professor” by L. V. Anderson show how easily individual experiences can be coopted into larger narratives, even for good causes. Margaret Mary Vojtko was easily read as a victim, even though the truth (or at least a more thoroughly researched version of events) appears to be more complicated. Anderson makes a case that, the real problem of adjuncts’ working conditions aside, Vojtko had a degree of responsibility for her conditions, and I was struck by the reasons why. When asked about planning for old age, Vojtko “said she thought everything would go on as it always had,” leaving Anderson to conclude that “[s]he treated the broken furnace like her eyesight and her mobility—a disability to circumvent” (10, 12 in PDF). From this account, Vojtko appears to be afraid of change and unwilling to fully confront her embodiment and her need for others. I immediately thought of theories of interdependence prevalent in disability studies, articulated by Jay Dolmage in his recent book Disability Rhetoric:
“We are powerfully conditioned to cordon off our own bodies and minds. But perhaps rhetoric itself can help to make sense of this interdependence: we can understand the rhetorical utterance as something shaped not only by an author or speaker. Maybe the same can be said of the body.” (113)
“We are, only because language, rhetoric, and embodiment are communally not normal, not “able.” This essential imperfection often means that we do need others, or we need access to other modes and discourses of being, and this makes our existence essentially prosthetic.” (115)
Dolmage also comments that it “becomes dangerous to view prosthesis purely as a metaphor or trope—we can overwrite the real experience of people with disabilities,” while at the same time, “we also come to understand, through the shifting cultural value of prosthetics, that the material and rhetorical always interact” (116). His key example here is veterans, who after WWII were expected to overcome, while after Vietnam came to signify a social problem.
Similarly, reading WPA narratives “purely as a metaphor or trope,” we risk overwriting real experience with the hope that we can understand cultural values. For Deb Dew and many others, WPA work, like prosthesis, reveals ongoing interaction between the material and the rhetorical. She writes that “the company of others naturally shapes and determines, enables and constrains administrative production” (125). This embodied interdependence between human stakeholders and discursive and non-discursive modes of a WPA’s “material and intellectual responsibilities,” (125) and experiential narratives are one way of getting at these interrelations; this goes for experiences of WPAs as well as adjuncts.
