Hybrid Discourse, Patchwriting, Codemeshing, Remixin'

Patricia Bizzell's treatises on the new developments in academic discourse expand upon the idea of "traditional academic discourse" to include other rhetorics in the process of academic research. In both "Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness, or, What to do with 'Mixed Forms of Academic Discourse" and "Hybrid Academic Discourses: What, Why, How," Bizzell directly challenges the notion of "correctness," or that there can be a static form of acceptable academic discourse. While in "Hybrid Academic Discourses" Bizzell acknowledges "that a sort of traditional academic discourse can be defined," she also recognizes that "traditional academic discourse must share the field with new forms of discourse that are clearly doing serious intellectual work." Although Bizzell targets the study of Basic Writing for her original challenge, her assertion that other discourses have validity within the ivory tower of academia extends beyond those students who she targets as "hybrid" students--those outside the privileged race, class, and gender of yesterday's university.

Bizzell is likely correct in challenging her own term, "hybrid," to describe these new discourses; in problematizing "hybrid" as "too abstract and too concrete," Bizzell recognizes that the term itself is too often describing the person and not the discourse. While I'm quite fond of "hybrid" as a term to explain and discuss identity--being of mixed race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and recently class (higher education has done a terrific job of allowing me to pass for middle-class), among other identities, it is exceptionally suited to allow me to defy binaries--I must agree with Bizzell that something else is needed to discuss shifting discourses in academia and other realms of power.

Some of the other terms I've read in academic literature for this change in lexicon and formality are "patchwriting" and "codemeshing" (the latter of which I have far more tolerance for, since linguistically it seems to get closer to the definition of new discourses). While they may avoid some of the pitfalls of the taxonomically-prone "hybrid," they still seem to lack both a relatable definition and a popular or current appeal. In other words, they're still too damned academic!

Instead, I like to think of this phenomenon of diversifying discourses as "remixing." For example, I find that much of the discussion of new discourses is similar to, the current social controversy of remixing media. While remixing is generally a term used to describe the alteration of original works of art (usually multimedia art, including songs, television, movies, internet videos, etc.) it is also perfectly appropriate to describe the growing hybridity of academese (interestingly, the discussion of hybridity in academic discourse is far more welcoming than the discourse of remixing as it applies to commercial material). Just as intrepid artists are taking commercial media and remixing it to create a new media, perhaps by adding what Stephen Colbert refers to as a "pumping k-hole groove," academics are taking traditional academic discourse and remixing it to create a new dialect that is a hybrid grapholect--one which can be read more easily as an oral or conversational discourse than as a medium that is meant to be read from a written artifact.

In my pedagogy, I intend to introduce this comparison between these two discourses of hybridity through a revealing interview from the Colbert Report in order to spark a conversation about voice, hybridity, and academic discourse (as well as acknowledging indebtedness):

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/215454/january-08-2009/lawrence-lessig

Just as the interview invites viewers to consider new forms of hybrid art and media, my intention is to invite students to invent new forms of academic discourse. Academics are already changing the way intellectual work is presented, researched, and discussed--this blog is proof of that!--and so it seems quite appropriate to discuss new and/or current terms for discussion.