Working Article: Consensus

Hi Everyone, I'm posting what I think is the start of an article about consensus process in the composition classroom. I'm undertaking a major revision of a thesis chapter in the hopes that I can get it published as an article somewhere. Any and all feedback would be helpful. Here, I'm wondering if my distinction between the two forms of consensus is clear enough and if I've hit the right tone.

In what is popularly coined the “Battle of Seattle,” a consensus-driven direct-action movement blocked the Washington Consensus of neoliberal trade policies. While the corporate and government authorities in the WTO attempted to write trade policy that would affect economic conditions worldwide, the bodies of a global multitude clung together across Seattle’s city blocks, resisting tear gas and pepper spray, singing “this is what democracy looks like.” On one side the Washington Consensus, on the other side, grassroots consensus. No event better demonstrates the tension between signifier and signified for this critical term.

While the Washington Consensus operated through top-down, manipulative ideological consensus, the opposing movement operated on what David Graeber (formerly Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale) cites as the “apparent miracle of consensus decision making in which one can see thousands of people coordinate their actions without any formal leadership structure” (4). The Washington Consensus was an over-reaching ideology; the consensus-driven oppositional movement was a specific, local action. While the Washington Consensus attempted to repress dissent, the consensus process of the opposition found a way to agree on an action while maintaining ideological differences.

Considering this apparent conflict over the definition of consensus, it is no wonder Raymond Williams calls the term “now a very difficult word to use” (77). Ranging in definition from a “positive sense of seeking general agreement” to a “’manipulative’ kind of politics seeking to build a ‘silent majority’ as the power-base from which dissenting movements or ideas can be excluded,” consensus has two strikingly different signifieds (77-78). So contentious is our conflict in definition that a powerful ideological global consensus can line up against a consensus-driven grassroots movement on any city block worldwide.

Discussions of consensus in composition studies have, likewise, balanced conflicting connotations, processes, and outcomes, mainly in debates about collaborative learning ushered in by social construction theory. Responding to these debates from the mid to late eighties, John Trimbur states that “the notion of consensus is one of the most controversial and misunderstood aspects of collaborative learning” (602). The two competing connotations of consensus and the goal of these debates are made clear by Trimbur: “To develop a critical version of collaborative learning, we will need to distinguish between consensus as an acculturative practice that reproduces business as usual and consensus as an oppositional one that challenges the prevailing conditions of production” (612). Which line of definition has consensus fell on in composition studies? And what can the global justice movement and its history and practice of consensus decision making teach us about student agency and consensus process in the composition classroom?