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The Green Bean Campaign in the Memo

1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nlh.1995.0037

1080-661X

Terry Caesar,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

The Green Bean Campaign in the Memo Terry Caesar (bio) Nancy Miller has written an essay on her career, which had the following consequence when she became the director of the Women’s Studies Program at Barnard: “I wrote a book-length collection of memos, characterized by the rhetorical turns of feminist righteousness, in a mode a colleague from Political Science taught me called ‘bullets’; my memo style, she explained, was too narrative.” 1 From this comment we learn at least three things about memos: (1) Memos are ephemeral. Miller will never publish them in a book. Nobody would want to read them. (2) Memos are the product of various discourses. Like any writing, a memo has a particular rhetoric, which can be distinguished from other rhetorics. (3) Memos have generic forms. Depending on the occasion, some forms are better than others. There is probably also a fourth thing: your academic career is going to be representable in terms of memos, whether or not it proves to be better (Miller doesn’t say for her part) to give than to receive. What is a memo? I have at hand one from the vice-president of Student Affairs at my university to the “University Community” in which he states that, before anyone can “utilize” the food service, a Catering Service Form must first be completed at his office. If all memos merely presented information in this way, there would appear to be no need to pose questions about them. “Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees and with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness,” writes Pierre Bourdieu. 2 It feels so natural to receive memos in any university that few people who do not even know about the catering service, and do not care about the Student Affairs Office, wonder nonetheless why they should be bothered to read such a memo in the first place. Every institutional structure may be more than the sum of its memos. And yet there is a very real sense in which the structure is cemented, day by day, department by department, out of hundreds and thousands of sheets of paper circulated as agreeably as air-conditioned air in summer or heat in winter. Memos comprise the preeminent example of an unexamined textual practice in the academy today. They are unexamined because they are practical. Yet the converse is more provocatively true: memos are practical because they are unexamined. [End Page 677] In a section of English in America entitled “The Memorandum as Act,” on The Pentagon Papers, Richard Ohmann states the following: “The writers of memoranda sit on the stream of events and try to direct it. They employ power directly.” 3 The most intriguing thing about memos as a textual practice is that they express power so immediately, ceaselessly, and bluntly that they hardly seem like “texts” at all. The vice-president of Student Affairs is in charge of the food service. Who can dispute it? Therefore the vice-president is authorized to disseminate rules concerning the food service. Who would want to challenge his authority to do so? The claim of memos to be purely factual follows directly from the unquestioned status of the power they exercise. Consequently, the first thing one notices in considering memos as texts is the more curious: few are content to be “purely” factual. Ones that are have to do with time: Friday is “Black Friday” of National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week, the Sabbatical Leave Committee will hold a question-and-answer session on a certain date, the Writing Across the Curriculum Committee presents a lecturer, and so on—just to take some examples from my own university during a typical year. If the most basic function of a memo is to announce something, the announcement is most factual when the appointment of an executive assistant to the dean or the Valentine’s Day carnation sale can be presented as a strictly temporal thing. However, most memos cannot limit themselves in this way. Even the one cited above on the food service has another paragraph in which it is explained that the university food service contractor cannot be contacted directly for use...