Last week in Alice Robison’s Social Media class, we read Jim Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics: Introduction,” in which he describes how one enters into a “secondary Discourse community,” a community other than the one in which one was raised. He uses the concept of “mushfake,” a prison term for the process of repurposing common materials to replace scarce or unavailable goods, as a descriptor of the process of becoming a member of a Discourse community. On consideration, I find the “mushfake” concept even less useful than I did on first read. To get at my critique, I’m going to outline three ways one enters Discourse communities, then test the “mushfake” concept against each of them.
1. Apprenticeship: By definition, nobody’s born into a secondary Discourse community. The rules and content of D/d discourse have to be learned, and the person accepted into the community in some status or other. How this works would seem to be a well-understood process, particularly outside the world of the excessively schooled (as school is used to undermine and supplant traditional processes of learning). Lave & Wenger’s Situated Learning provides solid examples and explication of the process.
Typically, it follows some or all of these stages: “sweeping up,” in which the aspirant performs menial labor unrelated to the core tasks of the occupation (from martial arts to tailoring to corporate law to community activism), but is afforded an opportunity to observe the (d)discourse – to learn communications styles and watch journeymen and masters work. Second is to assist a master – handing them materials, performing simple tasks, but essentially watching a master work. Next, or simultaneously, is training in simple tasks under a journeyman, then independent work as a journeyman, then mastery.
At each stage of the process the person *is* a member of the Discourse community – a cadet or trial member, ideally acting in a role-appropriate way. It’s not the job of the apprentice to sound and act like a master, it’s their job to sound and act like an apprentice.
2. Passing: Passing is the act of trying to seem like a member of a Discourse community for a circumscribed purpose, when one actually is not a member. Gee’s example of “a professor walks into a biker bar” is a case of passing: the professor is not trying to become a biker, or a biker bar regular, but to seem like one for a limited period of participant-observation.
Passing sometimes, but not always, involves a power or status differential. It is an attempt to temporarily take on the markers of a status other than that of one’s home Discourse: the professor in the bar, the mixed-race person trying to be taken as white, the gay as straight, the man as woman. Passing can be either high-to-low or low-to-high status: both cases have produced a great number of classic stories.
There is no period of training in passing; there is either success or failure, though the process can be iterative. Passing differs from apprenticeship in that, in the latter, the home Discourse community and the one of training are not inherently conflicting, while in the passing case they are. Passing is built on secrecy, if not deception, elements which undermine an effective apprenticeship.
3. Getting over: Getting over, it seems, is passing with intent to acquire something other than acceptance as a member of the Discourse community. One has to pass to get over, but not all who pass are seeking to get over. Grifters, con artists and seducers use the techniques of passing in order to get something extrinsic to community membership: wealth or sex.
So how does Gee’s concept of “mushfake,” what an earlier generation called “ersatz,” relate to these categories? Poorly, for the most part. “Mushfake” is the art of making do, of substituting plentiful materials in rough equivalency for scarce ones.
It has no bearing on the apprenticeship situation: there, materials (cognitive, discursive or physical) are abundant, and made available in a regulated manner appropriate to the person’s growth into mastery of the Discourse. Any sort of faking is inimical to the achievement of mastery in such a community, which requires an honest appreciation of the apprentice’s progress in order to produce a trained journeyman and skilled master.
Gee, writing from the “passing” context, rightly identifies an element of make-do and fakery. Passing involves misdirection to cover gaps in knowledge that a proper apprenticeship would have filled, which could be analogized to the repurposing of materials in “mushfake.” I didn’t see Gee as making that point explicitly: had he done so, and examined the role of misdirection in passing, his article would have gained greatly in subtlety, insight and utility.
It seems that in the case of getting over, the role of repurposing of discourse tools is less, and vastly more refined, than in the case of passing. Passing is a process akin to that of the stage magician: putting on a performance while manipulating attention away from acts which would break the illusion. Getting over takes the performer and audience into territory of greater skepticism, and requires something very like mastery of a Discourse without membership. Getting over has to stand up to direct scrutiny, where passing typically involves people just seeing what they expect to see.
Mushfake, as Gee describes it, is obviously fake: the old underwear repurposed into a hat. The performance of getting over has to be as masterful and convincing as the real thing, the art forger as skilled in technique and Discourse as the genuine master. There’s no room for obvious substitution.
In short, Gee’s mushfake concept seems to mis-describe the tool use of people entering Discourse communities, either legitimately as an apprentice or illegitimately as someone trying to pass or get over. It does suggest, however, that a subtle and sophisticated analysis of the use of misdirection (in the passing case) and alternative routes to mastery (in the getting over case) could usefully shed light on how Discourses are learned in less exotic circumstances.