Rescuing the Discourse of Community.

rhetoric of the discourse community as it has been articulated in composition studies during the last decade seem to support democracy in principle, yet tend to undermine it in their practice. That is, the theory that situates writing and reading in the discursive processes people use to negotiate ground for their cooperation assumes that those people are more or less equal politically, that they have equal access to and equal influence upon the discourse that determines the beliefs and purposes they will share. But as thoughtful proponents as well as critics of this rhetoric have noted, once enacted these processes tend to minimize or exclude the participation of some people as they establish the dominance of others.' I believe this tendency is the function of the tacit ethical assumption that underlies these democratic political ones-that the ground for cooperation must be agreement. I characterize this assumption as ethical because it treats agreement as the primary collective good when it designates the elimination of disagreement as the end toward which the discourse of community ought to be directed. The problem is this ethics contradicts a democratic politics, a contradiction that is manifest when, in its drive toward agreement, a discourse overlooks, minimizes, or excludes difference. It does so by denying the presence of unresolved or unresolvable conflict, and denying in the process equal participation in the discourse to those who disagree. It is this denial that provides reason for some commentators, like Joseph Harris, to argue that we should restrict our use of the concept of community in the study of writing and reading to the most concrete and local, and