For my WPA final project, I want to consider what it means (and doesn’t mean) to ask and answer the question “What is writing?” Much of the reading we’ve done this semester–particularly Richard Miller’s As If Learning Mattered and Smit’s End of Composition Studies–identify this question as central to the successes and limitations of rhetoric and composition as a modern, institutionalized discipline. For Miller, the question “What is writing?” needs to be answered (and answered succinctly) by the field because, he suggests, rhetcomp’s existence and future largely depends on funding allocated by high-ranking administrators who must make fast decisions about which programs to fund and which to not. (As Miller argues, program directors who make the most persuasive case, who can quickly and effectively connect their existing or proposed programs to the broader aims of the university, are more likely to receive funding than those who fail to make that institutional connection.) Put differently, a WPA probably won’t win over a Dean by justifying her/his program in terms of our field’s unwillingness or inability to define itself and what exactly we study.
In Smit’s limited reading of past and contemporary writing research, the question “What is writing?” rarely–if ever–surfaces (at least in the way Smit would have us answer this question). Early in End Smit faults the field for failing to adequately explain what exactly it means by writing, and what, therefore, it means to say “I teach writing.” From here, Smit goes on to identify “common” assumptions of learning and language acquisition in rhetcomp to further problematize the field’s less-than-concrete understanding of writing and learning. Echoing arguments made repeatedly in New Literacy Studies, Smit argues for an understanding of writing as a social practice, as locally enabled and constrained within specific (and seemingly closed) discourse communities. Ok, nothing much new to this argument, though Smit uses this take on writing to launch his broader push for “end” to composition studies: a refiguring of the “field” (i.e. research and graduate instruction) as discipline-specific writing instruction and administration, where writing is no longer abstracted as it is in the generic/first-year course but is rather integrated and employed within specific disciplinary ways of conversing and constructing meaning. The “end of composition studies” then–its reconfiguration and its telos–come when we finally admit that writing instruction is best and most responsible when it is locally determined and locally enacted.
Though Miller and Smit arrive at differing conceptions of the field, I want to read them together as representative of what I see as our willingness (eagerness?) to answer (again and again and again) the question “What is writing?” particularly when faced with disciplinary and institutional pressures to do so. Sure, the question is important (and I would argue “central” to the kind of research we do in rhetcomp), but we should be careful about coming too quickly to answers, even (and particularly) when doing so enables writing programs to sustain a singular focus that claims to know what writing is and is not. As Deleuze suggests, it’s not a matter of answering questions, but of posing them over and over again in order to invent new concepts, new tools that may be taken up by us and those who come after us.
So, this is where I’d like my project to begin. I want to keep the question “What is writing” visible–in the air–but just out of reach. I want, IOW, to keep writing studies open for those elements of language–the excesses (what D&G call percepts and affects and what VV-cum-Kant calls writing’s “sublime hetereogeneity”) that won’t submit to territorialization/institutionalization, that won’t sit still long enough for us to define them. Writing that’s unwieldy, that’s slippery, that’s actively passive precisely because it operates outside of the dialectic set into place when we answer the question “What is writing?”
I’m reading Deleuze’s Negotiations for the first time and was struck last night by the following passage. In terms of Bill Readings’s University in Ruins, paradoxically conceiving of writing as that which can’t be held or contained and that which creates possibilities through impossibilities may give us one way to “dwell in the ruins,” to IOW have our administrative cake and eat (consume) it too:
A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. A creator’s someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities. As with [John] McEnroe, it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through. You have to work on the wall, because without a sense of impossibilities, you won’t have a line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth. Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric. It’s what Bergson did in philosophy, what Virginia Woolf or Henry James did with the novel, what Renoir did in cinema (and what experimental cinema, which has gone a long way exploring the states of matter, does). Not becoming unearthly. But becoming all the more earthly by inventing laws of liquids and gases on which the earth depends. (133)