Weblogs as Liminal Oscillation

While I work from a fairly strong cultural studies perspective, I’m finishing my dissertation in a graduate program with a rather significant and well-known intellectual inheritance from the work of Walker Gibson, Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow. I didn’t get as many questions about that as I might have anticipated when I was on the job market — most of the search committees seemed to have actually gone through my materials, which makes me more fortunate than some other folks I’ve talked to — but there were a few interviewers (no, not the one who was asleep) who blinked when I mentioned John Trimbur or Bruce Horner in relation to my research. Those of us in this graduate program well understand all the critiques of that so-called expressivist intellectual inheritance, and have often agreed with those critiques or proposed extensions of those critiques. Still, institutions shape perspectives, and my recent readings of some technical communication-oriented scholarship got me thinking about questions of perspective and value.

The expressive (in James Britton’s sense of the term) writing that Gibson, Murray, Elbow, and others come under fire for privileging is writing that most would simply say is close to the self. I’d want to complicate that some, and say instead that expressive (in more my sense than Britton’s) writing is writing that is valued for its clear connection to the circumstances under which it is produced, within the context of an economy of meaning. The tech comm-oriented scholarship I’ve been reading, on the other hand, seems to privilege what Britton calls transactional writing; writing that’s oriented towards a specific audience for the sake of getting things done. Transactional writing, I might say, is valued for its conscious contribution to and instrumental attempt to alter the circumstances of an economy of meaning. Expressive writing focuses on the present, while transactional writing focuses on the future.

According to the George W. Bush White House, “We are living in an innovation economy — an economy where technology is transforming the way just about every job gets done — and some workers need new skills to succeed.” The technical communication perspective seems, in part, to focus on those skills in the context of technological transformation. To the neoclassical economist, the writing skills taught in college exist as a commodity intended to serve the economy, produced for their future exchange value, rather than the expressive act of writing valued in and of and for itself. I’d say this is a fairly common conception and valuation of writing: often, according to Bruce Horner, “the institution’s role in the production of student writing and the circumscriptions academic institutions typically impose on the circulation of student writing guarantee the low value of student writing in relation to other writing. In other words, student writing is evaluated as a commodity while being produced and distributed in ways that guarantee its lack of [present] exchange value” (Horner 50) An exclusive orientation towards transactional writing, I’d argue, creates a future-oriented focus on pedagogical outcomes that Horner suggests “treats the students, their skills, or their consciousness as commodities” and so “abstracts the labor of composition, denying its materiality by concealing the contribution of not just teachers but students, institutions, and specific social, material, historical circumstances” (18) — with one component of those historical circumstances being the information economy and the current changes we’re seeing in the structure and nature of capitalism.

In other words, an approach that commodifies student writing skills solely for the purpose of exchange dehistoricizes student work and student consciousness and occludes present-time evidence of its connection to the social. Horner proposes economic manifestation of this problem in his assertion that “Even those arguments representing students, or some students, as ‘working class’ or in terms of students’ future career aspirations, treat students’ relation to work as indirect: it is something from the past affecting their behavior during their temporary stays in Composition, or something for which Composition may prepare them” (35). As a counter to such arguments, Horner proposes “representing students as above all else workers, working on themselves, Composition, the academy, and the social” (35), with “the social” understood “as an ongoing, heterogeneous material process operating within as well as outside student consciousness, the site of teaching, and writing” (37). The emphasis on ongoing is Horner’s, and clearly connected to his earlier point, but I see a connection in that emphasis in the distinction I’m attempting to draw between the nature of present-focused work and future-focused work.

In place of the deeply problematic commodification of work fostered by an orientation towards the exclusive importance of exchangeable writerly skills, we might a writing that is “understood to comprise not just the material production of the text but all the activities of its provocation, composition, distribution, and reception and the involvement of these with each other: work, in short, as material social practice, where agency meets structure” (Horner 66). Work, perhaps, as the point of articulation between culture and economy in the simultaneously present and forward-looking immaterial labor and consciousness of the individual.

Let me make perfectly clear that I am in no way arguing for the elimination of pedagogies that carry a future-focused orientation on writing skills. I’m not at all saying that transactional writing is all bad and we should all be engaged in present-focused expressive writing: such a position would be absurd. Rather, I’m arguing towards a pedagogy that opens up room for both the future-focused and the present-focused; a pedagogy that allows for (and perhaps necessitates) a diversity of purposes for writing. And it seems to me there’s one particularly interesting form of writing that combines the transactional future horizon with the expressive present horizon in a way that makes understanding visible. Weblogs, I think, are today the best instantiation we have of a complex, polyvalent, processual form of writing that freeze their expressive value in the now while at the same time extending their transactional value into that distant horizon. Mariolina Salvatori talks about the hermeneutic move and the deconstructive move, and Peter Elbow talks about the believing game and the doubting game: to slightly paraphrase an earlier explanation I’ve offered, hermeneusis/believing/assent is an inhabiting-of, a highly present self-aware and reflective understanding of the constructed nature of a knowledge, its terms, how it comes to be, and all that makes it possible, seeing and inhabiting the circumstances that lead to its construction and simultaneously being and monitoring its belief-system. Deconstructing/doubting/dissent is a being-in-alterity, a future-looking critique, an unspinning of a notion’s inherent contradictions and seeing how that which is present within the thing at once calls forth its absent counterpart and in so doing makes visible the limits within which and by which that notion or knowledge is produced. The immaterial labor of writing a weblog, I think, collapses the sychronic and the diachronic, the hermeneutic and the deconstructive, the believing and the doubting, into a sort of liminal wave or oscillation between present and future, expression and transaction.