A question for comp folks: in what (likely various) ways do we understand the link between the function of writing and the motivation for writing? How do we connect what a piece of writing does to why the author wrote it?
As you can probably guess, this is a question that evolved in the discussion during my defense yesterday, and I’m still trying to find ways into it.
The later portions of my dissertation rely heavily on the diverse motivations Yochai Benkler charts for engaging in commons-based informational production: intrinsic hedonic rewards (i.e., pleasure), market-based rewards (i.e., material gain), and social-psychological rewards (i.e., recognition and/or affirmation). I think we can apply those motivations to writing, as well: people write for pleasure, for gain, for recognition, and for affirmation. But during my defense yesterday, one of my committee members suggested that there are also what she called “performative political” motivations for writing: one can write in order to perform and enact political change. (The performance is in getting other people to see you do it and prompt an enacted reaction from them; the enactment is the work of actually doing it.) And I totally agree: one reason to write is to change the world around you.
I’ve also tried to synthesize some of the work of Mariolina Salvatori, Peter Elbow, James Britton, and Janet Emig to try and talk about the diverse functions of writing. Britton talks about the expressive function, writing that is close to the self and does something for the self; the transactional function, writing that works to get things done; and the poetic function, writing that is essentially belletristic. I don’t think Britton’s taxonomy is adequate either in completeness or specificity, but Emig adds in the notion of writing to learn, which seems to carve out a space between the transactional and the expressive. And we could probably even throw Aristotle into the mix here, and talk about writing to determine future action, ascertain or prove the nature of past action, and engage in present-tense praise or blame, all perhaps as sub-categories of the transactional. So, yes, the notion of function could certainly use some sorting-out and taxonomizing.
But there are two big questions here:
- How do we express the link — if there is one — between motivation and function? (Would constructing a rigorous denial of that link open up interesting possibilities?)
- Can writing ever be done entirely for its own sake? What would that mean, and what would that look like? What motivation might one have for engaging in writing for its own sake?
I’d especially welcome examples folks might come up with.
Doesn’t the latter question have something to do with intended audience? Is diary-writing (assuming the diary is not to be read by anyone but its writer, something obviously not true of all diaries) “writing for its own sake?”
Aha! Yes, absolutely, and that was the point one of my examiners made: even journal-writing is not for a present self, but for the self one will be tomorrow or twenty years from now — and so, the examiner argued, it’s for a future self, and therefore transactional. I think it’s a bit of hair-splitting, myself, but perhaps such definitional concerns always are, and even if I disagree with my examiner, the discussion that the question prompted indicates to me that it demands further investigation. A caveat: my examiner, in calling into question the value of “writing for its own sake,” acknowledged the role of his Protestant background in so doing.
Journal writing can also be importnt for the present-day self, as a way to figure out something. Isn’t this what free-writing is about, a way to get past first thoughts (as Natalie Goldberg) would say and to get to deeper thoughts that we have? In other words, it’s still not writing for wrting’s sake but writing to help the writer in a present situation, perhaps, so it’s writing that has an effect outside the writing.
I’ve been reading Augustine today based upon the rec of Neg Cap, and I think that much of the reflection upon self and memory and knowledge deserves consideration in writing, even today, because it’s all about the audience. Who am I talking to? Who is listening to me? What is this for?
I agree with Nels about free-writing. Some of my colleagues poo-poo the possibilities, but I’ve seen it work, and I’m for whatever works.
Shelly, can you point me to some places in Augustine?
Book X of the Confessions which Neg Cap recommended after I talked about finding solace in Donne and Milton. Specifically, the first part, “Why Should Others Overhear Me?”
Par. 3: ” But why let others overhear my testimony, as if they could treat my symptoms?”
Par. 4: “Why should they believe my report of what they cannot know directly?–because the love of virtuous people tells them I do not deceive them in my testimony.”
Par. 5: “But what is their motive?”
For me, the concept of kairos intersects with what you call “motivation” in this post. Not only timeliness and finding apropos moments and rhetorical situations for transactions, but also locating what the rhetor’s motive is.
Tom Romano’s work on “voice” addresses that question of the journal as a genre written for a future self. He talks about documenting his present self for a moment decades later when he will be a different person and perhaps not know or understand who he was at a given moment in his life. None of which negates what Nels mentioned is the primary function of freewriting: discovery.
If every act of writing depends on an agent to write it into text, regardless of genre or motive, can there ever be “writing for its own sake.” ? Even if I disregard audience and claim to be writing freely, as Nels and Bill discuss, if I’m writing for a future self, then I’ve just added a motive. So what is writing? As long as it involves some sort of conscious (self, unself, ) intelligence to put words to page or screen, it seems that the “sake” of writing will always be caught up in the act, the motive and the function.
Helps me most to involve Burke’s dramatisms and his emphasis on ratios among them. That is, I’m inclined to associate motivation with agency (manner, instrument, and attitude) and to associate function with purpose (agency and purpose being Burke’s terms). I don’t know if it gives us much traction on the question about writing for its own sake. But it might give us a way to acknolwedge that ratios among these vary in any given language event, making it possible for the function/purpose to be relatively slight, temporarily underdetermined, or altogether negligible. Maybe in such a case the ratios would tip toward other of the dramatisms.
I think going back to Burke would certainly help me with this question, given that point about ratios: it’s a way of asking, “What matters most about this piece of writing, given the conditions of its production?” Joanna’s question, especially in the way it complicates what Nels suggests, goes to notions that link value to purpose: Marx makes a distinction between use value (he offers the example of the value that wheat that falls from the sky holds for the farmer) and exchange value (which inheres when the farmer tries to sell that wheat from someone else). Is there anything like writing that falls from the sky? If there’s always some Other as an audience, as Shelly points out, then is all writing a form of exchange, and in some way commodified? Or are our perceptions, our terministic screens, so thoroughly dominated by the ideology of market capitalism that we simply cannot see any purpose for writing other than that of exchange? (Hence my nod to Veblen in my examiner’s acknowledgement of his Protestant upbringing.) As Bill points out, writing for discovery seems to be the contested terrain here: some will say, “But discovery in the service of what?” and others will say, “Yes, discovery is an end in itself.”
I know it’s new critical and all that, but does the intentional fallacy have a place to play here? It’s been a long time since I’ve read it, and really even thought about it. In short though, in the consumption of writing, this argument (so argue Wimsatt and Beardsley?) asserts that the writer’s intent does not really matter.
Mike et al.,
Is there a way of thinking motivation without listing rewards? I mean is the best place to begin theorizing motivation a taxonomy of rewards. What the agent gets is perhaps not at all connected to why the agent does. Rewards reveal themselves post hoc. The motivation may be pure hardwired curiousity. If I do this, will that happen (again). Could motivation be considered as a manifestation of a drive such as a ludic impluse (moves in a game) or scientific outlook (hyposthesis forming and testing). I am suggesting that theorizing motivation may *gain* clarity by decoupling the concept of motiviation from that of acquisition — even that of the getting of wisdom. The pure pleasure of writing as it is written might provide a basic somatic motivation around which other motivations may cluster.
Mike, now that you’re settled in your new home, would you go to CCE and read Holly’s missive? It touches on what we’ve been discussing here and I’d like to hear you weigh in over there.
Joanna, I’ve read it a couple times, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that while I’m camped in the kitchen on an air mattress, it’s really, really hard for me to do that kind of detailed reaction. I want to, I really do, but I’m typing this standing at the kitchen counter with a stack of bills at my left elbow, West Point new faculty orientation material at my right elbow, and bags and clothes on the stove. The floors should be dry in another hour or so, which’ll let me go upstairs and use the bathroom, but I’m afraid my material circumstances mean I’m not going to be writing anything like the stuff I usually try to post for at least another week or so. I like what Holly says, I really do. But right now, I’m not doing much beyond showing up showered and shaved at work, and even that’s a bit of a struggle with circumstances.
At such a point, one might hope for Donna to jump in once more with an insightful point about materiality and writing.
No problem–I completely understand and hope that I wasn’t being too pushy. Enjoy getting your house fixed up. We’re putting in a bid for a house in Darnestown–remember when that was like saying “Pennsylvania” ?