Scholars have trajectories, traced by the contrail arcs of their intellectual projects. As a newly minted professor, I’ve been thinking about what mine might be: how do I characterize what I’ve been working on and what I want to continue to work on as a line across the sky of my discipline?
What I’m doing, I think, is trying to develop an economic phenomenology of student writing, and with it a language of value that can talk about why people want to write that moves beyond the instrumental. Instrumentality we know quite well: do X and get Y. Barter and exchange: simple transactions. The richer field, though, is the motivation that inheres within the moment, the act of writing for writing qua writing. So I’m putting together unlikely bedfellows — Elbow and the so-called expressivist compositionists with Gibson-Graham and the so-called Marxian economists — but with a specific attention to moment, to the temporally present acts of writerly production, circulation, and distribution. I’m not much interested in questions of history — “Where did this come from?” and “What will this lead to?” — except as phenomenologically enacted: “What is this doing now?” This isn’t to say that I support any sort of ahistoricity: it’s just that economic analysis as applied to composition pedagogy too easily lends itself, as we see in the literature, to an abnegation of responsibility; to the sometimes irresponsible assertions that current problems are best thought about in terms of their past causes or future consequences, rather than considering — as Elbow, Emig, and others show us — possible immediate interventions.
J. K. Gibson-Graham describes some problematic tendencies in economic thought that I see some of the literature in composition as still taking for granted as foundational assumptions: “the tendency to represent economy as a space of invariant logics and automatic unfolding that offered no field for intervention; [and] the tendency to constitute ‘the’ economy as a singular capitalist system or space rather than as a zone of cohabitation and contestation among multiple economic forms” (xxi). (See, as an outstanding example, Giroux’s recent JAC piece.) As writing teachers, I believe we understand that such ways of thinking are inadequate, and yet the vocabulary with which we have been left to understand economic concerns is so fundamentally incommensurate with our understanding of day-to-day pedagogical practice — with the daily fact of being and teaching and writing in the classroom — that we simply don’t talk about economy except as something taking place outside the classroom. Our economic attitudes remove us from the classroom scene and moment of the creation of intellectual and affectual value.
That’s, as I see it, my contrail. It starts in definitional concerns and the idea of an economic vocabulary for composition, develops into notions about the multiplicity of valuations for writing, and attempts to begin to address the place of open source economic concepts in the the classroom. Beyond that, I’m not sure what it might look like, other than a thin and incomplete white line across a wide blue sky.
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