DeCentering Writing Studies

I have finished taking notes on Laura Micciche’s Doing Emotion. Her book was well worth my reading. I appreciated most of what she wrote. And in those places where I had to acknowledge different universes, she brought up points for discussion.

Her important point to me involves the materiality of emotion: that we see emotion and we read emotion in texts—again, understanding texts as only superficially static. When we read emotions in texts, we are obviously reading ourselves, our histories, out cultures, our relationships with others, our friends we have loved, those who have died, those who have faded from our lives but left in our minds their traces.

Micciche makes a convincing argument to the necessity of paying attention to the materiality of emotion through language. Her larger point contests the debilitating dichotomy between emotion and reason—as if they could ever be separated by a theoretical centrifuge.

I believe with Micciche that when students are emotionally invested in whatever they write, they will write better than when defending some kind of canned topic. Not only will they write better, they will learn more about writing by having been engaged in the writing act.

Although Micciche links Marx’s theory of alienated labor to her overly-labored argument positioning composition and writing program administration as subjugated and feminized, I might turn it against what I have previously called performative, fake, or school writing—when we ask students to write essays demonstrating their competence or knowledge in order to achieve an external reward—a grade (see Daniel Pink’s TED talk on extrinsic vs intrinsic rewards). Reframed, we can see this kind of writing as alienated labor, labor that is “external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself . . . mortifies his body and ruins his mind.” This frame of school-writing might help to explain the marked difference between the kind of writing we get when we ask for honest or bogus information.

I appreciate the general thrust of Micciche’s argument, but I have to wonder about the space between what she and I see or whether one or both of us are blind. I wrote in a previous post that I have never “felt” the subjugation of writing studies or writing program administration—and I have often wondered about the disenfranchised claims—which Micciche extensively documents. I don’t have space to disentangle our differences here. I have always felt respected within the academic environment—and I think many of my WPA friends  have felt the same. I think some of this difference might be located in social class relationships—I don’t know. I do know that as a Writing Program Administrator, as a Professor, I have occupied an incredibly privileged social position. And I know that as a WPA, one of my dominant projects is to abdicate disenfranchised academic labor.  There is absolutely no logic that supports requiring writing courses taught by part-time teachers (other than the logic of profit).

Micciche argues extensively that Writing Studies suffers from its link to materialism, caring, affect. I think as a field we may have overly disenfranchised ourselves. I have seen a long history of rhetoric and composition scholars (note the way in which we have linked composition to “rhetoric”) attempting to argue for the centrality of our field. To me, these arguments have seemed silly. I think it’s equally important for citizens to be able to name in distant order the planets in our solar system as to be able to define ethos, logos, and pathos. I think as scholars we need to pay some attention to how our arguments make ourselves the center of the intellectual universe.  I love to write. If I can pass that on, that seems good enough. I’m not certain that this love should be required.

Writing Program Administration and Labor

I should be doing other work, but I have continued to struggle through Micciche's Doing Emotion this morning. The reading struggle has changed as I have moved through the chapters. In the early chapters, I resisted her theoretical language. I felt as if she were reproducing high-fives in the field. Micciche notes elsewhere Peter Herman's complaint that scholars in the field have reduced themselves in the tenure game to re-saying currently popular saids. I doubt that this trend is new. It might simply be an unannounced tradition of scholarship, mimicking a cultural phenomenon of resaying what's au courant. And who can blame? We all want to be known (see my previous post on numbers).

Here's how my reading struggle has changed. I strenuously resisted the  theoretical language in her first chapters, although I value, in my current emotional struggle with my dog's cancer, much of what she claims. We might even be "on the same page" (please forgive me). In her later chapters, the overly nominalized, abstract phrasing merged into straight language. But her message shifted from theorizing the ontology of emotion to a kind of rant (the kind to which I am prone). I think she has inherited this rant. I am materializing it here because I think the rant disables effective writing program administration and productive theorizing and scholarship in our field (loosely, the field of Writing Studies).

The first one involves the derogation of writing program administration. I have been a WPA in three institutions, beginning in 1990. I admit I am male--and my gender distorts my perception, but I have never felt marginalized in my work. In the three universities in which I have worked, I have always felt respected, my work and responsibilities certainly equal to a literary scholar's responsibility to acquaint students with Milton. Our responsibility is to help students with their writing, to make writing, like reading, a part of their personal, professional, and civic lives. I can't think of a more important responsibility.

As Writing Program Administrators, we are embedded within a historical labeling of our work as grunt as opposed to the etherealized labor of our literary brothers and sisters, but this imbrication doesn't mean we have to buy it. We can engage in the conversation, not be submerged by it. I have always been proud of my role in helping students make writing a part of their lives. I couldn't have wanted anything else. I also know many colleagues who have felt this sense of mission: of our desire to bring the magic of writing into our students lives. Most readers of this blog will know the names--the people who have thought of writing as pleasure, discovery, communication. NOT argument.

We have been embedded within an historically institutionalized structure that has profited from the "Johnny Can't Write" mythology. We require first-year writing and institutionalize adjunct labor as teaching faculty, paying low wages and no benefits. The hypocrisy is hardly obscure. I estimate that at my present institution, charging upwards of $50,000 a year per student, that we make about $40,000 a year per course by requiring this First-Year Writing courses. We try to imagine that our writing program is something no well-educated student could do without, but a little bit of self-referentially critique might seriously undermine that claim (that we spend hours teaching them about logos, ethos, and pathos and the logical fallacies? Please).

Let me get to the quick: WPAs don't need to apologize for the work they are doing (unless they are fetishizing argument). We can be doing good work. We certainly don't need to be whining about our own positions (or at least those of us who are tenured--actually, I'm in a non-tenured position right now). Our real problem is labor practices. We can certainly unite behind one clear objective somewhat based on logic: if what we are teaching is important, we need to have full-time teachers teaching what we pretend is important. Let's call this a mission. And let's stop complaining about our own positions (the thrust of Micchiche's later chapters); Either we require first-year writing courses and then engage in responsible hiring practices; or let's forget it.

I didn't get to the second rant.