The call to write can begin as a response to another blog’s request.

John Trimbur, “Changing the Question: Should Writing Be Studied?”

“Should writing be studied?” Trimbur’s piece asks. Yes, he answers, if we are speaking of a symbolic shift in where and how writing is studied, a shift from the workshop model (whose origins are in expressivism and process) to the seminar (whose origins are in something akin to the “intellectual work” of the Humanities). Ken Macrorie made a similar plea in the ’60s in his short CCC essay “Writing’s Dying.” Macrorie wanted to shift focus from “correction” to intellectual discussion. Trimbur’s idea is similar. He concludes his essay by arguing, “The work of theorizing and enacting the study of writing is to make transparent and teachable the social relations and bodies of knowledge that now silently underwrite the first year course - to organize the study of writing as an intellectual resource for undergraduates.”

I tried to make another version of this argument in my College English essay on networks. “The social relations and bodies of knowledge” are central to any “thing” we name or categorize as “writing.” Ideas maintain, break, and generate relations with one another (and with other forces).

The question of whether or not this should be studied, however, feels odd. Whether or not you study it, how do you avoid it? Isn’t this the deconstruction argument phrased for a different concept: language already engages in the deconstructive process whether or not the reading takes place? Ideas, writing, concepts, are already networked or in the process of the network. Studying offers recognition, obviously, but will it as well teach us to compose in this manner? I would hope so. Though, on its own, it can’t. If the other pieces of the network resist or reject the study (the idea of English, the university, the faculty, etc.), networked writing cannot function (because that particular kind of network obstructs this other network from occurring). That point, in a nutshell, is what networks mean.

We’ve been reading A Lover’s Discourse in my Writing Theory course. In the beginning of the text, Barthes offers his methodology, how he constructed his book. Figure, order, and references are the three principles which motivate his writing. What interests me in this description is the role “references” play in Barthes’ writing. They are not obligations, not texts one turns to for confirmation or proof, but are noted as “ordinary,” “insistent,” and “occasional.” They are part of “conversations.” Each conversation brings an ordinary, insistent, or occasional relationship to the reading or writing. Those conversations, implicit and explicit, can occur in a shopping list (which is one example Trimbur provides from his textbook; a writing some students dispute and label irrelevant) or on a website or in an encounter, or in a book, and so on. This writing, however, is not, as Trimbur offers, symbolic. Its process or flow does not represent another experience or encounter. It is writing itself. The challenge is to ask: how does one generate or maintain such relations with references? How does one teach that writing within an already established network that poses references as proof or confirmation?