An Always Already Absent Collaboration

Several Approaches to Composition Theory, Pedagogy, and Practice

All concepts, including collaborative writing, emerge, have meaning, and are put to work in a particular “grid of intelligibility” (Foucault, 1976/1978, p. 93). Enabled by social constructionism, writing process theory and the collaborative practices it encourages emerged in the 1970s (see, for example, Bruffee, 1973; Corder, 1979; Elbow, 1973; Emig, 1971; Graves, 1978; Macrorie, 1970; Murray, 1972; Shaughnessy, 1977). Writing process theory, which I will describe later, was a response to and a critique of logical positivist/empiricist, cognitive, and representational models of language and writing that fall under the umbrella term, the current traditional approach in composition theory, which was developed at Harvard in the 1880’s and which, in spite of a century of critique, continues. That approach assumes that language corresponds to objects in the external world and/or ideas in the writer’s mind and so can mirror or represent reality and thought. Often used in science writing, these models emphasize clear and precise language (for critiques, see Aoki, 2000, and Lather, 1996); they treat writing as a mechanical, linear activity; and posit that writing competence can be measured using experimental procedures. Following the assumptions of logical positivism, the written product can and should be value-free, “objective.” To that end, the use of first person pronouns and other personal references—any hint of the author’s values, of the author’s presence—is discouraged. So the text stands alone—author-free—and the focus is on the text itself, the product, and on the meaning implicit in the words in the text. I was taught to write using the current traditional approach. My high school English teachers were the authorities who explained the structure of the five-paragraph essay, and I—probably because I was a voracious reader—understood that structure well enough to reproduce it competently in a well-organized, grammatically correct, error-free paper that usually didn’t say much of anything.

Expressivist composition theories emerged later and focused instead on the writer and encouraged authors to find and express themselves in their writing, to loose their unique (essentialist) “inner voices” as they described intimate, personal, lived experiences. As Fulkerson (1990) explained, “expressivists value openness, honesty, sincerity, originality, authentic voice, and personal topic for writing” (p. 409). In this approach, freedom, individuality, experimentation, discovery, and personal growth are privileged over correctness and polished form. The writer is her own authority and is not absent but very present, all over the text in the new genre, the personal narrative. In social science research, auto-ethnography, for example, uses expressivist theory. In high school English classes, however, I was never encouraged to express myself. No one cared much what I thought about anything (who was I to think?), and I became practiced in using third person and passive voice to repeat what was already known in a clear, orderly, grammatically correct fashion. I had no “voice,” I was not there, and writing was certainly not a practice of discovery that might lead to personal transformation.

By the time I began to teach writing theory and pedagogy to pre-service teachers in English education in the mid-1990s, writing process theory, enabled by the social turn mentioned earlier, was all the rage. In this model, the focus is not on the text or the writer but on the composing process, which is described as a social and collaborative rather than an individual activity. Of course, process theories (see, for example, Rescher, 2000) and theories of development (especially in psychology)—all grounded in ideas of linearity—are common in education. In the 1980s, composition researchers claimed to have identified empirically a natural regularity, a process, they believed writers followed in writing a text. In fact, they isolated five (maybe four? perhaps six?) steps they believed writers moved through in producing a text including prewriting, drafting, revising, proofreading, and publishing. Signs with these steps are often displayed on the walls of language arts and English classrooms in schools. The social, rather than the individual, figures prominently in this approach, and peer collaboration is required as class members are assigned to work in pairs and in writing groups to contribute to each other’s work at each step of the process. Together, they are expected to brainstorm topics to write about, to review each other’s drafts, and to celebrate their final products, their publications.

The problem with this approach is that the prescriptive, linear writing process—defined in advance of writing and imposed on every writing task—is too often coercive and, in fact, not so natural after all. Many writing tasks are so straightforward they simply don’t require a process, and, of course, the process a writer uses may not be the writing process. Too, in this approach, writers must collaborate despite the fact that some people simply prefer to work alone. People like me may be leery of the romance of collaboration because it operates in the same discursive formation as consensus, which Foucault (1970/1977), for example, described as the “tyranny of good-will, the obligation to think ‘in common’ with others” (p. 181). After all, it’s not so easy to disagree when one is expected to collaborate, to move toward a “harmonious collective will” (Mouffe, 1996, p. 20), especially if one is already marginalized. Though collaborative writing is supposed to foster democratic relations and the sociality of authorship among knowing intellects and free wills, Horner (1997) argued that “it is a conception of sociality from which heterogeneity, conflict, and struggle have been excised” (p. 515). One might argue, instead, that conflict and antagonism are the permanent enabling conditions of democracy and should not be swept under the rug.

The Habermasian ideal of noise-free dialogue that undergirds the use of collaboration and peer groups in writing process theory and pedagogy has been critiqued for some time now because the unequal, oppressive power relations that can be dispersed and controlled somewhat by the teacher when working with all students at once can too easily intensify in small groups where bullying, racism, and misogyny can flourish unattended. Still, it makes sense that the social turn would usher in concepts and practices like collaboration and group work in composition theory. As for me, my high school English teachers had never heard of writing process theory just as they had never heard of expressivist writing theory. The only person who read my writing assignments were my teachers, they read only the final draft, and I did not experience a writing group until midlife during my doctoral program.

To sum up, the assumptions that organize various composition theories, pedagogies, and practices are thinkable in the larger discursive formations from which they emerge. None is essentially correct or useful for every author or for every writing task. Following the current traditional approach, a writer may deliberately choose not to be present in a particular text or portion of a text. Following the expressivist approach, she may choose to be very present in a text or portion of a text. And, of course, following writing process theory, she may choose to study her process and also to collaborate. I would argue that those decisions are strategic and rhetorical, depending on the actual writing project, the intended audience, and the work the author wants the text to do. My pedagogical desire is for writers to understand the assumptions and practices of a variety of approaches and to move among them as appropriate.

A Different Collaboration: A Reading–Writing Assemblage

What the approaches to composition theory and practice described above have in common is their ontology and a particular description of human being, including the author. All assume a modernist, humanist, sovereign, intentional subject—the unique and self-contained author present to herself who exists ahead of writing and who, in writing process theory, collaborates with other genuine authors like her. I have provided a critique of that description of human being elsewhere (St. Pierre, 2011) and will not repeat it here.

Now, I don’t have a label for the different approach to writing I describe here— perhaps, post-human, post-authorial, post-intentional, nomadic, rhizomatic, and smooth—oh, so smooth—writing lost in language, de-individualized, deterritorialized, imperceptible, but we should remember that this different approach is nothing new. Decades ago, Foucault (1979), Barthes (1984/1986), and Derrida (1967/1974), among others, deconstructed the notion of the author, a unique persona captured in a proper name. They critiqued the idea of a writer who exists as a self-contained and self-present human being before writing and proposed instead a subject produced in the writing, writing that “is an assemblage . . . and as such unattributable. It is a multiplicity” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 4).

Foucault (1979) set up this new possibility with the following: “In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject disappears” (p. 102). Spivak (1974) explained that this author “knows that he is always already surrendered to writing as he writes” (p. xlv). Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) gave us something else to chew on: “Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (pp. 4-5). Foucault also noted movement in “writing [that] has freed itself from the dimension of expression . . . [and is] identified with its own unfolded exteriority” (p. 102). Deleuze and Parnet (1977/1992) wrote that “the writer invents assemblages starting from assemblages which have invented him” (pp. 51-52). Here, one is used by and caught up in language, in writing. One becomes light and loses control. One never had control. There is no one in this writing. Imperceptible.

This is not the writing I learned in school, yet I have learned in many years of reading and writing since then that the writing I love is always already a collaboration of exteriority in which one text folds into another as I think and write with the words of others not present, no more present than I am in writing. The following famous passage by Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) describes an exterior relation of reading and writing:

Therefore a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. (p. 4)

My interest is just that—one writing machine plugging into others—the work of the writer writing. How is the author–text–world assemblage working? How does that work work? What happens? What’s possible?

These are age-old questions writers ask of themselves and other writers. For me, writing begins with others’ writing—others’ machines—and I collaborate, not in the conventional sense with a living, present co-author who stands guard over the text, but with writers absent, writers across the world or long dead, strangers I know intimately, lovers whose words I cherish and repeat repeatedly, cite and overcite for fear their words will be sacrificed to the paraphrase police. Here, I borrow from the ancient Greeks who recognized the “value of the already-said,” the “fragmentary logos transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading” (Foucault, 1997, p. 211). Valuing the already-said, the already-written, involves reading, but reading is hardly ever included in theories of writing. How can one write without reading?

Here’s a story I tell my students about the imbrication of reading and writing in my own scholarship. When I began my doctoral program, I’d been away from academia for decades and quickly realized that I didn’t know the meaning of words in the texts I most wanted to understand—work by Butler, Spivak, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others. Some of the words were new—bodies without organs, abstract machine; but others were old words used differently. For example, the words subject, power, presence, agency—even writing—obviously didn’t mean what I thought they meant. (No doubt, that is why poststructuralism is often accused of being deliberately obfuscatory.) Perhaps because I’m a librarian as well as a professor, I began compiling quotations from the texts I read in a document I now call “Bettie’s Dictionary.” At first, I handwrote the quotations, which were descriptions and definitions of concepts, on notebook paper and later typed that information into a Word document that is now almost 700 pages long. Anticipating a question some might ask, I’ll report that I’ve tried speech recognition software on occasion, but I prefer the physicality of typing and will sometimes spend half a day just typing others’ words, lengthy quotations of text I could never think or write. I’ve continued this laborious work for over two decades because I don’t want to lose my reading. I know that I will never, ever find that wonderful quote I read in some book or article a month (much less 10 years) hence because so much reading and writing will have intervened in the meantime. Bettie-the-librarian would explain that she wants ongoing access to her reading, and the dictionary provides that access.

So this is how it works. When I read, I come upon definitions or descriptions of concepts—perhaps subject or writing or consensus or deconstruction or empiricism—and write the concept and the page number on which its definition appears on a sticky note on the cover of the book or the first page of the journal article. Then, at some point, I type the definition exactly as it appears in the text into my dictionary—I quote the text—and include the page number followed by the complete bibliographic citation of the source in APA (American Psychological Association) format. Sometimes, I quote only a phrase or a sentence; sometimes I quote pages. For example, I have only one quotation for cognitive (not my thing) but the quotations for subject and subjectivity total 44 pages. Obviously, my dictionary is based on my own interests and reading, and I stress that there’s nothing original about it. It’s simply a dictionary of quotations—of others’ words. Here’s one quotation under the entry writing from my dictionary:

writing (see also rhizome): “Write to the nth power, the n - 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line (p. 24) of hips, line of flight. Don’t bring out the General in you! Don’t have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings” (p. 25). (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987).

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)

I read that quotation often; it inspires me.

To facilitate the dictionary work, I’ve created a second Word document, my “Master Bibliography,” which is now over 100 pages long. This document is simply a long reference list, a list of bibliographic citations in alphabetical order. My goal for this project (alas, only a goal) is to include the bibliographic citation of every text I read and use so I don’t ever have to re-create a citation, some of which are quite complicated, for example, the citation for a translated work like the book by Deleuze and Guattari I cited above. Of course, I can search both the dictionary and the bibliography, and that’s handy. If I were to begin this dictionary project now, I’d create my own database using software like RefWorks and EndNote (there are many others), but they weren’t available at the time.

I call this work a reading management strategy and encourage my students to begin something similar early in their academic careers. If they don’t, their reading will be filed away and lost. For me, writing begins with my dictionary in which I’ve rescued some of the already-said from a sea of reading. I begin to write by reading the quotations under appropriate entries; return to the original sources; read the reference lists of those texts; and borrow, buy, and copy more texts, creating a field of reading to feed me as I write. When I don’t know enough to write the next sentence, I stop to read. Reading and writing, then, are not separate practices but a simultaneity. Most importantly, the exact words of authors are there in my dictionary—the very words they wrote that surprised them, the words they could not have thought outside the intensity of writing, the already-said they finally settled on in a precise formation of words that I can read—read and repeat, cite, reproduce exactly on another page, assembling all those words together to move somewhere, to read and think and write.

That’s just what I did when I wrote the third paragraph of this section when I wanted to pile quotation on quotation to make a point about the work of writing. I read the pages of my dictionary entry for writing and found all those lovely quotations I had read and saved over the years. Those quotations insist we think writing not simply as straightforward inscription but as “an entire structure of investigation” that works against phonocentrism and presence—“metaphysics under erasure” (Spivak, 1974, p. lxix)—in which there is no author with a voice who exists ahead of and expresses her unique, authentic voice in the text. In the context of deconstruction, Spivak (1974) described this structure as follows:

The usual notion of writing in the narrow sense does not contain the elements of the structure of writing in general: the absence of the “author” and of the “subject matter,” interpretability, the deployment of a space and a time that is not “its own.” We “recognize” all this in writing in the narrow sense and “repress” it; this allows us to ignore that everything else is also inhabited by the structure of writing in general, that “the thing itself always escapes.” (p. lxix)

The thing itself always escapes, “the way a page of writing flies off in all directions and at the same time closes right up on itself like an egg” (Deleuze, 1990/1995, p. 14). This doubling, the attempt to close off meaning into words and the impossibility of doing so is the space and time of writing. The thing itself always escapes, and presence, the ground of phonocentrism, is unthinkable.

Perhaps it is possible to think writing not as a container of thought or a process that produces a product but as the space and time of assemblage (a different ontology).

What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns—different natures. Thus the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a “sympathy.” It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys: these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 69)

It is the contagion I desire, the folding of one text into another; those risky, thrilling liaisons of exteriority; the proliferation of words in different constellations in a space-time not its own; the “continuums of intensities” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 187); the smooth spaces where individuations fade.

Deleuze (1990/1995) worried that

what we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface and volume. (p. 176)

For me, writing is the affirmative and experimental space-time of the unthought, the to-come I believe in. After many years of writing, I have learned to believe in writing, to trust that sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes when I’m plodding along, laboriously putting one word after another after another—which is what writing is, after all—struggling to find words, any word; when I falter and stumble on a heavy word I no longer believe in; when I’m so out of words, have no words; when I’ve stood over my big, unabridged dictionary reading the columns looking for words; when I try again, and then again, sometimes (out of control and miraculously) words write themselves and then close right up on themselves like an egg, and I find I’ve written something I couldn’t have thought by thinking alone. I believe in those inconspicuous, monumental events of writing when words appear together differently—such a simple thing—and worlds open up.

This is never solitary work, and I am always in collaboration but differently. All this helps me understand why I don’t want to write with someone else, a co-author, who might feel obliged to rescue me from the pleasure of that terrifying pause in which I lose myself and am suspended insensible, moving with words, lost in words, wordless, imperceptible. I don’t want to be rescued by a collaborator then, to be I again, to be inserted into the old ontology—two authors writing a text together.