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Sid Dobrin: A Future of Writing Studies

Session A Featured Speaker - Sid Dobrin: A Future of Writing Studies
Reviewed by Michelle La France
mlafrance@umassd.edu

One word came immediately to my mind during Sid Dobrin's talk: Approfondement.

The session description in the conference program promised, "a presentation about writing and writing theory, and how changes outside of the field require substantial changes within. Synthesizing diverse discussions of posthumanism, visual/rhetoric, design, materiality, and ecology, the speaker considers what a future of writing studies might look like, if it wants to remain relevant intellectually." This is exactly what Dobrin's talk delivered—a far reaching and far sighted call for the field of composition/writing studies to embrace the post-human, to rethink the central notion of the "autonomous (student) subject," to let go of its preoccupation with "the management of student identities," and to move through the "discomfort" created by "contested disciplinary spaces." A call to thinkers in our field to play in the depths with ideas that will refresh and realign the field's self-representations.

Dobrin began by noting that Atlanta and 2011 marked his 18th consecutive 4Cs, situating his talk within the framework of the changes he has seen over these years. No longer preoccupied with validating the field's existence, some, like Dobrin himself, have begun to look forward, especially contributors to the recent special issue of College Composition and Communication on The Future of Composition. Citing from Greg G. Colomb's essay, "Franchising the Future"—particularly Colomb's claim that “what best characterizes the current work of composition is not just a service mission, but what I want to call a franchise, a public trust that gives us a license to operate the largest block of classes in most universities, but also the responsibility for the nation’s ability to write”—Dobrin announced an increasing disquiet with the ways certain imagined futures grant authority to the field. Especially because college remains a marker of privilege and exclusivity in the US and around the globe, futures that center on writing as a product of the university limit what is possible to think about writing. When writing is only theorized in relation to "agency and the emancipation of student subjects," according to Dobin, such thinking not only reinscribes the privileges afforded by this educational and economic order ("freeing the already most privileged"), but reduces our ability to think about "how writing is changing."

"Writing studies," Dobrin noted, "should be about more than just teaching writing." (He clarified that the "Writing Studies" of his interest is not the "Writing Studies" associated with Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle's call for more effective means of teaching scholarly writing.) Dobrin argued that it is time to release theoretical work in composition from the bindings of its political and material conditions, "expand[ing] our parameters about what counts as composition studies" and opening up the "revolutionary possibilities in understanding writing." Citing Lynn Worsham's distinction between the inherent conservatism of academic work and the "relentlessly critical, self-critical, and potentially revolutionary" aims of intellectual work ("to critique, change, and even destroy institutions, disciplines, and professions that rationalize exploitation, inequality, and injustice,") Dobrin asked, what might become of Writing Studies if it was truly pursued as an intellectual project?

"Writing wants to know, ‘when are we going to be there’?" Dobrin told the audience during a particularly memorable moment. His talk laid out a number of intellectual moments that offer opportunities for theoretical realignment and re-purposing for the field. Writing Studies as approfondement (equal parts critique, prognostication and theory):

• "It is not who writes that is important, but that writing is there," Dobrin argued. He believes it is time to rethink the field's attachments to subjectivity. While "subject and subjectivity have permitted the field to develop a body of research," Dobrin noted, our understandings of writing have been servile to subjectivity for too long. "We might be able to theorize writing in more complex ways," he claimed. Dobrin noted that he is not claiming "that there are no subjects or that subjects don't matter. But to understand what writing is—what writing does—we need to re-center our focus, chang[ing] the apparatus that allows us to engage writing."
• Composition faces "the regrettable failure to imagine what comes next." If writing were taking up theories of the posthuman and posthumanism (found in the works of Derrida, Haraway, LaTour, Wolfe, and others) it would be more possible to disrupt traditional theories of writing. Dobrin calls up advances in other fields that reimagine the human—"cybernetics, biotechnology, species interactions, the prosthetic subject, the becoming animal subject"—as examples of other fields breaching their own boundaries in revolutionary ways. In what ways is writing monstrous? How would these frameworks alter or compel our conceptions of writing along new trajectories of meaning?
• "When technology becomes inseparable to writing," Dobrin stated, "such reductions constrain what we think about writing—and that alters ontological thinking about writing." Dobrin called for intellectuals in the field to take up network theories and theories of disruptions—as a way to rethink our approaches to "technology." Too often our discourses oversimplify notions of technology, reducing complex interfaces and relationships into little more than tools. Further, the work that considers the relationship between writing and technology has "traditionally done so from the notion of the subject and the interpreter."
• "Writing has been superseded by visuals in many other spheres. . . visuals are linguistic writing." Dobrin called on thinkers to challenge the divisions imposed upon our key terminologies: reading vs. writing; visual vs. writing.
• "We'll show you how to make stuff with those tools." Our discourses reinforce our centrality and authority—for instance, "digital nativity." "Look what we do to natives," Dobrin said. "We bring them on res. We bring them to campus. We redress them in the model of what the academy says digital literacies ought to be."
• "When ideas have sex." Dobrin discussed the text "I, pencil" by E. Reed, a story written from the anthropomorphized perspective of the pencil. The problem being that as thinkers we allow ourselves to be limited by our perspectives; e.g. the worker who provides the wood for the pencil doesn't know how to make graphite. "No one knows how to make a computer mouse," Dobrin stated. A mouse is made as much of "the idea of plastic, the idea of metal, the idea of the mouse" as it is from the combination of particular working parts. But the cross pollination of ideas (from other fields and from beyond our typical perspectives) is necessary for innovation. "In truth," Dobrin noted, citing British scientist Matt Ridley, "the mouse is not so diff from a hand axe."
• "Writing is making stuff," according to Dobrin, a redefinition that allows him to embrace technologies, visuals, etc., as writing. Composition has not embraced "the primacy of vision and the visuals. Other creative individuals—artists, etc.—make visuals. We write." The field has not seen the ubiquity of visuals as "simply information[al]"—the field differentiates between words and things, when writing's most salient feature is its ability to represent something else, but the field must look to changes in the digital era, "producing writing in ways not hampered by [the baggage of] representation."
• "Composition does not broach the technological mediation of the physical." Concepts like screen and/or visual culture can enhance the frameworks thinkers in the field take up. The advent of "screen culture" is actually changing children's brain functions. Students are learning in non-traditional ways; for instance, the blind are increasingly learning—not with Braille—but with audio technologies. Braille is linear, audio is not. "Vision is a system that requires constant feedback and work," Dobrin stated. "We are not given the world, we make it through memory, perspective, and production."

"The future of Writing Studies is not the same [future] as Composition," Dobrin concluded his talk. "Theorizing writing must now take a different direction—away from our disciplinary ties and into these areas where the new ideas are waiting." Dobrin plays easily in the deep with such ideas, reminding his audience of the intellectual potential of thinkers in both Writing Studies and Composition, conjuring a number of futures before our eyes, promising that intellectual treasures await those of us brave enough to take an ax to the frozen seas of our choice.

2011 CCCC Reviews Index