What Matters Who Writes?
What Matters Who Responds?
Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo,
and Susan West
Rather than finding knowledge in texts, in the products associated
with earlier systems of intellectual property, I believe we are
going to identify knowledge in the ways people work with
information, in the ways that information is put to use. To give
one specific example: in our classes, knowledge becomes what
students do rather than what they study. Rather than study about
history, that is, they become historians. Rather than study about
writing, they become writers. And the knowledge they have comes
from embodying those practices, in the doing of those acts. Will we
be equal to such tasks of reimagining? At best, I am fearful we are
not. But I believe we have no choice but to try, and to try hard,
for we are already witnessing a bitter battle to control the future
of all knowledge and all knowledge production, one that will surely
write us and our students in ways I fear will support and replicate
a system that is thoroughly imbued with destructive radical
individualism and hypercompetition, with definitions of knowledge
as a commodity to be owned, bought, and sold, and with
representation of human agency as limited and narrow, one that
excludes alternative forms of subjectivity and of ownership. When
I pause to think about it, I can't imagine any more pressing and
compelling reasons to confront the issues involved in the questions
"What matters who writes?" and "What matters who responds?"
Next *
Previous
Postmodern (un)grounding *
Collaboration *
Copy(w)right/Ownership *
Possible Futures
Title Page *
Conclusions