Consumptive Writing (A Fatal Strategy)

*Consumptive Writing (A Fatal Strategy)* suggests disappearing production and unchecked invention. As an introduction, I would almost like to provide a recipe like that for Surrealism, a manifesto which would make this project as accessible as possible, but I am equally concerned with showing that this conception of composition requires no strict regulation of experience. I am a writing teacher, but I don't teach process.

At one time, I accepted the process paradigm as an invaluable escape from product-based pedagogy; however, now I realize that it is thinking in terms of an opposition between process and product that kills invention. As Kameen interprets Coleridge, "writing is neither process nor product, it is both in the continual act of becoming one another; writing is neither self nor world, it is both in the continual act of becoming one another; writing is neither information nor expression, it is both in the continual act of becoming one another."

In the desire to overcome their low status in English departments--as mere support staff to professors of literature--, writing teachers have become compositionists by defining their discipline against the practice of literature teachers. Unlike those interpreters of poetic texts, compositionists study the production process. While I support decanonization and favor rewarding those who keep English departments in business--First Year Composition teachers (see Crowley, Composition in the University) --, if status for composition comes at the price of a poverty-stricken conception of writing, and if resentment leads compositionists to enforce a tidy binary opposition between rhetoric and literature, the cost is too high.

Can we move away from the production model of composition? As television gets computerized, even as our state of late capitalist excess becomes more extreme, perhaps the possibility of a consumer society that writes becomes more and more plausible. But are we willing to be that inclusive? Can we, as writing teachers, follow Venturi's suggestion that we "learn from Las Vegas"(See Geoffrey Sirc's terrific article in *PRE/TEXT*)? In affirming the languaging of students, we recognize they are already writers.

Or do we see ourselves in a privileged position (read "powerless but relatively comfortable"), wielding a healing knife (our species-genus analytic and the endless lists of yeses and nos it has produced) with which we will slice away the pedestrian style and knowledge (ideology) of our students? I think, along with our students, we really hate those stylistic rules, which, in fact, rule out the works of our favorite writers.

This project does not limit itself to pedagogy. As writers and thinkers, ourselves, we need to be aware of how our habits exclude. I believe it is in this spirit that Victor J. Vitanza asks we be aware of the Negative as the principle of Exclusion.

The radical inclusiveness made possible in this project by its medium, the World Wide Web, de-delimits its message. Consumptive writing does not just include what I have written, but everything in Hyper Text Mark-up Language.

This project has no boundaries (but perhaps a HA HA! here or there). It borrows as much from the genres of hypertext fiction, rabbinical exegesis, semiotic analysis, hermenuetics, and situation comedy as from the strict genres of academic discourse, and can be considered a spin-off of several other collaborative projects.

page one-hundred forty-nine, *fatal strategies* jean baudrillard

The bulk of this project can be found in the links:

Please email me with comments at levy@utarlg.uta.edu