Writing Studies
I’ve not entered into the carnival circuit before, but I would like to offer some thoughts regarding John Trimbur’s Changing the question: Should writing be studied?. Some responses (at least so far) seem to have relatively little to do with the substance of the article, but are nonetheless stimulating.
To begin, Jeff Rice conflates Trimbur’s arguments with his own argument about networks: “‘The social relations and bodies of knowledge’ are central to any ‘thing’ we name or categorize as ‘writing.’” Trimbur’s question is branded as “odd” because, (at least as I understand Jeff’s claim) writing cannot be “studied” without studying the surrounding networks/economies of production and consumption. This point is easily granted, but seems commonplace. More intriguing is his closing reflection on Barthes A Lover’s Discourse:
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?
The conflation attempted here does not make nearly as much sense to me. The methodology deployed to explore the discourse of lovers is not even vaguely interchangeable with the context of academic writing studies. I am a huge fan of Barthes; the “process or flow” of the discourse of lovers does not represent another experience or encounter, but this is not equivalent to a lack of symbolic content. Indeed, such discourse is at its root symbolic in an iconic sense:
I am not invoking guarantees, merely recalling, by a kind of salute given in passing, what has seduced, convinced, or what has momentarily given the delight of understanding (of being understood?). Therefore, these remainders of reading, of listening, have been left in the frequently uncertain, uncompleted state suitable to a discourse whose occasion is indeed the memory of the sites (books, encounters) where such and such a thing has been read, spoken, heard. For if the author here lends us his ‘culture’ to the amorous subject, in exchange the amorous subject affords him the innocence of his image-repertoire, indifferent to the proprieties of knowledge. (Barthes 9)
The license granted to lovers is to violate the network that poses references as proof or confirmation. This special case of discourse cannot be extrapolated to be “writing itself.” The discourse of lovers is a discourse of fragments, not of “process or flow.” To cast it otherwise violates the spirit of Barthes’ book.
The issue of “writing studies” is a matter for deep consideration at the University of Minnesota right now; a new “writing studies” program created from the facilities of Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication and the compositionists from the English department is being created. The label troubles me, because of my focus on visual rhetoric. Part of my concern is defused by Trimbur’s shift from writing in its participle form—process theory has nothing to offer visual rhetorics as far as I can see. As nouns, image products (including letter-forms as much as paintings, photographs, and data displays) are fairly considered as writings.
Jeff’s reading of Barthes—considering his “image repertoire” as nonsymbolic anticipates the sort of difficulty I can see in attaching too much significance to universalizing “the network.” I would also suggest that the real schism is not so much that images aren’t writing, but rather that studies unfold over time—icons (in the strict Peircian definition) do not. Visual studies is ultimately oxymoronic—there can never be a pure field. What remains ultimately, are networks of discourses generated by “image-repertoires”—innocent ones (in the case of amateurs and lovers) and experienced ones for professionals, which are always dependent on reference to some textual/imagistic authority.
I really wanted to say much more than this. Perhaps I will.
February 20, 2007 10:08 PM
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Jeff Rice suggested that I revisit Roland Barthes’ work. I have, and I find that I really can’t connect with his network. I find too much interference in the texts. To come to adopt a closed sphere of language under... Read More
The methodology deployed to explore the discourse of lovers is not even vaguely interchangeable with the context of academic writing studies
Only if you take it as literal. And why would we? The pleasure of the text, which to remind you, is not based on the discourse of lovers. The discourse of lovers - like the text itself (Pleasure of the Text, Japan Empire of Signs, autobiography Roland Barthes - is one attempt to trace out a series of relationships as gestures. Barthes calls these relationships a rhetoric of pleasure. Go back to the beginning of A Lover's Discourse. Barthes maps his methodology regarding citation. The categories of reference are placed in relationship to one another. The method is generalizable.
Jeff’s reading of Barthes—considering his “image repertoire” as nonsymbolic anticipates the sort of difficulty I can see in attaching too much significance to universalizing “the network.”
I don't see the argument here. The image-repertoire is not symbolic. It does not represent. It is the generation of signs which are always in flux and always forcing new types of relationships. In that sense, the image-repertoire as identity (and again, not taking identity at the literal level of personal identity) always can be situated in a larger network of conversations and ideas regarding....networks. Trimbur's argument to focus on social relationship prompts me to take the challenge. By doing so, however, I see relationships not already in writing studies, composition, or your own "image-repertoire" of something called "visual writing" (or visual rhetoric).
And to that, so? If there's no "pure" field as you declare, what is the problem to focus on relationships?
Why should we take it as literal? Because if we cast a net so broadly as to include all writing as lover's discourse we minimize the power of love-- does a grocery list transport or deny reference? Mine don't, but I haven't read yours.
I did go back to the beginning-- in fact, I quoted it. The section on reference (as I'm interpreting it, perhaps we're not thinking of the same section?) begins "In order to compose this amorous subject" (8). What about that makes it generalizable?
I think the primary problem with the miscommunication regarding the "symbolic" nature of images is a difference in semiotic framework. I prefer to approach from Peircian rather than Saussurian terms-- the icon is the beginning of a procession of signs, which moves from icon, to index, to symbol. It is pointless to try to isolate this dynamic process of signifying activity and declare the symbol as separate from the icon. The symbol inevitably becomes an icon when removed from direct connection to its referrant. In other words, without a reference a symbol is an icon. This is an insoluble vocabulary problem.
W.B. Yeats called symbols "hints"-- hints need not represent, and neither do symbols. Even for Saussure, symbols are arbitrary. What does "A" represent? Isn't "A" a symbol?