Postcomposition

7. Pedagogy

187 7. Pedagogy Disorder does not merely destroy order, structure, and organization, but is also a condition of their formation and transformation. —Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture If writing has a point, it is to leave everyone and everything forever unsettled. —Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture The mantras of composition studies have worn thin, no longer offering answers that satisfy emerging questions about writing in its networked, hyper-circulatory condition. Questions now linger, unanswered by composition studies’ dominant inquiries of the last forty years: How is writing learned? How do students write? How do students learn to write? Can writing be taught? These inquiries, perhaps, have served composition studies well, but they offer little toward future investigation, theory. The current circumstance of writing elicits a new attention away from the student subject , away from subjectivity, and toward writing as complex system and the complex systems that writing saturates. This new theoretical endeavor, as I hope I have shown, evolves not as a restoration or re-invigoration of composition studies but as a step beyond the limit-situation of composition studies into the possibilities found at the edge of chaos. Possibilities for better understanding writing emerge with a new focus on the spatial qualities of writing, considering that production in the emerging condition of writing no longer refers simply to the making of writing (or any thing else for that matter—goods—as economic thinking has led us to understand) but to the production of space itself. Theorists like Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Perec, Julian Murphet, and others have alerted us to the possibility that we now occupy a historical period characterized by the production of space. As Murphet puts it, “Space is at once the field of production and the ultimate goal of production” 188 Pedagogy (203, emphases in original). New theories, then, emerge from this spatial awareness, making urgent new ways of thinking about writing that account not just for spatiality but for ecologic relationships within space and the circulation and saturation of and by writing in space. My proposals for developing theories that conceive of writing in spatial, ecological, complex, networked approaches are intended to shift the very ground from which writing has been primarily theorized in composition studies. This shift is intended to leave behind the subject, the student subject, the writing-subject, and subjectivity as outmoded ways of thinking about the production of writing. Instead, considerations of the posthuman agent operating nonautonomously in complex networks, not as producers, or even conductors, of writing but as indistinguishable from writing itself, now drive writing theory postcomposition. This book does not work toward resolution; it is intentionally a moment of resistance, of violence, that does not anticipate or desire answers. It is a nudge toward a much-needed tipping point, toward what we have come to oversimplify as a “paradigm shift.” To initiate this moment of tipping, postcomposition , à la Frantz Fanon, requires a total revolution, one of “absolute violence” (37), because, according to Fanon, violence purifies; it is a cleansing force. Fanon’s postcolonial revolution was to end categories of white and black, a revolution of much greater significance and importance than my application of violence to mere disciplinary matters of an elitist academic function, and I do not mean to diminish Fanon’s violence by applying it to composition studies. Yet, the call to violence and disruption seems rightminded .1 The difficulty is that throughout Postcomposition I have employed the word “violence” to suggest disruption, but the term carries too much baggage . It is spread thinly through our lexicon, and to suggest doing violence to composition studies is to unintentionally, though unavoidably, invoke an understanding of violence that lends to real suffering. And so, while it doesn’t, ahem, pack the same punch, I clarify here that by “violence” I intend “disruption” because I’m generally not in favor of exploiting those who take punches. Postcomposition is a pedagogy of disruption, a pedagogy of what Mark C. Taylor, borrowing from Le Corbusier, calls “creative destruction” (28), a concept that suggests wiping the slate clean and starting anew. Of course, there is little possibility or need to decimate composition studies and start from a completely blank slate; we can’t really be free of our past, nor do we want to be. As I made clear in chapter 1, postcomposition is not anti–composition studies, not opposed to composition studies; it is a measure...