Postcomposition

2. The Space of Writing

29 2. The Space of Writing If things endure, or if there is duration in things, the question of space will need to be reassessed on new foundations. For space will no longer simply be a form of exteriority, a sort of screen that denatures duration, an impurity that comes to disturb the pure, a relative that is opposed to the absolute: Space itself will need to be based in things, in relations between things and between durations, to belong itself to the absolute, to have its own “purity.” —Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism The ways in which we imagine space and place have a direct impact on how we imagine writing and acts of writing as well as the inhabitants of composition studies—and its outsiders, real or imagined. —Nedra Reynolds, Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. —Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life Because of the more popular use of “post” as an indicator of chronology, many may hear postcomposition to indicate an issue of time, a marker of a shift in era, a time after composition studies. However, as I hope I have indicated thus far, I intend “post” primarily as a spatial indicator. Separating the spatial from the temporal is a tricky maneuver, and I do not mean to suggest the possibility of an essential—or even necessarily possible— bifurcation between the two; instead, I emphasize the role of the spatial, turning to the temporal only when unavoidable, conveniently placing time aside until invoking it becomes strategically useful. I do this because time is the more familiar approach (think: process); space, in its unfamiliarity, offers potential for theorizing writing in ways not yet put forward and not confined by chronological thinking. Space and time are inseparable, but they are also politically loaded terms of demarcation.1 As W. J. T. Mitchell ’s Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, explains it, space and time “take on 30 The Space of Writing different ideological roles and relationships at different moments in history” (98). The explanation continues: “The categories of space and time are never innocent . . . they always carry an ideological freight” (98). My separation, too, of space and time in this discussion is conducted without innocence; it is strategic, for as Mitchell points out, “the terms ‘space’ and ‘time’ only become figurative or improper when they are abstracted from one another as independent, antithetical essences that define the nature of an object. The use of these terms is, strictly speaking, a concealed synecdoche, a reduction of the whole to the part” (103). I will add to this configuration of space-time that not only can they not be separated but neither can they be removed from an intrinsic relationship to writing, and like any other (problematic) metaphor, they ultimately can be understood as functions of writing. My intention here is to emphasize the spatial over the temporal as a method for disrupting the traditional sense of writing as temporal in favor of a spatial understanding of writing, of the act of writing, of the function of writing, and, in turn, of a spatial conception of the discipline of composition studies. To do so, I bring spatial theory not to bear upon writing but instead bring the two together in such a way as to elucidate a reciprocal relation between the two toward the end of conceptualizing writing as spatial and casting space not as that which must be in the beginning before creation, as Plato’s Timaeus suggests it must, but as a function of writing. Of course, by separating the two, I am reducing space to metaphor, thus limiting how space can be addressed in terms of my larger argument. I return often in this book to the idea of a will to metaphor but for now must acknowledge that despite my wish to not reduce space to metaphor, I am in some ways trapped by being able only to do so. In order to make such a distinction between writing as temporal and writing as spatial, it is important to note how the tradition of literature and literary analysis—and, in turn, the relationship between writing and literature—embraces the temporal. Given the history that binds writing to reading, that binds production to interpretation/consumption, that binds a concept of a written product to the idea of a literary work, that binds the value-judgment of a piece of writing to the relational...