Postcomposition

3. Beyond the Subject of Composition Studies

59 3. Beyond the Subject of Composition Studies Classically, the subject outshines the object. —Jean Baudrillard, “Photography, or the Writing of Light” We have always lived off the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object. It is the subject that makes history, it’s the subject that totalizes the world. Individual subject or collective subject, the subject of consciousness or of the unconscious, the ideal of all metaphysics is that of world subject; the object is only the detour on the royal road of subjectivity. —Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies The production of a student subject is a chief outcome of a course in composition. —Lester Faigley, Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition To begin to shift focus from subject toward a greater attention to writing, I propose reconfiguring how we think about the subject, the writing-subject, and the student-subject in composition studies. Undoubtedly, subject/subjectivity has played a key role in composition studies’ evolution, permitting the field to develop a body of “research” about subjectivity and to claim an authority to govern over student subjects. In doing so, composition studies has created a disciplinary bureaucratic structure in which subject management and production has unfolded as the central function of the field. The primacy of the subject in composition studies is visible not only in its managerial emphasis, which I address in detail in the next chapter, but in the ubiquitous attention to subjectivity in its scholarship. For composition studies, writing not only takes a backseat to subject but is most often addressable only in light of/in the shadow of the subject. And, not unlike others relegated to the backseat, writing wants to know, “When are we going to be there?” That is, writing is most often addressed not as an object of study in and of itself but as a result of and purveyor of subjectivity and as servile 60 Beyond the Subject of Composition Studies to subjectivity. Without subject, we assume (perhaps incorrectly), writing cannot be produced, distributed, circulated, or consumed. In such a configuration , composition studies as a field generally has initiated (historically) inquiry into writing via inquiry into subject. What I hope to show in this chapter and in chapters 5 and 6 is, first, that the conceptions of subjectivity upon which composition studies has relied no longer accurately explain the location or function of subjectivity or agency within the networked, hypercirculatory , complex situation of writing in which we now find ourselves. Second, in later chapters, I argue that by adopting systems theories and complexity theories methodologies and insights, we might begin theorizing writing in more dynamic, complex ways that account for the current conditions of writing without the a priori condition of subjectivity. Posthuman Subjectivity As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman. —N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics The task of posthumanism is to uncover those uncanny moments at which things start to drift, of reading humanism in a certain way, against itself and the grain. This clearly involves a rethinking of the meaning of the “post-.” —Neil Badmington, “Theorizing Posthumanism” It is not as if we have a choice about the coming posthumanism; it is already upon us. —Cary Wolfe, Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” Any decentering of subjectivity or the writing subject as composition studies’ primary object of study needs to account for how theories of the posthuman and posthumanism inform postcomposition. In the remainder of this chapter, I examine the posthuman and posthumanism. I engage this work in order to elaborate more fully the need to liberate composition studies from the straitjacket of subjectivity and to further establish a basis from which I develop ecological/spatial/networked theories of writing throughout the remainder of this book. In this chapter, I begin by looking at the distinctions between popular and critical posthumanism, examining closely the posthumanisms Beyond the Subject of Composition Studies 61 of N. Katherine Hayles and Jill Didur. I then look to Mark Hansen’s understanding of technesis as a way of better understanding posthumanism. Following this initial consideration of posthumanisms, I turn my attention to considering composition studies in light of posthumanisms, arguing for the need to rethink the idea of subjectivity as...