And so this is how I see the “writing process” … or at least a shorthand version. I would start with a two part process with cultural-material forces on one side (including, for example, interpellation, technologies, language, discourse communities, history, etc.) and embodied forces on the other (including bodily functions, memory, unconscious processes, desires and so on). This is a division of convenience rather than an essential ontological difference. We are familiar with articulating a division between ourselves and the “other.” However, we immediately need to recognize that what is effectively mapped in establishing this difference is the functioning of our consciousness, which is itself already a product of these forces. What does this mean? The concept of self as inside in relation to other as outside, reflects our experience of consciousness. Though some bodily experiences emerge from the unconscious, we experience them as internal, as opposed to external events. However, these experiences, as they are articulated within the conscious mind, reflect a historical-cultural-technological set of contexts as well as genetic-natural-embodied ones. Consciousness emerges from a space in which the distinctions of inside and outside do not make a difference, even though they do make a difference in the mundane space into which consciousness is projected. I realize this might be a little confusing, but we’re just getting started. Put simply, consciousness is the product of a recursive process involving both cultural-material and embodied forces. The process of invention, of producing knowledge through the technopractice of writing, is a similarly recursive process that is invovled in the production of consciousness. Consciousness is produced through the act of writing; text is produced through the production of consciousness. Generally speaking, we obscure this in our cultural notions of writing. Many of my students are invested in a romanticized concept of writing in which, much like Wordsworth, they expect text to appear to them wholly formed, as if in a dream. Writing is merely the transcription of preformed thought. Even when we teach the conventional writing process, we still attribute the ideas to the Cartesian individual rational mind. Writing as brainstorming only serves as a tool for getting the mind going. We don’t really talk about writing technologies as intelligent agents that contribute to knowledge production as a form of distributed cognition. However, this is what I mean by writing process: realizing that the mind is not inside. Ideological interpellation is the first thing that comes to mind, recognizing that identities are provided for us through institutional experiences and discourses. But if we stop here we are trapped. We need to see (to theorize) that writing is not, and has never been, an effective tool of logocentricism. Writing allows for other modes of consciousness production. As a result, to quote Derrida, “the meditation upon writing and the deconstruction of the history of philosophy become inseparable” (Of Grammatology, 86). So the writing process is a process of exteriorizing the subject from its location within the Cartesian coordinates of Western philosophy, a process of escaping the gravitational sink hole of ideology. From such perspectives the idea of “effective” and “critical” become interestingly warped. These are the things I consider as I enter into a departmental conversation about how to evaluate writing and how to assess our department’s teaching of writing. Though such a perspective may seem paralyzing, I do not find it so. To the contrary I find it wildly inventive and importantly deployable within this context. We shall see how it works out

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