The other day I was invited to participate in a faculty “focus group” for a College committee charged with studying means to create “effective, efficient and cost effective functioning.” The committee is interested in new faculty’s perspectives on ways to improve communication and collaboration among departments. I suppose I have a perverse interest in college bureaucracy, particularly when it curiously adopts corporate-speak like “focus group.” Unfortunately, from their perspective, I fear I am a vertical market of one.

In any case, I was thinking about this interdisciplianry-interdepartmental theme. It struck me that one of the most long-standing such operations, and one that is indicative of many of the challenges facing this charge, is writing across the curriculum. As those in rhetoric/composition have long-known, academics have a great resistance to acknowledging the study of writing as a specialized discipline on par with other disciplines. They certainly manage to overlook the historical fact that rhetoric and philosophy form the twin foundations of Western education. What would be a stake in making such an acknowledgement? Nothing less than accepting that writing–the physiological, psychological, social, cultural, and technological processes of producing text–contains uncertainties requiring rigorous intellectual investigation, replete with its own set of methodologies. From my own perspective, I would approach these uncertainties as aporias. But this articulation of writing causes significant intellectual problems for every other discipline, as they all rely upon writing as a fundamentally unproblematic mode to exchange information and thought.

As Derrida has argued, the functioning of Western knowledge relies upon the occlusion of the aporias of writing. In place of, or rather as a defense against, these aporias, the academy creates “problems,” specifically the problem that “students cannot write.” As a solution to this problem, we create composition and writing across the curriculum as technical solutions to technical problems. This is not to say that students cannot become more skilled at particular types of discursive practices; obviously they can and do. And perhaps this is in itself a worthy enough goal for WAC. However, this can never “solve” the problem of student writing, which in the end has nothing to do with technical skill. Furthermore, as long as academics remain fixated upon this problem, as they must in order to maintain the illusion of their own disciplinary integrity, they will never be able to acknowledge or understand rhetoric, let alone teach writing. In this sense WAC is pointless.

Now, it may strike you that by saying WAC is pointless that I would be suggesting that it should not be pursued. To the contrary, it is WAC’s pointlessness that makes it an interesting enterprise: a problem-generating, mutational machine of endless possibility. If approached with an understanding of aporia, WAC might constitute a mechanism for the ongoing deterritorialization of academic spaces with the concommitant potential for making rhizomatic connection. However, when such tasks are in the hands of managers fixated upon the specific economy of “efficiency” and “focus groups,” rather than the general economy of symbolic exchange, such potentials are likely to be missed.

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