I’ve been busy this week redesiging and launching the blog and website for Words in Motion and Growth Tactics. Words in Motion is the name of the small business my wife Rhonda and I have together. We offer a range of professional writing services from copywriting and ghostwriting to research and communications consulting. I have found it a useful experience in relation to my teaching as well; it keeps me grounded in the “real world” experience of working as a professional writer

It’s not simply a practical matter either. When doing this work I am often put in mind of Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy:”

“The logographer, in the strict sense, is a ghost writer who composes speeches for use by litigants, speeches which he himself does not pronounce, which he does not attend, so to speak, in person, and which produce their effects in his absence. In writing what he does not speak, what he would never say, and, in truth, would probably never even think, the author of the written speech is already entrenched in the posture of the sophist: the man of non-presence and of non-truth.” (Dissemination 68)

My colleague David Franke made note of the irony with which I approach this freelance writing. Less generously you might call it cynicism. That is, my wife and I are always generating copy for products we think are questionable and writing books on topics that do not particularly interest us, stating perspectives we don’t particularly agree with. Now that said, I don’t believe either of us could write or would write something we though was totally unethical or to which we had a deep political opposition. However, I do approach the work I do with a certain awareness of the irony of trying to convince someone of something you do not believe yourself. That is, something that I do not think.

Derrida suggests though that this is always already the case with writing. Writing is not about presence, about what I think. It is instead the dissemination of thought, of thought without presence.

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