I was discussing the role of the cultural and political in professional writing courses earlier today and thought I would expand on some ideas.
1. There is at least a tradition, if not a current practice, of perceiving profesisonal writing as apolitical. In technical writing, it is the articulation of writing as transparent communication of information. In more “creative” genres, it’s about finding your individual voice and being “true” to yourself.
It’s not so much that I would suggest that technical writers are not trying to communicate or that in some sense writers don’t have particular “voices” or styles that need to be developed and explored. It’s just that this is a rather simplistic way of understanding writing. I’m not sure if you could say that it is a “left” or “right” wing understanding; it certainly is a common understanding. It should hardly be surprising that most people, regardless of politics, understand very little about writing. Certainly, some argue that conservatives, in general, prefer to see the world in black and white, in simplistic terms, moreso than liberals. Maybe so. I will say that seeing writing (or anything else) in a complex way requires a willingness (and a capability) to do some intellectual work.
And, btw, we don’t just invent complexity for the fun of it. We investigate writing practices, uncovering their complexity, because we discover that our more simplistic understanding is incomplete and often misleading.
2. Cultural studies has a long association with rhetoric. Both, at least in my view, study the construction of meaning in communities. Both study how individuals and groups use language and other media to develop and share knowledge, to create and resolve conflicts, and to plan, enact, and review individual and collective action.
Cultural studies offers professional writing methods for understanding how the conventions of discourses are established, maintained, and disseminated; how and why different communities interpret texts differently; how ideology functions to shape the cultural roles and practices of writers and audiences; how technologies interact with meaning-making; and so on.
Simultaneously, cultural studies also uncovers how conventional discursive practices work to maintain the status quo, naturalize mainstream ideology, and marginalize non-dominant voices. In doing so, it woudl suggest not only that our conventional, “simplistic,” ideas of writing are not only simple but are also political and in service to the dominant ideology.
3. In doing so, cultural studies politicizes professional writing in a way that makes the job of teaching writing much more difficult. Students must not only learn to write professionally; they must also learn to negotiate the ideological mechanisms of discourse. Also, by insisting on dealing with the ideological undercurrent of discourse, cultural studies draws professional writing to the left in a context where it is impossible to be apolitical.
Here, it becomes necessary to deal with racism, sexism, all the familiar mechanisms of ideological control. However doing so also politically charges the classroom as conservatives and liberals act out the roles they learn from watching the network news. In all this conflict, and in the context of the deeply conservative mainstream media slandering higher education, how much is accomplished here? And how much of this type of conversation will help students to negotiate the difficult ideological terrain of professional writing?
4. Thinking about my students as writers helps me to keep these concerns focused. For me, this focus brings me back to the issue of authorship and composition itself. At the heart of our simplistic conventional understanding of writing is the author-in-control-of-the-text. When the fiction of authorship is deconstructed, we are left with insight into the network of symbolic relations with which the writer interfaces and the process of ripping material from the network, mixing it together, and burning it into a new composition: a recursive process that blurs the distinction between writer and network.
This does not obviate us from responsibility for our productions, but it does help us understand that we do not simply “author” our texts. As authors, students become the target of critique: “your text is racist” implies “you are racist.” I am not interested in this tactic of bad conscience. I don’t think anyone really is. However, by understanding the network of ideology and composition more complexly, we move into viewing the writer as logged into an ideological-symbolic information system.
Subject positions, such as “the” author or “the” college student or whatever mix’n match identity of various sexual, racial-ethnic, gender, class, and consumer categories, constitute, to use a rough analogy, a network protocol for how one is identified in the system. We are these things, more or less, or more accurately more and less: we are more than these categories suggest and we are also less than all that might be attributable culturally to these categories.
In giving up our identity as the author, we can depersonalize our relationship to the texts we produce while remaining responsible for them. Similarly, in recognizing our subjecitivity as ideological fiction, we open an impersonal space for investigating ideology, without attachment. I should not that the fact that identities are ideological fictions clearly does not mean that they do not have a material impact upon us or our culture, or that we can simply step away from them. They are sticky; or better put, they have a strong gravitational pull.
What has interested me about writing, from the very start of graduate school, is how writing practice might offer a line of flight, escape velocity. Writing’s very materiality; its pluridimensional insistence on being other than one’s thoughts; the cracks that open in the VR of ideology through experimenting with the other virtual, the unfolding of thought in the network.
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Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence 
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