Typically, the adjective "professional" in Professional Writing is read as job preparation. For some (especially parents of students) this is a positive; for others, like many faculty in the humanities, not so much. For the latter, job preparation comes at the curriculuar expense of the humanistic/liberal arts education they value. I’ve written about this before.

However, I was thinking the other day how this reaction points to the way in which the term professional has been degraded, and perhaps not without good reason. Traditional professionals, like doctors, teachers, and lawyers, certainly no longer garner the respect they once did. Each of these professions, like my own academic profession, has been enveloped in the capitalist, marketplace logic that holds sway over nearly all of our culture. It used to be that a professional didn’t perform his/her duties "for the money." That instead, professionals operated by a different ethical code and motivation.  Maybe that’s pollyanna and was never really the case, but certainly the contemporary professional environment is far more defined by monetary concerns than it ever was in the past.

So while I would not want to ignore the current material-ideological context, at least in terms of the title of our program, I’m thinking of a more idealistic notion of the "professional writer." The professional writer, then, does not write "for the money" (though obviously he/she makes a living by writing). Maybe I just don’t have what it takes, but I’ve never been very good at writing something that I didn’t believe in. It doesn’t feel good, and I don’t think I could sustain a career doing such work.

Now one could think about this in terms of a "higher calling" that suggests some ethical and political commitments (whatever they may be). That’s not quite my style. I prefer something a little darker, monstrous, material: a commitment to writing "itself," as the material unfolding of thought. I suppose one could Romanticize this as a profession of "Dark Arts." Deleuze and Guattari write of writing as sorcery. That works ok for me. However, I think of Derrida recognizing that writing technologies predate the development of history, science, and philosophy and plays an integral role in their development. Writing is both inside and outside human civilization; inside and outside of consciousness.

What does it mean to profess writing then? To commit oneself to an unnameable, prehistoric, uncivilized process? I suppose it has largely meant to attempt to domesticate writing, though for some it has certainly meant to follow it into the wild. Like the shaman/sorcerer, the recluse writer lurks at the edge of society, a broker with an external force; normal folk approach the door with trepidation: "Please, work your magic for me." The writer accepts payment but ultimately is not beholden to the dictates of the marketplace but rather the covenants that bind him/her to outside. There are rules… an etiquette to be observed.

Ok, maybe that sounds over the top, some obfuscating mumbo jumbo, but think about Ulmer’s approach to this in Internet Invention: the writer is the donor, the tester, who in turn faces his/her own test.

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