Can any one of my (even more open minded) readers, therefore, imagine the National Council of Teachers of English or the College Composition and Communication Conference having as its conference theme the question Should writing be taught? (This is no mere question of whether writing can be taught; obviously it can be as either craft or teone. This is no mere position based on “vitalism.) As far as I’m concerned, this political-cum-ethical question can/should no longer be begged And yet, it must be begged; for if it were, indeed, asked and then acted on, it might very well put an end to the NCTE or the CCCC or at least change their ends radically. (The asking might bring with it insight and then disempower the field.) Blindness here may be necessary. As both Burke and de Man tell us, a way of sceing is a way of not seeing: The dominant (therefore, blinding) language game of the profession of composition (i.e., the language une of knowledge) must disregard, or actually can make little immediate sense of, the two aspects of this third counterthesis. My suggestions (perhaps made by a jester), therefore, automatically have to be ruled out of court. (That’s often the fate of the differend.)

Vitanza, “Three Countertheses”

I often reference this passage here. It’s an important context, specifically in thinking about the dominant language game of the profession of composition.

There is a weird elision in composition pedagogy that was evident to me from my first year as a composition instructor so I imagine it is obvious to you all as well.

How does my interpretation of text become inscribed as a value placed upon another person identified as the author of the text? The answer is through an incorporeal transformation that is secured by territorializing institutional forces. In other words, the student can question my grade within an existing judicial system but the idea that students can be graded or that a professor’s valuation of a text can become an institutional valuation of a person is not questioned. There was never anything more “real” than a social construction there.

So all we need to do is establish a social construction that says we can assign values to people based on the AI-generated text they submit to us. It sounds weird maybe but there’s nothing less epistemologically or ontologically valid about doing that than what we have been doing. The only place where it does seem invalid is from within the social construction that validates the current mode of valuation: as I said before, “the dominant language game of the profession of composition.”

But I wouldn’t pin this on a single discipline. In this regard, compositionists reflect general academic and cultural values about authorship. That is, it’s not our language game really, though we are its professionals. From my perspective, pedagogy becomes a strange, attenuated game as the ideological structures of universities constrain becomings and thus learning. It’s why the first paper I wrote as a graduate student discussed writing pedagogy in relation to Barthes’ treatment of Bunraku.

Gen AI operation in composition processes calls attention to the network like Bunraku, pantomime, and Searle’s Chinese room. Can you tell the dancer from the dance?

OK. Another thought experiment. Imagine you are looking at a text. What do you know empirically about it? What do you know in terms of its secondary empirical qualities? Shall we shift toward your subjective response, including the way you turn these pixels into words, into patterns of meaning? Where is that coming from? Not the screen, right?

You want to assign me a grade for your BS experience? Maybe I should just hand you some AI slop if you’re going to be like that.

As we know, for most purposes, Gen AI can produce well-written texts. But composition was never really trying to teach people how to produce well-written texts. That has always been an ideological proxy for the valuation of reason internal to a mind: we are grading people as “thinkers.” Unfortunately that “reason internal to a mind” never existed, and the proxy was always a fig leaf over an abyss which has now been blown away.

This was what my dissertation was about.. the cybernetic operation of modern pedagogy as a black box. As Lester Faigley observed, “many of the fault lines in composition studies are disagreements over the subjectivities that teachers of writing want students to occupy” (Fragments). (Also one of my favorite (fault) lines.) And we still find fault in these places, including the subjective relationship of authorship with generative AI. How should we occupy such positions? We cannot not occupy positions in relation to AI, as AI exists and permeates our media infrastructure.

Who should be found at fault in these matters of concern? This returns me to Vitanza’s question: should writing be taught? The essay’s context gives the question a narrow focus: should there be composition and composition studies?

And I would say the answer to that question is Yes in a way today that was not so evident 30 years ago. Why?

Because we do not know what writing will become. We have imagined and sought to secure writing as the description of a particular set of relations among humans, institutions, and media technologies. These relations (these collective assemblages of enunciation) have been integral to our sense of self, community, and world for millennia. And though they have certainly evolved, nothing before now has so clearly presented us with the existential realization that “our words” aren’t exactly ours. It’s been in the background since the Phaedrus, but we’ve lived with the cognitive dissonance and made it work through the institutional balancing acts of Latourian hybrids.

And probably we will again, but not so much at the moment. So the study of writing is needed.

So I will say yes writing should be taught and that to do so NCTE/CCCC will need to change their ends radically if they wish to participate but that’s not my problem.

(And two big thumbs up to AI today for that image, LOL. Way to sell yourself!)