Vol. 2, No. 1: Contents

Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature

Virginia Anderson
Division of Rhetoric and Composition
University of Texas at Austin

The Usual Suspects

I occupy that space named by that devil term, Modernist Author. I am the one who has marked that space and hurled typewriters at people and gouged out eyes.
This demonic representation of the "author" fits nicely with postmodern theory, which sees the author's role as socially constructed, even fabricated. From such theory, we can move quickly to portray authors as metaphorically doing violence to the social debts underlying their creative efforts; we can imagine them usurping illegitimate authority when they defend the pristine original genius of their words. Yet, as an "author," I think that along with all it does say, there is much that theory doesn't say about the author's role.
I can partly explain what I think is missing by turning to an article Susan Romano shared with me while we were planning the presentation based on our HyperCard project. In "They Became What They Beheld: The Futility of Resistance in the Space of Electronic Writing," Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan also construct a representation of the modernist author. As I read, and thought about my own experiences trying to occupy this writerly space, I found myself writing "No, No, No!" in the margins. I can't be sure that these are the same Nos Susan heard/read me as uttering as we worked together on our project, but I think that in some ways they might have been. With all the best intentions, Susan shares with Moulthrop and Kaplan the sense that the space James Caan occupies in the film Misery and I try to create for myself is somehow like a castle on a hill, well-fortified, permanent, sanctified, or, as Moulthrop and Kaplan say, "definitive and immutable" (224) and "formally fixed and stable" (222). They think that I think that I cannot be approached in this castle, and that I revel in my untouchability. Moulthrop and Kaplan say that hypertextual innovations blow holes in my "pathological" and warlike fortification, so that my space will be gloriously transformed by the interactive, wildly democratic mutations engendered by a brave new hypertextual world.
Moulthrop and Kaplan are not the first nor will they be the last to put forward this formulation of print culture. In fact, I have chosen to call myself and my fellow authors "the usual suspects." We are regularly rounded up by postmodern scholarship to be interrogated and deconstructed, and now, it seems - at least if the scenario in Misery is any indication - we are also to have our ankles broken, and will only grudgingly be allowed to answer with a bit of eye-gouging. After all, we are the perps; we started all the nastiness, it seems.
But Moulthrop and Kaplan tell us that the only reading that really counts is the resistant reading, the "strong, independent" reading in which, in Gregory Ulmer's words, we "choose to use [our] cultural awareness to resist that prescribed way of reading" in which a text asks to be read (qtd. in Moulthrop and Kaplan 226). They even desire that their students will read against them (228). Here, I'm going to oblige them by offering a resistant reading. I'm going to open the gates and let go a volley, and on my shot, if it finds a target, will be inscribed a plaintive description of the view from the top of the hill.
In Moulthrop's and Kaplan's scenario, the hinterlands and English department basements (filled with computers, I guess) are home to real, joyous, living writing. Inspired students, brave teachers, and stalwart researchers pour out their wisdom, hope, and angst in a grand proliferation. Left to itself, this production would burgeon evangelistically and change the world. But enter the demons: a cartel of publishers, authors, and their henchmen, traditional teachers. To these demons, this wonderful outpouring is a threat. They must make money - all the money. They labor to create an economy of scarcity, control supply, and jack up demand for their work. They invent markers of value, inscribe them on their own products, and sort by arbitrary, self- serving standards, deciding, with carte-blanche omnipotence, what "acceptable" means. Not surprisingly, very little of the prodigious natural production passes as good enough. All this deviltry, of course, is built into print culture, which freezes and commodifies tiny slices of what would otherwise be a homogeneous babel of equally valuable outpourings. Print culture, competitive and greedy, removes the works of authors from the flux of discourse, stops the spontaneous flow of conversation, sets the authors apart from would- be challengers. It stops the word.

Economies of Scarcity and Otherwise
Classical and hence convincing as this model seems, it is naive. In his study of the academy, Worktime, Evan Watkins reminds us that our critical reading of consumer culture risks being similarly simplistic; his critique is illuminating here. The naive idea resembles the one advanced by Moulthrop and Kaplan: that producers invent intrinsically worthless products and then artificially inscribe worth on them, creating desire for these products through advertising. This is the "dupe" theory of consumer culture, a theory now being critiqued. It assumes that consumers are blind believers in capitalist inducements. It would follow perfectly from this theory that the more value you can impart to an item, the more money you can get for it, and one clear way of making an item "valuable" is to make it scarce.
While some markets do operate this way, to see this tactic as producers' and advertisers' only strategy is a reductive view of their goals. Many markets operate, not by selling a few extremely rare and high-priced articles, but by producing as many units as they think the public will purchase, as often lowering the price in order to sell more as raising it to sell fewer units at a higher cost. While advertisers do try to pump up desire for products, they recognize that only a portion of the total population will buy any given item. But the remainder - the unconverted - constitute not a contingent of lost souls but (to switch to more appropriate predatory metaphors) a new territory to conquer, an "uncaptured share." The producers go back to their drawing boards, give the product a tweak, and come out with a whole new line of merchandise to appeal to the holdouts (Watkins 180-81). Quite simply, producers in these markets would supply as many products, and as many different varieties of products, as they think people will buy. Numbers of products proliferate rather than shrink.
I have invested so much time in laying out this view of producer/consumer relations because I think book publishing, to a great extent, works this way. Book publishers, far from wanting to hold down sales, would purchase and market as many books as they think people will be willing to buy. Look, just as an example, at the textbook market. Look at the St. Martin's/Bedford catalogue, with its page after page of composition readers. If they have one bestseller, do they set it on a pedestal and freeze production? On the contrary. They produce clone after clone, like so many Hollywood rip-offs of Macaulay Culkin movies. Go into a bookstore. Does this look like a marketplace of scarcity to you?
I do not deny the competition that takes place in this capitalist arena. But it is not capitalism that chokes off writing. Capitalism prays/preys for more and more people capable of doing certain kinds of writing, and proliferation is not limited by the rapaciousness of publishers. They nurture it. The limiting factor, my friends, is us. They will only publish what we will buy.

Whence Acceptability
Yes, what they publish is limited by a conception of "acceptability," of what somehow makes the grade. This is a production question, shaping what gets set down in the first place. The question here, posed by Moulthrop and Kaplan, is Who Decides? Is it an oppressive conspiracy of "literary gatekeepers" who seek to "authorize" and hence "control literary value" (223-4)? Moulthrop and Kaplan point out that the modes of production in print culture are so "scarce and costly . . . [that] only the most popular or the most highly regarded writing can command them" (223). But they make a distinction in this claim that they do not explore. Clearly we are meant to envision the gatekeepers described above as doing this "high regard[ing]" that gets a book through the portals. But to what extent do literary gatekeepers also make writing "popular"? Reading "They Became What They Beheld," one would assume that both processes, that of deciding what works should be highly regarded and that of deciding what will be popular, are deliberate and willful, performed in tandem by the same people, the exclusionary, elitist guard. Actually, I cede their point about literary regarding. I think such a cartel does exist, I think most of us may have helped sustain it, and I think it is at least partly driven by a subtextual economics. After all, as long as there are deep texts, there will have to be experts to dredge them. But popularity is something else.
I define popularity as one of those nebulous qualities that makes writing "acceptable" enough that someone will pay for the means to disseminate it, and from here in the castle, popularity does not look like a benediction granted from above by a priesthood. No, it looks like a slippery, unpredictable negotiation. Editors, rejecting manuscripts, write things like, "I enjoyed this book, and agree that the writer has talent, but I don't know how I would market something like this." Or "there has never been a strong market for books on this subject." At a writers' conference long ago, I was told - and have since come to agree through experience - that "happy endings are in great demand." I go to a writers' group. "If I picked up your book in the grocery store," one of my colleagues tells me, "I'd toss it right back onto the shelf after reading your first page." As I digest her comment, sitting there with the charred remains of a manuscript five years in the writing before me, I wonder very much who decides what's popular. I, The Author, certainly don't.
So, when it comes to deciding what's popular and hence disseminated, who keeps the gate? In this post-Foucauldian era, I don't make the mistake of saying that the public or any member thereof has absolute power. The way it looks from here, editors try to figure out what the people want, people's choices are constrained by what editors think enough of them want, and all this is finally constrained by the fact that, as Moulthrop and Kaplan rightly say, the funding for dissemination is finite, and choices have to be made. Meanwhile the author, that all-powerful mogul in the castle, starts to look more like an insect caught in the web than like the cunning spider helping to trap hapless student texts and suck them dry.
In part, you'll see, I'm agreeing with hypertext theory. There is no
Real
author. But I'm disagreeing with Moulthrop and Kaplan. I argue that their demonized modernist author, their print-sanctified Lucifer, is always already captured in the multiplicity of cultural power, is already as much part of an ongoing discourse over value as any kernel text jousted at by resistant students in their hypertexts.

[Usual Suspects][Definitive Forever][Works Cited]

The Usual Suspects

Economies of Scarcity and Otherwise

Whence Acceptability

Real