Raul Sanchez "Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity"

I had a chance to read Raul Sanchez’ “Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity” the other day and want to summarize some of his ideas, as well as discuss my conversation with my friend Jake.  Sanchez posits that composition studies has traditionally differentiated between the writer and the subject ― “the latter remains a figure with which to theorize systematically, while the former is encounterd materially and individually” (234) ― with the field focusing on the former.  But he argues that, because of “recent and emerging technologies” (234), the distinction is withering.  Theories of the subject, particularly in the 1980s and 90s, positioned the subject as an abstract phenomenon: “agents, texts, and contexts are interconnected” as Sanchez remarks “and are all, in fact, participants in thoroughgoing textuality” (235).  But new technologies (I would imagine he means new media writing apparatuses, although he alludes to “nodes,” “networks,” and “clouds”) have engendered the discourse of the subject to become a materiality, one in which Sanchez hopes can be susceptible to empirical research and pedagogy.  Such a reconfiguring, or rather retheorizing, of the discourse of the subject will provide composition studies with a writing-subject figure, as well as a way to explore a “complex relationship between agency and textuality” (235).  This retheorizing also redefines identity, which Sanchez argues, “names an aspect of the idea of traffic between textuality and the ‘outside’ of texuality, the aspect with which composition studies historically is most concerned: agency” (235).

Sanchez believes that composition studies’ deployment of modernist and postmodernist frameworks are necessary and useful in understanding the writer and writing, but also posits that these frameworks need to extend further in terms of developing a writer-subject and the study of writing.  These two texts (I’m calling them texts) can be explored by appropriating empiricism. Since we already “look at texts ― graphic, filmic, electronic, or otherwise ― in systematic ways,” (238) as Sanchez contends, and hence we engage with empirical methods through which to understand the inside and outside of texts, resistance to empiricism is unproductive. Rather, a redeployment of empiricism in composition studies (or writing studies, as Sanchez highlights, which is where comp. studies is headed) will be fruitful Sanchez also identifies the opposition, likely from a postmodernist, to his argument: reimagining empiricism as the “old and familiar idea of strategic essentialism” (238). But Sanchez seeks ways to understand the systems that give texts the function of representations. It is here where I feel Sanchez is calling for a reenvisioning of structuralism, as he sees identity as an “event” of and in textuality (Raul might be frowning now as I’m attempting to cast his theory into a category). 

Sanchez also argues for what he calls neo-empirical theory: the act of writing, which is an “identity-based cultural activity” (240), produces identity as a rhetorical act (rather than a philosophical concept) (240). This theory, as Sanchez says Satya Mohanty articulates, suggests that experience ― as a way to process information, rather than an ontology ― is “mutable or plastic.” 

Sanchez’ theory does appear to contrast with Barthes’ theoretical concept signifiance, a term that suggests the subject is positioned as a “loss”, a “disappearance” (in other words, is deconstructed) during production, enunciation, symbolization (and in our case, writing) (Stephen Heath’s Note, 10). Of course, Barthes connects this moment of deconstruct to jouissance (an English translation is difficult because of the range of meaning in jouissance), but what’s interesting is that while both Sanchez and Barthes see identity and the act of writing as a process, each scholar differs in the content of the subject in the process: the former scholar does not suggest a sense of “loss” in the subject or act of writing, but (I believe) implies that a production produces identity ; the latter scholar suggests that in the act of writing, or speech, or language production, the subject is subjected to a deconstruction, a “loss.”  I’d like to think more about both these scholars' positions and as I will read Barthes in the next couple of days, I plan to return to some of these ideas in another post.

Identity, as Sanchez argues, “is a function of social and historical relations and interactions; it is not an epistemological or ontological concept.  It is a rhetorical action-an event” (241). Shortly after this claim, Sanchez brings his argument back to emerging technologies.  Such apparatuses offer events, and, as Sanchez remarks, an event or “eventiness” may be better understood “as a function, one that can emerge at once within and as the discourse of identity: at the level of bodies, whether utterly material or thoroughly discursive” (243), I conceptualized an event as a process, but also wondered where the particular moments in which events materialize are.  Sanchez suggests that events take place in the act of writing; and that this act of writing is identity.  In other words, Sanchez’ theoretical position is that identity and acts of writing are both events, which would complicate simplistic notions of experience as constructions of identity or objectivistic, or essentialist, approaches to identity.

I’ve summarized and cited much of Sanchez’ article for the purposes of my own understanding. I think Raul’s article will fit nicely with Sid’s Writing Technologies course in the fall.  I’d possibly like to explore more of the writing-subject (or, as Raul articulates in the end of his article, writingsubject), in particular with a certain technological apparatus.  Ultimately, Sanchez seeks a new methodology in considering what happens in the act of writing in relationship to technology, and so I’d like to work with this methodology and see what arises.  

Jake and I also spoke a couple of days ago about the piece and I wish I had written more notes, but here are some basic ideas.  Jake highlighted the point that Raul was saying that postmodernism and postmodernists are still caught in epistemological concepts.  Jake also underscored a key line from the piece, “Rather than retheorize the question, postmodern composition theory simply set it [the writer] aside on the grounds that it was too ideologically loaded with bad epistemological assumptions” (242). Hence, the reason why Raul encourages scholars to consider the limitations of postmodernism and move beyond its theoretical framework.

Jake also highlighted Raul’s primarily interest is in agency.  Early in the piece, Raul remarks, “More than ever, the study of writing needs a working and timely theory of writing, of which a crucial component would be a newly theorized writing-subject.  This theory of writing would try to explain how texts are made, distributed, received, and redistributed in contemporary systems” (236). When Jake brought up the point that Raul may be attempting to identify an agency outside of the text (or maybe I misunderstood Jake), I think Raul, and other scholars, would hit a wall and develop a flawed position.  Agency outside of a text would mean that the agent exists outside the text and any historical and spatial moment. But cultural, economic and political factors always constitute agents and agency, as texts move with, against, work off, destroy, produce, and transform each other and evoke and disseminate meanings. The only kind of agency that would exist outside a text would have to be a God-figure or some kind of omnipotence.  Yet, I still conceive of texts as symbiotic. I know Raul wants to move away from epistemological and ontological concepts, but I’m not sure one could propose an agency outside a text without some considerations of these philosophical branches. In other words, Derrida’s famous remark, “there is nothing outside the text” continues to ring true. (Btw, it is quite possible that Raul is NOT trying to identify an agency outside the text; in fact, I think, and Raul alludes several times, he concurs with Derrida’s idea of texts and the “outside.” Jake and I, or maybe just I, may be completely wrong in reading Raul’s argument).

I wonder though if Raul is trying to articulate an agency more along the lines of invention, but invention in the sense of an inconceivable agency now, but materialized in the process in the future. Just a last thought.  

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Print.

Sánchez, Raúl. “Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity.” College English 74.3 (2012): 234-246.