Writing Dialogically: Bold Lessons from Electronic Text by Fred Kemp It was during my seventh or eighth year of teaching writing that I realized that I wasn't teaching writing but was instead teaching a form of basket-weaving, and not doing a bad job of it. The baskets my students learned to weave were sturdy, prosaic affairs that could hold just what I designed them to carry, and no more, but not much less either. If you saw these baskets lined up along side the road, you'd grudgingly compliment them on their uniformity and minimal structural integrity and the diligence that went into the weave and, most of all, the sheer persistence required of anyone who would submit to the mindless discipline of twisting the staw here and there, here and there, for something that wasn't a whole lot different from what had gone before, and promised to be little different from what would come after. I was shocked to find that I was teaching basket weaving instead of writing, and that I myself was losing the abiltity to distinguish between the two. It wasn't entirely my fault. I had always carried an overhead of idealism that was growing heavier by the year. I was certain my students simply had to write well, had to write well, or they would be placed at a great disadvantage in a society that valued the freight that a man or woman's words carried. The writer must transmit meaning effectively. No slippage. No leakage. No tipping of the basket. To that end, I felt I must provide the students a technology of transmission that offered few opportunities for miscarriage, a document consciousness that packed meaning as carefully as one packed grandmother's china. Some forms were tried and true, and these the students must master or risk further complicating the already complicated business of getting the idea across intact to the reader. Experimentation was risky, or lazy. Basket technology was a fairly certain matter. Just follow the form, I told them. What you end up with will be able to do the job. But I learned, about that seventh or eight year, that what I was teaching couldn't do the job, mainly because I had never understood what the real job was. And further, when I looked around me, I realized that none among those colleagues from whom I'd learned the most about teaching (the "practitioner lore" that Steve North posits as dominating the great majority of writing instructors) understood what the real job was, that we had all been operating in an embarassingly procedural way (for presumed individualists and free thinkers). We had taken for granted what our teachers had taken for granted and their teachers before them, back up the line a long way. And that was that words, and the forms within which we carefully laid the words, had the single important function of communication. Our instructional mandate, the collection of student behaviors we promoted in the classroom and through writing assignments, had arisen out of that commonsensical belief. But, I discovered, if you pull that lynchpin, entirely new classroom and assignment structures becomes possible. If communication is the goal of writing, as was universally presumed among my practitioner peers, at least, then the vehicle must be as sturdy as tradition has molded it, and the forms of the ancients were undoubtedly the best master. How foolish it would be to question the collective accomplishments of great men (and a few great women) who seemed to say in every word they wrote that it was the transmission of what they knew (and what the reader didn't) that constituted the central dynamic to writing. Writing's only failure would be to leak or spill meaning during the maneuver of transmission, and hence cheat the reader of the writer's full magnanimous offer. To insure a safe passage, the text must be constructed firmly and formally, reducing risk by reducing idiosyncracy and anomoly. Nobody wants a aquaduct designed and built by an iconoclast. The container model of writing revealed a subtle bifurcation to the universe that I had not previously considered, at least for those first seven or eight years. The world was divided into writers and readers, or more directly, into knowers and unknowers, senders and receivers. The categories were contextual, of course, since a knower in one knowledge domain could be (and probably was) an unknower in another, and therefore be at the same time a writer about one thing and a reader about another. But the world in general, and certainly the educational system, was fairly clear about assigning the roles of knower and unknower in specific arenas, at least, and in my writing class the composition textbook writer was a knower and the student an unknower. The textbook writer sent and the student received, and it was up to writer to send with as little transmission noise as possible, and it was up to the student to make something approximating the barest minimal effort (as a student) to receive the professionally delivered goods. Writing can communicate to the self as well. As Lester Faigley has noted, " Since the beginning of composition teaching in the late nineteenth century, college writing teachers have been heavily invested in the stability of the self and the attendant beliefs that writing can be a means to self-discovery and intellectual self-realization" (15). But a "what's wrong with this picture" feeling begin to emerge after some years of tacitly accepting the above general assumptions. The baskets that my students were weaving weren't carrying anything. There were obvious flaws in construction, but not so many or of such seriousness to evacuate all transmittable material. There were, to be sure, some clever things the students would do with their texts, often consciously derived from techniques with a decided creative writing bent, or obviously culled from fiction and poetry or even from interesting films. I praised this ingenuity, this risk-taking even as I didactically reasserted that verbal cleverness should never distort the message, the meaning. It was what they had to say that was important, and the way they said it must always reflect that central fact, though sometimes a little playing around could make what they had to say more palatable or easier to digest. And then it hit me rather forcibly. I had taught the students to construct the vehicle within which to carry meaning (infuriatingly crude as those vehicles inevitably were), but had never given them any chance of actually becoming writers, because I had never provided any way by which they might come to understand what meaning itself is. And then even more forceably I came to realize that I myself, the central distributor of knowledge in my professional domain (little more than my classroom), really didn't understand why I was teaching writing. I myself had bought -- lock, stock, and barrel -- a version of meaning that, I had discovered, could do nothing other than inhibit writing and articulation and the very skills I intuited were so important in the modern (or any other) world. A quote by Gadamer kept coming to mind: "Language has its true being only in conversation, in the exercise of understanding between people" (Wachterhauser 32). Brice Wachterhauser says Gadamer is implying that "deep adequate views of things cannot in a strict sense be guaranteed at all, even by 'method,' but can be worked out only in conversation. Talk, 'mere talk' is the source of our growing awareness of how things really are in the world" (32-33). Rorty is saying much the same thing when he writes, eschewing an attempt to derive "certainty" from either a scientistic accuracy of perception or a mathematical purity of formula, that "our certainty will be a matter of conversation between persons, rather than a matter of interaction with nonhuman reality" (157), and again, If we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature, we will not be likely to envisage a metapractice which will be the critique of all possible forms of social practice. So holism produces. . .a conception of philosophy which has nothing to do with the quest for certainty. (171) Kenneth Bruffee quotes Michael Oakeshott's view of education as "a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. . . . And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance" (113). Bruffee goes on to comment that Oakeshott reverses the common foundational understanding of the relationship between thought and conversation that has been eloquently stated in a recent defense of conversation as the mode of education at St. John's College: "Conversation is the public complement to that original dialogue of the soul with itself that is called thinking." The position taken in this statement is that we can talk with one another because we can think. Oakeshott's position and the position taken in this book is the contrary, that we can think because we can talk with one another. (113) Conversation, or highly interactive verbal exchange, here takes on a primacy not afforded it in modernist thinking, as that which not merely displays conceptual deep structures but actually constitutes them. The implication is that if we are to understand "how things really are in the world," we can not achieve this understanding by attempting to appropriate the carefully modulated (as in written formally) concepts of an individual. And yet it was "method" in writing that assumed principal authority in modernist concepts of writing and especially in the teaching of writing. Sharon Crowley describes traditional concepts of what school writing accomplished: "The constant study and practice of discourse could be justified on the ground that it immersed its students in the exercise of method; method in turn exercised the mind along its natural lines and thus strengthened it" (126). This athletic view of writing presupposes meaning as essentially a function of individual perception and mental processing, and privileges the transmission or communication model of writing. Ironically, the essay, as it is typically constituted in academic thinking, may be the most oppressive, inhibiting, and actually misleading form of writing we can impose upon our students, a principal constituent in what Ted Nelson, the father of hypertext, has called "an era of school-induced stupor" (3/16). I first gained this insight (or perhaps it should be called "outersight") by virtue of the digital revolution that occurred in the 1980s. I used a computer for writing for several years before an accumulating unconscious comprehension burst out into the open. I had read McLuhan and Ong, and even Heim's The Electric Word, and presumed that their perspectives on language and communication were generally right, and McLuhan's famous "the medium is the message" played across my consciousness in various ways without influencing my hard core understanding of what writing is and what I was trying to teach. Yet, this group of writers, revolutionary as their theses appeared, were still operating from a principally modernist point of view. Heim, for instance, feared that "writing skills may become peripheral to the network" (94), clearly opposing the two in what I have begun to see as an unnecessary polarity. A kind of writing skill obviously suffers over the network, but "writing skill" as a fixed, formal set of characteristics is a fiction, but this was an understanding that had to come out of experience. The digitalizing of my text, my words, over and over in my word processor, began to affect my understanding of what for thirty-five years I had believed words were and did. Most influencing was the constant, re-occurring evidence of how extraordinarily fluid the letters and words existed before my eyes, as I cut and pasted and inserted and deleted and merged and indented. What I was watching on that monitor was not the loading of my ideas into the text the way steveadores load a freighter, but a kind of organic process of growth, microbes spawning beneath the electron microscope. I was experiencing a new portal into my own writing, not a magnification so much as a view I had previously been incapable of making sense of and so had ignored for many years. In societal terms, Heims describes what was happening to me as a manifestation of "transformation theory," the notion "that basic intellectual changes acompany widespread innovation in symbol manipulation" (97). Richard Lanham makes the point more fiercely: What happens when text moves from page to screen? First, the digital text becomes unfixed and interactive. The reader can change it, become writer. The center of Western culture since the Renaissance-really since the great Alexandrian editors of Homer-the fixed, authoritative, canonical text, simply explodes into the ether. (143) The "canonical text" is the literary equivilent to Holy Scripture, the fixed transmission of a transcendently accurate Turth, one that necessarily suffers from the ambiguities of language, the impossible-to-avoid "noise" of the medium of text. The hope was always to find, as Toulmin calls it, "the scratch line, to serve as a starting point for any 'rational' philosophy" (178), and it was the transcendent characteristics of individual authors, their genius or good luck, that provided them the insight to define where "the scratch line" lay. What was important was the conceptual baggage that the text carried. As Jay David Bolter puts it, the printed text was as an unchanging artifact, a monument to its author and its age [which magnified] the distance between the author and the reader, as the author became a monumental figure, the reader only a visitor in the author's cathedral. (3) As such, an "authoritative" cannonical text models for all writers the implicit and undeniable nature of writing as an always flawed, but impossible to do without, communication. And yet electronic forms of text, as Heim, Landow, Bolter, and Lanham indicate, undermine not just the literary canon but static models of writing as a communication that inevitably works against the deep-structure truths it must convey. Electronic texts, and especially extended email conversations, tend to diminish the authority of the writer in favor of the authority of the writing itself, and thereby reduce the competition between the conceptual freight and the medium of transmission. But I could not accept in an implicit, personal sense such revolutionary intellectual formulations -- as sympathetic as I have always been to Kuhn, Geertz, and Wittgenstein -- without experiencing the transforming phenomena myself. The most virulent resistence to the computer as a writing and text distributing tool comes from people who consider the matter in purely intellectual terms and only put their fingers on the keyboard while dominated by an overwhelming, visceral sense of mistrust, and until I had labored for some time as a mistrustful computerists could I come to see what had been before me all the time. The typewriter had always gauged out each letter from the paper, slammed each letter and word home with such conclusiveness that it became as fixed as any palpable reality, so that the physical text became a set container for its cargo of ideas, and the ideas themselves became anchored to their own manifestations in a way that, I realize now, denied what was really happening during the writing. One could always x out what one wanted to change and type in above or below it new letters or words, or handwrite changes in the margins with arrows and brackets and other means of directing the reader around these faults in the text, and I did this often. Then one retyped the text, creating a new, more faultless text from its messy predicessor. But this always seemed like a process of fixing faults and lapses, or ironing out glitches and bridging gaps. It was a continuing attempt to patch up or smooth out a recalcitrant surface in order to expose the perfect soul of the text that had ported over from my mind in almost metaphysical ways and whose representation was always, necessarily, damaged in transit. The text, throughout the cumbersome (we know now) drafting process on the typewriter or with the pen, was always damaged goods seeking repair. I had an almost Baconian mistrust of all the ways writing corrupts true meaning, the meaning that existed prior to the act of writing, the meaning that had arrived to be encoded and inscribed full-blown from my skull. What I saw on the computer screen displayed a different act altogether. The temporality and fragility of those words frightened me at first. If I kicked the plug loose or a slight power flux hit the house (the sort of thing that dims the lights briefly), the words would be gone, forever. I didn't even know where the words existed in the first place, for I realized that the screen was being rebuilt over and over many times each second and what appeared was at the direction of some internal representation, but where was this internal representation? Smeared across thousand of "memory addresses," whatever they were. From what I could understand reading about RAM ("random access memory"), the "storage" of words depended on no physical proximity, no logical sequencing of elements, nothing that could be comprehended in any commonsense way. The thing just worked and the words were just there, on the screen, and at the slightest disturbance of the electronic environment, they would be gone, like a dream forgotten upon awakening. The words could be made more permanent by saving them to a diskette or hard disk, but not much more permanent. Once saved, they were in another there, inside that little piece of plastic or behind the flashing red light on the front of the computer, and while such words could now survive a loss of power, I have accidently corrupted enough diskettes and crashed enough hard disks to know that words have no secure presence in digital storage media, certainly nothing approximating the stability and security of the typed or written page. Everytime a text is saved to such media, unless explicit instructions are given the computer, the new text completely obliterates the previous one and it is gone as if never written. I was at first considerably bothered at this lack of fixedness, this insecurity, and I know by experience that it vastly troubles new users (those of the "paper generation") and contributes to the tentative nature with which they approach word processing. But what was originally a curse began to reveal itself as a blessing. Once I had been freed (willing or not) from the assumption that writing must progress in these semi-permanent stages on paper drafts, I began to see revision as less a curing or fixing of the text and more a growing of the text, a growing process that can only exist outside the mind in a medium more permanent than neural activities but less fixed than ink and paper. The organic nature of writing may most clearly real itself, as some creatures do, only in a limited environment in which influencing elements are balanced uniquely, such as that provided by the representation of text on a computer monitor. This notion is heresy to those who claim, quite reasonably, that writing or editing on-screen is too difficult. The glow of the tube is unnatural, the clutter of command elements on the screen is too distracting, the scrolling process is too cumbersome, the limited ability to move between pages of the documents too irritating, and on and on. In essence, it just isn't the same. I suspect, further, than editing on-screen challenges attitudes more deeply fixed than even pre-computer editing behaviors, which all but the most adament would admit are, after all, simply habits. It is a well known and often remarked upon that new technologies generate resistence far outstripping the actual economic or procedural disruptions they cause, and the principal cause for such resistence is that changes of a certain magnitude actually challenge complex world views and belief structures in unimaginable ways. Moving from manuscript to print technology or from horse-drawn to automotive technology scewed deeply held personal cosmologies in subtle but nontheless influential ways. The mutability of screen text encourages, over a period of time, the understanding that print and manuscript may not be writing in some foundational sense, but may be only manifestations or variations of writing, and perhaps not the most useful or facilitating manifestations or variations. To those who have invested intellectual capital in a culture that cherishes the stability of inscribed knowledge, the perception that writing may actually do something other than transmit and preserve knowledge, may actually be something other than an efficient means of communication, is likely to be disorienting in profound ways. To such people, the words that appear on a CRT, whether in the course of composing or as text accessed from some other part of the world, may not seem like writing at all, but some perversion of it. Their resistence to such means of writing, storing, distributing, and reading words may transcend the common utilitarian arguments for and against word processing and networks. It was not until I began teaching students in networked-based computer classrooms in the late 1980s that my ideas regarding electronic text began to aggresively challenge my previous understanding of writing as principally communication, either communication with a reader or communication with myself. At that time, and since, I have used in networked classrooms software that allows a number of students to write messages in a "chat" format: one of the two windows on each computer screen is an editing window in which the student can compose and send a comment, and the other window displays all the students' comments in chronological order. It becomes an easy matter for several or all of the students to engage in a "real-time" written conversation, in which the transcript of the conversation is shared at the same time by everyone who is logged on. This process creates a mode of discourse that is not speech and not what we normally think of as writing. It is not speech because the participants are able to compose their remarks in writing, edit them carefully, and either distribute the comments or cancel them at will. Further, the usual collatoral aspects of face-to-face orality are missing, including gestures, appearance, tone of voice, and oral emphasis. On the other hand, it is not what is usually thought of as writing because the comments are delivered interactively, each responding to a context that changes as the "discussion" proceeds. Lester Faigley, a user of such computer-mediated discussion since 1988, calls this "a hybrid form of discourse, something between oral and written, where the conventions of turn-taking and topical coherence are altered" (168). The dictates of form, organization, and reflection that direct the usual writing process must be ignored, for the participant has to keep up with the flow of ideas and does not have the luxury of providing extensive support or editing at length. The type of writing that appears in written conversation is necessarily first-draft writing and hasty. Having performed its function, it will never see a second draft. It is a form of writing, in other words, that seems perfectly appalling to those who embrace a model of writing defined largely as a means of preserving or distributing valuable ideas, the commentary across time and space of great, or at least good, minds, what I have described above as the communication model. Often those who espouse the communication model condemn written conversation and e-mail as sloppy, witless, and even corrupting. But here, the medium that always first appears in a "broken" condition is not fixed, nor is it intended to be fixed, and the utter disregard for the purposely cracked communication of those who promote and use written conversation comes across as an affront to traditional sensibilities. The attitude of the critics is that writing is not being managed as it is supposed to be, and in an educational situation such a thing is not so much negligence as malfeasance. But those who use written conversation see it as highly functional, highly revealing, even revalatory, as it demonstrates interactive writing to be as fluid and liberating in terms of expository prose as screen text is in terms of physically inscribed or inked text. What displays itself in written conversation is a strata of human utterances delivered into chaos that emerges, grows, into a self-structured system of meaning. The point of focus here is not the individual comment, the single message, or even a string of messages from a single discussant. Most often, if not always, text is judged as the measure of the individual who wrote it, divorced from a constructing context. And this is reasonable, since most formal or serious writing is written precisely to be divorced from context, to be cut free from the constraints of time and place in an attempt to attain an objective or acontextual validity. If writing's purpose is to transmit the content of an individual consciousness, then a text's value resides in what it has carried from the writer. Those who read a written conversation grasp a message or a string of messages from an individual and attempt to discover an acontextual quality of conceptualization. The result of the attempt is usually derision, for a single written comment delivered in an interactive stream of comments is necessarily abbreviated, highly contextual, and often incomprehensible. Read in a traditional way, the comments of an individual in a written conversation contain just about every flaw as communication as what is usually considered dysfunctional text. A computer-based written conversation can only be read as a written conversation, and its scheme of development from beginning to end (although "beginning" and "end" have little meaning in such a context) is nothing approximating the scheme of development an individual would use in presenting a structure of ideas. Here there can be no forethought, no foreshadowing, no controlling thesis, no disciplined pattern of exposition, no managed rhetorical elements, no introduction or conclusion, no reoccuring motif, not even a consistent tone, purpose, or audience awareness. None of the criteria normally applied to judge a piece of serious writing can be applied to written conversation. So what is its value? Written conversation suggests that the criteria normally applied to judge a piece of serious writing may be myopic in terms of what writing really is and does. What experts and intellectuals have determined to be writing, the most serious writing, may be only a subset of what writing is and does in society. There may be a more valuable reason to teach writing in K-12 and post-secondary institutions than the traditionally accepted one, which is that writing communicates the expressed concepts of the individual. If, as Clifford Geertz has said, "Human thought is consummately social. . .social in its origins, social in its function, social in its forms, social in its applications," (Lefevre 119), then instructional processes should support that "consummately social" nature. Writing, rather than expressing the individual mind, may be in fact be a constituent of growth, incrementally unimportant but holistically of the greatest importance, of the values and belief structures of a community. This may not, at first, seem an exceptional statement. It is generally held that writers contribute to, if not construct, the cultures to which they belong. The point here is that it is not the writers who contribute to the written conversation: it is their writing. The writers individually, and their comments, exist in importance only as constituents of the system of meaning their comments contribute to. The claim that writers can be separated from their writing may seem disingenuous; it can be demonstrated clearly only in the context of a computer-based written conversation. The important thing to remember here is that the "writing" in a written conversation is much more dependent upon its context than upon the mental energies of its individual writers; the writing is more a creature of the writing that has gone before it and will go after it than it is dependent on the command of language and concepts of the individual writers. It has meaning only in terms of how it responds to and informs the messages that surround it. It is as if each comment in an electronic written conversation begins as the writer's best idea put forward and is quickly sucked into a system of meaning that transcends all of the contributing individuals, that ignores them and informs them at the same time. That which is offered from the periphery is quickly reconstructed as it enters the common stream and becomes an aspect of a significance impossible for any of the discourse participants to have originated or foreseen. Electronic writing therefore becomes the principal element of what Bolter calls "the network culture" in which "the network has replaced the hierarchy." This "culture of interconnections both reflects and is reflected in our new technology of writing" (232-3). The transition has been and will be a difficult one. Those steeped in a transmission or communication model of writing would conceive the transcript of a written communication, if assumed to be the work of an individual, to be in fact the work of a lunatic and each individual comment shallow and uninforming. A written conversation does not "transmit" anything other than its own organic self-construction. There is no constitutive singularity generating the text, no deep structure seeking a clear and adequate surface structure, no controlling intelligence struggling for translation into words, and in fact, no competition between thought and word at all. This is so because the "thought" which the written conversation engenders is purely a product of the conversation itself, not a pale, reconstituted (always imperfectly) copy transmitted from one brain to another. As such, this description resembles Faigley's description of a postmodern theory of text, which decisively rejects the primacy of consciousness and instead has consciousness originating in language, thus arguing that the subject is an effect rather than a cause of discourse. Because the subject is the locus of overlapping and competing discourses, it is a temporary stitching together of a series of often contradictory subject positions. (9) So the question might be asked (and often is asked), how does a written conversation differ from a transcribed oral discussion? The written conversation is in writing and is not merely a compilation of oral comments. The written nature of the interaction provides a reflective and compositional character that deepens the discourse at every stage and strengthens its self-structuring effect. Each individual's contribution can be examined and re-examined at length by the participants, as can entire series of comments. The discussant need not depend upon short-term memory in order to appropriate ideas, positions, and supports, but may rely upon the software for constant review. The comments themselves benefit from the advantages of writing, re-writing, and reflecting, through the nature of the dialogic interaction limits how long a discussant may take to prepare a comment. Long and carefully prepared comments are often ignored, since the discussion may have moved past the point of the long comment as it was being written and it will be seen as irrelevent or too taxing to be responded to. An ignored comment, while certainly existing in the final transcript, has not supported a discussion thread (having led nowhere) and exists as an excluded element of the written conversation. The value of written conversations and extended e-mail exchanges (such as fournd in Internet discussion lists and on NetNews discussions) lies in the organic and open-ended nature of knowledge-making they display, not in a their transmitted factual increments, what are usually, and crudely, termed "information." This "coming to knowing" is made manifest by the processes and results of written conversation in a way impossible or at least much more difficult otherwise. In a sense, knowledge and the manner in which knowledge is made is "scheduled" openly in a written conversation, but not by a single manager or according to any conscious script. About the only way to understand this is as another manifestation of much wider cultural shifts variously characterized as the movement from modernism to postmodrnism, or from a physics-based to a biological or organic model of how human beings make meaning. We have come from searching out the "scratch line," as Toulmin characterized to, to realizing that "there is no scratc [italics in the original]" (178). "In both science and philosoph, then, the intellectual agenda obliges us to pay less attention to stability and system, more attention to function and adaptability (192). In Lanham's terms, What seemed to be happening in the sciences was a movement from the "philosophic" thinking of Newtonian physics to the "rhetorical" thinking of molecular biology or nonlinear physics. Physical science had spent three hundred years looking for its lost keys under a Newtonian lamppost, not because it had lost them there but because, as the old joke has it, the light was better. (869) For Lanham, "The quarrel between the philosophers and the rhetoricians constitutes the quarrel in Western culture (709), in which philosophy asserted the primacy of ontological truths and foundational first principles and rhetoic the primacy of adaptation and function. Assumptions about writing, since the printing press and the ascendancy of copyright laws and notions of intellectual property, have reflected the premises of scientific positivism that have exalted unity, simplicity, and coherence and the singularity of authorial vision. The problem with scientific positivism and a physics-based view of nature that extrapolates universal principles from primal "laws" of particle behavior , according to investigators into Chaos and Complexity theory, is that such science consistently ignores much if not most natural phenomena that do not respond well to laboratory study. In other words, the physicists have studied those things that have been where "the light was better" and ignored the rest as irrelevant. James Gleick, discussing Chaos, points out that particle physics could complete its mission without answering some of the most fundamental questions about nature. How does life begin? What is turbulence? Above all, in a universe ruled by entropy, drawing inexorably toward greater and greater disorder, how does order arise? At the same time, objects of everyday experience like fluids and mechanical systems came to seem so basic and so ordinary that physicists had a natural tendency to assume they were well understood. It was not so. (7) Chaos, the "new science" that emerged primarily from computer-generated perceptions of dynamic processes, throws into question the nature of knowledge itself and how we learn. The modernist presumption, drawing upon an inherent positivism that deducts surface-structure behaviors from deep-structure, a priori principles and characteristics, has assumed that knowledge is primarily a transmitted set of identities and relationships, identities and relationships that were originally codified as an accumulated wisdom over time by men and women of extraordinary talent with the rare ability to perceive and report the deep structure of things. One learns primarily by receiving such transmitted knowledge, primarily through the act of reading. There is no doubt that much of what is called learning functions exactly so, just as much of what science considers important to study can be explained in the terms particle physics applies. But much of learning, perhaps most of learning, may occur in ways that teachers and theorists have consistently ignored for the same reasons that twentieth-century scientists have consistently ignored questions of turbulence and fluid mechanics: such things cannot be reduced to simple cause and effect. An underlying assumption guiding modernist science since Galileo and Copernicus and Newton has been "the postulate of simplicity," or the principle that "Nature always works in the simpliest manner, or goes by the simpliest route" (Doll 10). Those things that do not go by "the simplest route," have been ignored as scientifically uninteresting or trivial. Complexity theory suggests that systems which are "complex, in the sense that a great many independent agents are interacting with each other in a great many ways" (Waldrop 11) cannot be reduced to simple formulations. Instead of such systems responding to basic principles of organization or design, what Mitchell Waldrop has called "paranormal guidance" or principles that can be isolated and reduced to laws and formulas, the agents within the systems interact in such a massively complex fashion that prediction is impossible; "the very richness of these interactions allows the system as a whole to undergo spontaneious self-organization [italics in the original]"(11). Furthermore, these complex, self-organizing systems are adaptive [italics in the original], in that they don't just passively respond to events the way a rock might roll around in an earthquake. they actively try to turn whatever happens to their advantage. Thus, the human brain constantly organizes and reorganizes its billions of neural connections so as to learn from experience. . . . Species evolve for better survival in a changing environment--and so do corporations and industries. And the marketplace responds to changing tastes and lifestyles, immigration, technological developments, shifts in the price of raw materials, and a host of other factors. (Waldrop 11). What allows complex systems to adapt is (1) massive interactivity (or access to communication), and (2) open conditions for feedback. This was Darwin's great insight, that an agent can improve its internal models without any paranormal guidance whatsoever. It simply has to try the models out, see how well their predictions work in the real world, and -- it if survives the experience -- adjust the models to do better the next time. In biology, of course, the agents are individual orgnisms, the feedback is provided by natural selection, and the steady improvement of the models is called evolution. But in cognition, the process is essentially the same: the agents are individual minds, the feedback comes from teachers and direct experience, and the improvement is called learning. (Waldrop 179) William E. Doll Jr. has adapted the work of an important complexity theorist, Ilya Prigogine, a 1977 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry whose books From Being to Becoming (1980) and Order out of Chaos (1984) dealt with non-equilibrium thermodynamics, to instructional theory in ways that inform an understanding of writing. Doll proposes that a modernist or static model of instruction assumes, in Waldrop's terms, a "paranormal guidance" or transmitted knowledge informing the learner, and that this may be an error of modernist thinking. Doll quotes Christopher Lucas: The abandonment of Newtonian mechanics as a paradigm for understanding reality is relaltively well advanced. Yet, the metaphysical view of the world it once inspired has proved rather more durable. Perhaps because of cultural lag, only in recent decades have the philosophical implications of quantum physics begun to reverberate through other knowledge domains. Overall, the new image of reality unfolded by modern science portends a radical revision of how the world and human consciousness itself is to be comprehended. (2) Doll also quotes Prigogine and Stengers (Order out of Chaos) as saying that postmodernism is allowing us to develop " a new dialogue with nature" in which "our vision of nature is undergoing a radical change toward the multiple, the temporal, and the complex." (3). The "multiple, the temporal, and the complex" would seem to support a rhetorical over a philosophical interpretation of reality, or an approach that stresses "adaption and function" over "ontological truths and foundational first principles." The principal difference between traditional instruction and a postmodern instruction is that, unlike traditional instruction which stresses discipline, consistency, and internal coherency, postmodern instruction realizes the functionality of "external pertubations" or disequilibrium introduced into a system in order to exite its feedback mechanisms and allow it to evolve. "A far-from-equilibrium structure is one in the process of becoming" (Doll 4). Complex systems reach equilibrium only when they die or atrophy; disequilibrium is a condition of life and growth. Traditional instruction seeks a facilitating control of the student, more for the purposes of mass processing than for anything that encourages the individual student to grow, and too often in the process excludes as many disequilibriating influences as possible. We attempt to manage the minds of our students to such a degree that we either (1) deaden them to possibility itself, or (2) turn them against all that we are trying to do. Doll posits "thee facets of post-modern thought. . .which have radical implications for curriculum. . . . (1) the nature of open as opposed to closed systems, (2) the structure of complexity (as opposed to simplicity), (3) transformatory (as opposed to accumulative) change" (4). All three facets are displayed in electronic written discusion. The writing (viewing the discourse as a whole) is obviously open-ended: there can be no beginning, middle, or end to a transcipt that is not controlled by a singular purpose or authority. Those who contribute to written discussions act as independent agents seeking a validity within the communal discourse, largely through feedback. Those who contribute to a written discussion and who ignore feedback suffer the fate of having their posts ignored, their participation negated. An open-ended electronic discussion, therefore, operates as a complex system that structures itself without "paranormal guidance" or imposed hierarchical principles. So how does the openly manifested "coming to knowing" of written conversation, the openly displayed schedule of communal knowledge-making, benefit the participant? Certainly not as a source for acquring the usual table of facts or event narratives that provide the participant a kind of personal guidance in future decisions. Written conversations don't usually agree upon such things, a constant source of irritation for those who seek a modernist value to the texts they engage with. A written conversation is almost always internally inconsistent, self-contradicting, but not in the debilitating, static manner of an argument between two people holding fixed positions. Written conversations are perpetually in negotiation as participants build less off of their own internal representations and more off of the textual contexts of the conversation itself. This movement away from responding from personal, internal representation to the contexts of the text stream itself is a function of the short-message, highly interactive nature of written conversations. Long journal pieces and twenty-minute conference papers, though obviously and necessarily constructed out of disciplinary context and responding to the issues and conflicts within a professional domain, tend to be playbacks of internal, previously framed personal constructions, and hence support the communication model of text. Written conversations operate too much "on the fly" to validate such playbacks. Each e-message must build upon previous e-messages in order to be accepted within the communal discourse thread, and since e-messages arise out of a mix of positions, personalities, and experiences, the participant who attempts to bend the discourse thread into a singularly coherent representation of a theory or issues -- in effect force the previous organic complexity of the discourse into a coherently structured mental scheme -- simply signals his or her own irrelevency and places himself or herself outside the discourse thread. Such self-exclusion is certainly not the result of any conscious exclusion by other participants and often isn't even noticed by anyone but the person who has attempted to influence the discourse in terms of his or her own internal representations. The self-excluder's message or messages have simply been ignored. The reasons for ignoring those messages is never articulated, hardly even considered. If questioned as to why the self-excluder's mail was not responded to, other participants would probably indicate that the e-messages were too long, too complicated, too "stuffy," too "pretentious," too "rigid," and so forth. I once read a particularly apt description of why an apparently brilliant interloculator wasn't being responded to: "he obviously likes to read his own words too much." It has been the mission of intellectuals throughout the ages to explain phenomena by constructing abstract internal representations and then articulating those representations through a commonly shared terminology. Listeners and readers appropriated those representations as best they could, depending upon the explanatory adequacy of the representation itself, the verbal skills of the communicator, and the verbal and mental skills of the "de-coder" (as communication theory would term the listener or reader). The success of the philosopher, scientist, or theologian depended upon the internal coherency and completeness of the representation, its universality and relevance, and its ability to reduce inconsistencies and vagueness to a minimum. Such intellectuals not only had to read their own words with relish, but had to find in those words an explanatory adequacy, or beginning, middle, and end -- a logical consistency built upon the principles of competent meaning agreed-to by a particular community. Another way of terming such logical consistency is "closure." The written conversation denies the validity of any individual internal representation and ignores it when it tries to intrude too blatantly upon the discourse, which has in effect become an externally manifested representation whose "consistency" (if such is the right word), is the result of organic, self-structuring processes independent of any individual consciousness. It is not hard to understand the outrage of traditional, modernist intellectuals when confronting written conversations. The presumed pupose of discourse, especially academic discourse, seems thwarted by the lack of individual control, the lack of academic validation, and the sheer lack of beginning, middle, and end. There is no closure. The validity of closure itself, even as the product of a single author, is being consistently challenged as postmodernists attack the traditional notion of, as George Landow describes it, the "unitary text," and seek to "replace it with conceptions of a dispersed text," or a "dispersed field of variants" (56). Landow quotes Thais Morgan as suggesting that a new emphasis on the intertextuality of writing, "as a structural analysis of texts in relation to the larger system of signifying practices or uses of signs in culture," in Landow's words, "shifts attention from the triad constituted by author/work/tradition to another constituted by text/discourse/culture"(10). What arises from a writer's effort, even a single writer's effort, is less a transmission of individual insight and awareness and more a manifestation of a "dispersed field of varients" existing deceptively in a single stream of words. This is not a startling notion; Barthes some time ago presented the idea that the text writes the writer, that the various signifying codes in a text (cultural, semantic, proairetic, symbolic, hermaneutic) are the real producers of a text and the writer (ironically, considering the usual perception of text as merely a conduit) is simply the vehicle of transmission, or the slate upon which the culture writes itself. The "difference" among texts is not some complete, irreducible quality (according to a mythic view of literary creation), it is not what designates the individuality of each text, what names, signs, finishes off each work with a flourish; on the contrary, it is a difference which does not stop and which is articulated upon the infinity of texts, of languages, of systems: a difference of which each text is the return. (3) The "difference which does not stop" seems a specific counter to a presumed need for closure and the packaging of concepts that closure implies. The point here is that what is gained from the text, from the act of reading, is as an act of engagement with aculturating forces, not the reception or utilization of specific data or concepts. This engagement has no ontological placement, no value in terms of clicks up the scale of progress or degrees of ascending levels in some "tank" of knowledge. What is gained from the text is an holistic appropriation of one's culture, a subliminal map of beliefs and values that situate the reader within a field of aspirations and achievement. All texts do this, but obviously some are more influential than others. The electronic written conversation displays this writerly characteristic of texts more profoundly than any printed text, either written by an individual or a combination of individuals, and indeed more than even hypertexts that link hundreds and -- through the Internet's World Wide Web -- potentially hundreds of thousands of writers. Texts that build upon hypertext links leading into vast complexities of conjoined meaning promise an amazing "external neural network" for society, Ted Nelson's "docuverse" of equally, massively distributed information. But the links that tie together discrete bundles of text or information, even when readers are allowed to write their own links, or even, in "constructive" hypertext, when readers are allowed to add text itself and become co-writers of the hypertext, nevertheless do not constitute a defining interactivity or a truly constructive intertextuality. The link that leads from my www page to that on another campus or in another country does not necessarily lead back to me, and rarely does. The written conversation, however, unlike a hypertext, is multiply interactive. The text is sequential, a "stream," so that a reader has no choices in navigating it other than the usual ones to skip or stop. But the writers are intermittantly engaged, so that they are responsible to their various co-writers in complex ways. Challenges, corrections, and disavowals are endemic. Apologies and reversals are common. Although Barthes' concept of a text writing the writer may not be obvious to those unfamiliar with literary theory, it is certainly obvious to just about anyone who contributes to electronic written conversations, for they are under the persistent scrutiny of co-contributors and have no opportunity to manage or repair their texts behind the scenes. The entire process of presentation is delivered in the transcript. The authority of the text over the authority of the each writer is irrepressible and obvious. The result is an unmitigated freedom for the reader, who reads not to decode the mental representations of presumably more capable or more insightful people, or people more favored by the gods, but instead experiences in terms of personal negotiation ideas that are under the reoccurring management of people who, like him or her, haven't successfully completed what Dewey attacked as (the title of his 1929 Gifford Lectures) "The Quest for Certainty." Participating in an electronic conversation as reader and writer is similar to stepping out of the crowd and joining the parade, and not simply because one can actually send comments. The dialogic nature of written conversation melds text and writer profoundly and irreversibly, unplugging both the tyranny of the writer and the subserviance of the reader. Not without cost. Basket weaving has long enjoyed a mythical if not actual history as therapy for the insane. Much of American writing instruction has thrived on the passivity of many of the students, who have learned to give up their personalities and even their minds (temporarily, but leading to habit) to get an easy A, a "school-induced stupor." The comforting myth that writing is an esoteric presentation device for the especially talented permeates the student consciousness, leading to dull competence in a few and outright somnambulism in the many. The sheer lack of engagement in anything resembling a real-world writing act for both writing teachers and writing students permits both to engage in a collusion of diminished effort. It is easy to speak of e-mail conversations as "compelling" for instructionally reductive reasons, usually centering upon features of anonymity or the freedom to express oneself irresponsibily or the trivial nature of most e-mail topics. The central point in having students write, however, should not focus so much the nature of the writing we require, but whether we engage students in "writing" at all, no matter what word-management exercises we force on them. The end result of all education is "meaning," in two senses. First, in the sense of creating knowledge structures that include all the elements of one's experience -- one's world picture -- that affect success and failure, happiness and unhappiness, and the myriad decisions that navigate the extremes. The second is "meaning" in the sense of "meaningful," or personally important. Dialogic writing, or writing that arises from the interactive engagement of participants negotiating, without closure, the concepts that constitute those things that make life worth living, compells meaning in both senses. Dialogic writing, unlike monologic writing or writing as transmitted truths, is complex, open-ended, and transformatory. Computer-mediated-communication encourages both the disequilibrium and the process of feedback inherent in committed intellectual growth, but undoubtedly at the expense of clarity and method. Ken Burns' celebrated PBS series, "The Civil War," provided moving examples of exquisite writing from soldiers with 4th and 5th grade educations. This writing skill did not demonstrate, as some of my colleagues would have it, that school was more rigorous and effective in the first half of the nineteenth century than it is now (hinting darkly of a return to a draconian past), but that the written word was the singular means of entertainment and distance communication for nine-tenths of the literate population. Writing meant something to that population much different than it does for a population steeped in radio, television, movies, Interstate highways, VCRs, Nintendo, and -- above all -- the telephone. Writing was not a strange activity conducted almost entirely in classrooms, but something that liberated people from a crushing separation from those they loved and the ideas they respected. Writing was a cherished tool to all who possessed the skill, and it was lovingly exercised. It appears that it may again be lovingly exercised, on the Internet, but it ways whose value will take years to articulate. The digital revolution is showing us that writing is not something that can be codified in classroom assignments or glorified by romantics as windows into Platonic truth. Even TIME magazine (July 4, 1994) has remarked at how the phenomenal growth of the Internet represents "for millions of people, a living, breathing life of letters" among those not inclined to submit to the formalisms of academia. The often proclaimed death of "the novel" and poetry and even general literacy is more a report of the self-fixated concerns of those who hold very narrow definitions of what writing and literacy are than any indications of a significant deteriation in what writing itself is or does for people. Thomas Jefferson said that a revolution every now and then is good for democracy, and it may be that a revolution every now and then in the technology of writing is good for writing itself.         Works Cited   Barthes, Samuel. S/Z: An Essay. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. Bruffee, Kenneth A. Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Crowley, Sharon. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Doll, William, E. "Foundations For a Postmodern Curriculum." Journal of Curriculum Studies. May 1989 (Vol 21 num 3). Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word. Lefevre, Karen. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale. Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow's Intellectual Revolution, and Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. South Bend: Theodor Nelson, 1981. North, Stephen. The Making of Knowledge in Composition. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ. Princeton UP, 1979. Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: The Free Press, 1990. Wachterhauser, Brice R. "Introduction: History and Language in Understanding." in Wachterhauser, Brice R. Ed. Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York UP, 1986. Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.