Extending the Ecology: Writing Theory & Neoliberal Rationality

Abstract

Combining historiographic, rhetorical/analytical and hermeneutic research methodologies, this project takes as its grounding premise that neoliberal rationality is fundamentally reshaping writing and speech practices in the postsecondary higher education setting and beyond; and doing by ordering the ecology of writing at virtually every level of scale. Although ecologically-oriented writing research has thoroughly excavated and theorized writing’s environmental production, and demonstrated that its emergent properties comport with the laws governing complex systems, research focusing acutely on the political materiality of writing alongside writing theory has not been so thorough; nor has theory attended to how the neoliberal transformation bears on writing. This project moves to fill that gap by investigating the specific rhetorical-affective dimensions through which this reconstitution has occurred. How does neoliberalism—understood as a normative order of reason and a political rationality—intervene and order writing at the level of the subject? How do student indebtedness and other epiphenomenal developments with the ascent of neoliberalism allow for its ethos to infiltrate and inform what we write and how we represent the self in writing? These inquires turn the dissertation toward the constitution of the modern writing (neoliberal) subject. Against the movement in ecological writing research away from the study of subjectivity (Sánchez 2007; Hawk 2007; Dobrin 2011; Whicker 2013), this project situates the writing subject at the nexus of this project; I argue that the writer as critical to understanding how writing is moved by neoliberal affect in circulation—a third key research question. Taking a discursive approach to the study of neoliberal rationality, the chapters are loosely structured to comport with Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s model for interpreting discourse from historical, social, material and political perspectives, along with its faculty for producing subjectivity (Lecercle 2009). The chapters offer a history of neoliberalism and the rise of student debt as parallel, epiphenomenal and interdependent occurrences; a genealogy of important developments in ecologically-oriented writing research; and take up the University of California system as a case study—spanning two chapters—in how debt and neoliberal rationality shape institutional politics and policies. Blending qualitative and hermeneutic research into campus activism from 2014 to 2016, UC has also been ground zero for a clash between neoliberalism’s anti-political, counter-public ethos and the emergence of new—and deeply maligned—forms of disruptive writing and dissenting speech. Part work of political theory and part work of rhetorical/writing theory, the project brings together ecologically-based writing research and the emergence of neoliberalism to argue these research vectors are deeply interdetermining and inextricable, both with critical import for what writing is (its ontology) and how it works.