Writing, Words, and Waste: Words as a By-Product of Academic Writing

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: Explorations of Waste in Academic Inquiry

Abstract

In this presentation, I consider the productive capacity of writing as its potential to effect a writer, rather than that which is written. Here writing functions as a mode of becoming, a way of doing things--that is, things beyond the writing itself--with words. In this sense words, that which is written in the process of writing, become secondary to the thing that is done with or through writing. Writing, in other words, becomes waste, a by-product of the production of something other than the writing itself. In the contemporary academic audit environment, the capacity of writing exists to produce the person who writes as an academic, and it is, in part, through the measurement of this writing that the status of the writer is confirmed through employment and tenure. The writer, in other words, is an effect of the doing, rather than the doer of writing; it is the writing that writes the writer. That which is written academically, then, can be understood as a waste product of a process of becoming-writer/professor, with implications for how we think about the public good and sustainability of academic work.

Author

• David Bright, Monash University