Christina CrosbyDepartment of EnglishWesleyan University

Writer’s Block, Merit, and the Market: Working in theUniversity of Excellence

Readers of College English need to write, and not only

write, but publish. Finishing a dissertation is the

condition of entry into the profession, and professional

success requires a clear record of publication, first of

articles, then of the “tenure book.” Further promotion is

dependent on further publication. Ours is a profession that

clearly requires and rewards writing and publication, and

punishes those who do not write and publish. That some fail

and many suffer in this system of reward and punishment is

widely known, if not widely acknowledged. Problems with

writing are the bane of eighteen-year-olds, not of their

teachers, one would think, especially not those professors

who have chosen to work closely with language and

literature. After all, English departments historically have

had the responsibility of teaching first-year students how

to write. Yet we all know colleagues who have lost their

jobs because they did not write and publish, and in the

ranks of the tenured are many who have not met the

expectation of “continued scholarly productivity” indicated

by promotion with tenure.1 Professors are obligated to

write: if that is your work, you must do it. Why, then, do

many who wish to succeed, fail, or manage to write and stay

in the profession, but at the cost of real misery?

In this essay I argue that writing in general, and

scholarly writing especially, entails entering into a

complex network of relationships and engages the writer in a

process that may have a multitude of ends. These relations

and ends are organized in a particular way in the

professional discipline of English. Our profession depends

on the specialized writing we do for each other; success

requires submitting one’s writing to peer-reviewed journals

and presses, with the goal of producing work that one’s

peers judge to merit publication. Although the goal is

publication, this process that ends in producing a saleable

book or journal is not the same as writing for the general

market in books and magazines. Although our professional

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writing is related to the logic of the market in that we

must produce an exchangeable commodity, the process is

governed by the requirements of our profession and is not

directly driven by the need to turn a profit.

Since the mid-1980s, however, colleges and universities

have turned increasingly to the world of business for models

of management and administration that emphasize faculty

accountability and productivity; many have instituted merit-

based systems of salary compensation.2 Consequently,

professional practices of production and evaluation have

come to conform more to the logic of the market. I argue

that to understand both the successes and the failures of

professors-as-writers, we need to understand this logic.

Analyzing academic writing in his book, Understanding Writing

Blocks, Keith Hjortshoj observes, “Because writing is the

main form of currency in higher education and largely

determines one’s success or failure, severe difficulties

with writing are probably most common in universities” (5).

When writing is a currency, writers are embedded in market

relations.

3

The market requires a certain discipline, an ethic of

work that is both powerfully attractive (we all know

“workaholics”) and deeply alienating. Further, the market is

a complex of social relations, and writing is a relational

activity that is both sustained and impoverished by the

market. Finally, the market is structured according to a

clear standard of value, that of money: as the editor of

Harper’s recently declared unambiguously, ”A good writer is a

rich writer, and a rich writer is also a good writer”

(Kirkpatrick, E1). For all these reasons, writers may

flourish when required to produce for the market. Yet the

contradictions inherent in such production are profound,

and, I will argue, may block writing as well as enable it1 The argument I elaborate in this essay concerns “first-tier, selectiveadmissions schools” more directly than it does the “second-tier, open-registration, regional two- and four-year colleges . . . that represent the majority of institutions of higher education” (Alberti, 563). I acknowledge that more members of our profession work in second-tier schools than do in elite college and universities, and that requirementsfor publication differ between the first and second tiers. Yet writing and publication is required of all college and university professors, and because research universities are the top tier of our profession, publication is broadly understood to be the measure of professional excellence.

2 See the articles in the recent issue of Academe titled “Selling Out? Corporations on Campus” for articles that elaborate in detail the ways in which the academy has been restructured through its engagement with the corporate world.

4

The confluence in the academy of professional practices

of evaluation and the logic of the market is evident in the

adoption of merit pay at many colleges and universities. At

my institution, a small, elite liberal arts university where

the effects of corporatization are muted, the administration

nonetheless holds the faculty to a standard of “excellence”

in scholarship, teaching, and service. We are each evaluated

every year in a process that begins with the faculty member

herself. I must first judge my own work and determine

whether it is meritorious enough to submit a report listing

my accomplishments; then the chair of my department ranks my

work in relation to that of the other members of my

department; then the academic deans evaluate all the chairs’

reports for their divisions. Finally the Vice-President for

Academic Affairs makes a decision on what category of merit

pay, if any, each faculty member will receive, ranging from

“distinctive merit” to “no merit” depending on the

“excellence” of the work. “Excellence” is the universally

equivalent form of value in the economy of merit, since

everything is evaluated in its terms, and, appropriately,

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“excellence” takes the form of the universally equivalent

form of value, money.

“Merit,” a quantity of “excellence,” has come to higher

education from U. S. firms “where sophisticated, effective

performance-based compensation has been de rigueur since the

1980s—part and parcel, experts believe, of corporate

America’s highly successful restructuring” (Malanga, 1). One

such expert, the New York-based compensation consultant Alan

Johnson, has declared that “[i]t’s no longer credible to say

you can’t measure something or that the only thing you can

measure is a simple output”; for instance, statisticians

have developed a system for measuring the “value” a teacher

“adds” to student performance, the Tennessee Value-Added

Assessment System (Malanga, 2). Merit pay is based on the

belief that values of all sorts can be quantified, and that

quantified values can be measured in money. That to claim

otherwise is to be met with incredulity suggests that

“merit” is a word indispensable to an ideology: a whole

complex of beliefs condenses in the concept, “merit.”

Indeed, “merit” has theological and ethical meanings

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inextricable from its bureaucratic and economic registers,

and the intersection of the religious, ethical,

administrative, and economic creates the conditions within

which college and university professors do our writing.

To understand why professors, highly motivated and

highly trained writers, may fail to “produce” in their

chosen profession, we need to understand better the ethic of

work that legitimates evaluation according to the universal

equivalents of excellence and money, an ethic which

conceptualizes quality in terms of quantity. Any

consideration of this work ethic must necessarily entail

attention to the logic of capital and of a system of social

relations organized by production for the market. I argue

that failure to produce on the part of writers who want to

write, but can’t, may be an effect of the contradictions of

a system that turns quality into quantity, time into money,

relations into instruments, and writing into intellectual

property. Ultimately, this consideration of why some writers

have difficulty writing tells us something about the

conditions under which all academics labor.

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To make my case for the effects of the logic of capital

on writing will require turning away from the university per

se to consider how the impediments to writing known since

the mid-1950s as “writer’s block” have everything to do with

how writing is valued, and with the modern concept of the

writer as “author.” Indeed, I essay to reconceptualize

writer’s block not in terms of an ethic of work (she’s lazy)

nor in psychological ones (his cognitive processes are

flawed; her behavior requires modification; his neuroses

render him incapable), nor even in social terms (she’s

responsible for social reproduction, which saps her energy

and takes her time, he’s teaching four courses a semester).

Rather, I’m interested in the relation of writer’s block to

the logic of capital, a form of value that is driven by an

imperative to increase. All other values, including the

professional values of the academy, are increasingly subject

to capital. As George Soros observes, “[T]he hallmark of the

current form of global capitalism, the feature that sets it

apart from earlier versions, is its pervasive success: the

intensification of the profit motive and its penetration

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into areas . . . previously governed by other

considerations” (The Crisis of Global Capitalism, quoted in Academe,

22).

Yet my study of writer’s block does more than trace the

enabling and disabling effects of capital on writers. I

argue that the fact that writers are necessarily “in”

language and engaged with other writers and their texts

entails an ethical obligation that is fundamentally at odds

with the dictates of capital and the imperatives of the work

ethic. Taking my inspiration from Bill Reading’s strong

reading of pedagogy as an ethical practice that counters the

managerial demand for so-called accountability, I come to

the conclusion that writing is an open-ended, relational

process that engages one with others—other writers,

speakers, readers, other thoughts, other words, other times.

This profound otherness creates an ethical obligation that

is both a demand and a support, sustaining one in relation

to others and sustaining one in language. These relations

are neither congruent with, nor wholly absorbed by, the

social relations necessary to production for the market, and

9

constitute an ethics distinctly unlike the ethic of work

integral to capitalism. Writing and teaching, then, are

alike practices that are subject to capital, but not

reducible to market-logic. Therein lies hope for the blocked

writer in the twenty-first century university.

To trace the relation of writer’s block to capital and

to the work ethic, I begin with Anthony Trollope, an

astonishingly productive Victorian author, who elaborates a

clear theory of the value of writing and advances a robust

work ethic. Then I turn to the work of Robert Boice, author

of a number of essays and books on writer’s block, including

his recent How Writers Journey Towards Comfort and Fluency. His

prescriptions are a telling parallel to Trollope’s: both

believe that writers will thrive by responding to the

discipline of the market and will be sustained by the

complex of relations that the market organizes. Recognizing

that a vital counter-discourse to this view is elaborated in

Romantic theories of artistic autonomy, I go on to consider

how concepts of aesthetic autonomy are indispensable to the

elaboration of the law of copyright, which makes writing

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into the alienable intellectual property of the author. I

then return to the academy, to consider how the specialized,

professional writing of English professors relates to the

market for writing, and how the newly corporate university

deploys the logic of capital in managing faculty. Only then

do I make my ethical turn, and conclude by suggesting the

virtue of acknowledging the incalculable ethical obligation

to others that any writing entails.

Anthony Trollope, one of the most prolific authors of

nineteenth-century England, or, indeed, of any time, has no

doubt about why writers fail: they procrastinate, they won’t

secure themselves in their chairs with cobbler’s wax (as

Trollope recommends), they wait for inspiration, they over-

indulge in tobacco or wine and make themselves unfit for

their job. They lack discipline. This, and more, he

elaborates in his Autobiography, in which he also gives an

account of his own writing practices "for the benefit of

those who may read these pages, and when young may intend to

follow the same career" (303). He explains the regimen that

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he demands of himself and encourages in others: to rise

every morning in whatever circumstance at 5:30 and to work

for three hours; more precisely, after reading over what he

had written the day before, "to write with my watch before

me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an

hour," and “the words came as regularly as my watch went"

(227-28). As you might expect, Trollope is scornful of

anyone who fails to write what is required, when it is

required, a scorn he turned on himself to keep him to the

task. The result? Not only prolific composition, but

“extreme delight” at writing under what he calls “hot

pressure,” whether the pressure to complete his quota of

novel-writing in the morning or to send off an official

memorandum or report in the afternoon (he held a full-time

position as a civil servant in the Post Office for much of

his career as a novelist).

To prove that the highly productive writer is also the

writer of good works that people will pay to read, Trollope

includes in his last chapter a list of all the books he

published in the course of his career, along with the sums

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of money he earned by each, offering the income as

incontrovertible evidence of both quantity and quality. A

consistently productive writer who delights in his work,

Trollope declares that his writings are “more in amount than

the works of any other living English author,” and is

convinced that the quantity of his writing guarantees its

quality. The successful novelist is always on the job. Ever

observant in his daily life, he will “live with” his

characters as he goes about his business. He will read

novels written by others, and reviews, and think about what

he has read. When he sits down to write, his watch before

him, the constraints of time will dictate that he write just

what is needed to realize the ideas he has been imagining,

thereby animating his writing without intrusive artifice or

awkward design. The demand for quantity thus drives the

process of thought, creating the ideas that precede writing,

while writing under “hot pressure” militates against

intrusive poetic ornamentation or distracting flights of

fancy and ensures that the writer will profitably say just

what needs to be said. The more writing, the better.

13

While Trollope’s prescription for successful writing

admits no limit to effort, “block” suggests that, cobbler’s

wax or no, a blocked writer will be unable to write. “Block”

in the psychological sense has its first Oxford English Dictionary

citation from a 1931 issue of the American Journal of Psychology:

“The term ‘block’ . . . refers to those periods, experienced

by mental workers, when they seem unable to respond and

cannot, even by an effort, continue until a short time has

elapsed.”3 Taking seriously the concept of inhibiting blocks

which resist the conscious efforts of mental workers,

educational psychologists and researchers in rhetoric and

writing have studied failed or troubled writers. This

scholarly literature is rich, ranging from complexly

empirical studies of the process of composition to

sophisticated accounts of the dialogical dimensions of

writing using Bakhtinian concepts to analyze how all writers

are situated in an interactive network of historical

relations.

3 The concept of mental blockage is produced by American psychoanalytic discourse, and the term “writer’s block” is first used by Edmund Berglerin his 1950 book, The Writer and Psychoanalysis (Leader, 1).

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One of the most prolific contributors to the

considerable literature on blocked writers is Robert Boice,

a Professor of Psychology and a psychotherapist whose

practice is limited to treating writers troubled by writing.

He is a researcher and practicing clinician, and his 1994

book, How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure,

is informed by both extensive scholarly research and his

therapeutic practice. Like Trollope, he addresses himself to

professional writers who must write fluently and well to

succeed in their chosen careers. He surely intends to

encourage his readers by observing in How Writers Journey to

Comfort and Fluency that he “has published over 180 scholarly

articles, many about writing, in places like Behavior Research

and Therapy and Journal of Higher Education.” I turn to Boice, then,

to see what a late twentieth-century prescription for

productive, professional writing looks like, not because his

is the most influential work in composition studies, or the

most sophisticated empirically or theoretically, but because

he is latitudinarian in theory and clearly prescriptive in

his practice.

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Boice’s authorial voice is genial, empathetic,

generous, and learned. The range of citations to the

literature in psychology demonstrates his knowledge of a

wide range of theoretical and clinical work on writer’s

block and processes of composition. He is himself draws on

psychoanalytic, behavioral, and cognitive theories in

support of his therapeutic practices; he is interested, too,

in feminist critiques of social constraints on women’s

writing. In contrast to Trollope, he argues that

unproductive writers are not necessarily lazy, and does not

assume that procrastination is pleasurable. He is not

scornful of writers who fail to meet their deadlines. Yet

despite what appears to be a fundamental historical shift in

the discourse about the process of writing, from Trollope’s

very Victorian disciplined production to twentieth-century

theories of unconscious inhibitions, Boice’s theory of

writing repeats Trollope’s almost to the letter, and, as a

result, his prescriptions for writers also mirror the

novelist’s advice to aspiring writers.

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In describing the gradual procedure of his therapeutic

program for troubled writers, Boice explains in considerable

detail how the troubled writers who come to work with him

move towards “comfort and fluency.” At the end of every

chapter the narrative detail is condensed in the statement

of a one or two sentence “rule” governing good writing. The

final chapter is a list of these rules, thirty-four of them.

The “author’s note” gets the last word, following the list

of rules as the evidence of Boice’s own productivity (180

essays and counting).

In detailing the therapeutic training he has offered

over the years to uncomfortable and blocked writers, Boice

elaborates his position that successful writers can write

“habitually and painlessly” (“Psychotherapies,” 215), but

only if they are willing to submit to certain disciplines.

Boice advocates brief, daily sessions of writing, which he

abbreviates as “bds.” Bds are important because they

militate against bad behaviors such as forcing writing,

bingeing in long sessions, procrastinating, negative self-

talk, writing despite physical discomfort. Rather than

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bursts of effort and lapses of exhaustion, a controlled

session of daily writing will lead to the “state of mild

happiness” that Boice believes is most likely to produce

fluent writing by comfortable writers (Journey, xxii).

Steadiness and moderation induce regular writing, while

hypomania, that over-excited, euphoric state some writers

perversely enjoy while in the grips of composition, is

inevitably followed by fatigue, sometimes depression.

Further, mania is fundamentally isolating, while writing is

fundamentally relational. Writing in brief, daily sessions

means one learns to relax, knows when to begin, and, as

importantly, knows when to stop. One learns “to make good

use of that dearest of all commodities, time,” and “good

use” for the writer is predicated on pacing: not too much,

not too little (12).

Using time well is a daily task, and constancy in the

process of composition is an important theme in Boice’s

program. But bds alone will not ensure comfort and fluency.

“Exteriorization” is another set of behaviors crucial to

success, which involves entering into relation with an

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audience of readers and other writers. Exteriorizing is

participating in on-going conversations with other writers

(including “writerly reading,” or reading the work of others

with an eye to one’s own writing projects), circulating

materials in draft, soliciting criticism and benefiting from

it. Most importantly, exteriorization leads ultimately to

publication (175-208). Although the process of composition

is a solitary activity, Boice stresses repeatedly that

writing is a social process. In this, as in his emphasis on

disciplined, consistent production, Boice’s rules accord

with Trollope’s account of his successful writing practices,

for Trollope engaged in “exteriorization” with a Victorian

vigor that fueled his imaginative life and linked him to

other writers. The Autobiography is fascinating not only in

its record of his disciplined production, but in the account

Trollope gives of his dealings with publishers and

periodicals, and his assessments of novels written by his

contemporaries.

Discipline and exteriorization together, then, are

required if one is to be a successful writer and have the

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satisfaction of proving this success by enumerating one’s

publications. In this Trollope and Boice agree. In fact,

they both participate in a discourse about productivity and

the quality of life that is distinctively modern, which

stretches back to the eighteenth century and forward to the

twenty-first. This discourse is political economy, and its

organizing concept is the market. Indeed, Boice derives the

final rule of his program, which he names “Adam Smith’s

rule,” from The Wealth of Nations. He begins his final chapter

with an epigraph from Smith: “the man who works so

moderately as to be able to work constantly, not only

preserves his health the longest, but in the course of the

year, executes the greatest quantity of work” (213). From

this Boice formulates his last rule: “writers who work with

a constancy and a shared rationality of their thoughts not

only preserve their health but produce the most quality and

quantity of prose” (246).

The virtues of constancy are clear, for only a

disciplined writer does not squander the precious commodity

of time. However, the demand for “a shared rationality of

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thought” and the assertion of “quality” are more opaque,

since the epigraph from The Wealth of Nations emphasizes

constancy and quantity, but says nothing about shared

rationality or quality. Boice is nonetheless right to name

his final prescription after Smith, for “shared rationality”

is the founding concept of The Wealth of Nations: “shared

rationality” is the market. Individual producers, constant

in their effort, healthy, executing quantities of work, can

only flourish if there is some mechanism by which they can

exchange their surplus product for the goods they need.

Smith argues that social relations are so providentially

ordered that such a mechanism in fact exists, whereby the

good of all is served by the desire of each for more and

better commodities. The market is a shared rationality which

organizes relations among autonomous individuals; it is the

invisible hand that rationalizes relations across time and

space, bringing individuals separated by the division of

labor into relations of exchange, creating wealth through

efficiencies which would seem at first to benefit only those

who most directly profit from them, but which in fact bring

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more goods to all. The rationality of the market consists in

the fact that it providentially produces a beneficent order

out of the proclivity of human beings to truck, barter, and

pursue their self-interest.

No wonder, then, that Boice emphasizes both constancy

and “a shared rationality of thought” in Adam Smith’s rule

for writers. The market is not very important to Boice as a

place of explicit financial exchange, although he is

straightforwardly concerned about the failed or diminished

careers of those in writing professions whose output is

limited. Indeed, he never names “the market” as such.

Nonetheless, the concept is central to his thinking because

it is the site of ordered relations and exchange. No writer,

no matter how disciplined, can be productive without

entering into the network of relations which make up the

market in writing. These relations are elaborated through

“exteriorization,” and are structured by the shared

rationality of exchange, the telos of which is publication.

Such relations are, of course, a form of discipline in

addition to the cobbler’s wax that keeps a writer at her

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desk for a daily session. “Exteriorization” is the

pleasurable and profitable discipline of a shared

rationality. Precisely because it is so much larger than

any isolated individual, precisely because it is impersonal

yet beneficent, the market is a shared rationality that

gives writing its form of value. Good writing is good

precisely because its end is publication. Published, writing

takes its commodity-form and is alienable, exchangeable. It

can be sold.

To regard publication in the market as the proper end

of writing, as do both Trollope and Boice, is to fly in the

face of another well-elaborated discourse concerning

writing, that of artistic and aesthetic autonomy. Indeed,

writers in Boice’s program who resist his therapeutic

prescriptions often do so in terms produced by this

discourse, protesting that sitting down to a brief, daily

session is of little use unless one has something to say, a

idea to realize in words. Further, ideas worth expressing

are original to the thinker, precisely the opposite of a

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shared rationality of thought. Finally, this discourse

declares that writing for publication is the kiss of death

for creativity, since the author is impelled to write with

an eye to what will sell and responds to the demands of an

established readership: editors, publishers, reviewers,

buyers of books. Since the eighteenth century and the

development of European markets in literature, authors have

protested that their creative work is damaged, not enhanced,

by the discipline imposed by the market. Yet, as we will

soon see, the very concepts of autonomy and authorship that

writers champion against the market are inextricable from

its logic. The ethical stance of autonomy can neither

protect writers from the demand to produce for publication

and profit, nor assure fluency of composition. To the

contrary.

Martha Woodmansee has written a genealogy of the

concept of artistic autonomy in her excellent study, The

Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. She traces

how “the author” is produced as an aesthetic and legal

entity in Europe and England, and is as much a response to

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developments in the market for writing as it is integral to

modern aesthetics. The autonomy of art and of the artist are

effects of a complex social, literary, and intellectual

history. Kant may codify the autonomy of art in densely

philosophical terms, but artistic autonomy cannot be reduced

to a philosophical concern. It develops in the eighteenth

century to distinguish “fine art” from works written for the

purpose of payment. Elaborated first in Germany, the

discourse of artistic autonomy is by the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries established in England as well,

and is central to the aesthetic theory and artistic

practices of the English Romantics.4

Following Woodmansee, we can sketch the logic of this

discourse in the work of Karl Philipp Moritz (1756-1793). In

his essay Toward a Unification of All the Fine Arts and Letters under the

4 As Leader notes (quoting Thomas McFarland, Originality and Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1984), p. 48), “The story of how these ideas—of genius, originality, spontaneity—found their way back from Germany to England at the beginning of the nineteenth century has been frequently told. . . . If ‘the cultivated Briton of the Elizabethanage looked to Italy to improve his mind; and the cultivated Briton in Dryden’s time and the Enlightenment looked to France; by Romantic and Victorian times he looked almost slavishly to Germany.’ And what he found there . . .was an image . . . of the writer as elevated and apart,and of writing as an exalted mystery rather than a craft” (131).

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Concept of Self-Sufficiency (1785), Moritz articulates a

philosophical argument for the autonomy of art five years

before Kant’s Critique of Judgment (11). A professional writer,

Moritz was prolific by necessity. Admired by the

intelligentsia and admitted to polite circles of German

society, Moritz was nonetheless plagued by financial worries

since the publishers paid him a flat sum for each

publication, no matter how high their profit from the book

might be; moreover, the reprinting of published books by

other presses (book piracy) further distanced an author from

the income generated by his writing. Finally, the developing

middle-class readership was more inclined to “light”

literature than to rigorous philosophical speculation, so

that he had not only to write quickly and but also conform

most of his writing to popular taste. Woodmansee points out

that Moritz responds to the demands of the market with a

philosophy of art consistent with the German Pietism of his

youth: just as Pietism requires of the believer a “total

abandonment of the self and entry upon a blissful state of

nothingness, with that complete extermination of all so-

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called self-ness [Eigenheit] or self-love [Eigenliebe], and a totally

disinterested [uninteressierte] love of God,” so his aesthetics

declares that the contemplation of a beautiful work of art

“diverts our attention momentarily from ourselves with the

result that we seem to lose ourselves in the beautiful

object; and precisely this loss, this forgetfulness of

ourselves, is the highest degree of pure and disinterested

[uneigennutzigen] pleasure which beauty grants us” (19).

Disinterestedness is the key test distinguishing the

creative arts, for while a craftsman is constrained by the

instrumentality of what he makes, as is the purchaser, the

artist makes a work that “does not have its purpose outside

itself, and . . . [exists] for the sake of its own internal

perfection” (18). Significantly, it is this very

valorization of disinterestedness, and the separation of

fine art from craft, that will support the claims of writers

to ownership of intellectual property, and lead to a

profound shift in the understanding of both books and

writers. In the eighteenth century books are largely thought

to be the property of the printer who makes them, but by the

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early nineteenth century a book is understood to be the

material repository of an author’s ideas. These ideas take a

form unique to that author when he puts them into words, and

the book “itself” is the ideas-in-words, not the physical

object of paper, print, and cover.5 The writer is an author

endowed with creative powers, and the book is the singular

creation of an author who writes according to the dictates

of art. Only when writing is so idealized can the author be

a disinterested artist, creating works which exist for the

sake of their own internal perfection; and only when writing

is abstracted into idea and the writer into the autonomy of

authorship, can an author be the owner of a unique

intellectual property.

All property on the market must be transformable into

quantifiable exchange value, or the money form of value,

5 As Fichte argues in his essay Proof of the Illegality of Reprinting: A Rationale and a Parable, the form is the property of the author: “each individual has hisown thought processes, his own way of forming concepts and connecting them. . . . [E]ach writer must give his thoughts a certain form, and he can give them no other form than his own because he has no other. . . . [N]o one can appropriate his thoughts without thereby altering their form. This latter thus remains his exclusive property” (Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3,pt. 3, ed. J.H. Fichte (Leipzig: Mayer and Müller, n.d.), quoted and translated by Woodmansee, 52).

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which is why the abstraction of writing into “idea” is

necessary if a writer is to own his writing. An author’s

property rights are thereby consistent with a philosophy of

the transcendental qualities of art, for it is the author

who gives form to ideas in a book. Indeed, to put the case

strongly, copyright, which governs the life of a book in the

marketplace, requires the theory of artistic autonomy. The

book becomes, as Woodmansee argues, “an emanation of [the

author’s] intellect—an intentional, as opposed to a merely

physical object,” and therefore intellectual property. This

emanation is the property that, protected by copyright, can

make him rich.6 As Woodmansee makes clear, Romanticism is

not removed from the market, but a reaction against it that

has the paradoxical effect of codifying art as intellectual

property. Copyright decisively confirms that writers are

6 The recent controversy over Jonathan Frazen’s criticism of Oprah Winfrey’s book club and his defense of “the high-art literary tradition”is the latest high-profile display of these contradictions. After “publicly disparag[ing] Oprah Winfrey’s literary taste” and questioning the idea that books can be judged by sales, Frazen “was full of abashed apologies,” writes David D. Kirpatrick in his New York Times report on thematter. “[T]he aftermath . . .showed that if there was ever a time in the book business when authors wrote to impress critics and their peers without regard to book sales, getting caught in that posture is now almost embarrassing.”

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autonomous authors who make original creations, and as

decisively positions those authors in the “shared

rationality” which is the literary market place

Romantic theories of artistic autonomy thus oppose the

mundane world of “getting and spending” while imagining

writing as intellectual property that must be protected by

law so that writers can earn their deserved income. On the

one hand, a writer is bound to await inspiration before

writing lest he betray his gift by rote production; on the

other, if he is to be worth anything, he has to write.

Otherwise he will have no property to protect! Faithful to

the ideal of the internal perfection of art, the author

insulates himself from worldly demands, while the writing he

does is ever more complexly enmeshed in the logic of the

market. This contradictory position may explain in part why

the Romantics are known as the writers of “incompleteness,

fragmentation, and ruin,” notoriously unable to bring

writing projects to completion, and tormented by unrealized

plans (Leader, 142, quoting Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and

the Forms of Ruin, 5).7

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For the Romantics, difficulties in writing are

impediments in a creative process beyond the conscious

control of the author, since art is an autonomous realm that

transcends the work-a-day world. The fragments of poetry

left by Coleridge, his self-justifying explanations, and

Wordsworth’s famous meditation on the virtues of “the

Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground” in contrast to the long

philosophical poem he found himself incapable of writing are

richly suggestive of the impediments to writing these great

poets suffered.8 The creativity of the writer, and his right

to intellectual property, depends on his autonomy, but from

7 In his book on writer’s block, Leader turns to the Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, to consider the phenomenon in terms of literary history. His chapters on these poets detail their suffering and suggests ways in which their incapacitates, as well as their major poetic achievements, may be understood in light of Romantic theories of creativity.

8 I refer to Wordsworth’s sonnet “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room” and to Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” and the prose explanation Coleridge appended to the poem. The poet Stevie Smith wrote a poem titled “The Person from Porlock” which offers a reading of Coleridge’s explanation for the fragmentary nature of “Kubla Kahn.” It is a meditation on the “benison” of worldly distractions from the effort of writing, and a wickedly intelligent critique of both Romantic theories of inspiration and of the Protestant work ethic as a supposed cure for writer’s block. Yet the ironic sympathy she offers Coleridge and her bitter refusal of the ethical imperative to get to work suggests that a principled silence is the only answer she has to offer to the contradictions the poem so eloquently represents.

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that autonomy, block. When authorship is set apart from

worldly relations, when writing requires that one withdraw

and attend on inspiration, writers are bound to have

trouble. And when the abstracting logic of the market is

intricately, if silently, bound to theories of autonomous

creativity, the writer is surely caught in a bind.

Considering the trials of Coleridge and Wordsworth is

enough to drive one into the arms of Trollope, abjuring

forever the cycle of hypomania and depression, inspiration

and silence. If the market is inescapable, turn its

discipline to good effect. Such is Trollope’s response to

Romanticism: “There are those . . . who think that the man

who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait

till—inspiration moves him. When I have heard such a

doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my

scorn. To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker

were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the

divine moment of melting” (102). Trollope scorns those who

wait for inspiration, and embraces the analogy of novel

writing to shoe making, pointedly refusing the Romantic

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separation of Art from craft: “A shoemaker when he has

finished one pair of shoes does not sit down and contemplate

his work in idle satisfaction . . .. The shoemaker who so

indulged himself would be without wages half his time. It is

the same with a professional writer of books. . . . I had

now quite accustomed myself to begin a second pair as soon

as the first was out of my hands" (265). God is on the side

not so much of the angels, as of the man who settles down to

do his work here on earth, for idleness is a vice,

industriousness a virtue.

Just do it. This familiar marketing slogan is

applicable to all walks of life, it seems. Donald Murray, in

his book on writing, The Craft of Revision, echoes Trollope and

Boice, too, when he urges writers to “[make] writing a habit

. . . The habit of writing becomes expected in the way you

are expected to wait on tables, show up for your job in the

emergency room, deliver papers. Roger Simon of the Baltimore

Sun explained, ‘There’s no such thing as writer’s block. My

father drove a truck for 40 years. And never once did he

wake up in the morning and say: “I have truck driver’s block

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today. I am not going to work”’” (17). There’s something

bracing about this. Murray appeals to the complex network of

social relations any worker must enter into, which carry

obligations that must be honored. The market makes us all

interdependent and we are all expected to work, indeed,

required to work if we need to earn our incomes. So Murray,

like Trollope, urges one to internalize these obligations,

which are both ethical and economic, and thus take advantage

of the support this network can provide. Replace the

Romantic agonies of inspiration with an ethic of work and

you will be rewarded. You will have your writing, your

copyright, your income, and your peace of mind.

Yet the work ethic is by no means our salvation, as Max

Weber’s magisterial study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of

Capitalism, makes clear. Weber argues that Protestants

developed in the seventeenth century an ethic that he calls

“worldly asceticism” (120). This ethic is motivated first by

religious belief and later, in the late eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, by the force of capitalist

accumulation. For Calvin, the purposeful organization and

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arrangement of the cosmos is evidence of a divine plan, even

if the will of God is mysterious. Obvious in the order of

the natural world, this organization extends to the order of

society as well, in which every person has a calling, a job

to do. Those who are in a state of grace glorify God by

fulfilling his commandments, which providentially organize

social relations. Each individual Christian must therefore

work in his or her calling, regardless of his or her

desires, and must work methodically, honestly, prudently,

steadfastly, all for the glory of God. As Weber observes,

“Labor in a calling was . . . the ascetic activity par

excellance” (133). Alone in an individual relation with God,

quit of priestly mediation and Catholic acts of penance, the

Protestant went to work and prospered. Such labor is endless

since it is not a goal in itself; done conscientiously, it

will yield riches on earth that represent prospectively

(given the grace of God) the Protestant’s reward in heaven.

I sketch the theological dimensions of the Protestant

ethic to stress the fact that it is predicated on deeply

felt belief, and to recall how inextricable this belief is

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from the discourse of political economy. Weber argues the

logic of utilitarian political economy is an effect of

Protestant theology and religious belief. Calvinism holds

that

the cosmos of the world serves the glory of God.

The utilitarian turn, that the economic cosmos

should serve the good of the many, the common

good, etc., was a consequence of the idea that any

other interpretation of it would lead to an

aristocratic idolatry of the flesh, or at least

not serve the glory of God, but only fleshly

cultural ends. But God’s will, as it is expressed

in the purposeful arrangements of the economic

cosmos, can, so far as secular ends are in

question at all, only be embodied in the good of

the community, in impersonal usefulness (265).

That “purposeful arrangement” becomes for Smith an

“invisible hand” which reconciles self-interest with the

social good, and personal riches with the commonwealth.

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An ethic that first was motivated by the most profound

spiritual need of Protestant believers, to please God and

receive from Him some indication whether they were saved or

damned, is in its latter days motivated by the most profound

economic need of capitalism, the need for more. Capitalism

is an economic system that requires expansion; capital is

itself a form of value defined by its growth. The Protestant

ethic is not, however, displaced by the spirit of

capitalism, but remains integral to an economy organized by

production for the market. Internal to capitalism, then, is

an ethical judgment based on the belief that more is better:

those who have more work harder and are worth more, both

ethically and economically. They are meritorious, deserving

of the rewards they receive. Trollope puts the case with his

customary frankness in his Autobiography. There he advances

his "theory" (88) that "the love of money is so distinctive

a characteristic of humanity that . . . sermons [preached

against it] are mere platitudes called for by customary but

unintelligent piety. All material progress has come from

man's desire to do the best he can for himself and those

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about him, and civilization and Christianity itself have

been made possible by such progress. Though we do not all

of us argue this matter out within our breasts we do all

feel it; and we know that the more a man earns the more

useful he is to his fellow men" (89). A man’s value is

measured by his income, which is why at the end of his book

Trollope lists all of his published works and the money he

received for them: the amount of money measures the goodness

of his writing and his worth as person.

This entanglement of aesthetic, ethical, theological,

and economic value is evident, too, in “Adam Smith’s rule”

as laid out by Boice: “writers who work with a constancy and

a shared rationality of their thoughts not only preserve

their health but produce the most quality and quantity of

prose.” The solecism, “most quality,” alerts us to the

determining logic of the market in Boice’s thinking: not

highest quality, but “most quality.” Quality is thus not an

effect of comparative evaluation within a delimited group,

but rather is absolutely quantifiable; indeed, quantity is

quality. Quantification is what the market requires, above

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all, and quantity is unlimited. Trollope, who happily

participates in the “shared rationality” that produces this

logic, lashes himself to the mast so as to enjoy the delight

of writing according to the dictates of quantity.

Boice assures us that if we abide by the rules, we,

too, can “produce the most quality and quantity of prose.”

His prescriptions are consistent with the logic of the

market, yet college English teachers who write and publish

criticism can hardly be said to be producing for the market

in the manner of other professional writers. We are paid

little for our published writing, the few books that bring

in significant royalties being the exception that proves the

rule. As Richard Ohmann argues in his essay “The Social

Relations of Criticism,” the market in criticism is both

small and markedly circular, “largely an artifact of those

who produce for it. . . . In the central situations of

criticism—a paper presented at a conference or published in

a journal—critics are at once producers, purveyors, and

consumers. Criticism has little value of either the economic

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or the personal sort apart from our own needs and the needs

we impose on students and librarians” (22). These needs are

those of the profession, which must produce a body of

specialized knowledge.

The professionalization of English in institutions of

higher learning depends on the creation of specialized

knowledge that the public accepts as a good, in the case of

English “the ennobling effect of literature on the self

[and] . . . on the whole society,” as Ohmann has shown in

his indispensable book, English in America (248). As he points

out, the legitimating ideology of “culture” dovetails with

the other crucial function of English, the inculcation of

verbal facility with standard English, yet insures that the

study of literature is distinct from the teaching of

composition and other language skills. This distinction is

crucially marked by the creation of a specialized kind of

writing, “criticism.” Specialized writing, then, is

indispensable to English as a profession, and our status as

professionals depends on our production, circulation, and

consumption of this writing. We value such writing so

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highly, value it in contrast to teaching, and value it most

in its published form because our profession quite literally

depends upon it. We require it of ourselves and one another

because by “establishing our own scale of merit,” we have

partially protected ourselves from judgment by non-

professionals (students, parents, administrators, trustees,

politicians, businessmen), and from evaluation solely in

terms of profitability (English, 251). As long as our

professional service is thought to be valuable and

legitimate, we are free to judge ourselves, and that

judgment in turn confirms our professionalism.

The fact that our writing often does not assume the

money form of value, or does so in the archaic form of an

honorarium or nominal payment, separates our work from

immediate market constraints. This separation is crucial to

the professional self-determination so dear to academics. We

write for each other, and to create knowledge. Like artists

who embrace the ideal of autonomy, we take refuge in a

professionalism designed to protect the production of

knowledge from the logic of the bottom line. Yet ours is

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only a relative autonomy. Professionalism is finally no more

free of the shared rationality of the market than is

artistic autonomy, even though professional practices can

sometimes insulate faculty from the immediate demands of the

bottom line. As Ohmann makes clear, criticism is of economic

value to those who manage universities and college. It is a

measurement of the quality of the institution, and a

demonstration of “excellence.” Published criticism, along

with other forms of academic research, contributes to the

ranking of institutions: the more criticism, the higher the

rank. The higher the rank, the more money flowing into the

university or college, the more prestige conferred on its

graduates, the better access they have to wealth, some of

which may return to their alma mater, and so on.

In the years since Ohmann published his essay, the

social relations he analyzes have developed further along

the lines he describes. Systems of merit evaluation and pay

now codify in administrative policy what have long been

professional practices. “Criticism has become an activity in

which we exercise our freedom only to be judged and ranked

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according to what we produce,” Ohmann writes, “and in which

we can establish our worth only by invidious comparison with

others” (“Social Relations,” 25). The evaluation is

invidious not because it involves judgment of the quality of

one’s work, but because quality is difficult to conceive

except in quantitative terms. Further, since quantity is

illimitable, evaluation becomes an end in itself; there can

never be enough judging and ranking. Merit enacts this logic

and enforces the transformation of quality into quantity. It

is an accounting practice. For work to have value, it must

be measurable, and measured. In the “University of

Excellence” writing projects can be evaluated by counting up

the number of pages a professor has published, ranking the

journals and presses which publish the work, and enumerating

the number of times these publications are cited.9 Merit pay

is determined by accounting measures, which, like exchange

in the marketplace, require a quantitative abstraction to

render equivalent all kinds of incommensurate practices of

thinking and writing.

9 The phrase is Readings’s.

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In The University in Ruins, Bill Readings develops a lengthy

critique of the contemporary University of Excellence, an

institution animated less by the education of national

citizens and the preservation of a national culture, which

are the traditional functions of modern universities, and

more by the logic of markets, consumers, and corporations.

Bildung is done, he argues, in a world that is more

transnational than not, and “accountability” is what now

organizes university life. “To whom or what are teachers,

students, and institutions accountable? And in what terms?

In the University of Excellence, the problem of value is

bracketed, and statistical evaluation (of the measure of

excellence) is presumed to provide definitive answers that

then feed into funding, resources, and salary decisions”

(151). Readings is not nostalgic for the University which

served the nation, nor am I, but he is deeply troubled by

what has taken its place, and rightly so. For with the

depreciation of national “cultural values,” the University

no longer describes itself as a guardian of culture, but as

a guarantor of “excellence.” Moreover, those who continue

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to argue that universities have a responsibility to transmit

national values are by and large political conservatives who

have no problem connecting their desire for such values to

the market. The linking of value, merit, and accounting

mechanisms is common sense, which precludes asking questions

about how value is judged.

Insisting on value as a problem that is not solved by

accounting is a way to counter the bureaucratic-

administrative enterprise and to represent differently the

work of the University. Readings focuses on teaching, but

what he says about pedagogy also offers a way to think about

writing. “Pedagogy,” he suggests, “has a specific chronotope

that is radically alien to the notion of accountable time

upon which the excellence of capitalist-bureaucratic

management and bookkeeping depend. Such a pedagogy can

provide a notion of educational responsibility, of

accountability, that is markedly at odds with the logic of

accounting that runs the University of Excellence” (151).

His emphasis is on the time of thinking and the

relationality of thinking; he stresses the fact that

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thinking is open-ended, an activity that is productive but

not determinate. Teaching, then, involves thinkers—teachers

and students both—in what he calls “a network of ethical

obligations,” obligation to the other, to the unknown (156).

Readings thus resists both the quantifying demands of the

market and its shared rationality, and the coordinate

concepts of autonomous producers and exclusive intellectual

property. He rethinks value as ethical, and therefore

fundamentally relational, and figures pedagogy as an ethical

undertaking.

Readings argues for pedagogy in these terms because

teaching in the University of Excellence is largely the

administration of information, an activity that is

consistent with accounting practices (150-154). Students

learn “to make good use of that dearest of all commodities,

time” (to recall Boice’s phrase), as students, teachers, and

administrators alike devote themselves to the project of

administering knowledge: teachers write syllabi as contracts

and schematize knowledge into manageable units, students

evaluate teaching according to quantitative measures,

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administrators rank “units” of the University according to

how many students are efficiently taught, while information

technology services expand exponentially, driven by the

promise of greater access to and control of information.

Time is abstracted from any particular activity of reading

or writing, and is simply a way to measure productivity.

“Excellence,” then, is the universal equivalent that

integrates everything and everyone in the University into a

shared rationality of quantitative evaluation and exchange.

Once again, quality becomes quantity.

This is, of course, a dream (or nightmare) of an

instrumental rationality that is in fact riven with

contradictions and rich with possibilities for different

ways of understanding and organizing the work of the

University. Teaching is, as Reading claims, dialogic, which

is to say that teachers and students meet in language, and

language, while wholly relational, is never controlled by

any single speaker (156). As philosophers of language and

ethics have proposed, we encounter a profound alterity in

language and in relation to others that cannot be

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administered out of existence.10 Readings emphasizes the

estranging work of language that nonetheless is fundamental

to social life and human being. Pedagogy, which takes place

in language, is fundamentally relational, but not subsumed

into the shared rationality that is foundational to

Enlightenment thought and the organization of modern social

and economic relations. This is a way to imagine teaching as

a practice in which participants are ethically accountable

to one another without abstracting pedagogical relations

into administrative terms. As he writes, “My aim . . .is an

anti-modernist rephrasing of teaching and learning as sites

of obligation, as a loci of ethical practices, rather than as means

for the transmission of scientific knowledge. Teaching thus

becomes answerable to the question of justice, rather than to the

criteria of truth. We must seek to do justice to teaching

rather than to know what it is” (154). Reading’s

understanding of the work of the University is anti-

10 I have in mind here not only the work of Bakhtin and scholars like Kay Halasek who have put his work to such good use in composition studies. I’m also thinking of the work of Jacques Derrida and Emanual Levinas, and of ethicists and literary scholars who have worked with their writings, notably Drucilla Cornell and Jill Robbins.

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modernist in his rejection of autonomy and communicative

rationality, and in his valorization of a time not subject

to measurement, which is neither saved nor spent. 11

This reworking of relationality and accountability is

appropriate not only to teaching, but to writing. Writing

also has a specific chronotope, for writing, like teaching,

takes place in the time of thinking and places one in an

open network of obligation to others who are writing and

reading. Writing is also an encounter, a very close

encounter, with language. Yet this ethical obligation—one’s

responsibility as a thinker, student, teacher, writer, to

others who are thinking, learning, teaching, writing—need

not be the Protestant-capitalist ethic of work. The

obligation is not to account for one’s time, to submit to

the discipline of work, but rather is an obligation to the

11 Mary Poovey argues that the humanities in particular may be figuredas a site of ethical practices not assimilable to the corporate university: “The only way we can evaluate the effects of market penetration into the university in terms other than the market’s own is to assert some basis for evaluation that repudiates market logic and refuses market language. In order to assert an alternative basis for evaluation, we must establish a normative definition of this alternativethat is just as tautological as that of the market. For the purposes of discussion, I want to call this alternative ‘the humanities’” (11).

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“interminable process” of thought (159). This process is

interminable because it puts one in relation to the past, to

others who have written and thought, and to the future,

which opens to unknown, indeed, inconceivable thoughts and

unexpected, even astonishing relations. To understand

writing as an ethical practice continuous with teaching is

to contest our profession’s long-standing valorization of

writing—or, more accurately, of published criticism—over

teaching. This is not to valorize teaching, in its turn,

over writing, but rather to extend Readings’s helpful

reconceptualization of the work we do, which, as I

understand it, undoes the hierarchy of writing over teaching

and allows one to figure both as ethical practices.

Contemplating an interminable process and infinite

obligation may seem just the thing to finish off a

struggling writer, but I think not, for the network of

relations Reading articulates and the obligations they

entail are sustaining. The obligation is not to produce a

measurable quantity of writing, as is the case when social

relations are shaped by the logic of the market and worth

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determined according the ethic of “merit.” This network is

not organized by the telos of publication, so writing may or

may not end up in print. One may be a working, responsible

writer while writing commentaries on the work of others, or

working collaboratively on research and writing projects, or

writing to enhance one’s teaching, or to clarify one’s

understanding of an intellectual question. Publication may

expand the range of relations into which one enters, but

writing is valuable as a process, not a product.

Working on this essay has helped me as a writer. It has

given me a way to experience the arduous work of writing as

a relational practice, rather than a response to the demand

to produce. I have learned a great deal, even from those

writers whose work I criticize. Certainly I have learned

from reading Boice’s book, and I am grateful to him for his

helpful suggestions about how to write even during a busy

semester, for I worked in brief, daily sessions, and engaged

in “writerly reading.” While I am critical of his devotion

to discipline and dedication to the telos of publication, I

do better understand the relationality of writing as a

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result of having read his work in conjunction with

Reading’s. Friends and colleagues read drafts of this

writing, and if the essay is published, the words will be in

print thanks to the thoughtful work of the editors and

referees of this journal. The essay itself began as a paper

I wrote to give at a conference on writing organized by

Martha Woodmansee and the Society for Critical Exchange, and

my experience at that conference encouraged me to continue

thinking about the concept of writing block. So thinking and

writing are necessarily relational, but not, I think,

necessarily rational, as in Boice’s “shared rationality of

thought.” Indeed, I would argue with Readings that thought

is precisely not rational, although that does not make it

irrational. The point is to shift the field of the argument

to a problematic of value that is neither pre-determined by

instrumental ends nor transcendental, and to do what we can

to change the social relations of criticism. Writers are

neither shoemakers nor prophets, but thinkers who work in

and with language, and on whom language works.

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