"Beyond Dichotomy: Toward a Theory of Divergence in Composition Studies" (article)

Composition studies, in its brief thirty year history as a discipline, has for the most part accepted and perpetuated the subject/object, internal/external Cartesian split that so dominates the Western epistemological tradition. Such a dichotomy defines the field, manifesting itself in disputes about what constitutes the self, the writing self more specifically, and resulting in artificial categorizations that describe the self as either existing autonomously outside of discourse—an authentic, prediscursive self who uses language as a conduit for expressing ideas originating within the self—or as always already constituted by discourse—a socially constructed, situated, and discursive subjectivity whose identity is a cultural artifact. Such dichotomies are so entrenched, in fact, that they have become household names in composition studies, commonly recognized as expressivism and social constructionism. These two approaches define the writer's relationship to writing differently, at the same time as they both maintain the Cartesian split between the self (internal/individual) and the world (external/social).

A recent exchange between David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow in College Composition and Communication characterizes the self/social dichotomy by summarizing how composition theorists have perceived the self and the impasse arising from this perception. In this exchange, the dichotomy rests between personal and academic writing, but can easily be applied to the larger Cartesian split upon which it is predicated. Bartholomae, an apologist for academic writing, argues that it forces students to write in a "space defined by all the writing that has preceded them. . . . This is the busy, noisy, intertextual space" that he wants student writers to occupy (64). Personal (expressive) writing, the kind espoused by Elbow, imagines a non-intertextual space, a space in which students can "express their own thoughts and ideas, not to reproduce those of others" (64). According to Bartholomae, such a space does not exist—it is a particularly Romantic myth, a myth of the autotelic self, a desire for presence or transcendence. When Elbow imagines such a space, he reflects an expressivist belief in "an independent, self-creative, self-expressive subjectivity" (65). From his social constructionist position, Bartholomae argues that when we talk about any kind of writing, academic or otherwise, we are talking about "sites," scenes of writing that are intertextually and ideologically fraught. When we teach writing in the academy, we need to make students aware of how writing situates them, how they are written, to paraphrase Derrida, as they write.

Elbow, by privileging the personal, perceives an inherent conflict between the goals of the "academic" and the goals of the "writer," a conflict predicated on issues of control. Social constructionists (here read as "academics") claim that a writer's intentions do not matter or at least are undefinable. For them, meaning is communally constructed—it is an artifact, Kenneth Bruffee explains, "created by social interaction. We can think because we can talk, and we think in ways we have learned to talk" (640). "Academics," courtesy of Barthes and Foucault, become functions of discourse. "Writers," on the other hand, need to claim intention and ownership. This is particularly the case with beginning writers. Elbow makes this clear when he rejects the social constructionist notion that "if you can't say it, you don't know it." For him, thought is not entirely constituted by language, as writers repeatedly testify knowing more than they are able to "put" into words. In response, Elbow posits a pedagogy of intention, a pedagogy that asks teachers to encourage writers' intentions and demands that readers respect and acknowledge these intentions. In order to privilege intentions, Elbow argues against reminding writers of their situatedness, of their work being an artifact in an ongoing intellectual/cultural conversation. Instead, he invites students to pretend "that no authorities have ever written about their subject before" (79). Elbow's expressivism resists situatedness.

Much has been written in the last ten or so years to suggest that such an expressivist/social constructionist dichotomy precludes an accurate understanding of the self, particularly as it engages in the act of writing. Recently, in the Spring 1995 issue of The Writing Instructor, for example, guest editor Jennifer Welsh invited readers to transcend the social/self dichotomy by publishing four articles that consider the self and the social as "embedded in each other, each enhancing the complexities of the other" (100). While such efforts to consider the interactive nature of the self and the social certainly point composition studies in the right direction, much of this work merely calls for a more dialectical theory without articulating it. That is, they point out the exclusionary and reductive nature of the dichotomy without theorizing how to get beyond it.

A few more recent scholars, however, (see Thomas Kent, David Russell, Reed Way Dasenbrock, Donald C. Jones and Johndan Johnson-Eilola, for example) have actually begun to articulate an interactive theory. These theorists turn to work done in philosophy, particularly to the work of Lev Vygotsky, John Dewey, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty, in order to account for how the self and the social interact in the construction of reality. They do not accept that mental states precede expression or that meaning and the means of communicating it can be separated. Instead, they posit an externalist theory of the self, one that perceives the self as engaging in a perpetual guessing game, what David Russell terms a "dynamic hermeneutic, a constant reinterpretation, a constant reweaving of the `web of belief' (Rorty) or `web of meaning' (Vygotsky), a constant `reconstruction of experience' (Dewey)" which allows individuals to continuously reconstruct sociohistorically situated activities at the same time as these activities reconstruct individuals (179). The emphasis on the "constant" (constant reinterpretation, constant reconstruction, and so on) belies the externalist notion that our beliefs, desires, intentions and other mental states are not mediated or stabilized by conceptual schemes, social norms, or linguistic conventions—for example, the way we communicate our values and beliefs is not mediated by certain preexisting conceptual frameworks such as "discourse communities"; instead, such mental states derive from our public interactions with others and with the world, thereby becoming constantly reconstituted every time we engage in a communicative act. Every communicative act (both written and spoken) requires that the speaker/writer, the audience, and the object of their discussion communicate by interpreting one another. As such, every communicative act is an interpretive act and thus is mediated by and unique to a particular moment, a particular object, and a particular set of people, each dynamically (re)constituting the other. Externalists, citing Donald Davidson, refer to this interpretive act as "passing" because it involves a constant shifting of our interpretations as we continuously try to guess what others are saying and vice versa. Communicative acts are thus "passing" because we can only interpret and understand one another during the communicative act, not prior to it. So every communicative action is self-mediated, unprecedented, and to some extent, unpredictable.

By positing that meaning is always already mediated by an interpretive interaction between self, others, and the world they share, externalists provide a partial way out of the self/social dichotomy. I say "partial," however, because by emphasizing the "passing" nature of this interaction, the externalist approach does not fully account for the role that prior epistemological systems or, to borrow Davidson's term, "conceptual schemes" play in communicative interactions. As I argue in this paper, such systems cannot be overlooked mainly because they are inscribed in the very conventions (ideological, linguistic, generic) we use not only to communicate with one another, but also to interpret one another and the world we share. Externalism thus fails to adequately consider the interpretive baggage that we bring with us to every communicative interaction—those prior strategies or conceptual frameworks (gendered, racial, class-based)—that we carry with us from one communicative moment to the next and that determine how we interpret ourselves, others, and objects in the world. In other words, there are power relations and hegemonic ways of conceptualizing the world that exist prior to our engaging in a communicative act, and which constitute the very passing reconstitutions that go on when we interpret one another. That externalism overlooks the determining influence of prior conventions does not mean we dismiss it as a viable means of reconciling the self/social dichotomy, only that we complicate it by describing a more accurate dialectic, one that accounts not only for the externalist interaction between the self and the social, but also for the interaction between passing and prior interpretive strategies. In short, we need a theory of divergence, one informed by externalism as well as by recent scholarship in genre and creativity theory.

Externalism

Thomas Kent has been largely responsible for introducing externalism to composition studies.¹ Drawing heavily on the anti-foundationalist philosophy of Donald Davidson, Kent proclaims that the "`emergence of a radically revised view of the relation of mind and the world' predicted by Davidson is now upon us, and it has come to be called externalism in opposition to internalist Cartesian conceptions of mind and the world" ("Externalism" 62). This "radically revised view of the relation of mind and world" rejects the internalist view "that a conceptual scheme or internal realm of mental states—beliefs, desires, intentions, and so forth—exists anterior to an external realm of objects and events" (57). Mental states, externalism argues, do not exist a priori within conceptual schemes; they are not innately hard-wired into our minds nor are they mental internalizations of socially constructed conceptual systems. Because they cannot be conceptualized as prepackaged entities within the mind or within discourse communities, then, mental states do not form the basis for our communicative interactions but are rather a consequence of these interactions.

The externalist view denies language and discourse conventions any mediatory status in the construction of mental states. Kent explains: "we no longer need to talk about language in terms of something that mediates between subjective mental states—thoughts, beliefs, intentions, or conceptual schemes—and a reality `out there,'. . ." ("Externalism" 63). Language is not a bridge that reconciles the self and all that is not self. Instead, mental states derive from communicative interactions, what Davidson calls "triangulation," an anti-Cartesian view that understands writing (indeed all communication) as an act "that brings us in unmediated touch with the world and with the minds of others" (Kent, "On the Very Idea" 426). In this view, our beliefs, intentions, desires, epistemologies "derive from our public interactions with other language users and with the world. Consequently, mental states cannot exist without an external world" (Kent, "On the very Idea" 430). Thus while social constructionists and expressivists endorse a split between the social and the self, externalists emphasize the necessity of interaction between the two in the formation of mental states. Mental states, as such, arise as a result of the interaction between the self and the social—they do not exist a priori within an autonomous self nor do they exist a priori within a stable conceptual scheme. It is not satisfactory, then, to argue as Elbow does that mental states mainly exist in and for themselves at the same time as it is not satisfactory to insist as Bartholomae does that mental states are mainly constructed by community-generated discourses.

The externalist position thus argues that mental states derive from an interpretive interaction between one person's mind, an other's or many others' mind(s), and a stimuli they share. Such an interaction is what Davidson means by "triangulation." When we triangulate, we engage in an interpretive mental relationship with the world around us. Kent explains that "we cannot believe or know something without believing or knowing what others already believe and know, for knowing our own minds means simultaneously knowing the minds of others existing within a world of objects we all agree to exist" ("On the Very Idea" 431-32). Mental states—beliefs, intentions, thoughts, desires—are the result of a tenuously negotiated agreement, an agreement contingent upon how others interpret our actions and how we interpret others' interpretations of our actions. We come to know and understand objects in the world and each other only when our interpretations match others' interpretations. This is what triangulation is all about, and, as Kent explains, the interpretation that drives it "goes all the way down" ("Hope" 429). The crucial point here is that we come to understand "self" not as some a priori concept but rather as a negotiated, contingent state existing as a result of communicative interaction with others and the stimuli they share. Thus, we have a subject/object/other dialectic that is continuously being recreated as it is being reinterpreted.

Such a dialectic emerges out of a critical and transient interpretative act, what Davidson calls a "passing theory." Because this interpretive moment constitutes "the only shared relation between communicants," every communicative act becomes a dialectical hermeneutic, an on-the-spot interaction that lasts only as long as the triangulation lasts (Kent, "On the Very Idea" 433). In this case, any interpretive strategy or convention communicants bring with them to a communicative situation—what Davidson calls a "prior theory"—takes a back seat to the actual interpretive interaction that communicants employ when they communicate. David Russell provides an example which I will quote in full:

A seven-month-old child who has yet learned her first word reaches in the direction of a spherical object and babbles. Her parent, seeing this, puts the object in her hands and says, "Ball! You want to play with the ball?" Sooner or later—usually sooner—the child learns that adults play with her using spherical objects and that certain sounds ("ball") and certain activities accompany human interactions with such objects. She learns through observing others' actions and her own that making the sound "ball" in certain situations often produces certain effects in others. Triangulation has been achieved. And learning. (181)

No language or discourse conventions, no conceptual system, and no paradigms mediated this interaction, especially since the child, lacking any prior knowledge of such conventions, nonetheless was able to communicate with her parent. The child, in other words, did not draw upon a prior interpretive theory but rather depended on what Kent calls a "hermeneutical guess," a passing theory that emerged out of an interaction between her mind, her mother's mind, and an object they shared. Passing theory, as it were, takes precedence over prior theory, and hence every communicative act is unique in that it is not mediated by convention. Externalism thus reminds us that the relationship between self and Other is too dynamic—always re-woven, always re-constituted—for us to reduce it to an either/or choice such as "expressivism" or "social constructionism." The dichotomy no longer holds. And yet, even while the more recent externalist theories help us get beyond the social/self dichotomy created by the Cartesian split, they nonetheless still do not account for how passing and prior theories interact, and so we are left with yet another dichotomy. That is, while externalism describes how the self and the Other construct one another, it still does not adequately address the question of priority. Instead it assumes that communicants can somehow set aside their prior communicative strategies and conceptual systems for more immediate passing ones, something I suggest is nearly impossible to do—unless, perhaps, you are a seven-month-old child— given the fact that people so often rely—in fact cannot help but rely—on already existing strategies and conventions even as they encounter new situations.² We need a dialectic that not only accounts for how the self and the social interact (externalism), but also one that accounts for how passing and prior theories interact. We need a theory of divergence.

Toward a Theory of Divergence

By suggesting that writers and speakers engage in a continuous dialectical interaction with other language users and the world they share, externalists offer a way out of the Cartesian dichotomy. The problem, however, is that this dialectic is located in a passing moment of triangulation and so is constantly being reproduced from one communicative act to the next. There appears to be little account of priority in the externalist dialectic, leaving us to conclude that we are always already engaged in an unprecedented and transient interpretive act. The rest of this paper critiques this externalist assumption, arguing instead that language and discourse conventions are much more epistemological and hence linked to the way we think than externalists are willing to admit. Jettisoning these conventions for more passing strategies may not be as easy or as possible as the theory imagines. Instead of separating them, we need a way of talking about how prior and passing theories interact.

No matter how unique and passing each communicative act is—and certainly no two communicative situations, however similar, are exactly the same—communicants always rely on prior strategies and conventions even as they [re]create them. We see examples of this every time a writer writes within a genre. Even though the rhetorical and social situations to which genres respond are almost never exactly alike, some aspects of these situations must recur for a genre to emerge. Thus, the very nature of genres requires writers to contend, simultaneously, with standardization and variation. For example, a birthday greeting card must contain certain conventions common to all genres we call "greeting cards." These prototypical conventions—elements ranging from the physical texture of the card to more textual aspects such as an impersonal, brief message (often in rhyme), some kind of a drawing or picture, a blank space for a more personal message, and so on—respond to and perpetuate the values, goals, and epistemologies of the culture at large. At the same time, a birthday greeting card contains generic conventions that reflect the specific values, goals, and epistemologies of the particular context, sender, and receiver who use it—the values of the person sending the card, the relationship between the sender and receiver, the receiver's age, the sender's age, and so on. Whenever an employee at Hallmark, say, creates a genre like the greeting card, then, she must negotiate between the functional or prototypical aspects and the constituent aspects of genres—the recurring conventions that mark the genre as a whole and the conventions that are unique to only one particular text at one particular time.

Hence, every genre, whether overtly or not, embodies and dramatizes a tension between at least two generic strategies: 1) conventional and hence "prior" ways of dealing with a communicative situation, and 2) unique, passing strategies. These generic strategies mediate one another, each exerting pressure on the other. The prototypical conventions, for example, constrain the extent to which a writer or speaker can vary the constituent features; at the same time, variations in the constituent features may eventually reconstitute the prototypical conventions. In order to account for the complexity of this interaction, we need to complicate the notion of triangulation by reconceptualizing the communicative act so it includes not only an interaction between a speaker/writer, an audience, and their shared world, but also an interaction between the prior and passing strategies they employ. Such an interaction is constitutive of every creative and/or communicative act.

Creativity theorists have begun to critique the notion of creativity as unprecedented or passing, arguing instead that there can be no transcendence without derivation (see Bailin, Koestler, Perkins, Rothenberg and Hausman, Weisberg). Instead of transcendence, they posit "divergence," a term which suggests a swerving or turning away. But it must be a swerve from something; otherwise we would not be able to recognize it as a swerve. This is why the expressivist Donald Stewart, responding to the social constructionist Kenneth Bruffee's notion of communally constructed meaning, is misguided when he longs for a satisfactory "explanation of Mozart's ability to transcend the influence of Haydn, of Beethoven's to transcend Mozart, of Brahm's to transcend Beethoven" (67). The problem is with the word transcend. Influence cannot be transcended; in fact, the very notion of "transcending influence" is a contradiction. If, for example, Mozart really was able to transcend Haydn's influence, then we would not be able to recognize an influence in the first place. In addition, if there was no influence, then we would not be able to recognize any kind of "transcendence." Such a desire for creative transcendence is akin to what Carl Hausman in A Discourse on Novelty and Creation terms "Novelty Proper." Novelty Proper refers to creations that are radically new and that exemplify an unprecedented and irreducible form. Such creations are thought to transcend whatever has come prior to them—to, indeed, transcend influence by manifesting themselves as breaks or gaps within otherwise continuous processes. "Passing theory" promises just this kind of discontinuity by positing that every communicative act is an unprecedented phenomenon.

Recent theoretical work in creativity challenges such notions of unprecedentedness, in many ways debunking the "genius" myth associated with them—both the spiritual and autonomous undertones—and replacing it with a much more sophisticated notion that explains creativity as a "divergence from the already existing."³ This theory posits that a creative act both derives (is always already) and diverges (transforms/inflects the always already). Robert-Alain de Beaugrande, in his "Toward a General Theory of Creativity," refers to this act as the "motivated modification of systems." Such an act requires that a creator work within a traditional system (ideological, linguistic, literary, generic, epistemological, etc.) before he or she can intentionally modify that system. According to Beaugrande, one's creativity is contingent upon his or her familiarity with a system's capabilities, because such "systemic competence" allows him or her to recognize "when a communicative situation cannot be successfully managed by simple adherence to systemic norms" (277). In other words, we must understand "systemic norms"—a genre's formal and textual conventions, for example—before we can recognize their inability to perform certain communicative actions and hence modify them. Motivation and modification are thus predicated on systemic competence. Thomas Kuhn posits a similar theory when he argues that the recognition and interpretation of an anomaly becomes meaningful only as it emerges against the backdrop of a paradigm. The point is that systems or paradigms are conceptual structures that limit the way we interpret and experience the world at the same time as they, because unable to account for anomalies, prepare "the way for the perception of novelty" (Kuhn 57). This perception applies not only to the production of creative work, but also to its reception. Once an act of modification is motivated by and performed within a system, then we (readers, reviewers, listeners) can also recognize the result as divergent, and hence creative. In short, Beaugrande's systems-motivated-modification dialectic insists that vestiges of the convention (systems) both inspire and be present in the variation (modification) if the creative act is to be meaningful. In order to understand the modification, then, one needs to understand the systems that motivated the modification in the first place.

While externalists would argue that conventions or conceptual systems do not exist a priori, Beaugrande and Kuhn argue that in cultures, discourse communities, and groups, individuals function within, are determined by, and interact within prior "systems" or "paradigms." What ostensibly appears as unique or "passing" is thus always structured by and interpreted through already existing systems. The concept of "systems" refers to the means by which a culture, community, or group constructs and conceptualizes its reality; the means by which it makes and sanctions knowledge; and the means by which it decides what is appropriate, acceptable, and most of all, possible. I would not hesitate, in fact, to say that "systems" are akin to what Foucault calls "discourse formations." To function and communicate meaningfully within a culture, community, or group, one needs to be aware of how meaning is made in these spaces, how, that is, experience is made meaningful, language is made intelligible, and so on. The conceptual and communicative means of a culture, a community, or a group are embodied in the systems they construct. "Systems," then, become created social patterns of action which both respond to and construct recurrent social needs. Just like genres, as we will see in a moment.

An awareness of "systems" allows both the creator and the audience to make certain assumptions about shared knowledge and expectations. In order to make their work intelligible and meaningful, creative individuals need to duplicate enough of the "systems" in their work so as to allow their audiences to recognize the divergences. In this regard, "systems" are necessarily regulative and stabilizing forces that constrain at the same time as they enable. "Systems," then, exist as a result of a constant dialectic of choice and constraint, the self and the social, prior and passing theory—just like in the example of the greeting card. It is this dialogue between the writer and the "systems" that is implied in Beaugrande's "motivated modification of systems."

Creativity thus needs to be seen as a divergence from the already existing, a divergence that is motivated and structured by "systems." This means that even passing theories which appear as unique and temporary communicative strategies are always embedded within and structured by prior strategies. Once again, take genres for example. To write within a genre is to negotiate between constraint and choice—between the constraint inherent in prior strategies that a community has constructed in response to recurrent social and rhetorical needs and the choice allowed by the more immediate passing strategies employed by individuals in response to particular rhetorical and social needs. As such, because generic conventions—or systems, to use Beaugrande's term—contribute both prior and passing theories to the communicative act, writing genres is often an exercise in creativity.

This approach to genre rejects the notion that textual and formal conventions are deterministic—stable, artificial, perhaps even arbitrary boundaries which contain ideas. Such a "container" notion of genre presupposes that somehow ideas and experiences can be divorced from the manner in which we express them. The traditional notion here is that forms, patterns, paradigms, schemes, and other conventions are somehow innocent, simply models, modes, text types, systems of classification that exist independently of the meaning produced in the writer's mind. Creativity, as such, occurs in the mind of the solitary, inspired creator and then is transposed into the genre of choice in order to be classified. It is this notion of convention—generic or otherwise—that Kent and others have rejected. And rightfully so.

But just because conventions are not stable does not mean that we must reject them and opt instead for a passing theory of communication. Recent reconceptualizations of genre, for example, posit that conventions do exist, not only as classification systems, but more importantly as conceptual systems. Far from being artificial and static, generic patternings dynamically respond to and construct recurrent rhetorical and social situations. That is, they are rhetorical constructs that not only respond to recurring social situations, but also structure the way we organize, experience, and understand these situations. Genres, therefore, are what Carolyn Miller has defined as "typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations" (159; my emphasis). The emphasis on "actions" suggests that for Miller genres are not merely typified responses to recurrent objective and predetermined situations, such as emergencies and disasters; they also help construct and perpetuate such situations by turning them into social exegencies. For example, the greeting card as a genre may have emerged as a response to recurring social events (death of loved ones, birth of loved ones, marriage, and so on), but the greeting card also serves to transform these events into social exigencies by endowing them with a certain social significance that in turn sanctions them as deserving of a greeting card. Today we see the extent to which the greeting card as a genre constructs the very recurring exigencies that it in turn responds to in such examples as "the secretaries's-day card," "the bosses'-day card," "the grandparents'-day card," etc.) Genres, thus, mediate to a great extent our experience of the world, determining our motives, what we deem valuable, and how we communicate these motives and values.

In short, genres are dynamically linked to the way we conceptualize, order, and change our world. That is why generic conventions linger with us from one communicative moment to the next, in many ways reconstituting every passing communicative act with vestiges of a prior one. We cannot get beyond them. In his "The Problem of Speech Genres," Bakhtin reinforces the inescapable nature of genres. Defining speech genres as typified utterances, Bakhtin claims that "we speak only in definite speech genres[;] that is, all our utterances have definite and relatively stable typical forms of construction of the whole" (79; Bakhtin's emphasis). Such generic forms of the utterance constrain and organize what Bakhtin calls a speaker's "speech plan" or "speech will" (78). He explains:

The speaker's speech will is manifested primarily in the choice of a particular speech genre. This choice is determined by the specific nature of the given sphere of speech communication, semantic (thematic) considerations, the concrete situation of the speech communication, the personal composition of its participants, and so on. And when the speaker's speech plan with all its individuality and subjectivity is applied and adapted to a chosen genre, it is shaped and developed within a certain generic form. Such genres exist above all in the great and multifarious sphere of everyday oral communication, including the most familiar and the most intimate. (78; Bakhtin's emphasis)

Without such speech genres, which "enter our experience and our consciousness together" and help construct the "dialogic reverberations" that make up speech communication, Bakhtin concludes, communication would be nearly impossible (78, 94). Therefore, in the same way that we must not separate the self from the social, so too can we not separate our passing communicative interactions with others from the prior conventions and strategies in and with which they take place.

We can see how genre affects communicative interaction in D.H. Lawrence's use of different literary genres to describe similar experiences.⁴ The genre—the convention—Lawrence writes in imposes upon him a culturally sanctioned meaning-making pattern that alters in some way how he conceptualizes and communicates his experiences. As such, what he eventually communicates is motivated and structured not just by certain "passing" strategies he utilizes for a particular communicative interaction, but also by the constraints of the "prior" conventions, the genres, that he works within. The way he chooses to tell his story and the way the audience perceives it changes as the patterns within which it is told change, so that the very generic conventions he turns to in order to define himself end up defining him and vice versa. For generic reasons that space does not permit us to discuss in detail here, Lawrence's use of the autobiographical poem and the autobiographical novel provide him with different reminiscential possibilities. Simon Lesser, in Fiction and the Unconscious, argues that the novel as a genre is regulative by nature—it checkmates the anxiety that produces it by cathartically strengthening "the hand of the ego in controlling repudiated impulses." Fiction, therefore, is employed in the service of the ego, speaking "to us in a language which effortlessly conceals many things from conscious awareness at the same time that it communicates them to the unconscious with extraordinary vividness" (173, 175). There is something, then, in the generic conventions of fiction that regulates the very anxieties and impulses that it describes—this may have to do with plot, length, narrator (especially 3rd person narrator), characters, description, etc. This regulative function may or may not exit in poetry, and depending on the degree to which it exerts its control, can alter how much Lawrence is willing to divulge of his life in one genre and not in another.

Part of the mythic, idealized relationship between Lawrence and his mother that is presented in the poems is due to the absence of Lawrence's father from the poems. There is simply no counterpart to the Mr. Morel figure (Lawrence's father in Sons and Lovers) in the poems. Is this because poetry as a genre ostensibly lacks fiction's regulative power and so does not afford Lawrence the same opportunity he has in the novel to control his father's presence? Is this then why he ignores him? Maybe. For whatever reason, and I suppose we could give many, the absence of a Mr. Morel figure in one genre and his presence in another changes the way Lawrence recounts and perhaps even experiences his autobiography. At the same time, the absence and presence alters the way we subsequently read the autobiography.

Similarly, when Lawrence describes his mother's death in Sons and Lovers and then in the poem "The Bride," for example, Lawrence again seems to describe two very different experiences. In the poem, his mother's death is idealized. She becomes a beautiful bride:

Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams

Of perfect things.

She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,

And her dead mouth sings

By its shape, like thrushes in clear evenings. (464)

In the novel, however, the same death scene is suddenly contextualized in reality, complete with carts clanking outside her window. In addition, the bride-like face of the dying mother in the poem is replaced in the novel with a very different face: "She lay with her cheek in her hand, her mouth fallen open, and the great, ghastly snores came and went" (398). What a difference, thrushes singing and ghastly snores!

Both the novel and the poem are describing the same event, but they do so in conventionally different ways. Mrs. Morel dies one generic death while the "She" of the poems dies another generic death. It seems that each genre—each convention—compels Lawrence to remember and interpret his mother's death differently. In this case, the genre Lawrence chooses—with its prior conventions and constraints—in addition to the passing theory he employs—his unique, context-bound interpretation of events in his life—structures not only how he experiences and conceptualizes significant events in his life, but also the way we as readers experience and conceptualize these events. Genres thus dramatize a transformative interaction between an individual's unique experiences and a conventional frame of reference. They are, finally, conceptual frameworks, webs in which the social and the self are constantly re-weaving and recreating each other, in which the prototypical aspects of a text—those "prior" conventions that make a text part of the genre—and the constituent aspects of a text—those "passing" conventions that mark the text's uniqueness—interact to produce divergence of experience.

Conclusion

As the Lawrence example suggests, what we desire to communicate is constrained by the conventions we use to communicate it. While externalism accounts for how meaning is mediated by an interaction between a writer (Lawrence), an audience (readers of his novels and poems) and an object (Lawrence's experience), it does not account for the role that the genre (as conceptual scheme or system) plays in mediating meaning. In other words, it does not describe how "passing" acts of triangulation take shape within prior conventions. A text, for example, will have aspects that are recognized as conventional, elements that identify it as part of a genre, at the same time as it will have aspects that individuate it. So even as communicants employ unique "passing" strategies to deal with a particular communicative act, they also rely on conventional "prior" strategies. Every communicative act, therefore, is not "passing," but divergent. It relies on at the same time that it diverges from priority.

We need such a theory of divergence in composition studies as a way to reconcile the autonomous self and the constituted self, a way to talk about how writers not only derive from generic, ideological, and discursive conventions, but also how they diverge from these conventions. As yet, composition studies has not articulated such a theory. I think that the recent work in creativity and genre theory, coupled with Kent and others' work in externalist theory, can help us articulate such a perspective. It is my hope that we in composition studies will use these conversations and then build from them a theory of divergence that will yield a more sophisticated and satisfying notion of agency.⁵

JAC Volume 17 Issue 1