pace Mark Coeckelbergh and David Gunkel

My main task now is to compose the first of these bedridden travel notes so that I shall be ready when my publisher’s emissary arrives to take my dictation, letter by letter. In my head I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph.

Jean-Dominique Bauby, The diving bell and the butterfly, pp. 5-6

Bauby was not just completely paralyzed when he wrote his book; he was “locked-in”. When he says that an emissary will arrive and “take dictation”, he means that she will patiently say each letter of the alphabet and write down the one she got to when he blinks. That is, he composed the book in his head and then communicated it to a scribe one letter at a time with his eyes. He was clearly a “writer”. He “wrote” a book. But what part of this process was the actual writing?

The transfer of letters from his head to the page is, of course, an essential part. Without that, he would not be writing, but is he actually writing when the dictation is going on? Interestingly, even though it would not be writing without the transcription onto the page, I want to say that the letter-by-letter communication of the text to the emissary is not actually “writing”. In an important sense, the writing has already happened by this point. He has, literally, written the chapter “in his head”.

Borges has a character “write” a play in his head, too, just before he dies. It never sees the surface of a page. But here, too, I think we would say the writing did get done.

I have elsewhere said that “writing is something we do with our hands”. But this case shows that this statement is not at all accurate. People who have no hands or hands tied behind their backs or hands but no motor neurons to use them can still write. Bauby describes the process much as we would describe writing on paper or with a word processor (much like what I’m doing now): churning over sentences, deleting and adding words, composing paragraphs. Writing, it turns out, is, first of all, a mental activity. It can literally, almost, be all in your head.

That does not mean that our inner monologue is always an act of writing. I want to say that we are writing when we are thinking about putting words on a page — or, of course, when we’re actually doing it. We are writing when we intend to represent our thoughts or feelings in a durable linguistic form. Bauby was not just daydreaming; he was composing. And though he did at each point have those paragraphs in his head (or, better, by his heart) — a whole chapter at a time, as I understand it — the act of transcription must have been important to him. The moment where he has “set it down” must have felt very special — he has “gotten it off his chest”. That’s what I mean when I say that, while most of the writing was already done before the emissary arrives, the transcription is nonetheless essential to the process. Bauby wanted those words to end up on a page. That desire is part of writing.

To write is to imagine words on a page. If you can manage it, it often helps to actually put them there. For most of us, it’s the only way to be sure we’ve actually done it.

This isn’t a new question. But it has been coming up lately in my encounters with David Gunkel over the question of whether large language models like ChatGPT can write. I keep saying that they’re not doing anything that people like Barthes, Foucault, or, especially, Derrida would consider writing. He keeps asking me how I, then, would define “writing”.

I should have an answer to that question, of course. This post is just a reminder to me to come up with something a little more interesting than “words on a page” and a little less mysterious than “any differential trace structure”.

Let’s see what I’ve got tomorrow morning!

Is writing seemly? Does the writer cut a respectable figure? Is it proper to write? Is it done?

Of course not.

Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”

Yesterday David Gunkel said something puzzling. I have been trying to argue that “ChatGPT can’t write” in a sense that Derrida would acknowledge as such. David’s position is that

ChatGPT is not a “writer” in the human sense. It doesn’t have something it wishes to say (the logocentric conceptualization of “writing”). But it does output sequences of words in/on a medium (the screen). So it does produce writing.

X, 2:13 PM · Oct 10, 2023

I responded as follows:

I’m pretty sure that for Derrida real writing (human writing) is somewhere between logocentric vouloir dire and producing sequences of words. My argument is that he would not countenance the latter as writing without a trace of difference.

X, 4:57 PM · Oct 10, 2023

Here’s his puzzling response:

You presume to speak for Derrida. The very concept of ‘real writing’ (as opposed to what would be “apparent writing”) is submitted to the movement of deconstruction. See “Plato’s Pharmacy” and the essays in “Writing and Difference.”

X, 5:11 PM · Oct 10, 2023

What puzzles me is that David, who is such an enthusiastic reader of Derrida, would, first, reduce the concept of “writing” to the mere production of a sequence of words and, then, dissolve the distinction between a “real” act of writing and a simulacrum. Even humans can fake it, pull one over, dial it in. Surely we can tell when a sequence of words isn’t really a piece of writing? To say that there is no interesting difference to trace here is very strange to me. Especially for the author of a book called Deconstruction.

About six years ago, a question occurred to me. Is blogging even writing? To use a familiar distinction in its pre-deconstructed form, is blogging more like writing or speaking? After deconstruction, of course, this question doesn’t come up, but on most days I am utterly beholden to the metaphysics of presence and worried about writing, if you will, “proper” — or, as the English say, properly worried about writing. The future of writing is online. Is online writing even writing? I worry.

The issue turns on the famous displacements of the subjects of writing in time and place. The meaning of the text is produced by the difference and deferral of the words. Even the word “subject” is ambiguous here since it can refer to both the subject that is writing and the topic being written about. The important thing about writing, it seems to me, is that, while it is going on, the subject (the “I”) of the text is utterly alone. Explicitly so. Excruciatingly so. The reader is implicit, imaginary. In an important sense, the reader is a “fantasy” of the writer. (“Imagine having readers!” the author sighs.) The loneliness of the writer — what we may call, borrowing a line from Virginia Woolf (via Frank Cioffi), “the loneliness that is the truth of things” — is eventually to be shared with the reader. But first it must be suffered alone. And, here’s the thing: in the moment of writing, it seems it could last forever.

Blogging, I want to say, is different. As I write these words I know my suffering will stop. I’ve decided to post this before 8:00 AM. (Let’s see if I find the courage.) It’s not really writing. I’m not deferring the meaning of my words — not for very long — I will give them to my reader presently, immediately. Almost. Blogging almost isn’t writing. Or is it almost writing?

Dave Cormier recently advised us to stop assigning essays because it doesn’t teach students what he wants to teach them, namely, how to do research. My immediate response to this was to say that I’m teaching students how to write sentences to put in paragraphs to make arguments to use in essays. To steal a line from T. S. Eliot, I’m teaching prose primarily as prose and not another thing.

In fact, I felt like I had pre-emptively responded to his post nine months ago with my first post of the year, reflecting on the coming (now ongoing) disruption of higher education by generative AI: “How They Must Write: Saving the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Contingencies.”

When I say I want to teach students how to “make arguments” I’m not saying that I’m teaching the essay in order to build “critical thinking” skills, although I do believe that Dave’s long list of skills that generative AI will increasingly “cover” are important and still need to be taught. I think Dave agrees with this, although I was surprised to see him say that AI means that “the student doesn’t need to be creative” any longer.

I’m not using the essay to teach information literacy. I’m literally (!) just trying to teach literacy — specifically, writing skills. Students should understand how sentences and paragraphs work. They should be able to compose them into arguments and they should be able to occupy a reader’s attention effectively for 5 or 11 or 40 minutes. Students should simply be able to write essays, not for the sake of some other skill that is required to write them, but for the sake of writing essays. Indeed, I’ll teach some of those other skills for the sake of the essays!

So I will keep assigning essays, including take-home essays. It’s just that I’ll only give grades for in-class writing. Or, rather, that is my advice to teachers.