Jimmy Butts teaches writing and the teaching of writing to university students, and is always looking for novel ways of doing those things. He has worked with students from Charleston County High Schools, Winthrop University, Clemson University, Wake Forest University, and now LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana as Director of The University Writing Program. He received his Ph.D. from the transdisciplinary program known as Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University. His research interests include postmodern composition strategies, new media, rhetorical criticism, defamiliarization, and writing pedagogy. He has published multimodal work in The KB Journal, Pre-Text, as a proud instructor in The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects, The Cybertext Yearbook, and for Pearson Education.

Creator's Statement

So, here is the question:

How will we write in the future? The question(s) offer an invitation for thinking, a pedagogical meditation.

How many questions about writing will never be answered? Of course, when we speculate about the future, all we have are questions. We cannot know what will happen.

In our current world, where electricity and human compositions are more ubiquitous than ever, we, of course, have to find new ways of interjecting our voices. And then, too, we have to find ways of prepping ourselves to be good compositionists after the bomb—whatever that may end up looking like. That is, in the face of potential apocalypse, how can we begin to practice approaches to writing that may serve us in scenarios where the tools of writing must inevitably change? It is impossible to discern, so we imagine futures discerningly, but endlessly.

The world will one day end. That is inevitable—whether it happens tomorrow or in a zillion years, the earth will grow hot or cold, and everything will die. Before that, there will be smaller deaths: the death of Microsoft and the death of the Internet and the death of paper made from trees. A happier thought: we have the opportunity to invent new approaches to composition before everything dies. So, how will we do that? We uncover—following the meaning of apocalypse—the forms, conventions, genres, practices, process, and tools that we can compose with moving forward.

What models do we have? We do have some examples:

Anne Frank writes her diary, keeps track of herself in the midst of catastrophe. In 9/11, we have records of text messages send to and from loved ones. We have The Tower of Babel and the burned Library of Alexandria. What textual archives will we build and lose? We imagine scraps of paper and facing our eventual death. This is always the essence of writing. We have seen science fiction where electricity is gone, or trees, or the general functioning of everyday life—the postal service, for example. So, we wonder at what may come. And what genres will we generate? Prophecy will likely return in full force. It already has in the work of folks like Al Gore. Kenneth Burke imagines our collective worst possible outcome in his speculative classic rhetorical text: “Towards Helhaven.”

Or, we have speculative visions in stories and film that offer us insight into how we may construct compositions in our various possible futures. We are to be compositional doomsday preppers, writerly end times watchers. The trope of the sandwich board decrying that “THE END IS NIGH” is at its core a kind of writing with particular rhetorical intent. The warning as a missive is a reluctant imperative.

Maurice Blanchot gives us what is perhaps one of the most seminal sketches—explorations—in the writing of disaster. In his book, he attempts an explanation: “The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual” (7). The disaster is only theory. It is the unthinkable that offers infinite thought.

Questions.

Michael Bernard Donals too offers some injunctions in thinking about writing in the face of impossible disaster, especially in consideration of the holocaust. In his article, “The Rhetoric of Disaster and the Imperative of Writing,” he inures the reader of the importance of testifying, of speaking toward the requirement of taking a stance in the face of obliteration (73-74). Bernard-Donals is looking at a real past, but we too, then, can look forward at what sorts of futures will have been our collective history. If we end up with apocalyptic pasts, it will only be by undergoing various kinds of particular futures.

And Gregory Ulmer invites theory as a kind of undergoing, learning by doing rather than just through spectatating. But apocalypse is spectacle, which is why so many of us have already seen footage of the Atom Bomb. Perhaps the strongest two places where Ulmer theorizes futurity (aside from his essential work on electracy, which inherently paves the way for the future of writing) are in Electronic Monuments and in a briefer essay called “Teletheory: A Mystory.” There Ulmer wonders in his opening section called The Future of Theory, “At the speed of thought now—mock something-or-other—it becomes necessary to ask what will have been next, in order to allow time for thought: tense, without anxiety” (339).

Jacques Derrida in “No Apocalypse, Not Now” and Susan Sontag in “The Imagination of Disaster” both warn us not to romanticize the apocalypse the way many tend to do. The implore a richer meta-awareness that leads to ethical actions in the present. And Slavoj Zizek too balks at the ridiculousness of our galloping toward the end of capitalism in Living in the End Times.

Finally, Aristotle too gives us a sense of our own being-in-time by thinking through the kinds of rhetorical practices we enact toward the past, the present, and the future. We make arguments to change the world in the future, working against all contingency. The past offers a kind of cheering or mourning over what we’ve done—epideictic. But we can imagine doing things that are praiseworthy in the future. I hope so, at least.

If we can create, compose, novel and good futures, we offer a way out, a new take on a long (hi)story. I want us to be able to see and speculate some good possible futures. I want for us to find new pathways for texts to function in powerful ways going forward. I don’t know where language will take us, but I’m willing to keep being a user and find out. Quitting is not an option.

I’m wondering what possible things we could even begin to know about the future. Wondering seems like all we can do. But I suppose that we can make changes in the present that would lead to different, more predictable future outcomes, for better or for worse.

What can we do? What needs doing now?

100 Questions About Writing and The Future

Works Consulted

Bernard-Donals, Michael. “The Rhetoric of Disaster and the Imperative of Writing.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 1, 2001, pp. 73-94.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of Disaster. University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Burke, Kenneth. “Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 79, no. 1, 1971, pp. 11-25.

Derrida, Jacques. “Not Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 20-31.

Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank. Doubleday, 1959.

Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986, pp. 3-14.

Ulmer, Gregory. Electronic Monuments. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

- - -. “Teletheory: A Mystory.” Electracy: Gregory L. Ulmer’s Textshop Experiments, edited by Craig Saper and Victor Vitanza, The Davies Group Publishers, pp. 47-82.

Zizek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2011.