Rhetoric and Composition’s Conceptual Indeterminacy as Political-Economic Work

By returning to the controversy created by the publication in 2002 of Marc Bousquet’s JAC article (“Composition as a Management Science”), focusing on the labor issues attending composition teaching and the prospects of institutional critique, I examine how the conceptual indeterminacy of many of the field’s key terms in actuality undergo (and perform) a political-economic function. This exploration forms the basis for an analysis of how the knowledge domains of the field can be more clearly defined through an effort to reframe the field as “writing studies,” for the purpose of moving beyond the worn out commonplaces and labor exploitation associated with first-year composition.