Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
272. ..."about the writer-reader relationship...of course it's collaborative, thought we're not sure just how....for example, is it a collaborative relationship...or a competetive relationship, author and reader wanting to occupy the same place, each rhetoric seeking to displace the other?"
273. definitions: "by the phrase collaborative writing, i believe i intend to designate writing done jointly by two or more persons, where each person participates in the response to an occasion or need, the conception of the project, the discovery of its sources and possibilities, its design, style, and presentation to an audience"; examples from his own life/work: "i collaborated with one colleague in the production of a textbook, and with another in writing three articles....many times with editors....with the enemy, that is, those who have assigned or expected me to participate in the composition of work that i could not regard as my own....with the world, because that's not to be avoied, and with myself, pirating lines from earlier work, vandalizing passages i had intended to use elsewhere."
276. "i keep coming upon attacks against the 'myth of the great artist as solitary genius.' i don't want to hold on to...great or artist or genius, but i do want to hold on to solitary"; "tentative conclusion: why does it have to be one way or another? either collaboration or solitude? if we paid attention, we'd know: you're always with other, but sometimes you're desperately alone."
277. "on monday, we go to our literature classes and agree with barthes that 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author,' but on tuesday, we go to our composition classes and tell student writers to show themselves to us in their personal essays"; "perhaps i'm angry...at what i read as recommendation that we submit to the group....it is clearly a possible consequence of excessive devotion to collaboration: eventually the group is privileged, and then perhaps the corporation, and then perhaps the state."
280. "to oppose arguments for collaborative writing is odd, in the first place, because collaboration is probably the prime hope citizens have for survival on the planet....[and] to set myself against collaborative writing is strange, in the second instance, because my own log shows that i was always collaborating in some way"
281. "i am at best a member of my classes, not a teacher, and the classes ought to be participatory, experimental, and collaborative, for there is no one who knows, and that is true and always was. when i write, i do not write, for what i write is intertextual and collaborative as all past language writes me, and that is true. when i have written, i disappear as readers create the only self that they can find"; all this postmodern worldview aside, "some of the arguments for collaborative writing exhibit problematic features and predict, i think, disasterous consequences."
less significantly, the readings of history used to justify these arguments are inconsistent & sometimes unclear; more importantly:
283. "some arguments fail to distinguish among writers and among kinds of writing"--a lot of writing is collaborative, but also "some people write when there is no one else in the room save the inescapable monologues and dialogues inside the head, the solo voices and choral ensembles that ring and echo around us."
284. "the composing i is always plural, but the responsible i is typically singular"; "when the decision for collaboration is made beforehand, a program begins to take shape. its end is not collaobraive writing. collaborative writing is a mode, not the end. the ultimate consequence...is the dimunition or elimination of the individual as a source of meaning in order to seve whatever collective is at hand"
286. potentially highly distructively, "arguments for collaborative writing, like many academic arguments, evince the power of the tribal" ("academics will do tribal dances."): "tribal magic is powerful and wrong. when you join the tribe and accept the tribal rhetoric, therby the tribal magic, then any outsider who does not immediately accede is already a fool and may be a villain"; "some of us take our pleasure, our strength, and our energy from others, learning with them and through them, seeing with them and through them. some of us take our pleasure, our strength, and our energy from what we catch inside our private headbones, turning our experience, looking at it this way and that, trying to see what sense we can make of it. why should we ever imagine that any one conceptualization of writing would serve us all? we are too various, too lovely, for any single vision to hold us."