THE TENSION THAT WAS ALWAYS THERE: AUTHORSHIP, AGENCY, AND THE LIMITS OF COMPOSITION'S POST-STRUCTURALIST SETTLEMENT

Abstract

Composition studies’ engagement with post-structuralist theories of authorship, particularly Michel Foucault’s concept of the author-function, represented a theoretically coherent and historically grounded response to the field’s earlier reliance on expressivist individualism. By foregrounding the social, intertextual, and institutional conditions of textual production, composition scholars displaced the sovereign author without fully relinquishing the notion of the responsible writer. This paper argues that the resulting theoretical settlement—distributed textuality coexisting with individual rhetorical accountability—was not a conceptual failure but a productive accommodation to institutional and pedagogical demands. However, this accommodation left unresolved a foundational tension at the core of the field’s account of agency. The emergence of algorithmic writing systems does not disrupt this settlement so much as it renders its structural limits newly visible. Through close readings of Michel Foucault, Patricia Bizzell, James E. Porter, and Thomas Kent, this study traces the genealogy of that tension and demonstrates how it has been sustained across key developments in composition theory.It argues that the challenges posed by algorithmic mediation call not for a new theory of technology, but for a renewed theoretical reckoning with what composition studies has long presupposed yet never fully resolved: the nature and limits of rhetorical agency.