Meta-writing
Origin: Concept developed from a professional practice with generative AI
Definition
Meta-writing designates the professional gesture of writing texts that produce other texts. It is no longer writing as direct production of content, but writing as the framing of content production by a technical system: instructions, skills, structuring prompts, meta-documents.
A meta-document does not directly contain usable information. It contains criteria, structures, and generation rules that enable the AI to produce this information in specific cases. It is writing at a second degree: one writes so that the machine writes.
In my writings
This emerging professional gesture extends the grammatization movement described by Stiegler, but applies it at a higher level. Traditional writing externalized oral memory. Meta-writing externalizes argumentative structures, reasoning schemas, and entire intellectual procedures.
It demands a deep mastery of one’s own profession: to write instructions that work, one must first be able to make explicit what one does implicitly. Moving from the particular case to the class of cases, then to the structure enabling the treatment of that class, is a cognitive abstraction that few training programs prepare for. This competency is not taught in any law school. It is acquired through trial and error, progressive adjustment, and observation of errors.
Meta-writing is also a form of voluntary proletarianization: by externalizing my reasoning structures into skills, I accept making them reproducible without me — while retaining mastery over their design.