This dissertation deals primarily with the tension between the institutionalization of writing studies and what I conceive of as the promise of literacy. I discuss institutionalization on a global scale, the institutionalization of composition as a discipline, and how writing teachers might transgress this institutionalization. I argue that at least since the early 1970s composition has been closely aligned with theories of transgression—conceiving itself as political and finding ways to allow others to become political through writing. Many compositionists feel writing is one mechanism that allows human beings to become entities in the world, to exist, to become recognized as individuals, and to have a social impact in creating democratic dialogue. However, I argue that when put into practice, many of the techniques that define resistance or transgression theories have often resulted in little more than a repackaging of what writing teachers have always done—privilege. In order for writing studies to have genuine political effects, those working in composition and resistance should ask how institutional logics often delimit the kinds of action we can take in the public field and how the discipline of composition might itself be implicated in the difficulties and complexity of that transgression. In the first two chapters I combine both ontological and materialist critiques and argue that while transgression theories are usually tied to one or the other, they are rarely used in combination, which is how they need to be utilized to be effective. Chapters three and four focus specifically on the development of the discipline of composition and demonstrate the discrepancy between the theories and practices of resistance. I conclude with the suggestion that to undermine the social logic of totalitarianism, teachers of writing can use literacy as a way to construct new social worlds—to construct the personal (that is, a post-humanist ethics) after modernism. To do this, however, teachers of writing must realize the system of totalitarianism under which they operate and find ways to locally transgress it. This type of resistance is one that must remain communal, contingent, and fluctuating.