Recent theoretical and technological developments, including concepts of networking elaborated by Bruno Latour, enable composition studies to take an empiricist turn toward issues of identity. More specifically, these developments help the field more strongly connect the figure of the writing-subject to the experiences of actual writers. In this article, the author proposes a retheorized discourse of identity. He argues that identity names an aspect of the idea of traffic between textuality and the "outside" of textuality, the aspect with which composition studies historically is most concerned: agency.