Joyce’s Title

It’s late — after midnight as I start this — and I’ve been working all day, so this’ll be brief. I met with Donna today, and she had some really helpful questions and insights. I’ll paraphrase them as a way of trying to sum up what I’ve been thinking about here these past few weeks. (I’d quote the title of that most excellent and deservedly canonical Joyce Carol Oates short story — one of my favorite ever, from one of my favorite authors — as the title of this entry, but it belongs to Joyce. A link here suffices.) Donna sees two primary topics, and one recent secondary topic.

The secondary topic: my recent questions about computers and composition’s historical interest in efficiency and equity, and the class agendas behind them, may align well with the Habermasian concept of instrumental rationality, Donna suggested, to the point where it might be interesting to line up Habermas and Marx (perhaps partly via Bruce Horner’s perspective) as a way to examine those discourses of efficiency and equity in computers and composition. (Curtiss, I think your input has helped me tremendously here.)

Primary topic one: class as analysis of how students construct identities in contexts connected to the wired writing classroom. I might use Bourdieu’s relational definition of class to look at how, whether individuals create their own class or context creates class for individuals, context in both instances also creates the space within/through which that relational definition of class is created. Given such a circumstance, can I try to imagine how the context of the wired writing classroom both materially and discursively sets up possibilities for defining one’s relational position based on present experience connected to that classroom and past experiences not connected to that classroom? (I have to type this stuff really slowly in order to think through each word ’cause every flippin term is so abstract and the relations between them are abstract and I’m talking about abstraction and about relations and ’cause the kitten’s clawing her way up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down my leg as I think and type.) So class mobility and constriction could be seen in the ways that classrooms create positions for speaking/writing subjects and simultaneously offer new posibilities for the way those subjects (students and also teachers) define themselves outside the classroom. Contexts always partially create class, so looking at the classroom and its relations to other contexts (which of those contexts, those concentric circles I mentioned, might I focus on?) is a necessity in any discussion of individual agency and the possibility for class mobility. And since my ostensible focus is on computers and writing, one thing to do would be to examine the ways in which they transfer and don’t transfer across contexts. I’ve been playing Peter Elbow’s “doubting game,” examining the ways in which class has failed to fit into the discourse of computers and composition. What might the “believing game” entail? How might computers foster class mobility in ways beyond the simplistically instrumental? And another doubt: is class mobility really an important thing to look at, or will that push my research into directions it can’t go?

Primary topic two: I’ve been asking how economies of writing work, and I enjoy trying to think about how computers interact with and affect and are a part of those economies. The circulation of writing is both a material and a cultural economy (both its exchange value for a grade and its understanding within and across cultures are connected to universities that are never truly entirely vocational- or liberal-education in their explicit classroom curricula, and which we understand from Jean Anyon and Basil Bernstein and, again, Pierre Bourdieu contain invisible or hidden curricula as well) which is classed within a classroom, an institution, a culture, which are all themselves positioned, economically and culturally, in terms of class. Such an understanding could be useful in examining what compositionists are saying about writing on the Web in class terms: the things compositionists are saying about writing on the Web make implicit arguments about the circulation of writing in relation to the class structure, and the place of computers as not so much an instrument of production as a part of the process of production in that circulation. (Again, computers aren’t just tools to be used and owned and replaced in the way a sculptor owns her chisels.) When compositionists teach Web writing, we’re also teaching and helping to construct class via both explicit and hidden pedagogies.

So there’s what I’ve been talking about lately, filtered through Donna and back through me. Tomorrow, along with whatever else I write, I’ll throw in some of the questions and clarifications Donna helped me with. Time for bed.

If I had a part as an extra in Dances with Wolves, my Indian name would be “Makes Long Parentheticals.”