Instrumentality and Economies

Tink is one of the two kittens I adopted a few weeks ago (she’s the orange one; her sister, Zeugma, is the tortie), and I’m kinda worried about her: she’s got something wrong with her left eye so she’s squinting with it a lot of the time. The vet gave me some terramycin ointment to put in her eye three times a day, which she doesn’t like much, and I’m impatient — after three days, yes, I know, not long — for her to get better. She and Zeugma play rough, but she — Tink — is very much the hesitant, shy, and klutzy one, so much so that I wondered if she might be deaf when I first adopted her. (Easy to test. Nope.) So I worry — I mean, it’s totally obvious to me what kind of gut-level emotional needs are being fulfilled: my mom died of ALS last September, Christa and I broke up after four years this Spring, and she moved out and took the two cats she and I had adopted with her — and, yeah, I’m kind of overinvested in these two.

Anyway, I finished Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe’s History today, and also checked out Hawisher and Selfe’s February 1991 College Composition and Communication essay, “The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class” (CCC Vol. 42, No. 1). Not much new in the History from what I talked about yesterday, save the concession that “By the advent of the 1990s, it had become clear to computers and composition specialists that technology would not automatically increase the opportunities for the democratic participation of less privileged segments of our society” (Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe 257). This assertion, while one familiar to me and one that forms a part of my own ideology, seems to not go far enough; what I’m looking at in this dissertation are some of the possible ways in which the technological components of economies of writing and education may shut down opportunities and reproduce inequalities.

Hawisher and Selfe lend support to this position with the understanding they draw from Foucault “that a technology cannot ‘guarantee’ any behavior alone ‘simply by its nature’ (‘Space’ 245); according to Foucault, the ‘architecture’ of such electronic spaces is a highly political act in itself” (60). (Aside: does anyone out there have a list of the table of contents for the new Rabinow-edited one-volume The Essential Foucault from The New Press? The essay Hawisher and Selfe cite, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” is in Rabinow’s Foucault Reader, which I’m not interested in for reasons of redundancy, so I’m wondering if the new one’s worth spending money on. And while I’m asking for help: any guidance on whether Kant’s Der Streit Der Fakultaten might usefully enough inform my too-reductive understanding of the vocational versus liberal education models of the university to reward study?) And yet we treat technology as if it will magically make writing better: “All too often, those who use computers for composition instruction speak and write of ‘the effects of technology’ in overly positive terms as if computers were good in and of themselves” (Hawisher and Selfe 56, emphasis mine).

There are two things going on here: first, Hawisher and Selfe are primarily critiquing the unthinking acceptance of computers as universal good. Second, they’re very aware of the discourse that separates technology from context, that takes computers out of the complex processes that constitute the writing classroom and imagines technology as somehow transcendent, in much the same way that Mankiw and Resnick & Wolff — despite their vast ideological differences — all constructed technology as an instrument that could make changes to economic systems, rather than acting in and being affected by economic systems. (This isn’t entirely true; I know I’m exaggerating a bit in order to try and sort things out for myself.) The thing is, Hawisher and Selfe then turn around and enact the very same instrumental view, pointing out that “Scant attention is paid. . . to the harmful ways in which computers can be used even by well-meaning teachers” and then suggesting that “If electronic technology is to help us bring about positive changes in writing classes, we must identify and confront the potential problems computers pose” (56).

This isn’t a critique of what they’re saying — I mean, what I want to do builds directly on this, and besides which Gail and Cindy are terrifically kind people who’ve been really helpful in responding to some questions I had — but more of a pointing out that it’s really, really hard to get away from the instrumental view of technology. We’ve been so trained to think of technology as some neutral and transcendent thing that even our lingual habits enact that view, and it’s really hard for me to come up with any sort of original concrete and easy counterexample to the instrumental view. But I want to try out some language here: let’s change Hawisher and Selfe’s words a little to say, “if technology is to help us bring about positive changes in society. . .” Does that sound like a familiar proposition? OK, what if we change one word in it: “if writing is to help us bring about positive changes in society. . .” Doesn’t that feel a little weird? But writing’s a technology, right? The thing that Plato was getting was that it isn’t a value-free technology. I want to say the same for computers in writing classes. Writing teachers, using the above example, would be more prone to say something like, “if learning to write is to help students make positive contributions to societal change. . .” and something about that word-substitution progression I’ve just traced confirms for me that teachers do not view computers to be a part of the learning process in the same way that they view writing to be a part of the learning process.

The language of use and instrumentality is embedded, but not acknowledged, within the economies of valuation attached to computers and composition. This points me towards an understanding that my project does not have to do so much with asking about the determinate classes of students before, during, and after college, but rather with asking about how computers serve as a part of the economies of the writing classroom within the context of that classroom’s shifting valuations and markers of class, and also within the context of the university, itself situated within the post-Fordist information economy.

And the “so what” response would be: yeah, yeah, economies bla bla bla. All these abstractions — haven’t we writing teachers got enough to do already? You want us to have the students read some Althusser between the copy-editing workshop for Essay 2 and the small-group peer response sheets for Essay 3, when the semester’s jam-packed as it is and the students are already complaining about a syllabus that moves at a hundred miles an hour and we’re looking at stacks of papers every night?

Um, no. I think these questions are actually ones that ask for self-conscious examinations of pedagogical and learning practices on the parts of both students and teachers: somewhat in the spirit of American translations of critical pedagogy, these questions might point me towards a public and reflexive look, in class, at how learning to write with computers works, and why one learns to write with computers, why within a liberal or vocational education context, and within the broader context of the information economy — an economy that students, in many ways, may be more familiar with than instructors.