Another Summary

As I noted yesterday, I’m meeting with my committee this week (still at the very-early pre-prospectus stage), so this entry is mostly a condensation and restatement of where I’ve been in the past few weeks, with a good bit of cutting and pasting. Still, it almost has the shape of an argument, which is reassuring, I suppose.

From my sociological readings, I took the understanding that researchers will always try to rely on investigating a single criterion, because it simplifies the analysis in powerful ways. The problem is, I’m coming from the position that composition’s understandings of class have been both incoherent (relying on an unacknowledged multiplicity of criteria) and oversimplified (asserting that class is equal to wealth, for example). For that reason, I want my research to move in the opposite direction: to acknowledge a multiplicity of criteria, and to acknowledge their complex interrelationships.

For example, many conventional views of class equate it to horizontal stratification, ignoring the fact that there is also a vertical segmentation within and through classes (think of the way the category of “Boston Irish” cleaves through classes from Beacon Hill to Southie) that Worsley says Dutch sociologists have called verzuiling, or vertical “pillarization” (320). From the comments I’ve received, and from my own experience, I believe Americans have a complex intuitive understanding of the ways in which many factors overlap to create what we call “class”, and the reason our classes (“middle” and “working”, usually) are so apparently monolithic is that they have to contain such a contradictory multiplicity of factors (or, as I called them above, “vectors”): if class was simple to determine, we’d habitually make distinctions between five or eight or ten or however many classes in conversation, because the terms would be easy to understand.

The problem is that the class of individuals is overdetermined by wealth, income, and occupation; by cultural practices, tastes, and values; by education; by prestige; by political power, class consciousness, and social relationships; by relations of production; and by lived experience. Furthermore, while the American ideology of upward mobility along some of these vectors of class can sometimes cause corresponding moves up other vectors, many ascensions take place independently of one another. Some vectors are interrelated and/or are changing their relations in sophisticated ways: Hardt and Weeks, for example, helpfully gloss Jameson’s demonstration of “how culture occupies a central position in the functioning and reproduction of capitalist society” (3), and of how “as culture has come to play a more important role in the life of capital, capital correspondingly has become ever more deeply rooted in the domain of culture” (5). In the past, I’ve assigned what I’ve called the vocational education model of the university to the domain of capital, and the liberal education model to the domain of culture, but in Jameson’s “late capitalism” the lines between culture and capital become more blurred. “Just as capital is understood as a comprehensive social (not narrowly economic) power, so too a mode of production must be conceived in terms of not only economic production but also cultural production and social production of all sorts” (12). Consider what this means for the wired composition classroom when, as Olson points out, “the computer as a tool does fundamentally reorganize material relationships and organizations of production and our thoughts about what production is” (183, emphasis in original). What we do with words and computers has effects beyond the merely instrumental, and constructs the economies of the wired writing classroom as cultural, social, and material.

Yet even at the most basic level, 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. A computer user can manipulate the keyboard and mouse, with an understanding of metaphor (do one thing here, another thing happens there), in order to ask the computer to manipulate data in operations we refer to as copying, pasting, printing, typing, and so forth. But the important part there is an understanding of metaphor. A graphical user interface does not reward trial and error the way a hammer rewards trial and error. One must learn an array of cultural signs and complex skills and ways of thinking to use the computer, to engage the many different uses to which a computer may be put: what does the Start menu do? What about the recycle bin or trash can icon? Why doesn’t Microsoft Word follow the same metaphors that the task bar does? The computer demands change in the user, and that change is undergone at different rates among different people, but as instructors we assume a fairly constant level of technological skill among students in our classrooms. Furthermore, we see technology — and not the so-taken-for-granted-as-to-be-invisible cultural, social, and material interactions with technology — as a mechanism for efficiency in writing, as something separable from writing that can make writing better. To use Linda Brodkey’s vocabulary: we always want to see ourselves in the privileged positions vis-

Another Summary

2 thoughts on “Another Summary

  • August 14, 2003 at 10:42 pm
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    Bruce Horner looks at issues of class and how the functions of the university contribute to the smokescreen you so rightly point out. I think his book is _Terms of Work in Composition_ or something to that effect. Beyond that, I would like to know how (or if) you differentiate between the “economy” of the classroom and the “ecology.” For me, I see “economy” as something quantifiable set in motion. Yet the roots of the word, eco + nomos, crop up, notably in Susan Jarratt’s reading of the sophists: nomos is a third term put against both mythos and logos. Which brings me back to “ecology.” My understanding here is not so much the quanta in flux, but the “logic” upon which a given system or set of systems seem to operate. Again, back to Jarratt, this need not be the dialectical logic so much derided in the academy today (our branch of it at least). Within nomos, there are other logics — logics of emotion, for example. Nomos takes account, as it were, of all the variables of a particular time and place. Its logic is firmly rooted in the very specific context in which the participants find themselves — material, social, cultural, etc. rather than the transcendent “truth.” Of course, the other term, eco- is somewhat loaded as it assumes the participants are “at home” if not on common and/or familiar ground.

  • August 18, 2003 at 11:35 pm
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    David, I’ve found Bruce Horner’s work profoundly useful — along with John Trimbur, he’s one of the only people doing careful Marxian-influenced examinations of what goes on in composition. I think I’d have to say that it’s impossible not to differentiate between the “economy” and the “ecology”, though Marxians like Resnick and Wolff would say that the “logics” of the wired composition classroom are overdetermined by what you refer to as the “nomos” — which in some ways seems to line up well with Bourdieu’s perspectives on class. In that sense, “economies” involve many quantifiables not so much set in motion but (to use the terrible cliché) always already ( /cliché ) in motion, and then for the questions get kicked up to the next level of abstraction in Jarratt’s etymological sense: how do we talk about the systems that value and exchange these quantifiables, and how do they connect in concrete ways to the material bodies and circumstances of the teachers and students in those classrooms?

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