(Continued from yesterday’s post.)
Seitz wraps up his discussion of Diana and Mike with a careful and complex analysis of the contradictory nature of classed impulses towards solidarity and individualism, suggesting that “middle-class” students often value “social mobility” via “individual prestige” whereas “working-class” students “reject their more status-conscious classmates” and “seek economic mobility while rejecting, or remaining ambivalent to, social mobility” and in such actions practice a sort of “class solidarity” (70, 71). So we see again the potential for differential movement along the social and economic vectors of class, and — recursively — class differences in terms of values relating to that class movement.
Forms of class mobility are themselves classed, as ought to be clear to us from the differences between universities we associate with the liberal education model and universities we associate with the vocational education model. It’s interesting, however, that Seitz points to “class solidarity” as a distinguishing characteristic of his working class and not of his middle class, and this construction seems to me to be also implicit in the middle class critical teacher’s opposition to “mass culture ideology” (65) and “monologic discourse” (75). When Seitz critiques “the dominant myth of the American individual” (66) as a sort of working-class false consciousness, he’s assigning to himself the privileged perspective of the individual who stands outside culture and critiques it, rather than being spoken by its discourse. To be a middle class critical teacher is to be an authentic individual, rather than being one of the unenlightened who foolishly believe in myths of individualism. According to Seitz, “white working-class students’ discourses of individualism” “may have more to do with complex issues of white working-class solidarity. . . than general manipulations of mass culture” (73), and we here finally see the two moves of class distancing that Seitz as middle class critical teacher attempts: first, a distancing from the working class, and second, a distancing from “mass culture”. Both moves rely on the class-consious middle-class critical individual’s hermeneutic dispelling — via education and values — of the “myth” of individualism, or, as Seitz puts it in the following section, “naive” “concerns for unity” (73).
The following section deals with Lilia, “a Latina who rejected the Catholic tradition, though not the Mexican culture, to become a disciple in the Chicago Church of Christ” (73). While Seitz quotes Lilia’s use of the term “exploitative structures” (73), he does not explicitly acknowledge any intersection of exploitation with class. On the other hand, he does refer to “monologic discourse within her church” (75) without ever suggesting that he had visited her church, and speaks of political action on the parts of churches as “rare” (74): religion as a cultural practices vector of class seems to be a liability in Seitz’s eyes. (Perhaps because he sees faith as opposing the “critical uncertainty” (77) he privileges?) The point of the section seems to again be the complex relationship between individualism and class consciousness. Seitz finds it problematic that Lilia’s “final paper reads like a hybrid genre of sermon and opinion page calling for unity within women’s common struggles, rather than an argumentative researched inquiry into an issue” (74). The prior genre says, “Let’s do something!” while the latter asks, “What is this phenomenon?”: Seitz’s relative valuation suggests that the middle-class perspective of the university expects good students to confirm their powerlessness by privileging individual abstracted critique over collective action. Class consciousness is a form of unity, and as such can foster political agency — another vector of class. And yet for Seitz, to reiterate, “critical uncertainty” (77) is privileged. As a concluding question, Seitz asks “which students value college primarily for hopes of economic mobility and which seek social mobility” (77), and it seems clear to me that he hopes students will take up the ideological stance of “critical inquiry” and thereby achieve social mobility by adopting the values he prizes. The alternative, economic mobility by means of changing one’s material conditions, is implied to be somehow less appealing. Seitz seems to have forgotten his Freire and one of the primary goals of critical pedagogy.
So what’s missing in all these class analyses? Seitz’s class analysis never considers class relationships based on relations of production, despite the ostensible focus on class in his essay and the Marxist foundation upon which the two primary theoretical framers — Paulo Freire and the Frankfurt School — of his “critical” approach rely. Composition in America, in fact, has managed to construct a critical pedagogy that is profoundly self-contradictory in its almost complete disconnection from Marxian ideas. Composition in America has sublimated the notion of class struggle, turned class consciousness into “critical inquiry” (77) and “critical positions” (65) opposed to the false consciousness of “mass culture ideology” (65), mistranslated the proletariat into the working class and the middle class into the bourgeoisie, substituted “oppression” for “exploitation”, and steadfastly refused to incorporate any understanding of the relations of production into its construction of critical pedagogy. Composition, in other words, has taken Paulo Freire and turned him on his head, substituting the neoclassical economist’s embedded-in-capitalism perspective for the Marxian economist’s analysis of capitalism.
Seitz, David. “Keeping Honest: Working-Class Students, Difference, and Rethinking the Critical Agenda in Composition.” In Under Construction: Working at the Intersection of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice. Farris, Christine and Chris Anson, eds. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1998.
Recent Comments