Bizzell’s Critical Pedagogy

In reading Patricia Bizzell‘s essay “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies” (in the 1991 MLA collection Contending with Words, Harkin and Schilb, eds.) (caution about that second link: JAC really needs to do something about the miserable quality of their OCRed text), I’ve come across a quotation from Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, describing Marxism’s “demystifying vocation to unmask and to demostrate the ways in which a cultural artefact fulfills a specific ideological mission, in legitimating a given power structure” as a “demonstration of the instrumental function of a given cultural object” (Jameson 291, qtd. in Bizzell 54). I find this provocative for two reasons: (1) the “instrumental function” is what I’ve been assigning to the mainstream view of computers, and here I suddenly find it associated via composition theory with Marxism and Jameson, and (2) the quote describes exactly what I’ve begun to construct as my “demystifying” mission for the prospectus and the dissertation. And, in fact, what Bizzell means when she says “Marxist Ideas” mostly has to do with Althusser’s revision of Marx’s notion of ideology.

Which isn’t to say that the essay is useless or uninteresting. Bizzell points out that “rhetoricians have used the concept of community to attack injustice by removing the onus of failure from students, by treating failure as a systemic problem, and by seeking to involve all teachers more actively in circumventing educational inequality, on behalf of all students. But as Joseph Harris argues, the very invocation of community, which was meant to galvanize such efforts, then comes to seem like an oppressive affirmation of one — and only one — set of discursive practices” (59). In other words, in attempting to remedy unfairness, teachers impose a set of singularly-classed behaviors upon all students. This seems to me to highlight the conflict at the heart of discussions of education and class: is it elitist to attempt to foster upward class mobility?

The problem, I think, is in the not-entirely-independently shifting vectors of class. My answer would be, Yes, I want students to have upward economic mobility inasmuch as it frees them from material want. Do I want the poor student from Appalachia or the Bronx to adopt the values of, say, the wealthier student from Wellesley or Orange County? Depends on what values you mean. What I do want, I know, is for students to have power, to not be at the mercy of the circumstances — cultural, material, political — that surround them. And that’s partly an issue of economics, and it’s partly an issue of values, and it’s even partly an issue of those Marxist relations of production, but I think it’s very much an issue of education.

Bizzell suggests that “Cultural criticism should work to reveal the inequities in the social world around us — beginning, I think, with the most immediate site, the school itself — and also to help students imagine liberatory alternatives to the unjust status quo by drawing on the knowledge they possess from their membership in groups at some remove from those who enforce this status quo” (65). While I have some difficulties with the latter part of that sentence — I think students are in fact parts of the groups that enforce the status quo, inasmuch as I buy Bourdieu’s relational concept of class created by difference and Foucault’s notion of the functioning of power at the “capillary” level — I think the aside about the “most immediate site” in that sentence is illuminating and essential, since it suggests a recursive function for writing instruction that can actually help writing instruction — asking students to think about what writing does while they do it — and at the same time creates a space for cultural criticism in the classroom that doesn’t run counter to the instructional aims of the syllabus and goals of the course.