Micro-Ur-Prospectus Mark 1

Test, test. Is this thing on? OK: so this entry is going to be a very, very early draft of a prospectus in miniature. I’m hoping I might manage to flesh it out into the real thing within a month or two. By Halloween, let’s say, at which point I’ll put on my platinum wig and tightest dress and see if Candidia will let me karaoke Marilyn’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” over at Wealth Bondage.

So here goes. My disseration will attempt to answer the following questions:

• Is the discourse around class more obscured in the sub-discipline of computers and composition than it is in composition in general?
• Is the discourse around technology one cause for that increased occlusion of class in computers and composition?
• What might understanding the discourse around technology as a cause for the occlusion of class tell us about the discourses of composition and computers & composition?
• How might those discourses change?
• What effect might changes in those discourses have on composition pedagogy? How might a revised understanding of class better account for the effects of technology in the wired writing classroom?

The dissertation will be divided into five major sections.

I. Class: Definitions and Contexts
II. Discourses of Class, Present and Absent
III. Technology’s Effects on Current Discourses of Class
IV. A Revised Conception of Class
V. Conclusions and Directions for Change

A brief explanation of each section follows.

I. Class: Definitions and Contexts

The most basic sense of the word “class” is that of a group of people with some common characteristic (Williams, Keywords). Marx defined class in terms of relations of production, which he saw as economic concerns; Weber complicated and refined Marx’s notion by introducing the variable of status. Sociologists following Weber attempted to further refine understandings of class by examining such variables as occupation and education; Dennis Gilbert, in The American Class System, gives an excellent precis of the various definitions of class over the last century, ultimately concluding that there are nine variables that can be seen as affecting class: occupation, income, and wealth (economic variables); personal prestige, association, and socialization (status variables); power and class consciousness (political variables); and class mobility. One concern advanced by some Marxian critics (Gibson-Graham) is that contemporary understandings of class have seen a shift in emphasis from practices of production to practices of consumption.

That concern shapes my revision of Gilbert’s system. I’d suggest that the literature in composition dedicated to class does not understand class as shaped by the interplay of a number of different variables, as Gilbert does, but rather uses one variable or set of variables to define class, to the exclusion of other variables. These variables show up as being grouped in ways slightly different from Gilbert: wealth, income, and occupation (economic variables: Lindquist, Moran, Seitz); cultural practices, tastes, and values (cultural variables: the cultural studies movement in composition, Bloom); education; prestige; political power, class consciousness, and social relationships (political variables: Freire et aliis); by relations of production (Ohmann, Horner, Trimbur); and by lived experience (Rose, Villanueva).

Just as we must understand the definitions and variables of class as multiple and overlapping — to use Resnick and Wolff’s term, class is “overdetermined” — so must we understand the contexts within which we apply those definitions and variables as multiple and overlapping. The student in the wired composition classroom exists within a series of concentric contexts.

Those contexts are themselves classed: in other words, they are associated with various economic, cultural, political, and other variables, as we will see in the next section.

I’ll note here, as an aside, that the ultimate point of this dissertation is to focus on classroom pedagogy. For that reason, I will not address issues of academic labor in composition as made manifest in relation to CCC’s Wyoming resolution.

II. Discourses of Class, Present and Absent

A. Present

1. Moran and Selfe seem to be the only people in computers & composition who’ve done any sort of sustained analysis of any topics even remotely connected to the class of individual students.
2. Tom Fox, Julie Lindquist, and my recent work with David Seitz provide some examples of how class has played out in composition’s discussions of individual students.
3. Histories by Berlin, Connors, Crowley, and Harris, as well as review essays in College English and CCC, offer an understanding of how class has played out in the discipline of composition.
4. Kerr and Bok offer an understanding of how class works in the context of the university, as does the recent Almanac Issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
5. Olson, Shapiro & Varian, and Taylor show some of the ways class gets discussed in the context of the information economy, as do the Pew Internet, UCLA Internet Report, and Digital Divide studies.
6. Gilbert, Fussell, and Kingston demonstrate the range of ways class is discussed across contemporary American society. A look at the hyper-fragmentation of the Prizm definitions of class and their application demonstrates the reorientation of class along the lines of consumptive practices, and may serve as evidence confirming Jameson’s arguments about the intermingling of economic and cultural class markers.

B. Absent

1. Marxian conceptions of class (Gibson-Graham, Resnick & Wolff) are not widely discussed in contemporary American society. Kingston and other stratification theorists deny class exists.
2. Feenberg, Dyer-Witheford, and Negri and the tradition of Italian Autonomist Marxism offer insights as to the ways in which class is elided in discussions of the information economy.
3. Anyon, Aronowitz, and Bowles & Gintis offer a partial understanding of the elision of class in discussions of higher education.
4. Linda Brodkey and Mary Soliday begin to demonstrate in compelling ways how and why discussions of class have been historically excluded from the discourse of composition. In this section, I’ll begin to rely much more on my own analysis than on what other authors have said, since I’m essentially looking for something that isn’t there and inquiring into the reasons for its absence. A significant part of that analysis will examine the problematic ways in which composition’s construction of critical pedagogy both foregrounds and elides discussions of class. I’ll suggest that Sharon O’Dair is quite right in her recent contention that critical pedagogy is the new “default” in composition instruction (despite my profound disagreement with O’Dair’s conclusions), but will also point out that critical pedagogy for American compositionists is no longer in any way associated with Marxist ideas: rather, it’s become more just a loose construction of “critical thinking” muddled together with cultural studies approaches to teaching composition. For these reasons, I may want to examine the differences between Giroux’s 1983 Theory and Resistance and his 1992 Border Crossings for understandings of why critical pedagogy in composition has moved from Marxist ideas to cultural studies ideas, and in doing so has moved further away from an engagement with class. As a transition to 5, below, I’ll examine the writing-as-labor work of Bruce Horner, John Trimbur, and (recently) Joseph Harris and ask why it doesn’t account for the ways in which the material presence of computers interacts with the writing process.
5. Moran points us to the absence of talk about class in the discourse of computers and composition, relying on an economic construction of class. I’ll also undertake a close reading of the disciplinary history written by Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe for the ways in which discussions of class are elided therein, looking in particular at the ways in which constructions of computers-as-efficiency and computers-as-equity can be understood as occluded representations of class.

C. Comparison

1. Important ways in which discussions of class in the concentric circles detailed above affect and overlap with one one another.
2. How discussions of class in computers & composition are different in degree and kind from discussions of class in composition.
3. Why discussions of class in computers & composition are different in degree and kind from discussions of class in composition. Transition to III, below: why technology itself may help us ignore certain things about class.

III. Technology’s Effect on Current Discourses of Class

A. Neoclassical economics and its instrumental construction of technology (Hazlitt, Mankiw, Heilbroner & Thurow, Resnick & Wolff).

B. Marxian economics and its instrumental construction of technology (Marx, Resnick & Wolff, Heilbroner, Gibson-Graham). Both neoclassical and Marxian economics understand technology as an instrument separate from their economic systems that itself has the ability to produce changes to and within those economic systems.

C. Technology and class in education (Olson, Moran, Lankshear & Knobel, Travers & Decker). Additionally, Selfe & Selfe point out in “The Politics of the Interface” that learning to navigate the file folder icons of the GUI is training for work in corporate America, and as such may be understood as a vehicle for both class mobility and the reproduction of the class system. Cynthia Selfe also argues, in Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century, that technology is embedded within and acts upon the system of American political discourse, pointing out that Al Gore and Goals 2000 set up technology as a mechanism that would magically spread wealth and power. One could argue that such a construction is why folks in computers & composition don’t look at class: we expect that computers themselves will do all the work of providing upward economic mobility.

D. Recent theories of technology (Feenberg, Dyer-Witheford).

IV. A Revised Conception of Class

A. Habermas’ theories of instrumental and communicative rationality may help me to examine how different understandings of the purposes of communication and education and their relations to social class may also be connected to different undertandings of the function of technology.

B. Bourdieu, in Practical Reason and Distinction, constructs classes as infinite and relational. This understanding can be usefully connected to Davis, Davis and Gardner’s relation/distance construction of class, by which members of individual classes make finer distinctions among the classes closest to their own. The further away a class gets from one’s own position, the larger it gets and more people it incorporates.

C. The concentric contexts pictured above constitute the fields within which Bourdieu’s relational classes operate via difference. Writing circulates within and across these fields (in Horner’s and Trimbur’s senses) in economies that incorporate, affect, and are affected by technologies, in the ways described by Feenberg and Dyer-Witheford. In that sense, the economies of the wired writing classroom help to define the contexts within which Bourdieu’s relational classes operate.

D. Incorporating these three components into a revised conception of class may help to open up avenues for discussion of the topic of class in computers & composition that lead to the same sort of broader discussion of class that’s just beginning to happen in composition in general.

V. Conclusions and Directions for Change

A. The work on discourses of class will, I hope, illuminate the ways in which composition as a discipline, and computers & composition as a sub-discipline, might more usefully, explicitly, and consistently talk about class. Connecting it to the function of the university and the university’s place within the information economy may show why such change is necessary.

B. The revised conception of class in IV, above, may help me to re-see Horner’s and Trimbur’s writing-as-labor work within the context of the wired writing classroom. Such Marxian work, perhaps coupled with the work of Italian Autonomist Marxists following Negri, may pave the way for synthesizing a theory of technology in the manner of Feenberg more directly applicable to the wired writing classroom, a productive and consistent understanding for a post-Freirean pedagogical praxis involving class and technology.

C. Beyond this already long-range goal, the ultimate conclusion would involve extended classroom studies that enact and attempt to somehow test that theoretical synthesis.

Whew. That’s it for tonight, folks.