One of the most useful aspects of the “Rethinking Economy” seminar I’m auditing has been the reminders it’s offered me about the power of language to construct — and thereby change — reality. Those who decry the excesses of capital-t theory, poststructural or otherwise, will feel their knees jerk at this, but consider: in the past weeks, we’ve read chapters from Greider’s One World, Ready or Not that constructed global capitalism as an implacable and monolithic juggernaut, with its subjects — multinational and transnational corporations (MNCs and TNCs) — beholden to no national government and taking their investment capital to whatever location proved most felicitous. Ha-Jin Chang, in an essay titled “Transnational Corporations and Strategic Industrial Policy”, is intensely critical of such a construction, pointing to all the ways in which it’s more cultural narrative than empirical fact, and pointing to the many gaps in such a monolithic construction: by Chang’s version, foreign direct investment (FDI) is much more circumscribed and industry-specific, capital is not footloose but rather largely geographically bounded, strong local economies attract FDI rather than springing from FDI, and national governments have immense leverage in negotiating with MNCs and TNCs. Policymakers depend on white papers expressing perspectives like Greider’s and Chang’s, and if we imagine a choice between the two, we can imagine very real consequences coming out of the different narratives: governmental policymakers who listen to Greider will suggest that their best course of action is to lower all barriers to trade and make their countries as attractive as possible to FDI. Governmental policymakers who listen to Chang will take a much more industry-specific and case-by-case approach, build their local economies before going after FDI, and take a much more hard-nosed approach when dealing with MNCs and TNCs.
The way we talk about the economy has real and material effects upon the economy. I’m trying to lay out a systematic way in which the same tendencies might hold true for the way teachers and students talk about class in the wired writing classroom.
I’ve talked a little bit about how my first assigment goes with and against the grain of the personal narrative first essay assignment conventional to many composition classrooms. I ask students to talk about their lives and experiences in concrete terms and also to reflect on how those concrete experiences have shaped their abstract ideals and ways of perceiving the world, and vice versa, so I think there’s a little bit of the theoretical approach I lay out above coming into practice. I’ve themed my syllabus around a reflexive approach to education, asking students to keep coming back to an ongoing examination of the educative practices and goals and contexts they find themselves acting out, acting with, acting upon. Later on, we’ll be working with a series of different texts that frame educative goals and practices and contexts in different ways, and I’ll ask students to write about how taking on any of those texts’ widely varying versions of reality might have very different concrete and material effects. The subsequent step, of course, will be to examine how presenting different versions of reality in their own writings will have different concrete and material effects, so in that sense my syllabus attempts to persuade students to accept my perspective on the effects of language, and then asks them to write as if they do, in fact, accept that perspective.
The reader I mentioned above — the reader whose knee jerks at the mention of poststructuralist theory — will demand: isn’t this indoctrination? And I’ll answer: absolutely. And I’ll ask: is it at all surprising to see a writing teacher attempting to indoctrinate his students into believing that writing matters, into acting as if writing matters, into acting as if there’s something at stake?
The next question, then, is: why this class stuff? How does it matter? A big part of my project has been in attempting to connect big ideas about what a college education is or ought to be to big ideas about class. It’s not a simple matter of pedagogy X being better-suited to so-called working-class students, and in fact, I think invoking such a perspective is the surest and most pernicious way to exacerbate America’s already-existing class divisions. So I guess I’m onto something not quite but almost like Freirean critical pedagogy, or at least the version of critical pedagogy that didn’t become indistinguishable from cultural studies pedagogies. But I’m not just trying to construct a pedagogy I can live with: as is probably obvious to folks who’ve read a little of the stuff I’ve been writing, there’s a rather sizable component of institutional critique going on here, too. I don’t like the way composition talks (and avoids talking) about class. I think it’s smug and short-sighted and reductive and self-indulgent. And I think it has material effects, in that it contributes to that pernicious exacerbation of already-existing class differences.
And I’m fixin to do somethin about it, by golly.
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