Development and Literacy

I feel like I should be cueing that old Aerosmith chestnut here: I’m ba-aack. . . Blogging has been intermittent lately (and I’m feeling guilty once again at seeing really helpful comments that I haven’t yet responded to or acknowledged) because I’m trying to revise an article for publication, put together a proposal, and have had that perpetual boomeranging paper pile. Which I did manage to get back to students today, happy for the most part with their publication (i.e., final) drafts or perhaps it’s more accurate to say happy because while there were the usual early-semester difficulties I was also pleasantly surprised by more than the expected number of highly ambitious papers, all in all making for another good teaching day in gorgeous fall weather. Even managed to connect the weekend’s couch-burning car-flipping cop-confronting bottle-hurling high-rise dorm riots (yes, the home team won — but it probably would’ve been the same result if they’d lost) to the day’s lesson plans.

That said, with all my busy-ness lately, the prospectusward reading plan seems to have hit a patch of black ice and is spinning across four lanes of traffic as I write. I’m aiming for the median, but, well, I’ll let you know how I do once I get this article revised. In the interim, some brief notes.

I’ve been reading portions of Arturo Escobar’s apparently canonical Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World for the Rethinking Economy seminar, among other texts, and — as with the Porter readings — am quite impressed. Escobar prompts me towards some really interesting ways of thinking about the project of composition instruction and its intersections with class mobility, ways of thinking that intersect powerfully with some of Sharon Crowley’s ideas, which I’ll be returning to soon. I’m afraid this post won’t do much in the way of analysis, but rather point towards some textual moments with a couple thoughts.

Escobar writes, “The transformation of the poor into the assisted had profound consequences. This ‘modernization’ of poverty signified not only the rupture of vernacular relations but also the setting in place of new mechanisms of control. The poor increasingly appeared as a social problem requiring new ways of intervention in society. It was, indeed, in relation to poverty that the modern ways of thinking about the meaning of life, the economy, rights, and social management came into place. . . The treatment of poverty allowed society to conquer new domains. More perhaps than on industrial and technological might, the nascent order of capitalism and modernity relied on a politics of poverty the aim of which was not only to create consumers but to transform society by turning the poor into objects of knowledge and management” (23). Now, there are a couple things going on here. The first thing that’s obvious here is that I really gotta set up some kind of workable blockquote style for this weblog. The second thing is that the politics of “remediation” (not my term, and one I find as problematic as others find the term “current-traditional”) in literacy instruction are an aspect of this “treatment of poverty” and, in fact, one could take a really interesting look at writing instruction by substituting the term “illiteracy” for the term “poverty”. Which is what I think Dorothea may be getting at from another angle in her insightful (as usual) recent comment.

The possible connections of Escobar to literacy instruction seem to me even more illuminating, and usefully connected to the discourse of technology stuff, when Escobar writes, “Development was conceived not as a cultural process (culture was a residual variable, to disappear with the advance of modernization) but instead as a system of more or less universally applicable technical interventions intended to deliver some ‘badly needed’ goods to a ‘target’ population” (44). Escobar saves the really striking stuff for the end of the chapter, though: “The coherence of effects that the development discourse achieved is the key to its success as a hegemonic form of representation: the construction of the poor and underdeveloped as universal, preconstituted subjects, based on the privilege of the representers; the exercise of power over the Third World made possible by this discursive homogenization. . .; and the colonization and domination of the natural and human ecologies and economies of the Third World. Development assumes a teleology to the extent that it proposes that the ‘natives’ will sooner or later be reformed; at the same time, however, it reproduces endlessly the separation between reformers and those to be reformed” (53). This is where, to me, the parallels between composition’s language of remediation in literacy instruction and the economic discourse of development seem unignorable, and this is where I really do see the discourse of composition instruction as being unmistakably classed.

I think I’d best point out now that my first read of Escobar was the source of my sorta all-over-the-place ramblings Sunday, so maybe I should quit while I’m ahead (well, relatively speaking, at least), and see if I can’t pull some of this stuff together more effectively tomorrow night after the seminar.

I’m going to bed early tonight. I’m going to bed early tonight. I am. Really.

Oh, wait.