Yesterday I talked about how “I want to show how capitalist discourses of class are very much present in the composition classroom, a space historically thought to be free of such crassly materialistic concerns”. In my readings today, I was glad to have a little supporting evidence in Larner and Heron’s pointing-out, in “The Spaces and Subjects of a Globalizing Economy”, of the “tendency in cultural literature to portray the political-economic as ‘background’, foundational to the apparently more interesting issues of meaning, identity and representation” (6). English types work with words and ideas and so assume that the words and ideas are always the most important (or sometimes even the only) thing. In fact, I think that’s why so many English types have swallowed whole the tenets of poststructuralism: hey, if everything’s discursive, then that makes English really important, right?
Which isn’t to say that I think these things (these words, rather) are unimportant. In fact, the poststructural perspective offers a nice antidote to the Cartesian privileging of the immaterial in its understanding that words themselves have material consequence. And yet English types, as Larner and Heron indicate, don’t talk about The Economy; we presume that it’s, as they say, “background,” or perhaps more accurately, somehow transcendent, beyond our grasp. Such a perspective makes the economy into “something that does things to us” rather than “something we do”, to invert my quotation yesterday from the Community Economies Collective. And if it’s transcendent, ubiquitous, all-encompassing, it becomes almost like the weather only man-made (sic), something so around us and beyond control as to be worth our attention only in passing. Larner and Heron show how, in discussions of economic globalization, “A complex and contradictory set of processes was re-presented as a relatively coherent and universalising process that was both monolithic and disembodied” within which “agency was re-inscribed as the particular — as the moment where apparently universal processes become specific” (8, emphasis in original).
The reason I’m so interested in computers is that computers make the tendencies I’ve described above much more visible in the classroom. Discussions of technology in composition often separate technology from its context, just as economic discourses (both neoclassical and Marxian) do: technology is understood as an instrument separate from its surroundings which possesses the transcendent agency for producing changes to and within those surroundings. This is almost exactly the same way people involved with teaching first-year writing think about literacy in relation to the economy, and this is why I think it’s so important.
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