Here we go again, or part one at least, where I try to say, “This is why it’s important.” Comments welcomed — encouraged — sought, especially in terms of making the language more clear to those not familiar with the concerns.
In the literature of computers and composition, scant explicit attention has been paid to the issue of socioeconomic class. Yet, as Charles Moran points out, computers and composition as a discipline has traditionally constructed the functions of technology in the wired writing classroom as fostering either efficiency (making the production and circulation of writing easier) or equity (making the classroom a more democratic space), and both efficiency and equity are concerns associated with class: the former with relations of production, and the latter with relations of privilege. Moran notes that Thomas Brownell’s reference in “Planning and Implementing the Right Word Processing System” to the “increased productivity” (5) computers can bring to student writing is symptomatic of the perception common in the early years of the journal Computers and Composition that computers would make writing more efficient, and Donna LeCourt’s hope that “technology offers a way to provide students with the means to critique how their textual practice participates in ideological reproduction” (292) reflects the growing perception that technology can be used to serve critical pedagogy’s end of fostering a fairer and more equitable classroom (and, by extension, a fairer and more equitable society).
Both perceptions — efficiency and equity — rely on an assumption that computers themselves will help to bring about the changes imagined within the uses to which they are put. In other words, technology is imagined as a neutral and transcendent tool, able to bring about changes to the contexts within which it is used, with the nature of those changes being determined entirely by the intentions of the user.
Andrew Feenberg refers to this assumption as the “instrumental theory” of technology, which has four major components:
- Technology, as pure instrumentality, is indifferent to the variety of ends it can be employed to achieve. . .
- Technology also appears to be indifferent with respect to politics. . . A hammer is a hammer, a steam turbine is a steam turbine, and such tools are useful in any social context. . .
- The socio-political neutrality of technology is usually attributed to its “rational” character and the universality of the truth it embodies. . .
- The universality of technology also means that the same standards of measurement can be applied in different settings. Thus technology is routinely said to increase the productivity of labor in different countries, different eras, and different civilizations. (5)
Computers, however, are not the only technology in the wired writing classroom: writing itself is a technology, though a technology far less overtly visible to us than computers. Consider the arguments that might be made when we substitute “literacy” for Feenberg’s key term. Literacy, “as pure instrumentality, is indifferent to the variety of ends it can be employed to achieve”: it coulds be argued that one can write just as well for antidemocratic or oppressive purposes as one can write for liberatory or democratic purposes. The understanding that literacy “also appears to be indifferent with respect to politics” has been with us since Isocrates made the weaker cause appear the stronger: “A hammer is a hammer, a steam turbine is a steam turbine,” and narrative is narrative and exposition is exposition, or so the argument would seem to go. Literacy’s “socio-political neutrality” has in fact been constructed as embodying rationality, and while literate practices are reflected in an infinitude of heterogeneous particularities, the practice of literacy itself is popularly understood as a universal good. Such an understanding of literacy’s universal good might indicate “that the same standards of measurement can be applied in different settings” to the point where literacy “is routinely said to increase the productivity of labor in different countries, different eras, and different civilizations” (5).
Yet the tentative language in which these correspondences are couched ought to indicate how exceptionable they truly are. Composition’s disciplinary history has done much to show that literacy is not an indifferent, neutral, or standardized practice. However, while Feenberg’s critique does much to problematize the instrumental theory of technology, the perspectives of teachers and theorists in the sub-field of computers and composition still rely on an instrumental understanding of computers, in much the same way that teachers and theorists in the broader field of composition — when considering class — understand literacy as an instrument for upward mobility.
Furthermore, those teachers and theorists often understand that mobility in largely cultural terms. As Larner and Heron note in “The Spaces and Subjects of a Globalizing Economy”, there is a frequent “tendency in cultural literature to portray the political-economic as ‘background’, foundational to the apparently more interesting issues of meaning, identity and representation” (6). The economy is constructed as “the scene of abject submission, the social site that constrains activities at all other sites, the supreme being whose dictates must unquestioningly be obeyed” (Gibson-Graham 94): there can only be mobility within such a system, and no possible change to the system itself. Technology, as a transcendent instrument, is understood as being separate from the context of that economic system: both neoclassical economics (Hazlitt, Mankiw, Heilbroner & Thurow, Resnick & Wolff) and Marxian economics (Marx, Resnick & Wolff, Heilbroner, Gibson-Graham) theorize technology as an independent force with the abstracted utility to make changes within those economic systems. In its moment of use, the moment in which it offers upward mobility, a technology transcends capital and so becomes democratic, offering its agentless agency to all.
In composition and in computers and composition, this instrumental discourse of technology takes problems of politics and economics and transfers them into the “neutral” realm of technology, where it is understood that the technology will serve as the tool to divorce those problems from the individual subjectivities with which they are associated and from their political and economic contexts and then simply “fix” them. We see inequality and propose a technological fix, whether that technology be writing or the computer. According to Joe Harris, we might understand “the project of composition” as one “which has always aimed to produce subjects, students, who are prepared to take on the work of the academy, and which can thus be accused of furthering the ends of the status quo, of ensuring that the machinery of the university remains well-oiled and well-tuned”, and we might concomitantly understand “this critique of composition as merely instrumental” (581). In its refusal to attempt to make changes to the economic or political contexts for the inequality, the instrumental approach maintains that status quo. Feenberg critiques this instrumental view as a “take it or leave it” approach by which “technology is destiny” and subsequently “beyond human intervention” (8). A careful understanding of the ways in which this instrumental view has played out in the field of computers and composition may help to explain why scholars in the field have historically avoided significant engagement with the topic of socioeconomic class.
So, too, an analysis of the sublimated ways in which computers and composition constructs computers as a technology offering upward economic mobility via the promises of efficiency and equity may provide a more sophisticated understanding of the problems with the broader field of composition’s instrumental construction of literacy itself as a vehicle for upward class mobility. Computers, as relatively unfamiliar material artifacts of culture, make visible practices and assumptions that are hidden or obscured in their association with the technology of literacy. As such, computers are perhaps the only site in the discourse of composition where material concerns of socioeconomic class can overtly and explicitly be connected to the practice of teaching without necessarily constructing literacy instruction as either instrumentally vocationalized (it’ll help students get a better job) or instrumentally elitist (it’ll help students adapt to academic culture). These circumstances constitute the exigency for the question: what are the discourses of class within and around the discipline of computers and composition and the discipline of composition?
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