This is pretty long, and probably pretty dry. And if you read it all the way through, you might even call me a flippin communist. Isn’t that reward enough? Dammit, where’s Curtiss?
Anyway: As I think I’ve pointed out before, some first-year composition programs teach the five-paragraph theme, while others teach writing as closely connected to close reading in a cultural studies context (University of Pittsburgh; Rachael’s prized — and rightly so — Ways of Reading), and others teach the personal essay, and others (University of Minnesota) break it down according to genre (the abstract, the proposal, the research paper; other institutions use the lab report, the memorandum, and so on), and still others, according to Sharon Crowley, choose to focus on “traditional grammar, orthography, and punctuation” (229). These widely varying instances of composition instruction have their own class connotations within those wider university contexts. This offers another reason why compositionists seem unable to agree on what class is in their classrooms: the various models of composition instruction and of the university are connected to differently theorized purposes for education, which in turn lead to differing perceptions of the dynamics and movements of class. A teacher teaching a course that traffics largely in the personal essay will likely have a definition of class as it functions in the classroom that relies primarily upon personal experience and authenticity claims. On the other hand, a teacher teaching the genres of the essay would seem to be relying upon a service-oriented approach, in that those genres make up the forms students will need to do well in other courses, which would seem to incline towards a view of class largely reliant on occupational definitions.
Colleges and universities, when understood in the context of class, also carry a diversity of purposes. We do not need to be told that Nevada State College at Henderson is of a very different class than Brown University, or that small, exclusive liberal arts colleges are different from large state universities which are in turn different from community colleges, but the axes of difference bear further investigation. Consider the fact that Amherst College, where “classes are characterized by spirited interchange among students and acclaimed faculty skilled at asking challenging questions”, prizes on its Web site “men and women of intellectual promise who have demonstrated qualities of mind and character” while the stated University of Massachusetts “mission is to provide an affordable education of high quality and conduct programs of research and public service that advance our knowledge and improve the lives of the people of the Commonwealth”, and Hampshire College puts an “emphasis on each student’s curiosity and motivation” while another community college system aims to “support the economic growth of the state and its citizens through programs that supply business and industry with a skilled, well-trained work force”. Clearly, these institutions construct a variety of purposes for education, and construct a variety of students — or, to put matters more explicitly, these institutions class their students differently. And yet, as the College English January 2001 “WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition” demonstrates, we still tend to construct composition as having a monolithic, transcendent and unified project across institutions.
Such constructions of transcendence are hardly limited to the field of composition. As I’ve noted before, many neoclassical and Marxian economists understand technology as transcending its local economic contexts. So, too, Michael Porter in On Competition seeks an antidote to the transcendent and delocalizing discourse of globalization and transnational corporations. Porter describes the business advantages of what he calls “clusters”: “A cluster is a geographically proximate group of interconnected companies and associated institutions in a particular field, linked by commonalities and complementarities” (199). In pointing out the absence of an understanding of the significance of location in the literature on management, innovation, and organizations, Porter suggests that “It is as if linkages, transactions, and information flow took place outside time and space” (223), as if they were abstract and immaterial and ungrounded in the concrete and localized particulars of individuals’ lived experience. The cheerleaders of cyberspace and the information economy — Negroponte, Bolter, Landow, Lanham, Turkle, Wired Magazine — do the same thing, constructing information as free-flowing and transcending any material context. To this, Porter can metaphorically offer a decentered understanding of class still very much grounded in the material and specific realities of the diversity of composition’s purposes as they exist within the space of the diverse economy.
In this diverse economy, J. K. Gibson-Graham attempts to understand capitalism “as fragmented and contradictory, stitched together as a patchwork of a million smaller interrelated economies and exploitative processes” such as “the state economy of taxes and services which interacts with the corporate economy of products and investments which interacts with the cultural economy of ideas and fashions which interacts with the social economy of relationships and communications, all of them and more subdividable into even smaller economies of exploitative and nonexploitative processes, commodities and noncommodities, goods and services and gifts and ideas and so on”, and that “These small spaces are where change takes place.” In such a context, Bourdieu’s relational infinitude of classes stands as the most workable model.
The difficulty with Bourdieu’s model, however, is that Bourdieu understands every class marker as having a value that he describes as “capital” (Distinction). Bourdieu’s metaphor relies on a conception of ownership that, when applied to the classroom, can serve to commodify knowledge and turn learning into a product. This is a mode of thinking by which everything done in the classroom has value only in what it can be exchanged for, and so limits avenues for class mobility — despite the distinctions Bourdieu takes pains to make between cultural and economic capital — to those that are directly instrumental.
Of course, such a conception of the composition classroom has long existed independently of Bourdieu’s theories. Composition teachers talk about wanting students to have “ownership” of the texts they produce; Bruce Horner examines the way we construct the exchange value of those texts; most if not all schools have plagiarism policies. In that sense, perhaps ownership concerns are one common factor across a diversity of educational institutions: as Andrea Lunsford and Susan West point out (I’m raiding Charlie Lowe’s Works Cited here), “the teaching of writing has traditionally been invested in a model of composing that makes solitary reflection central to the production of ‘original’ texts absolutely ‘owned’ by their creators” (387). In the grades that papers are assigned, they come to have a value, and in that valuation they become scarce and commodified items. Those who do well in such an economy are those who produce, own, and exchange the more valuable texts. (In fact, the ultimate class distinction at the university — that between students and teachers — relies on textual ownership and exchange as one of its vectors: professors are expected to publish their writing, while students are not.) In this way, the meritocratic concerns of the wired writing classroom (i.e., equity; making sure the same opportunities are available to all) are directly connected to the economic concerns of the wired writing classroom (i.e., efficiency; using technology to help students more easily produce those scarce and valuable texts). Textual ownership would seem to be the sine qua non of any examination of the composition classroom.
But some have begun to question the logic of absolute textual ownership, and their questioning has largely been in the context of the open source/open access movement, which understands the value of texts as being dependent upon the free and open exchange of ideas (S�derberg, Barbrook). The logic of the open source/open access movement understands the inherent reproducibility of texts as contravening conventional understandings of scarcity, and so opens up a space of possibility for the de-commodification of those ideas. This presents one way in which we might avoid constructing the composition classroom as serving the purposes Bruce Horner sees as largely privileging the exchange value of student writing. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that the open source/open access movement, as constituted today, is inextricably linked to computers, electronic publication, and digital reproducibility. In this sense — a sense that the field of computers and composition has almost entirely ignored (again, an insight I owe to Charlie) — computers and writing are connected in a profoundly non-instrumental way: values and practices associated with the computer as a material artifact of culture can be seen as interrupting and fragmenting conventional scarcity-based understandings of economics. The open source/open access movement may metaphorically indicate to us ways in which technologies (computers, literacy) can help us to rethink concerns and valuations of ownership that themselves rest as the foundations of our rationalizations of class inequality by making visible the cracks and fissures within those foundations.
Class differences rest upon and find their cruelest expression in economic inequalities, and are reproduced in part by educative practices and the demands placed upon educative practices by economic forces (Bowles & Gintis). Nick Dyer-Witheford points to the examination in Anthony Negri’s work of “how schools and universities become sites of conflict between capital’s rising need for an functionally educated workforce, and peoples’ insistence on learning for their own purposes” (emphasis in original). I see hope in the possibility that this may be a result of an expanding and diversifying capitalist economy different from itself, and hope in the possibility that “peoples’ insistence on learning for their own purposes” may increasingly prevail in such conflicts. Such possibilities may be most usefully fostered by a careful examination not of the ways in which class hierarchies are reinforced by instrumental understandings of technologies (literacy and computers), not of the alignments and correspondences across the various vectors of class, but by a careful examination of the moments of rupture and transgression in our understandings of class, by a search for the places where class doesn’t work, where it explodes, where it becomes incoherent — and a deployment of those fractures and fissures as footholds for enacting potential remedies for the injuries of class.
With this goal in mind, one might use current economic writings on globalization (e.g., Escobar, Gibson-Graham, Mitchell) as well as a close reading of the instrumental discourses in computers and composition in order to disrupt the instrumentalist economic justification of writing instruction with computers and attempt to offer an understanding of computers as acting in and being affected by the cultural, social, and material economies associated with the wired writing classroom and with that classroom’s shifting valuations and markers of class. If the writing composed in computer classrooms is to have a value beyond the economic, we must construct perspectives on technology and globalization that themselves interrupt and transcend contemporary representations of the implacable and all-consuming global economy and the way class operates in that economy. To take a lesson from the writings of J. K. Gibson-Graham, seeing class structures and definitions as exploded and incoherent can help us to see how those structures themselves can be changed to remedy inequality; so, too, the work of Feenberg and Dyer-Witheford and the open source/open access movement offer opportunities for imagining computers as something other than the instruments of increased production within a capitalist economy, opportunities heretofore inadequately examined in the literature of computers and composition. Coupling these re-seeings may offer the only real opportunity for imagining how the wired writing classroom might be constructed as a space in and from which the economy itself, its associated class structures, and its technologically embodied material artifacts and cultural practices — literacy, the computer — might themselves undergo progressive change rather than reification as mysterious and transcendent and beyond human intervention.
This is a hopeful perspective. As such, it illuminates some things and obscures others. In attempting to construct a general theoretical perspective regarding the ways people think and write about these issues, and in its critique of instrumentality, it can be accused of distancing itself from the happily and hopefully practical focus of much of the discourse of computers and composition. In such distancing, it can be accused of ignoring or diminishing the concerns of access compellingly articulated by Moran and others. My hope is that it might lay the theoretical foundations for future classroom studies focusing on the intersection of access and ownership as classed practices, and their relations as such to the computer and the owned text as material artifacts of culture; classroom studies that might demonstrate ways in which texts, computers, and education itself need not be as scarce as the prevailing economic wisdom would have us believe.
I wonder if we even can envision a place where both professorial and student writing were assigned an exchange value based upon their perceived contribution to the intellectual commons. This notion, of course, is the putative reason behind certificating (at least, I suppose, at the graduate level). It would necessitate a sea-change in class relationships within the university: what happens when student contributions to the commons outstrip those of their mentors? Who, in this situation, judges such things? Even our ability to measure exchange value within the university is bound up in the classedness of the university.
I’ve been noodling over ideas for comp classes that put the evaluation in the hands of the students and larger college community to as great an extent as I can get away with. One interesting note on this front is that I find myself unable to conceive of how to do this without some sort of technology as mediating and presenting the material to the “public,” which makes for interesting, new conflicts. Never mind the sticky little issues of 1) On what bases is student work evaluated; 2) Who decides criteria for evaluation; and 3) Should I try to control for “ballot-stuffing,” or should I point out that it happens in “the real world,” too? Wouldn’t it be a hoot to really assign grades based on Slashdot or Fark-style moderation?
Btw, I wanted to photocopy Crowley’s penultimate chapter and foist it on my Dean when I finished the book.
Great! You said a few things that really got me thinking in new directions. Let me ramble:
1) I felt like I got hit upside the head when you discuss student “ownership” of texts. So true. We are inculcating them into the commodification of texts. But its interesting how we get there. Consider a more expressionist which wants students to take ownership of their writing to improve voice and to make them feel as if they can be writers. Then there’s the service side, which is more clearly aimed at having students take ownership of their writing to adopt academci discourse to produce academic texts, a product. And in this sense, the goal is to turn student into authors. Is there a distinction that can be made here between a writer, one who writes, and authors, one who publishes? The first could continue to exist outside the propety metaphor, couldn’t it?
2)You wrote, “Furthermore, it should be pointed out that the open source/open access movement, as constituted today, is inextricably linked to computers, electronic publication, and digital reproducibility.” True. And while it doesn’t have to be, it must necessarily be so. Computers, via the Internet, offer the best opportunity for resistance, for making texts available as a resource without commodifying them, since it allows the individual to make decisions and publish with the widest possible dispersal. But eventually, this resistance could result in a more “open” model within print by forcing publishers to value more making texts a resource, rather than merely profit (I think I’m making sense).
Now here’s the jump. I think you were right when you say “hopeful” in the last paragraph. Because–as producers of text–we have more opportunities to control how texts are published and shared as electronic texts, we have more opportunities to find points of resistance (and maybe I’m just resaying what you say here). For example, thanks to word processors, and even more so with email and other electronic communication mediums, it’s easier to create opportunities for group collaborative projects where texts are shared. We should also work to help students to become even more critical at evaluating “free” resources (vs those that require paid access) online for research. Students already appreciate the value of shared texts (file trading). Let’s help them to think more critically about it in a way that recognizes the importance of shared texts.
Enough babble from me for now. I look forward to future installments 🙂
Hmmmm, quite a lot to think about here—here goes:
A commodity is a thing with a use value that is produced for its exchange value. Capital, on the other hand, is a particular transformation of specific commodities: it appears first as money, is transformed into commodities, and then returns as a larger sum of money. This is the formula M–>C –>M´ where M´ > M. The increase from M to M´ occurs because of exploitatin in the production process.
Argh—hit post when I mean to hit preview. Let me continue.
Anyway, using S to stand for this social/symbolic (is that his term?) capital, we can update the classic formula to:
S–>C–>M–>S´
or
S–>C–>M´
and possibly other forms, but (I hope) you get my idea. Now here’s the point of this: on the one hand, in so far as the S imparted in composition classes allows them to survive and possibly thrive under the capitalist mode of production, that’s a good thing—but on the other hand, the particular S imparted by education doesn’t only realize itself in the production process. An industrial worker can build something for his or her personal use with job skills; this item, because it does not enter into the sphere of circulation is not a Marxian commodity. Likewise with so-called “knowledge workers.” However, just as industrial workers have to submit to exploitation to sustain their lives, so do knowledge workers: given that teachers prepare their pupils for the capitalist work place, I figure the surplus value they throw off for capital is actually quite high—it just isn’t realized within a uniform amount of time.
I’ve horribly overgeneralized about Bourdieu based on very little you wrote about him, I haven’t given any thought to how this sort of teaching contributes to solidarity for people outside of the so-called first world, and…well, this is what I can come up with in a first pass. Still, teaching people to write and research collaboratively could be a potent force for social change.
Chris — yes, it’s very much a question of value; your response pushed me towards the “Against Capital” response I put up tonight. There was actually a post a while ago over on Kairosnews thinking about grading via Slashdot-style moderation; did you see it?
I did an experiment with group work one semester where I “gave” the group a certain number of points and asked each student to privately and anonymously write out for me how the 50 points should be divided up between the students. Their numbers varied, but the valuation were surprisingly consistent in pointing out how much work each group member had done.
That said, I haven’t done it again since, cause it felt uncomfortably close to some serious Lord of the Flies type shit.
Charlie, it’s seeming to me more and more like these ideas of “owning,” “authoring,” “publishing,” and “sharing” texts are at the center of what I’m thinking about, and I think each of the words has very different connotations — and the weird tweak to “class” happens when we make those activities into descriptors of people, as you suggest (an “author” is one who “publishes”, et cetera, and there is social value in those classifications; i.e., as Chris seemed to be getting at, the class of “authors” is valued more highly than the class of “non-authors”, just as a professor’s publication of an essay in a scholarly journal is somehow valued more than a student’s publication of an essay in a class magazine). Identity is somehow bound up in the way one “owns” things. And you’re right; the hopeful jump is in trying to see alternatives: I think it’s essential that so many students appreciate the value of shared texts, and there are ways to think about that with classroom writing, too.
Imagine a network of shared and circulating essays, perhaps with Amazon-style star ratings, where everyone — students, teachers — could write and contribute and read and rate the texts that circulated within such a system. But what would motivate the circulation of such texts? Kuro5hin is an interesting model, but it’s hardly the same thing as a first-year composition course — and I also think that it’s telling that my first instinct in attempting to describe this imaginary network was to suggest that it could be a highly useful anti-plagiarism resource.
Back to ownership.
Curtiss — talk about a generous response. Man. Thanks. I actually don’t think Bourdieu uses the terms interchangeably, and I think that’s evidence of one place where I really need to go back and consider carefully the ways in which my rather muddled meanings may overlap or interfere with his. But the sorting-out of commodity versus capital and the transformations between the two helps a lot, as does your example of the salesman: class condenses various meanings into, I don’t know, sort of constellations of valuation.
The further analysis of Negroponte et aliis as rechanneling symbolic capital into commodity form is useful as well, though I think Lanham at least would probably want to argue that he’s doing precisely the opposite, despite the fact that so many of the arguments he and Landow make rely on the assumption that the material reality associated with computers reflects the literary theories the two of them espouse, and this reflection is occasion for celebration. They’re happily saying, “See? The theories are right!” but the subtext is that the theories have a concrete and practical application: they can serve the economy. As you say, they’ve co-opted radical ideas in service of the market. Thomas Frank would be impressed.
Your take on “massification” versus re-individuation is brilliant, and serves as one answer to Charlie’s mention of “expressivism” above (the rhetoric of the romantic individual student as inspired to write from a definite and unique core of selfhood: I think Peter Elbow is a wonderful person, and he’d probably be very distressed to hear me raise the question, but I wonder if anybody has ever thought to compare some of the things done in his name with some of the things done in Ayn Rand’s name), and I think composition pedagogy could do a lot to foster usefully (and non-instrumentally) collaborative projects. I don’t know if I would construct open source as a (or the) means as much as I would want to see it as a set of cultural practices enacted within a variety of sites, including the wired composition classroom as one, and both the site of labor and the site of that-which-is-not-labor as two others, in which people learn not just skills but modes of valuation that, as you say, “are not directed towards the interests of capital”.
You’ve given me a hell of a lot to think about. Thanks again for the incredibly generous response.