I’ve got two different wikis downloaded, and one of them requires a bit more Linux knowledge than I have in order to install it, so I’ll be doing some studying in the next few days; I realized last night I had to get shell access for my ISP, so that’s done, at least. In the meantime, I’ve also been quickly re-reading Joe Harris‘s A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966 (113k PDF link; it’s an interesting review, and I thought Torill might be interested by the first sentence, which reads: “Why we teach writing in college in the United States [a puzzling phenomenon to instructors in higher education in most other countries] is perhaps the most crucial question for composition scholars and teachers to answer”; as one might expect, Harris does indeed attempt to answer), since I promised a colleague she could borrow it and then realized there was some stuff in the final section that might be helpful.
Sure enough, it was; Harris does some fine work with Raymond Williams‘s critical history of the word “community” (beware, not the full version, which can be found in the indispensable Keywords) and uses that work as a starting point from which to examine the ways we use the term. I found this initially interesting because of the earlier reading I’d done on Godbout and Gudeman and the gift economy (wherein a gift can be read as a way of offering membership in a community to an outsider or reinforcing membership for an insider) and the connections I’d tried to make from there to Jill’s intimidatingly smart work on the political economy of linking. Harris points out that gifts are laden with power relations, proposing that “the gambit of community, once offered, is almost impossible to decline — since what is invoked is a community of those in power, of those who know the accepted ways of writing and interpreting texts” (100), and perhaps thereby offering us not just an insight about texts, but about the way social networks operate.
What I found even more interesting, though, was what followed.
Harris contends “that the borders of most discourses are hazily marked and often traveled, and that the communities they define are thus often indistinct and overlapping. As Williams again has suggested, one does not step cleanly and wholly from one community to another, but is caught instead in an always changing mix of dominant, residual, and emerging discourses” (103; Harris is here citing Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature 121-127), and in thinking about internet social networks like Friendster or Orkut, this seems immediately obvious. What seems less obvious, however, is how it might correspond to Bourdieu’s views of the relational infinitude of social classes. Bourdieu suggests that there is no overarching structure of class: rather, class is a relational quality, enacted by the consciousness of difference, of distinction. But let me push the relevance of Harris’s argument a little further, and suggest that these indistinct and overlapping qualities apply not only to discourse communities and social classes, but to the economic landscape as well; gift transactions overlapping with market transactions overlapping with third sphere transactions, until we understand that things are rather more sophisticated than Gregory Mankiw’s simplistic models of supply and demand might have us believe.
If we keep those metaphorical applications in mind, I think Harris is worth quoting at length here:
“There has been much debate in recent years over whether we need, above all, to respect our students’ ‘right to their own language,’ or to teach them the ways and forms of ‘academic discourse.’ Both sides of this argument, in the end, rest their cases on the same suspect generalization: That we and our students belong to different and fairly distinct communities of discourse, that we have ‘our’ ‘academic’ discourse and they have ‘their own’ ‘common’ (?!) ones. The choice is one between opposing fictions, The ‘languages’ that our students bring to us cannot but have been shaped, at least in part, by their experiences in school, and thus must, in some ways, already be ‘academic.’ Similarly, our teaching will and should always be affected by a host of beliefs and values that we hold regardless of our roles as academics. What we see in the classroom, then, are not two coherent and competing discourses but many overlapping and conflicting ones. Our students are no more wholly ‘outside’ the discourse of the university than we are wholly ‘within’ it. We are all at once insiders and outsiders” (105).
The above quotation seems to me to apply more elegantly to class than to economy, although he later extends it to the point where it seems to apply quite well indeed to what I’ve been able to understand about J. K. Gibson-Graham’s notions of the diverse economic landscape, suggesting that “instead of presenting academic discourse as coherent and well-defined, we might be better off viewing it as polyglot, as a sort of space in which competing beliefs and practices intersect with and confront another. One does not need to have consensus to have community. Matters of accident, necessity, and convenience hold groups together as well” (106). For such reasons, Harris recommends relying on the word “community” in only a very limited and local sense, suggesting that it has a “sense of like-mindedness and warmth that make community at once such an appealing and limiting concept”. Rather, “we need a vocabulary that will allow us to talk about certain forces as social rather than communal, as involving power but not always consent” (107).
In agreeing with Harris on that last point, I might be edging back towards my habitual left melancholia, and see only confirmation of said left melancholia in my further agreement when Harris offers in the stead of a warm, fuzzy “community” a less happy but perhaps more perceptive view “of a public space as a place where differences are made visible, and thus where the threat of conflict or even violence is always present” (109). But perhaps not, because in that “threat of conflict” there’s the possibility for progressive change. A stable community is an inherently conservative place, and looking at our present grievous economic inequalities, I gotta say: give me conflict.
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