CCCC on Class

Ira Shor, Bill Macauley, Jennifer Beech, and Bill Thelin did a session titled “In and Out of ‘Class’: Repositioning Ourselves and Our Discouse So That Literacy Matters” that mitigated many of the problems of their panel last year that caused such acrimony in the question and answer session. Still, I had some pretty significant concerns, and I think the structure of much of their discourse was in some ways self-marginalizing. At the beginning, Ira suggested that the discourse of class in composition is “anemic”, and asked: “What does it mean to understand class?” Parts of the presentations took steps toward such an understanding — and other parts took steps retreating from such an understanding.

Bill Macauley had a fine beginning, focusing on the Marvel superhero Ben Grimm — The Thing, from the Fantastic Four — as “the only working-class hero” in comics. Of course, this immediately raised questions for me of what we mean by “working class”, and what we see as the differences between class identity, class position, and class background: in other words, my usual concerns about the vague and unfocused terminology used by people who talk about class in composition. I immediately wanted to say: what about Luke Cage? And how working class do we consider farming families of modest means like Jonathan and Martha Kent? (The first-generation college students who come to my rural Big State U campus from the surrounding farms are certainly the sorts of students who many folks on the Working Class Studies listserv would refer to as “working class”.) In any case, Macauley used Grimm as a metaphor for working class college students, and moved on to talk about “traditional academic writing” and “academe-specific” writing as a monolithic construction, and then argued that there are “other cultural contexts” towards which we should teach, and extracurricular literacies about which we should learn, as a counter to the “rarefied air of academe”.

There are several problems here. First, if I recall correctly, Macauley connected that “rarefied air of academe” to English departments, but compositionists certainly don’t demand that all of their writing students become English majors. Second, this perpetuates the false split (and I think Macauley acknowledged this) between academia and “the real world”: the university is hardly an airtight environment, isolated from its surrounding communities. As far as that “rarefied air” goes, perhaps one could attempt to apply such a desription to some of the Ivies, but beyond that, it’s a cliché, a straw man, something that doesn’t exist. It seemed to me that it served Macauley’s argument to construct a picture of a hermetically sealed institution coupled to a monolithic construction of academic discourse operating only for the most base and instrumental purposes, and then critique that picture, offering in its stead a field of composition studies situated, contextual, and particular. But isn’t this where we were in composition studies fifteen years ago? The understanding Macauley calls for has long since been here, and the only purpose such a call can serve is to reify old targets as monolithic, thereby making them simultaneously easier to shoot at and impervious to any damage from those shots. It’s the old Marxist problem: if one looks at problems at systematic, then the only solution is to overturn the system completely. The supposed need for total revolution is a wonderful excuse for inaction.

Jennifer Beech gave an engaging presentation on activist writing and class privilege, and raised some of the integral definitional issues that were so sorely neglected last year in New York, citing Bernstein to invoke Bourdieu’s distinctions between cultural and economic capital, and between relational and gradational models of class. Still, despite such care, Beech’s presentation slipped into a too-easy and underexamined use of the gradational labels “middle class” and “working class” and “upper middle class”. I would have liked to ask all of the panelists: how many classes are there? In any case, Beech used Nancy Frazier to criticize Habermas’s notion of the bourgeois public sphere, and moved on to cite the work of Peck, Flower and Higgins in the Pittsburgh community literacy project to ask how class affects the community intereactions of activist work and writing, with a particular concern for working class students. Again, here’s my definitional concern: what is this elusive beast we refer to as the working class student? My friend from Pittsburgh who was first-generation college and whose dad worked in the mills: is he working class even if his dad was union and making $30K more per year than, say, a librarian? Is a foreman at a pharmaceutical company factory with a paid-off mortgage in the suburbs and a new car and a minivan in the driveway working class or middle class? What about the kid whose mom cleans hotels and who never goes to college because he teaches himself to program computers on his own, and gets a six-figure income in Silicon Valley?

Bill Thelin did some wonderful work talking about the problems of privileged discourse in his honors writing course centered around class. I grinned when he noted that nobody talks about class in honors English courses; again Brodkey’s “class blindness that sees itself everywhere it looks.” I was happy, as well, to see him acknowledging the complexity of definitions of class, with class as wealth, class as decorum, class as education, class as ownership of the means of production. Understanding class as a category is far more problematic, he suggested, than understanding class as a relation of privilege and power. Despite this, students are highly conscious of their own (and others’) divided class affiliations and multi-positioned class backgrounds. Thelin offered (personal?) narrative as a lens for a more complexly classed self-understanding, and briefly discussed the collaborative essay as a possible avenue towards creating class solidarity. (Which, to me, seems in line with some of the stuff I’ve been reading on open source, but also seems a little too easy and simple.)

Finally, while the question and answer session raised some useful questions about the radically individualist achievement-based program of education (Ira called it “the normative personal success project”), when I asked them about the instrumental and monolithic view of the purpose and form of academic writing they were presenting, Ira and Bill protested that it was “portrayed” as instrumental and monolithic. I disagree, and I think a look at the recent College English Outcomes Statement supports my position, and would further contend that they are reinforcing such a portrayal with their straw man arguments.

I’m happy to be now disabused of my conviction that the people who are talking about class and composition were short-sighted in their failure to publicly acknowledge the complexity of how class gets defined: the acknowledgement of the presence of relational and gradational models, and of the influence of cultural and economic capital, status and wealth, education and decorum, of all these things in shaping, influencing, creating, and determining class is essential, and it’s a good thing to have.

The problem is, that acknowledgement was made, and then all of the presenters using the term ‘class’ in precisely the same undifferentiated way. This is muddy, foolish, and self-marginalizing, and it’s got to stop. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for people who talk about class.

1. Make it clear how you’re defining class and class mobility.
2. Make it clear how many classes you see.
3. Make it clear precisely what factors you see as shaping, influencing, creating, and determining class, and how.
4. Make it clear how you understand the overlaps and differences between class identity and class background.