Dissertation Progress

Earlier this week, I met with Charlie and Donna, the two comp faculty on my three-person committee, and the meetings were really helpful. Donna gave me some super-detailed constructive comments on my early, early draft of Chapter Five and suggested putting together an “assertion outline”, acknowledging that organizational difficulties in dissertating are often the most problematic, and Charlie helped me talk through a series of the assertions I make in the half-chapter, and how they relate to assertions I intend to make in the dissertation.

Here are some of those assertions:

1. That economic discourses are hidden within the discourses of composition and of computers & composition;
2. That computers make these economic concerns freshly visible;
3. That therefore as a profession we need at this time to bring these economic discourses forward, and think of the classroom in more carefully examined economic perspective;
4. And that re-seeing classroom practices through the lens of a diverse set of economic perspectives may offer composition teachers useful ways of helping students combat the consequences of contemporary economic inequalities.

Furthermore, within the assertion that economic discourses are hidden within the discourses of composition and of computers & composition are embedded the assertions

1. That compositionists don’t do anything approaching an overt Marxist economic critique except when we talk about academic labor;
2. That when we think about the economics of (when we talk about economics in??) the classroom, we go to mainstream, neoclassical economics, in which the economy is seen as monolithic and unchangeable, in which The Economy has a sort of agentless agency to it, in which economic change somehow just happens;
3. That we therefore do not, in our hidden or sublimated discussions of the economics of the classroom, consider possible changes to the extant economic systems;
4. And that when we want to critique, we have discarded the possibilities for economic change offered by Friere’s Christian Marxism in favor of Giroux’s critique of culture.

In order to remedy this set of circumstances, as I noted above, I think we need to re-see classroom practices through the lens of a diverse understanding of contemporary economic perspectives. One way to do this would be to use the “diverse economy” proposed by J.K. Gibson-Graham, by which we might understand the practices of the writing classroom as perhaps not solely capitalist or market-based. Grading and assessment need not be either exploitatively capitalist or purely non-economic; peer critique might be better understood as gift rather than exchange; plagiarism might be helpfully understood as something other than the theft of singularly-owned intellectual property; and so on. Most importantly: the production, consumption, and circulation of writing in the composition classroom does not necessarily need to be based on the capitalist logic of supply and demand — and the digital reproducibility offered by the computer considerably strengthens this premise.

That’s my dissertation, and that’s why I think compositionists need to start thinking about economics.

While I’m working on this stuff, I’m also refinishing furniture — I’ve got two bookcases, one big and one small, that are serving me as practice for my inherited dining room table (1/32 inch veneer, badly worn, which I’m gonna sand with 220 and build up with amber shellac) and massive office desk (solid wood with a darker stain, and probably the shellac again). The bookcases are tough: the big one’s aspen, so the stain really brought out the high-contrast grain, and I’m thinking about maybe using a tinted golden polyurethane on top of it, to tone down the grainy contrast. Maybe an initial satin coat, for depth, and then a couple gloss coats for shine, sanding with 320 between coats and then buffing it out with 400 sandpaper and 0000 steel wool. I stripped and sanded the smaller one and it had an odd reaction (blooms and shininess in spots) to the stain, which makes me think maybe it had been waxed before, so I’m not gonna risk polyurethane. On the good side, I’ve tested a spot of BriWax on the underside of one of the shelves, and it seems to take well, so that’ll actually be less effort than varnishing. And the wood will be pretty, pretty, pretty, with a wonderful depth and gloss to it. One of the nice things I learned from my father, I suppose: I do love wood, its appearance and its feel, and I love how good it lets you make it feel and look.

Tink and Zeugma are passed out in the kitchen. I gave them some catnip tonight, scattered out across the floor, and after the obligatory munching, there was the rolling-around-in-it phase. The problem was that I didn’t distribute enough catnip for both of the girls to roll around in it at once, so they took turns: one would roll in it while the other would lick the catnip off her.

My cats are doing body shots.