According to Elspeth Stuckey, “The current high profile of literacy is symptomatic of a speedy, ruthless transition from an industrial to an information-based economy. This economic shift accentuates literacy’s role in economic growth, class structure, and social estrangement. Literacy, to be sure, is a powerful, unique technology. Yet literacy remains a human invention contained by social contract, and the maintenance of that contract in education betrays our ideas of humanity as surely as our use of literacy enforces them. Are we helping those in need of economic and social opportunity, or those (including ourselves) who wish to maintain their own economic and social advantage?” (Violence viii). This was largely the point of my post yesterday: the mask of altruism worn by many folks in the field of computers and writing is nothing more than a mask. Indeed, some highly respected scholars have gone so far as to say, essentially, “Fuck the poor.”
I’m not writing to them. I know I don’t stand a chance of ever changing their minds: we’ve all seen how institutional comfort can harden overnight into conservatism. But in light of such conservatism, consider Stuckey’s quotation of Henry Giroux’s acknowledgement that in public debate, “the issue of literacy has been removed from the broader social, historical, and ideological forces that constitute its existence” (Stuckey 52). I would argue that those who advocate an engagement with digital literacies on their own terms, apart from the social and the material (again, see yesterday’s post), are attempting a similar remove. So why is this important? Because this remove is exactly the same move that J. K. Gibson-Graham describes in the discourse of economics, a shift “from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society” via “a hegemonic move through which representations of economy have slipped from their locations in discourse and landed ‘on the ground,’ in the ‘real,’ not just separate from, but outside of society” (1).
It’s learned helplessness in the service of political, economic, and pedagogical conservatism. And I’d hope that any good teacher might ask that her students turn their faces not to the past, but to the future: to possibility, and to the hope of a more egalitarian society, where those in positions of privilege work to help the disenfranchised, rather than exclude them.
Mike, wish you were at the Working-Class Studies Conference this week, where we’re talking about how to sustain the kind of forward thinking that you’re advocating here. I’ve been thinking a lot about your sobering analyses the past few days and (as I start to prep syllabi for fall) trying to consider new pedagogical ways to use literacy and other technologies toward these ethical ends.
Thanks, Bill. A question: are any folks at the Working-Class Studies Conference talking about the pedagogical applications and implications of computers? I’m curious in part because I would describe the focus of my own scholarship not as on the working class, but as on class itself as a category of difference — and I wonder if scholars who focus on the working class (correctly) perceive computers as an aspect of privilege, and so (incorrectly) construct computers as outside their purview.
More to the point: I wish there were more people who “get” class issues doing scholarly work on computers & writing. Rejection of engagement serves no purpose other than guaranteeing one has no place in the debate.
Not a single presentation relating to computers and pedagogy. We need you to bring those issues to the conference. I don’t think folks here necessarily see computers as outside of the purview of the (sub)field, it’s just not what they themselves are working on.