Economy’s Far Horizon

Until recently, the discourse of socioeconomic class has been the chief means by which composition has addressed economic concerns in examining students’ day-to-day work in the writing classroom. While I’m approaching those concerns from a Marxian point of view, neoclassical economics remains the dominant paradigm in American culture today. Classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo focused their attentions on large-scale problems like economic growth, unemployment, and accumulation; neoclassical economics, evolving out of that thought, shifted its attention to the tastes and preferences of individuals within the economy, and how those individuals make decisions based on marginal cost and marginal utility. With their diagrams, curves, graphs, and equations, neoclassical economists seem to be doing everything they can to discursively represent economics as a scientific discipline (much is made in introductory economics textbooks of the distinction between “descriptive” and “normative”), despite the fact that it borrows its metaphors from geometry and its principles of application and its structure of explanation from physics. In fact, several scholars have noted the curious tendency of economics to represent itself as a sort of social physics with a historical perspective, despite reservations about constructing neoclassical economics as scientific, such as those expressed by conservative economist Friedrich August von Hayek at his Nobel Banquet Speech in 1974. Neoclassical economists occupy a broad range of political perspectives, from Hayek and Milton Friedman to John Maynard Keynes and Amartya Sen; all, however, share a belief in the utility-maximising individual who (in an ideal situation) is free to make choices about how to maximise that utility. This focus on the individual, and on free choice, allows neoclassical economics to rhetorically align itself with democracy. Neoclassical economists also tend to privilege efficiency, self-interest, rationality, and scarcity as their key concepts, while critics of neoclassical economics argue that it is overly positivistic, that it unrealistically assumes perfect knowledge and rationality, and that its idealized notions of competition excessively rely on conceptions of sameness and homogeneity while real-world competition is fundamentally based in difference, and that it bears a myopic focus on market transactions as the only economic transactions worth investigating.

Deborah Brandt is likely the most prominent compositionist dealing explicitly with economic concerns from a neoclassical perspective. Brandt begins “Writing for a Living” (Written Communication April 2005) with the statement that “Writing is at the heart of the knowledge economy” (166) and goes on to propose that “Writers put knowledge in tangible, and thereby transactional, form” (167). The very act of writing itself, it would seem, can be understood as an act of commodification. This understanding of writing as something to be transacted is not new, of course: James Britton used the term “transactional” to characterize instrumental, getting-things-done writing in 1970’s Language and Learning. What is new is the way that Brandt connects this understanding of writing to an economy that involves “knowledge-making and knowledge-selling” wherein writing is “a chief vehicle for economic trade and profit making” (167). In fact, Brandt argues, writing can be understood “as a manufacturing process in knowledge work” (176), and “Workplace writers can be likened to complex pieces of machinery that turn raw materials (both concrete and abstract) into functional, transactional, and valuable form, often with great expenditures of emotional, psychological, and technical effort” (176). This focus on “Workplace writers” is important, because Brandt’s interest in “Writing for a Living” is explicitly on an intercorporate environment in which “knowledge must be protected and even obscured to maintain competitive edge” (189) and “literacy as a human skill is recruited as an instrument of production in the knowledge economy” (179). This does not necessarily mean that Brandt sees all writing as commodified: in fact, she characterizes written knowledge as a “leaky property” (191) that circulates in arenas other than that of the marketplace.

However, what’s absent in her account in “Writing for a Living,” at least explicitly, is any connection between the classroom and the workplace: we might infer some conclusions about literacy instruction from Brandt’s account of the economic functions of writing, but the focus is very much on workers. Elsewhere, though, Brandt does explicitly connect economic pressures to literacy instruction. In “Losing Literacy” (Research in the Teaching of English February 2005), Brandt proposes that “A lot of teaching and learning–especially around communication–is for the purposes of stimulating consumer desire” (308), and points out that literacy instruction is often centered around concerns of profitability. Writing about educators in the “learning economy” (307), Brandt argues that “Literacy and knowledge, once the domain of the humanistic tradition, are being redefined within a production imperative” (307-308). She expresses strong reservations about such a circumstance, but offers no indication that she percieves any viable alternative to the demands and the workings of market capitalism. In fact, these two essays are both profoundly immersed in the logic of neoclassical economics, and the implicit conclusion for literacy educators would seem to be that whether we like it or not, our classrooms serve the market economy, and that students and workers internalize literate practices that privilege assumptions of efficiency, self-interest, rationality, and scarcity. Furthermore, the value for students in internalizing such practices is in how well those practices will help them to succeed in the marketplace: in other words, the value of work in the composition classroom has a distant horizon; it is understood as serving the student after the course is over, in other classes and ultimately in the workplace. Writing essays for their own sake, or for their use value in the near term, is not considered.