Far Horizon, Part 3

In composition, Marxist arguments typically construct the value of work performed in the classroom as carrying future rather than present value. Consider the College English “WPA Outcomes Statement,” which offers the political contention that “By the end of first-year composition, students should[…] Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating[…;] Integrate their own ideas with those of others [; and] Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power” (324). Writing here is understood to carry use value, instrumental value, social or communal value, and critical value in the way it is expected to interrogate ideologies of power — but in most of these aspects, that value is still a distant rather than present horizon.

In contrast, Lester Faigley uses a Marxist-influenced analysis to critique the distant economic horizon of the neoclassical economic perspective: following the work of Geoff Sirc, he rather caustically proposes that “Only after [the student] receives her degree will she learn if she has been granted all that has been promised: that you too can be a success if you go to college, work hard, and do what you’re told” (73). Faigley’s work in Fragments of Rationality offers a useful summary of many of the Marxist approaches common to composition. From Barbara Ehrenreich, he takes the notion that the identity of middle class students will be determined by their education, rather than by relative poverty or wealth (Faigley 53), and later characterizes Janet Emig’s and Peter Elbow’s expressivist classroom practices as reactions against an increasing corporate influence on education as manifested in the transactional purposes of writing (58) (which should likely bring to mind Raymond Williams and his observations on Romanticism as a cultural reaction to the economic shifts of the industrial revolution).

Furthermore, Faigley notes that Lisa Delpit, Myron Tuman, and Susan Miller all argue that early advocates of process pedagogies ignore and so perpetuate economic inequalities in their discourse that privileges middle-class communicative habits and practices — but, again, the Marxist critique here is largely ideological rather than economic. This Marxist ideological reaction to economic inequality is also visible in the work of Greg Myers, who writes in “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching” that he’s seeking “not for a new kind of assignment, but for more skepticism about what assignments do to reproduce the structures of our society” (434): in other words, “One teaches job letters to the business communications students who need to get jobs downtown, without teaching that a job downtown is the answer to their problems” (434). The work of the classroom is not viewed as necessarily carrying value in its own right, but in how it might enlighten the student and orient that student towards future productive change in society.

In a similar vein, Min-Zhan Lu writes with considerable concern of “the Fast Capitalist investment in turning the young people of China into eager Consumers and below-minimum-wage Labor for global corporations” (31), and describes, with some irony, “fast capitalism’s interest in prioritizing areas of our life, turning our life outside paid work and school work (in preparation for paid work)” (41). Despite the irony, however, the notion is still there that education serves the economy, even as she seeks economic critique within the context of education. Language use, for Lu, can help us to become critical of fast capitalism’s agentless “order” and “Our word-work can help to design a better world” (46): the value of such word-work, again, is understood to exist in the possibility for future change, rather than in the present.

The emphasis in Patricia Bizzell’s work is less explicitly economic. In “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies,” Bizzell acknowledges that compositionists make use of the titular “Marxist ideas,” but those ideas are ones that seek a political “critical consciousness” rather than addressing economic concerns. While Bizzell addresses socioeconomic class as a concern, it is brought up only as a concern of ideology (53), rather than of explicitly material circumstance; similarly, in “College Composition: Initiation into the Academic Discourse Community,” she cites research from Bernstein, Bourdieu, and Passeron demonstrating that “students from different social classes come to school with different abilities to deal with academic discourse” (107), but her interest is much more in discourse than in class. Furthermore, she acknowledges that she follows Jameson’s shift in “emphasis from economic to ideological relations” in examining the modes of production “of meaning and the struggle over who controls it” (57). While later theorists like Hardt and Negri might see the production of meaning as an economic form of immaterial labor, Bizzell’s perspective excludes economy in favor of ideology. The long-term goal of education for Bizzell, following Freire, is “the ability to see one’s world as the object of reflection and change” (126): again, a distant horizon for the value of writing, and change understood in the future rather than in the present.

Finally, perhaps the strongest and most influential Marxist critique of economic concerns in composition comes from James Berlin, who in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures describes “the changing economic conditions for which we are preparing our students” (43) but strongly critiques the notion that composition teachers are merely providing businesses with well-trained workers (52). This is a critique carried over from earlier essays by Berlin: in “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” he asserts that “many teachers (and I suspect most) look upon their vocations as the imparting of a largely mechanical skill, important only because is serves students in getting them through school and advancing them in their professions” (235), privileging instead a pedagogy “that will enable [students] to become effective persons as they become effective writers” (246). This circumstance is largely due to the fact that “we have just been through a period in which the end of education was conspicuously declared to be primarily the making of money,” to which Berlin offers the “counterproposal” that “education exists to provide intelligent, articulate, and responsible citizens who understand their obligation and their right to insist that economic, social, and political power be exerted in the best interests of the community” (55). Furthermore, according to Berlin, “the division of the workforce into a small group of the comfortably secure, on the one hand, and a large group of the poorly compensated and expendable, on the other hand, must be challenged in the name of social justice” (56). While this stands as a Marxist critique of economic relations, it is one based in assumptions about the ways in which higher education leads to a career, and so once more projects the value of writing in serving social change as existing beyond the bounds of the classroom.