The title of Darin Payne’s presentation, “Globalization and its Discursive Discontents,” of course referred both to the title of Saskia Sassen’s book and to the title of Joseph Stiglitz’s book. Payne offered some propositions for problematization: does globalization temper capitalism’s faith in markets? What degree of interventionism is appropriate in the so-called world economy? Is there to be any undoing of the alleged New World Order? (Mike’s editorializing: cue the Ministry song.) Are we truly saturated in globalization, and is it truly irresistible and permanent?
There are, certainly, changes in economic structures, in ideologies of nationalism and postnationalism and colonialism, in technologies of communication, in the migrations of workers, and in cultural transactions: are all these, then, how we name “globalization”? With such huge and overarching changes, don’t we need to change how we construct the teaching of writing?
(Mike’s editorializing: I’m not sure I buy that cause-effect relationship: there’s an implicit surrender there that feels uncomfortable to me.)
Ultimately, according to Payne, our goal should be to help students simultaneously gain and critique what counts today as cultural capital. And again, I’m being a difficult reader: why the accumulative model, and why the critical model? What might happen, instead, if we were to value writing in and of and for itself? Is the deferral of value an essential component of composition today — or only an essential component of the way we try to sell it to people outside our discipline?
The Web doesn’t merely expand the [bourgeois] public sphere, but also changes what counts as argumentation and information — but what does that mean for our “mainstream” students, and what might it mean for “transnationalism” (Mike’s editorializing again: we all know this term means something different from “multinationalism” or “globalization”) when BlackBoard and WebCT perform the pedagogical equivalent of Coca-Cola-ization? Does engagement equal adaptation, or surrender to hegemony’s regime? According to Payne, the question poses a false binary: globalization can serve either as a teleological force (see Rostow) or as revolutionary force (see orthodox Marxist thought).
And if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I don’t buy either piece of that binary. Globalization isn’t an end or a change: it’s something that’s happening, right now, in your classroom, in the dorms, in your students’ parents’ houses. In the basement. In that place you were going to make a guest bedroom. On their phones.
These transactions are all about affect. It’s the new work, and it’s the work that many of us are failing to do, and work that explodes out beyond conventional boundaries of valuation.
My loose questions here aren’t posed as problems with Payne’s presentation so much as they’re questions I think Payne usefully raised — and in any case, I think they’re best taken in conjunction with Jenny Edbauer’s excellent Fall 2005 article in RSQ in terms of framing the discursive ecologies for our conversations about globalization and writing. Check it out.
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