Early Chapters In

I turned in a little over 50 pages to my advisor today: a solid (but still needing revision) Chapter 1, and an early and somewhat thin (but coherent) Chapter 2. It’s a good feeling. Still: Chapter 1 was essentially my problem statement and introductory analysis, and Chapter 2 was my metonymic review of the literature on student class and pedagogy in composition, and taken together, they’re essentially the preamble to the real economic analysis I’m trying to work through in the rest of the dissertation. Chapter 2 proposed that there are five major parameters of class in the literature of composition — power and exploitation, occupation, wealth and income, education, and taste and values — and further ventured that as determinants of class these parameters are often examined largely in isolation from one another. Unfortunately, in this cycle of drafting I was unable to figure out how to work into Chapter 2 my look at the rhetoric of the authenticity of the lived experience of class that seems to come up so often in composition’s discourse, no matter which parameters of class such rhetoric invokes. That rhetoric is something I’ll want to circle back to in my later chapters that deal with the intersections of economics and subjectivity-production online (the Paris Hilton stuff), so I’ll have to figure out where to foreground it in revising Chapters 1 and 2.

For the next few weeks, though, my task is to churn out a dirty-but-down draft of Chapter 3, which is one that I’ve been anxious about because it attempts an ambitious (and, for me, difficult) weaving-together of class, cultural, and economic abstractions from a variety of sources.

Following the analysis of Linda Brodkey’s remarks on the “professional class narcissism that sees itself everywhere it looks” in relation to monolithic constructions of the parameters of class at the end of Chapter 2, Chapter 3 begins with a look at Raymond Williams’s charting of how this class narcissism or blindness evolved within the changes in the systems of class and culture brought about by the technological and economic changes of the industrial revolution. (Guy DeBord offers a possibly apocryphal quotation — I couldn’t find it anywhere in the archives, although it may be a variant translation — from Marx that sounds very much like Brodkey: “men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; every thing speaks to them of themselves.” Anybody who’s got a cite for it in Marx, I’d be grateful.) Williams demonstrates how the technological and economic changes that took place from 1780 to 1950 helped to bring about the creation of new hierarchies of class and culture; changes that necessarily led to changes in education.

I’ll then move from Williams to Bourdieu’s analysis of the 20th-century class and cultural consequences of this shift to a mass industrial economy, particularly in the infinite relational splintering of socioeconomic classes. However, Bourdieu’s work comes at the end of one historical moment (the move into a mass industrial economy) and the beginning of another overlapping historical moment (the move into an economy of increasingly individuated and immaterial production and consumption), as does J. K. Gibson-Graham’s early work demonstrating how the economy itself is diverse and splintered, embracing a variety of types of transactions: capitalism does not consist solely of monetized, commodified market transactions undertaken with the profit motive in mind. And while Zuboff and Maxmin frame their economic analysis primarily in terms of monetized transactions, their observations about the shift from a mass economy to an individuated economy as simultaneous cause and effect (this is why I lead off with Williams) of technological and cultural changes parallel Gibson-Graham’s in terms of the looking at the increasing splintering of motivations people carry for engaging in economic activity.

Finally, Derek Bok, Wesley Shumar, Clark Kerr, and others have pointed out the problematic belief that the academy stands somehow outside the economy. (I’ll admit here that I eagerly sped through Kelly Ritter’s “The Economics of Authorship” when the June 2005 CCC came in the mail a couple days ago — and grew increasingly disappointed each time she repeated her explicit opposition between “academy” and “economy.” And nope: despite the promising title, no economics in the Works Cited.) Here I return to the perspectives critiqued in chapter 1: there exists a clear belief among many scholars that students, in their academic work, are non-economic (or, to trot out that Susan Miller quotation yet again, “pre-economic”) beings engaging in non-economic activity. Building on the analysis above of Williams, Bourdieu, Gibson-Graham, and Zuboff and Maxmin, the subsequent chapter will analyze the diverse class and cultural positions students bring to the writing classroom, and the ways in which changes in the economy and in technology are both bringing about and reflected in the varied motivations students have for performing their classroom work, with a focus on the variety of ways in which composition teachers might understand student’s work as economic — and, therefore, variously classed.

So, yeah. Lotsa work for the next few weeks.