Composition Theory

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.

From my notes on the ugly, ugly draft of my dissertation’s Chapter 4, some further thoughts on composition’s relationship to mainstream neoclassical economics: with the focus of neoclassical economics on commodified market transactions, it’s understandable why the classroom work of students in higher education is seldom seen itself as a scene of genuine economic activity. The only market transactions readily apparent to neoclassical economics are the student’s exchange of cash for tuition, in payment for the service of instruction, or the institution’s exchange of cash for faculty salary, in payment again for the service of instruction. In such a context, the labor of faculty is the nexus of exchange, rather than the labor of student, and if the student’s labor in the classroom is to be exchanged for any gain, that gain is always constructed by neoclassical economics as existing necessarily in the future, in the exchange of a degree (and its attendant qualifications, one assumes) for the value-added salary of a post-college occupation.

Such constructions are the most common instances of neoclassical economic thought in the discourse of composition, although they are often fragmentary or observed only in passing, as in Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor’s essay “Teaching Argument: A Theory of Types,” where they describe a course “devoted entirely to written argument, out of our conviction that written argument brings together other writing skills and prepares students for the kinds of writing tasks demanded in college courses and careers” (186). The work of students is here constructed as carrying long-time value in preparing them for work in the market-based information economy. Upon careful analysis, such an ideology is also implicit–although rather less visible–in the work of David Bartholomae, whose famous essay “Inventing the University” suggests that the student must invent the university in order to be able to adapt her writing to the university, so that she might later make the subsequent step of adapting herself to the larger capitalist order. In Bartholomae’s words, “The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do” (589), and even if the student adopts the critical stance Bartholomae later suggests, to do so is to acculturate oneself to a way of thinking and speaking in the service of future gain. The value of such intellectual labor is deferred rather than immediate. Consider how Bartholomae, in his conversation with Peter Elbow, expresses a desire for “students to be able to negotiate the ways they are figured in relationship to the official forms of knowledge valued in the academy” (503): those “official forms of knowledge” are a component of the authorizing discourse of market capitalism, and the value of the student’s language inheres in its deferred nature as a currency for exchange.

Hepzibah Roskelly, in “The Risky Business of Group Work,” offers a similar example of the construction of the value of student writing as deferred for future exchange, but also offers additional complicating examples of neoclassical economic ideology. In her initial characterization of the problematic nature of certain instances of group work in which one person performs most of the labor while others stand by and let that student pick up their slack (141), the problem is understood to be the unequal distribution of labor in the group and the therefore unfair distribution of the rewards of that labor: in other words, an unequal and inefficient mode of compensation for labor, or what neoclassical economics might characterize as a “market failure.” Although Roskelly describes a “clear link […] between social interaction and learning” (141), the risks and flaws of its dysfunction is posted in deferred or future terms. Furthermore, the neoclassical privileging of risk-taking and the ideology of economic winners and losers is present in the concluding analogy Roskelly draws to the Tom Cruise movie Risky Business, with the movie’s climactic confrontation between Cruise’s character and Rutherford, the Princeton admissions officer played by Richard Masur: the admissions officer is highly impressed by Cruise’s suburban-pimp capitalist drive and rewards him with admission, and Roskelly sees this as a teaching moment, the deferred gratifaction of capitalist behavior while engaging in “Risky Business” (146). As I argued earlier this week, the neoclassical valuation of student work in first-year composition is always a distant rather than a present 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.