Economics

Scholars have trajectories, traced by the contrail arcs of their intellectual projects. As a newly minted professor, I’ve been thinking about what mine might be: how do I characterize what I’ve been working on and what I want to continue to work on as a line across the sky of my discipline?

What I’m doing, I think, is trying to develop an economic phenomenology of student writing, and with it a language of value that can talk about why people want to write that moves beyond the instrumental. Instrumentality we know quite well: do X and get Y. Barter and exchange: simple transactions. The richer field, though, is the motivation that inheres within the moment, the act of writing for writing qua writing. So I’m putting together unlikely bedfellows — Elbow and the so-called expressivist compositionists with Gibson-Graham and the so-called Marxian economists — but with a specific attention to moment, to the temporally present acts of writerly production, circulation, and distribution. I’m not much interested in questions of history — “Where did this come from?” and “What will this lead to?” — except as phenomenologically enacted: “What is this doing now?” This isn’t to say that I support any sort of ahistoricity: it’s just that economic analysis as applied to composition pedagogy too easily lends itself, as we see in the literature, to an abnegation of responsibility; to the sometimes irresponsible assertions that current problems are best thought about in terms of their past causes or future consequences, rather than considering — as Elbow, Emig, and others show us — possible immediate interventions.

J. K. Gibson-Graham describes some problematic tendencies in economic thought that I see some of the literature in composition as still taking for granted as foundational assumptions: “the tendency to represent economy as a space of invariant logics and automatic unfolding that offered no field for intervention; [and] the tendency to constitute ‘the’ economy as a singular capitalist system or space rather than as a zone of cohabitation and contestation among multiple economic forms” (xxi). (See, as an outstanding example, Giroux’s recent JAC piece.) As writing teachers, I believe we understand that such ways of thinking are inadequate, and yet the vocabulary with which we have been left to understand economic concerns is so fundamentally incommensurate with our understanding of day-to-day pedagogical practice — with the daily fact of being and teaching and writing in the classroom — that we simply don’t talk about economy except as something taking place outside the classroom. Our economic attitudes remove us from the classroom scene and moment of the creation of intellectual and affectual value.

That’s, as I see it, my contrail. It starts in definitional concerns and the idea of an economic vocabulary for composition, develops into notions about the multiplicity of valuations for writing, and attempts to begin to address the place of open source economic concepts in the the classroom. Beyond that, I’m not sure what it might look like, other than a thin and incomplete white line across a wide blue sky.

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.