Metadissertating

Analytical Scope

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Culture, Economics, Metadissertating

In Bourdieu’s Distinction, one way class inequality gets expressed is in the dominant classes’ distancing themselves from acknowledging the materiality of life. The judgement of distinction is a privileging of the abstract and the idealized and the rarefied and the immaterial; small portions over large portions; classical over jazz over pop. The more capital one possesses, the less one is affected by the quotidian concerns of the material world, and so one attempts to demonstrate one’s superior class position by enacting and performing that distance. The converse is also true: note the emphasis “vulgar” art — including musical forms like country, gangsta rap, and bluegrass — place on authenticity, on “keeping it real,” on the representation of the materiality of everyday lived experience. This trend, of course, is also highly visible in Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, particularly in his analyses of Coleridge, Carlyle, and (very much) Matthew Arnold.

In the Industrial Revolution of Williams’s analysis, technological advance was one of the chief driving factors of economic advance, and I’m arguing that much the same is true today. Steam, railroads, telegraphs, electricity: the emergence of these technologies produced immense and immensely unequal economic growth, just as the emergence of newer technologies has done today, and while the twentieth century’s division of labor led to a staggering increase in the volume of class positions, the class positions at the top are moving further and further away from the class positions at the bottom. But the core of the argument Williams makes is that economic changes, in confluence with changes in such factors as art and democracy, produced radical change in our understandings of class and culture: this is no mere techno-economic determinism. I’m saying much the same thing, although some of the other changes in causal factors Williams might note today include things like globalization, the post-ironic aesthetic, ethnic nationalism, and the conflict between energy consumption and environmentalism. My scope is considerably more narrow: I’m simply looking at the way certain (rather than all) factors — technology, economy — are helping to drive change in our understanding of class and its relationship to a certain aspect of culture: namely, the practice and instruction of literacy.

Rethinking Class with Bourdieu

preterite Class (Meta), Metadissertating

There’s a really smart discussion on WCS-L (the working class studies listserv) right now about definitions of class, and it’s intersecting in curious ways with my re-reading of Bourdieu’s perspectives on class for my dissertation’s chapter 3. For me, it’s useful to think of one pole of the discussion as being Marx’s tension between class-as-position (where one stands in relation to the means of production; whether one’s exploiter or exploited) and class-as-consciousness (how one feels oneself to be a member of a group), and the other pole of the discussion as being Bourdieu’s attempt to ease that tension by showing how positional structures of class get unknowingly internalized into one’s consciousness as inhabited structures of feeling (and, subsequently, structures of tastes and values). When I first encountered Bourdieu’s work, I didn’t understand this at all; now, it seems elementary. And — perhaps as a result of this — I’ve begun to reconsider much of my initial dislike for the authenticity-based rhetoric of class as lived experience, partly because I’m starting to understand what Bourdieu’s saying about class, experience, and affect, and how it gets structured: Bourdieu was, in his background, what Americans would call a hick, and he took a lot of flak for it early in his academic career, and it profoundly shaped his research. So while my initial intent in returning to Bourdieu was to try to better understand his relational model of class — I’m really not much interested in the commodifying tendencies so obviously evident in the whole cultural capital thing — I’m now seeing, partly through the WCS-L discussion, the ways in which economic and cultural rhetorics of class get connected to rhetorics of the personal. In other words, I started chapter 3 with the intent of raiding Bourdieu’s work for his assertions that class is a relational quality enacted within a social space, and therefore, classes are infinite: “difference (which I express in describing social space) exists and persists. […] Social classes do not exist […]. What exists is a social space, a space of differences, in which classes exist in some sense in a state of virtuality, not as something given but as something to be done” (Practical Reason 12; see also, of course, the entirety of Distinction). But I’m coming to find that this understanding of class is inextricably tied to a rhetoric of the personal that I’ve incompletely addressed in chapter 2 and expect to be a significant component of either chapter 4 or chapter 5, and that I’ve yammered on about at some length in the past.

So yeah: the diss is starting to come together a bit.

In other news, Tink loudly insists that I play with her toes. Gotta go.

Hubris

preterite Class (Meta), Economics, Metadissertating

I’ve now made it most of the way, again, through Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, and the book reminds me, again, as to why Williams holds such immense intellectual stature. Williams demonstrates how

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of words, which are now of capital importance, came for the first time into common English use, or, where they had already been generally used in the language, acquired new and important meanings. [. . .] The changes in their use, at this critical period, bear witness to a general change in our characteristic ways of thinking about our common life: about our social, political and economic institutions; about the purposes which these institutions are designed to embody; and about the relations to these institutions and purposes of our activities in learning, education, and the arts. (xiii)

In my dissertation’s Chapter 3, I use J. K. Gibson-Graham’s definition of “Economy” in New Keywords as the starting point for an examination of how we are seeing a similar “general change” today, a change that is both cause and symptom of changes in technology, subjectivity, and economy. In Chapter 2, I metonymically charted the parameters — in that term’s senses both of variables and of boundaries — of composition’s discourse on class; Chapter 3 examines economy starting from the perspective of Williams as the sine qua non parameter of class, and composition’s contemporary re-orienting of our notions about class in relation to economy. One obvious symptom of this re-orienting is in the frequent deployment of a class rhetoric of the authenticity of lived experience: while class is understood to have a variety of causal factors — power and exploitation, occupation, wealth and income, education, tastes and values — it also has a rhetoric of idiosyncratic and individuated lived experience; an individuated rhetoric that reflects a societal turn from an economy of mass production and consumption to an economy of individuated production and consumption. And this societal turn is driven, in part, by our embracing of the technological turn to the digital.

In other words: there’s a reason we call it the “personal” computer, and that reason carries deep and incompletely examined implications for economy and subjectivity.

So here’s my problem. Relying on Williams, I shouldn’t have too many difficulties in Chapter 3 demonstrating the specifics of past connections between economy, technology, and subjectivity. The case Williams makes — using the work of Burke and Cobbett, Southey and Owen, Carlyle and Arnold and on through the Romantics and the 1880-1915 “interregnum” into the twentieth century — is, to say the least, compelling. But he’s showing what happened, demonstrating the existence of a trend, avoiding — with immense wisdom — reductive and unprovable analyses of how such a thing happened. I worry that in my attempts to connect Williams on change to Bourdieu on class and Gibson-Graham on economy, I’m making exactly the sort of hubristic mistake Williams avoids.

Early Chapters In

preterite Metadissertating

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.

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Revised Chapter Outline

preterite Metadissertating

As my advisor and others cautioned, my dissertation — in the process of being written — has drifted away from the chapter outline I initially set down in the prospectus.

Chapter 1, which is essentially my problem statement, is pretty much done, though it’ll likely be considerably revised as I finish up. Chapter 2, my big and unwieldy review of the literature on class in composition, is about two thirds done; naturally, it places considerable reliance on synecdoche. After Chapter 2 is where the revision starts to come into play: Chapter 3 needs to get me from class to the diverse economy, and I’m discarding my foolish initial plan to address the diversity of representations of class outside composition. Instead, I’m backing up my working definition of class as the point of articulation between the economy and culture as materially experienced by the individual with the theories Raymond Williams puts forward in Culture and Society 1780-1950, and then complicate the perspective Williams offers with the way Pierre Bourdieu sees economics and culture intersecting to produce a relational infinitude of classes. Chapter 4 then attempts to somewhat reconcile the perspectives of Williams and Bourdieu by pointing out the historical shift from a mass economy to an individuated and diverse economy, and uses Gibson-Graham, Ironmonger, and Zuboff & Maxmin to explore the consequences of that shift. Chapter 5, of which I’ve now got two very different first drafts, takes that shift back into the college writing classroom and argues for an understanding of student writing as an economic act, but an economic act performed for individuated and diverse (and not always commodified or exchange-based) purposes. Refusal of commodification — especially on a collective basis — can permit refusal of exploitation and domination. This is not to say that such writing lies outside the economy, but that the economy is composed of multiple transactions and motivations and purposes, and that a necessary and heretofore mostly absent economic understanding of student writing need not be solely based on notions of exchange. Chapter 6 then takes that last notion to its logical conclusion by showing how some of the philosophies of the open source movement can help writing teachers refigure classroom practice by moving away from notions of artificial informational scarcity, and I hope lays the groundwork for a qualitative empirical study that might test these ideas.

Does that sound at least somewhat sensible? I’ve been struggling in fits and starts (few starts, lots of fits) to get my head around Chapters 3 and 4 in particular, and this suddenly makes it feel so much more manageable. Grateful for any feedback.

Personal Branding

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Economics, Metadissertating, Writing

I’ve had this idea I’ve been working at from different angles for a few weeks; an idea that feels like the germ of the idea that’s at the heart of my dissertation’s final chapter. In Chapter 1, I argue that the discipline of composition has a really difficult time talking explicitly about economic issues, and that teaching writing with computers is one of the big places in composition that makes economic inequality really, really visible. So I go through chapters on class and economics, and come back to the economics of computers and composition at the end, where I talk about how open source perspectives can help to de-fang the effects of economic commodification in the writing classroom. But I haven’t been able to connect those issues all that well to class, until lately, especially with some prodding from a colleague over dinner tonight.

At Wealth Bondage, CEO Candidia Cruikshanks rages that The Happy Tutor is trying to steal her “brand equity” — said equity, of course, embodied in all that attitude and oh my those boots. Naomi Klein recently argued elsewhere (can’t find the link now — help me out?) that personal identity is itself an act of branding. And I’ve argued that class is the point of articulation between economics and identity. What I’ve neglected to investigate, in my considerations of the (economic?) use value of personal writing, are the ways in which identity/self/persona in and of itself, as enacted in writing, takes on both commodified and non-commodified (market and non-market; monetized and non-monetized) economic value. At Wealth Bondage — perhaps as nowhere else — we see personae qua personae ventured, offered, exchanged, and rejected in market, feudal, slave, and gift transactions. So — rhetoricians, compositionists, bloggers — what are the values of the personal selves you compose and enact on your weblogs? Some of those values are easily commodified: technorati, blogshares, comments; promotion, hiring, tenure. So, too, for students: my professor tells me this weblog entry is worth a C minus. But what about those other types of economic transactions; the non-commodified ones?

And how might those non-commodified values shift when we move from considering the various blog personae of teachers to considering the various blog personae of students?

Various Anxieties

preterite Metadissertating

My dissertation’s first chapter is close to done. With two different drafts on understanding student writing as economic activity to be put together for Chapter 5, I’ve got a solid start there. Chapter 2, my overview of the various ways rhetoric and composition talks about class, is about halfway done. But I’m stuck in my thinking about Chapter 3, which was originally intended to connect Bourdieu’s relational multiplicity of classes to Gibson-Graham’s diverse model of capitalism: it feels like the logic just isn’t working, and it feels like it strays too far from the context of the writing classroom. I’d originally thought that I could simply shift the chapter’s focus a bit to a look at how the concept of class functions within the new distributed economy (i.e., distributed production and consumption rather than mass production and consumption) and connect that to what I see as James Berlin’s somewhat superannuated Marxian understanding of the connections between composition and economics, but that still feels like it’s too far from the writing classroom. I mean, I’m doing a dissertation within the field of rhetoric and composition, but so much of my focus on the new distributed economy as context seems so tough to connect to actually teaching writing, and so I’m feeling like I’ve wandered out into the wilderness here.

Other stuff on my plate: working on CCCC proposals, and I’m applying for a university dissertation fellowship, for which I need to draft a brief personal statement, which is — in terms of genre — kind of a weird document. As best as I can understand it, the statement should a (very) little bit about me and my background, and a lot more about why I’m doing this research and where it’s going. So I’ll bring up my experience as an enlisted soldier in the Army who used the G.I. Bill to fund my education, and my undergrad experience moving from a very expensive private university to a community college to a public state university, as my initial experiences of the intersection of class and economic issues with higher education and part of my motivation for undertaking this dissertation project. But then the rest of it is me saying why this dissertation project is valuable and important, what it’ll contribute to my discipline and to the academic community, what might follow it — so, yeah, right now I’m feeling a little anxious about essentially having to justify my academic existence. And part of me (with the sudden paranoid worry that somebody who’s on the fellowship committee might read this) asks, “But I really like teaching, too, so am I really sure I even want this fellowship?” Well, yeah, sure I do, and one hopes that ambivalence is no great crime: ultimately, I’ll be happy if I get it, but happy as well if someone else is more deserving.

All right: enough whining. To work, to work.

Dissertation Progress

preterite Metadissertating

Earlier this week, I met with Charlie and Donna, the two comp faculty on my three-person committee, and the meetings were really helpful. Donna gave me some super-detailed constructive comments on my early, early draft of Chapter Five and suggested putting together an “assertion outline”, acknowledging that organizational difficulties in dissertating are often the most problematic, and Charlie helped me talk through a series of the assertions I make in the half-chapter, and how they relate to assertions I intend to make in the dissertation.

Here are some of those assertions:
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Derailment Recovery

preterite Metadissertating

Maybe you’ve been able to tell from my postings (and lack thereof) that my dissertation work has derailed in the past few weeks. Mostly it’s the flippin estate lawsuit that’s burning up my attention and my money and my time, and I’ve lately been short-tempered and irritable and just plain frustrated that this thing’s still dragging along.

Which isn’t to say that I’ve been entirely neglecting my work. I finished Mark C. Taylor’s The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture a while ago, and was halfway through William Greider’s excellent The Soul of Capitalism when someone recalled it to the library. I’ve also just started Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin’s The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, and the three books share many similar ideas about our economic future in an age of distributed interactions. All three books are hopeful, but in different ways: Taylor and Zuboff and Maxmin seem to be saying, “Here’s what’s going to happen,” while Greider is a little more cautionary, saying, “Here’s what needs to happen.”
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Boringest Post Ever

preterite Metadissertating

I’ve been putting together the list of works cited for that last draft of the prospectus for most of the evening; hunting down information for sources that I’ve since returned to the library or had only in photocopy form. Tiresome drudgery.

Still, on the off chance anyone with an interest in similar issues might actually want to have a look at the list, and to show that yes, I actually have had a productive day, I’ll put it up here. (I’ll also note that I sometimes — let me point out that this is rare — engage in the shameful and horribly geekish habit of going straight to the bibliography when picking up an interesting-looking book.)

Has anybody out there used EndNote? ‘Cause with this kind of work, I might be willing to check out the university store’s academic prices on software if folks say it’s good.
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