Metadissertating

Here we go again, or part one at least, where I try to say, “This is why it’s important.” Comments welcomed — encouraged — sought, especially in terms of making the language more clear to those not familiar with the concerns.

In the literature of computers and composition, scant explicit attention has been paid to the issue of socioeconomic class. Yet, as Charles Moran points out, computers and composition as a discipline has traditionally constructed the functions of technology in the wired writing classroom as fostering either efficiency (making the production and circulation of writing easier) or equity (making the classroom a more democratic space), and both efficiency and equity are concerns associated with class: the former with relations of production, and the latter with relations of privilege. Moran notes that Thomas Brownell’s reference in “Planning and Implementing the Right Word Processing System” to the “increased productivity” (5) computers can bring to student writing is symptomatic of the perception common in the early years of the journal Computers and Composition that computers would make writing more efficient, and Donna LeCourt’s hope that “technology offers a way to provide students with the means to critique how their textual practice participates in ideological reproduction” (292) reflects the growing perception that technology can be used to serve critical pedagogy’s end of fostering a fairer and more equitable classroom (and, by extension, a fairer and more equitable society).
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In my attempts to define the various axes and vectors of class for myself, I’ve raised another definitional problem, one to which I’m not sure how much attention I should devote. I mean, I think I’ve done a decent initial job of laying out most of the initial ways in which compositionists define class, but then I think about the contexts within which class works, and I’m all of a sudden uneasy, and my uneasiness springs from having started Derek Bok’s book on Universities in the Marketplace. Here’s why: I met with a group of fellow dissertators this week, and one of the innovative approaches someone had taken was to not pin down her terms with definitions. She gave herself some serious flexibility, because she was using a vexed term. Maybe I’d do well to do the same: maybe I don’t need a single all-encompassing definition of class that takes into account whether it’s a hierarchy or a relation or how much its various components matter.
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Donna gave me some sharp rhetorically-oriented feedback on my micro-faux-prospectus recently. The most useful question she asked: who do I think this dissertation is for? I mean, all along, I’d been thinking to myself, “It’s for the committee, Mike; that’s all you need to worry about,” and totally ignoring my own field’s useful heuristics: understanding audience will determine your arguments and evidence, grasshopper. Now I’ve been relying on the conventional wisdom that the maximum effective range of a dissertation, unless you’re someone like Albert Kitzhaber, is the interview to which it gets you, and perhaps beyond that your initial monograph, which means that my short-range thinking has been that I’m only writing for myself and my committee. Which in itself is pretty foolish, given the existence of this weblog, and the fact that you’re reading this, and the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to get insightful comments from you and people like you who’ve stopped by and had lots of smart things to say. Beyond that, it’s also pretty foolish given all my adulation of John Trimbur’s recent work on the circulation of writing, and how much I like what the much-missed Father Ong had to say about how The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction. Donna suggests that I construct a disciplinary audience, and use that to inform my arguments: how do these components of class, computers, and composition fit together in relation to their various possible audiences? Am I making an argument to scholars in computers and composition that they need to follow the lead of the broader field in examining class issues? If so, I’ll start from a certain point and invoke certain arguments and lay them out in certain ways that may be very different from the ways I might write if I’m attempting to demonstrate to composition scholars that technology itself does certain things that have a significant effect on the interactions of class and writing pedagogy.

So who do I want to argue to? That’s easy. Disclosure of ego and vanity: I think this stuff is important, and I want other people to think so too, the more the better. I want to aim this at the broader field of composition; I don’t want this to be just a specialist thing. And I think that such an impulse might usefully mesh with technologizing trends in education, too.

Chris asked me a while ago about posting a list of what I’ve read so far, so here goes. There’s some stuff that I can’t figure out where to fit below, like Bizzell’s “Marxist Ideas” and the Jameson I read and the Web and cultural theory stuff, and I don’t really have a place to put Clark Kerr yet, but otherwise, what follows is an annotated rough list of my readings on class so far, or at least most of the major ones.
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In 1963, Clark Kerr wrote,

“The basic reality, for the university, is the widespread recognition that new knowledge is the most important factor in economic and social growth. We are just now perceiving that the university’s product, knowledge, may be the most powerful single element in our culture, affecting the rise and fall of professions and even of social classes, of regions and even of nations.

Becasue of this fundamental reality, the university is being called upon to produce knowledge as never before — for civic and regional purposes, for national purposes, and even for no purpose at all beyond the realization that most knowledge eventually comes to serve mankind. And it is also being called upon to transmit knowledge to an unprecedented portion of the population.

This reality is rehsaping the very nature and quality of the university. Old concepts of faculty-student relations, of research, of faculty-administration roles are being changed at a rate without parallel. And this at a time when it seems that an entire generation is pounding at the gates and demanding admission. To the academician, conservative by nature, the sound made by the new generation often resembles the howl of a mob. To the politician, it is a signal to be obeyed. To the administrator, it is a warning that we are in new times and that the decisions we make now will be uncommonly productive — both of good and ill.

Thus the university has come to have a new centrality for all of us, as much as for those who never see the ivied halls as for those who pass through them or reside there.” (xii, The Uses of the University)

Perhaps I’ve already been looking at class for too long, and I’m seeing it everywhere I look. In that short passage from Kerr’s preface to The Uses of the University, class is not only named explicitly, but also embedded in the connection between education and profession, in economic growth, in the understanding of knowledge as a product, in the acknowledgements of broadening inclusivity and gated exclusion, and in the Arnoldian reference to the mob.
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Test, test. Is this thing on? OK: so this entry is going to be a very, very early draft of a prospectus in miniature. I’m hoping I might manage to flesh it out into the real thing within a month or two. By Halloween, let’s say, at which point I’ll put on my platinum wig and tightest dress and see if Candidia will let me karaoke Marilyn’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” over at Wealth Bondage.

So here goes. My disseration will attempt to answer the following questions:

• Is the discourse around class more obscured in the sub-discipline of computers and composition than it is in composition in general?
• Is the discourse around technology one cause for that increased occlusion of class in computers and composition?
• What might understanding the discourse around technology as a cause for the occlusion of class tell us about the discourses of composition and computers & composition?
• How might those discourses change?
• What effect might changes in those discourses have on composition pedagogy? How might a revised understanding of class better account for the effects of technology in the wired writing classroom?

The dissertation will be divided into five major sections.

I. Class: Definitions and Contexts
II. Discourses of Class, Present and Absent
III. Technology’s Effects on Current Discourses of Class
IV. A Revised Conception of Class
V. Conclusions and Directions for Change

A brief explanation of each section follows.
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I’ll lead off with an observation from Charlie that I really should have put into yesterday’s discussion of the various classes of universities: while I’ve assigned the vocational education model of the university to the domain of capital, and the liberal education model of the university to the domain of culture, Charlie points out that technical and community colleges have very little capital, and old-line “liberal education” schools like Yale and Amherst College have loads of capital. Charlie also offered the helpful advice that if I follow the course I described yesterday — comparing how class works in the discourse of composition to how class works in the discourse of computers and composition — it might help me to set 1982 as the cutoff date for both disciplines, since it’s the year that the journal Computers and Composition was established, and roughly the time that the process model of writing was completely reorienting writing instruction.
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As I understand the genre, a prospectus tells one’s dissertation committee, “Here’s what I’m going to do, and here’s how I’m going to do it.” Beyond that, it also says, “Here’s the background; here are the principal theories; here are the key works and why I’ve selected them; here’s my methodological approach.” Recently, I’ve tried to pin down a couple of possible research questions that I might pose in the dissertation.

• Is the discourse around class more hidden in the sub-discipline of computers and composition than it is in composition in general?
• If I can demonstrate that it is, can I then argue that technology is the cause of such a circumstance?
• Can I establish the discourse around technology as one believable cause for the increased occlusion of class in computers and composition?

Those questions, of course, beg other questions. Questions like: What do you mean by ‘class’? And: Well, even if you demonstrate all this stuff, what can people in the field of composition possibly do about it? I’ll try to incorporate those questions into my thinking-through of this post, which I’ve been putting together since yesterday evening. Consider this a first attempt to lay out a very loose and tiny version of a prospectus; a pseudo-ur-prospectus, maybe.
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Old friends (like people I’ve known for 15 or 20 years) are visiting me this weekend, so blogging — while I’ll attempt to keep it daily — may be sparse. I’m helping one of them to overhaul the old version and set up the new version of his Hogmalion venture, so check it out in a couple days, once he’s got it like he wants it: fun stuff.

Anyway: so this’ll be a slim entry; something I’ll try to bang out before starting the coals on the grill. (I do have something in mind for tomorrow’s Friday Non-Dissertational that I’ll see if I can get together in time.) I had terrifically helpful meetings with Charlie and Donna this week, both of whom suggested that I was well on my way towards cooking this mess down into a prospectus, based on the Another Summary stuff.
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