Writing

Economics & Critical Pedagogy

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Economics, Education, Writing

In a recent entry, I asserted that composition has taken Paulo Freire and turned him on his head, substituting the neoclassical economist’s embedded-in-capitalism perspective for the Marxist’s economic analysis of capitalism, and asked: how did this happen? How did composition, in adopting critical pedagogies as its default models for instruction, come to decide that the economic aspects of such pedagogies were to be avoided? Part of this, I think, comes out of the work of one of the most prominent proponents of Freirean critical pedagogy. Composition, and the field of education in general, owes an immense debt to the theoretical work of Henry Giroux in translating Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy into educational applications for an American context: Giroux is a rigorous and prolific scholar (his curriculum vitae [PDF] goes to 75 pages), and one of the most prominent critical pedagogues working today. Interestingly, however, Giroux’s later work has done much to turn Freirean critical pedagogy away from economic concerns and towards cultural concerns: in a 1998 interview, Giroux notes that his recent ‘work gives less emphasis to class as a universal category of domination’ (142), and this seems to be because Giroux sees formulating cultural concerns in economic terms as problematic: "Reformulating social issues as strictly individual or economic issues, corporate culture functions largely to cancel out the democratic impulses and practices of civil society by either devaluing them or absorbing such impulses within a market logic. No longer a space for political struggle, culture in the corporate model becomes an all-encompassing horizon for producing market identities, values, and practices" (1.2)[i]. We can take from this contention that Giroux would prefer the opposite circumstance, by which one replaces political struggle in the economic sphere with political struggle in the cultural sphere.

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Elbow’s Economics

preterite Composition Theory, Writing

For argument’s sake, I want to return to the reductive old liberal education versus vocational education binary. On the one side, we hear that higher education is credentialing and job training; that the mission of someone who teachers first-year writing in college is to prepare students for writing research reports in their future courses and for careers of memo-writing. Composition and the university exist to help the student serve the economy. On the other side, we hear that higher education is self-development, a fostering of critical consciousness, a preparation for individual political action and self-actualization; that the mission of someone who teaches first-year writing in college is to help students to realize their potential, to help students become better people, to help students understand how they might change the world around them.

Not bad for a prose caricature, right? It’s good fun to try to funnel disputes in composition into this hopper and see how they line up, even if we all know that It’s Not That Simple. But there are still important concerns to take from that reductive binary, and the most significant one is the structuring of economic activity as somehow societal versus cultural activity as somehow individual. The (largely structuralist) vocationalists tend to take an assimilationist view, asking how students might change themselves to fit into the hierarchies of the university and the job market, whereas the (largely romantic) liberal-education folks tend to take an accomodationist view, asking how students might better themselves in order to maximize what they get out of their surroundings. (Obviously, some citations here might serve to strengthen my argument, but I’m a lazy, lazy boy, dear reader, so let me offer you some names and ask you to peg them into the appropriate holes: David Bartholomae, Lisa Delpit, Janet Emig, Linda Brodkey, James Kinneavy, Kenneth Bruffee, Linda Flower. Responses / thoughts / observations?) If the student is to work for the world, she must first change herself according to its dictates; if the student is to change the world, she must first understand herself on her own terms within the world.

Such binaries may be why many composition teachers include both personal essays and research essays in their syllabi. But what I’m getting at is that there are hidden messages sent: many composition teachers want to say “Write for yourself” when they assign the personal essay, and “Write for the world” when they assign the research essay. The thing is, writing for the world is often the only assignment that is understood to have some future productive economic value. In the contemporary mainstream economic understanding, “being yourself” is a consumptive practice. Economic production (unless you’re a member of the celebrity class) requires an abnegation of self.
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Zuboff, Maxmin, and Elbow

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics, Writing

In The Support Economy, Zuboff and Maxmin offer “metaprinciples” for what they call the new “distributed capitalism.” I’ll quote some of the more interesting ones here.

  • All value resides in individuals. […] Individuals [rather than enterprises] are recognized as the source of all value and all cash flow. […] Distributed capitalism thus entails a shift in commercial logic from consumer to individual, as momentous as the eighteenth-century shift in political logic from subject to citizen.
  • Distributed value necessitates distributed structures among all aspects of the enterprise. Value is distributed, lodged in individuals in individual space. This is the common origin for corresponding distributed structures in every aspect of the enterprise. It necessitates distributed production, distributed ownership, and distributed control.
  • Relationship economics is the framework for wealth creation. Distributed capitalism creates new wealth from the essential building blocks of relationships with [perhaps ‘among’?] individuals. Using the new framework of relationship economics, enterprises […] invest in commitment and trust in order to maximize realized relationship value.
  • All commercial practices are aligned with the individual. Under distributed capitalism, commercial practices are aligned with the interests of individuals […] . This is operationalized by a strict dictate that cannot be compromised: no cash is released […] until the individual pays. […] Cash flow is thus the essential measure of value realization.
  • New valuation methods reflect the primacy of individual space. New approaches to valuation emphasize the intellectual, emotional, behavioral, and digital assets that enable infinite configuration, sustain alliances among enterprises, and nourish relations of deep support with individuals. (321-323)

Now, some of this sounds like the bad old new-economy cheerleading, and I wonder how much of that comes out of Maxmin’s corporate background (founder and Chairman of Global Brand Development, former CEO of Volvo UK and Laura Ashley, et cetera) — but if you read closely, there’s some genuinely revolutionary stuff in there.
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Teaching’s Assembly Line

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

Today was a good teaching day with my sections of computer-lab first year composition. I’m happy to see the students, and I was grinning when I left campus. I like them a lot. And we got a lot done today, even though I overplanned, like I always do, and we didn’t get to everything I had in mind, so there’ll be plenty of overlap and catch-up time with the new add/drop students.

As I indicated yesterday, we did break up the activities, moving from individual writing to one-on-one peer interaction to individual writing to group sharing and discussion, back to peer work and individual writing. This back-and-forth is something, to me, that feels much more native to the computer classroom than to the paper-and-pen classroom. In the paper-and-pen classroom, a discussion or one-on-one peer work or small group collaborative writing can go on for the entire class session, but in the computer classroom, I always feel like I’ve got to mix things up and shift from task to task, and I wonder why it’s so.
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Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout

preterite Asides, Composition Theory, Education, Writing

I did several JSTOR searches today, looking for how often people in English and in composition and rhetoric talk about economics. In JSTOR (which should be available via your nearest academic library, if not your community library), I searched for the word “economic” in the title and abstract fields for the journals College English and CCC. Results: two hits, both for College English. One an article from 1947, the other an article from 1977. Apparently, we only talk specifically about economics once every thirty years or so. Next, I searched for the word “economic” in the full text field for the journal CCC. CCC articles tend to run between 4000 and 7000 words. Volume 1 of CCC was published in 1950; since then, there has been a total of 3070 articles (or, very roughly, 16,885,000 words) published in the journal’s pages. In that time, compositionists have used the words “economic” or “economics” 207 times. (For much cooler wordcount fun, go check out wordcount.org. 4808 1427!) This gives me some additional information about the contours of economic and class discourses in English and composition; my next step will probably be to do the same sort of thing with The Bedford Bibliography.

In other news, Zeugma’s new favorite game is upstairs-downstairs. She loves being out on my second-floor little deck behind the kitchen, being able to watch the birds that come to the birdfeeder up close, and she wants to go outside every chance she gets. So I’ll go out there with a book and the laptop and do some work and make sure she doesn’t go down the stairs. Only lately she’s gotten quick and bold. She’ll dart around me and down the steps, then dash across the lower deck (the flower shop and restaurant use it) and up the other stairs to the bigger second-floor deck on the other side, behind my bedroom. I chased her a couple times, with her looking back every few steps to make sure I was following, and she was delighted to find that the other door led back into the bedroom. (It was a better option for me than carrying her, fussing and wiggling and clawing, back down and back up the deck stairs.) So now it’s a game: pick a time when Dad’s not watching, dash down the steps, let him chase you up the other steps and let you back into the bedroom, and then run around to the kitchen again.

OK, I can indulge that, at least for a little while. The problem came the other night, when I was refinishing some furniture and had the sliding door in the kitchen cracked for ventilation.
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As Marxist as They Wanna Be

preterite Class (Other), Composition Theory, Writing

I’m about halfway through Zuboff and Maxmin’s The Support Economy now. They continue to point to how the nature of production has undergone major changes in recent years, and cite many statistics and studies to support their contention. For example: in 1997, “31 percent of employees said that they bring work home at least once a week, compared to 20 percent in 1977, while those who say they never bring work home decreased by 16 percent” (125). Furthermore, “68 percent of [The National Study of the Changing Workforce] respondents in 1997 agreed that their jobs require them to work very fast, compared to 55 percent in 1977; 88 percent agreed that their jobs required that their jobs require them to to work very hard, compared to 70 percent in 1977; and 60 percent agreed that there is never enough time to get everything done on the job, compared to 40 percent in 1977” (125).

They couple these observations to an argument that the nature of consumption is undergoing profound changes, as well, from a model of mass consumption to a model of individuated consumption. The Baffler has done brilliant work following, analyzing, and satirizing this shift: anyone who’s read the writing of Thomas Frank will find instantly familiar the results of a survey conducted by “a New York City market-research firm”; namely, that “teens said their most valued traits are ‘individuality’ and ‘uniqueness’ — ‘being truly uniquely themselves'” (169). Zuboff and Maxmin summarize their argument as follows: “In the twentieth century, managerial capitalism created unprecedented wealth with an enterprise logic invented for the dreams of a mass society. It emphasized consumption and mass production. Its success unleashed the large-scale forces associated with health, education, communication, mobility, and so on. These forces transformed populations. They engendered a psychological reformation that imbued many people around the world, and especially within its industrial core, with an abiding sense of individuality and a deep impulse toward psychological self-determination” (174). Now, I’m absolutely dying here to use this passage as the foundation for an economic reading of the expressivist and individualist pedagogies typically ascribed to Peter Elbow (heck, there’s probably a book-length project in there about how contemporary capitalism formed and informed the reflective personal essay assignment; something along the lines of Raymond Williams’s brilliant Culture and Society), but I’ll have to hold off until I think through it more adequately — and there’s also something in there about re-understanding Marx’s arguments that capitalism drives itself into perpetual crisis: the effects of mass production and mass consumption have ultimately begun to destroy mass production and mass consumption.
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Historicizing Practices

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Writing

Eleven and a half hours on the redeye from Honolulu to New England and I’m stuck with the middle seat in the middle row on a 777. Still, I’ve got two laptop batteries, and my neighbors on either side are sleeping; time enough to do a little blogging, and work on photoshopping some of my Kailua and Waikiki pictures, which I’ll try to post tonight.

Steve Krause, Julia Romberger, and Stephanie Vie gave a fine panel on “Historicizing Computers and Writing: Media and Methods” with some really interesting overlaps, intersections, and complications among the individual presentations.
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Now We Are One

preterite Writing

No, it’s not some silly psychedelia lyric; it’s an A. A. Milne reference, to Now We Are Six. Maybe When We Were Very Young would have been better: yes, this place is one year old today.

Some statistics: 346 entries and 605 generous comments (not including comment spam) in 365 days, for a total of 299,455 words (including comments), or an average of 865.5 words every 1.055 days. Basically, a page a day, which means it’s time to speed up some if I’m going to get this dissertation done.

I didn’t, however, disinclude the “Asides” or “Friday Non-Dissertational” or “About This Place” categories, for the simple reason that I feel they’re very much a part of the dissertation-writing process, even if they’re not directly on topic. I hope that’s something that teaching writing has taught me: although it may not always look like it connects to the assignment, it can still help one move forward.

Which is also the reason I didn’t disinclude comments from the word count. The arguments, support, input, questions, criticism, advice, and explanations I’ve gotten from all of you who’ve commented here have been invaluable, and I hope the writing I’ll do here in the coming year does justice to the feedback you’ve been kind enough to give in the past. I don’t know how folks do dissertations with “just” a committee: I couldn’t imagine doing this sort of work without a weblog.

Which is all a way of saying: thanks, y’all.

After Empire

preterite Computers, Economics, Rhetoric, Writing

Finished Hardt & Negri’s Empire today. Good stuff, mostly, with a fairly consistent point of view; certainly succeeds in the philosophy department as much as it fails (which it does, abjectly and completely, despite its clearly huge ambitions) in the materialist department. Their erudition is, of course, impressive, and I wished I’d had a dictionary of philosophy on hand while reading: while I’ve read bits of the Hume, Locke, Hobbes, Descartes, and Adorno that they cite, and plenty of the Aristotle, Plato, Foucault, Derrida, Tocqueville, and Benjamin, I’ve only made it through introductions to Kant and Rousseau and Heidegger, and know Spinoza and Hegel by nothing other than reputation and reference. So I struggled a bit when the references flew, as they often did.
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The Sea Change

preterite Composition Theory, Economics, Education, Writing

Varoufakis acknowledges the implication from Aristotle’s work “that living a successful life is more complicated than satisfying our own desires”, and contrasts it to the subsequent evolution of the “notion of a market in which one pursues profit” and its association “with the freedom to be unapologetically happy” (77). In fact, “Wanting to be happy thus emerged as a perfectly defensible philosophical ambition”, and Varoufakis explicitly connects the philosophical and economic consequences of this emergence to Thomas Hobbes and his “idea of the person as a sovereign individual” (77).

I wrote briefly on Thursday about the ways in which individualistic ideologies create problems for the study of class. I also believe that individualistic ideologies create problems for the ways I might attempt to theorize the economies of the wired writing classroom, and this is a question I need to think through further: how does the ideology of individualism (or its counterpart, which — from an etymological standpoint — one would think ought to be called “socialism” or “communism”, but both of those are rather loaded terms and not all that close to what I mean) intersect with the infinite digitial reproducibility of information goods? (Recall here the point Varoufakis makes about how information is something radically different from other commodities.)
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