As I noted yesterday, I’m meeting with my committee this week (still at the very-early pre-prospectus stage), so this entry is mostly a condensation and restatement of where I’ve been in the past few weeks, with a good bit of cutting and pasting. Still, it almost has the shape of an argument, which is reassuring, I suppose.

From my sociological readings, I took the understanding that researchers will always try to rely on investigating a single criterion, because it simplifies the analysis in powerful ways. The problem is, I’m coming from the position that composition’s understandings of class have been both incoherent (relying on an unacknowledged multiplicity of criteria) and oversimplified (asserting that class is equal to wealth, for example). For that reason, I want my research to move in the opposite direction: to acknowledge a multiplicity of criteria, and to acknowledge their complex interrelationships.

For example, many conventional views of class equate it to horizontal stratification, ignoring the fact that there is also a vertical segmentation within and through classes (think of the way the category of “Boston Irish” cleaves through classes from Beacon Hill to Southie) that Worsley says Dutch sociologists have called verzuiling, or vertical “pillarization” (320). From the comments I’ve received, and from my own experience, I believe Americans have a complex intuitive understanding of the ways in which many factors overlap to create what we call “class”, and the reason our classes (”middle” and “working”, usually) are so apparently monolithic is that they have to contain such a contradictory multiplicity of factors (or, as I called them above, “vectors”): if class was simple to determine, we’d habitually make distinctions between five or eight or ten or however many classes in conversation, because the terms would be easy to understand.

The problem is that the class of individuals is overdetermined by wealth, income, and occupation; by cultural practices, tastes, and values; by education; by prestige; by political power, class consciousness, and social relationships; by relations of production; and by lived experience. Furthermore, while the American ideology of upward mobility along some of these vectors of class can sometimes cause corresponding moves up other vectors, many ascensions take place independently of one another. Some vectors are interrelated and/or are changing their relations in sophisticated ways: Hardt and Weeks, for example, helpfully gloss Jameson’s demonstration of “how culture occupies a central position in the functioning and reproduction of capitalist society” (3), and of how “as culture has come to play a more important role in the life of capital, capital correspondingly has become ever more deeply rooted in the domain of culture” (5). In the past, I’ve assigned what I’ve called the vocational education model of the university to the domain of capital, and the liberal education model to the domain of culture, but in Jameson’s “late capitalism” the lines between culture and capital become more blurred. “Just as capital is understood as a comprehensive social (not narrowly economic) power, so too a mode of production must be conceived in terms of not only economic production but also cultural production and social production of all sorts” (12). Consider what this means for the wired composition classroom when, as Olson points out, “the computer as a tool does fundamentally reorganize material relationships and organizations of production and our thoughts about what production is” (183, emphasis in original). What we do with words and computers has effects beyond the merely instrumental, and constructs the economies of the wired writing classroom as cultural, social, and material.

Yet even at the most basic level, teachers do not view computers to be a part of the learning process in the same way that they view writing to be a part of the learning process. A computer user can manipulate the keyboard and mouse, with an understanding of metaphor (do one thing here, another thing happens there), in order to ask the computer to manipulate data in operations we refer to as copying, pasting, printing, typing, and so forth. But the important part there is an understanding of metaphor. A graphical user interface does not reward trial and error the way a hammer rewards trial and error. One must learn an array of cultural signs and complex skills and ways of thinking to use the computer, to engage the many different uses to which a computer may be put: what does the Start menu do? What about the recycle bin or trash can icon? Why doesn’t Microsoft Word follow the same metaphors that the task bar does? The computer demands change in the user, and that change is undergone at different rates among different people, but as instructors we assume a fairly constant level of technological skill among students in our classrooms. Furthermore, we see technology — and not the so-taken-for-granted-as-to-be-invisible cultural, social, and material interactions with technology — as a mechanism for efficiency in writing, as something separable from writing that can make writing better. To use Linda Brodkey’s vocabulary: we always want to see ourselves in the privileged positions vis-á-vis computers, and the instrumental stance rewards that desire; we use computers to speak, instrumentally, and are never spoken by them. Technology is always separable from culture, separable from economics, separable from writing, separable from instruction: it’s an independent variable. And the discourse that separates technology from context, that takes computers out of the complex processes that constitute the writing classroom and imagines technology as somehow transcendent, seems to function in much the same way that Mankiw and Resnick & Wolff — despite their vast ideological differences — all constructed technology as an instrument that could make changes to economic systems, rather than acting in and being affected by economic systems.

So if the language of use and instrumentality is embedded, but not acknowledged, within the economies of valuation attached to computers and composition, this may point me towards an understanding that my project does not have to do so much with asking about the determinate classes of students before, during, and after college, but rather with asking about how computers serve as a part of the economies of the writing classroom within the context of that classroom’s shifting valuations and markers of class, and also within the context of the university, itself situated within the post-Fordist information economy. I would turn my focus away from overdetermined questions about static class positions before and after college, which I think would be in large part very difficult to answer (although I believe it’s still important to ask about ways in which attitudes particular to the wired composition classroom might be prevented from enacting class bigotry), and towards the ways in which technology interacts with writing instruction as a part of the learning process, as a part of the writing process, as a part of the liberal-educational/vocational-educational functions of the university, as a part of the way we see writing working within the wider world of work and society, towards the ways in which technology seems to permeate every level of the information economy within which composition classrooms find themselves situated, as we see from Jameson’s argument that “The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself” (38), suggesting that the figure of the computer itself serves as a sort of metonymic representation of global capital, and so functions not just as a device that helps that capital to circulate, but as a circulating part and representation of capital.

Given this understanding, I think I’d find myself relying much more upon Bourdieu’s construction of class as a sort of infinitely subdivided relational space, and attempting to understand how composition instruction and the economies of the wired writing classroom would work within such a relational space. Gelles and Levine offer an example of some of the things affecting and operating within that space when they list the five functions of schooling understood by functionalist sociologists: instruction, socialization, custody and control, certification, and selection (447). My perspective on education has so far dealt primarily with the instruction function, although I’m also certainly drawing from Bourdieu in my coupling of the selection and socialization functions to the instruction function. But Gelles and Levine also offer a distinction between individual mobility and “structural mobility” which “occurs when technological change, urbanization, economic booms or busts, wars, and other events alter the number and kinds of occupations available in a society” (277), which serves to remind me that I’ve been thinking primarily about individual mobility within the context of technological change and its affects on the vocations available to students via the instruction function. The university interacts with class hierarchies in other ways, as well.

Consider the ways in which composition and computers have traditionally constructed the functions of technology in the classroom, as fostering either efficiency (making it easier to write papers) or equity (making the classroom a more democratic space). Both efficiency and equity are concerns associated with class; the former with the relationships of production, and the latter with relationships of privilege. The specter of class seems to hide behind our discourse: so how and why are people in the field avoiding explicit discussions of the very real ways in which concerns of class intersect with the ideals of efficiency and equality? And how do the functions of the university and the demands of the information economy contribute to the smokescreen?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2003 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Metadissertating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.