By: David M. Grant

David M. Grant — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Bruce Horner looks at issues of class and how the functions of the university contribute to the smokescreen you so rightly point out. I think his book is _Terms of Work in Composition_ or something to that effect. Beyond that, I would like to know how (or if) you differentiate between the “economy” of the classroom and the “ecology.” For me, I see “economy” as something quantifiable set in motion. Yet the roots of the word, eco + nomos, crop up, notably in Susan Jarratt’s reading of the sophists: nomos is a third term put against both mythos and logos. Which brings me back to “ecology.” My understanding here is not so much the quanta in flux, but the “logic” upon which a given system or set of systems seem to operate. Again, back to Jarratt, this need not be the dialectical logic so much derided in the academy today (our branch of it at least). Within nomos, there are other logics — logics of emotion, for example. Nomos takes account, as it were, of all the variables of a particular time and place. Its logic is firmly rooted in the very specific context in which the participants find themselves — material, social, cultural, etc. rather than the transcendent “truth.” Of course, the other term, eco- is somewhat loaded as it assumes the participants are “at home” if not on common and/or familiar ground.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

David, I’ve found Bruce Horner’s work profoundly useful — along with John Trimbur, he’s one of the only people doing careful Marxian-influenced examinations of what goes on in composition. I think I’d have to say that it’s impossible not to differentiate between the “economy” and the “ecology”, though Marxians like Resnick and Wolff would say that the “logics” of the wired composition classroom are overdetermined by what you refer to as the “nomos” — which in some ways seems to line up well with Bourdieu’s perspectives on class. In that sense, “economies” involve many quantifiables not so much set in motion but (to use the terrible cliché) always already ( /cliché ) in motion, and then for the questions get kicked up to the next level of abstraction in Jarratt’s etymological sense: how do we talk about the systems that value and exchange these quantifiables, and how do they connect in concrete ways to the material bodies and circumstances of the teachers and students in those classrooms?

Comments on: Another Summary

By: David M. Grant

By: Mike