Comments on: Generational Economics

By: Schenectady Synecdoche

Schenectady Synecdoche — Mon, 02 May 2005 12:08:39 +0000

Intersections

I’m blogging about faculty contempt for their students; Mike is blogging about the Keynesian-neoclassical economics that would prevent us from recognizing student writing as capital. Which, to my way of thinking, offers another explanation for that pr…

By: mike

mike — Mon, 02 May 2005 03:36:15 +0000

Yup. Bourdieu is my Chapter 4. Which is the hard chapter. Which is why I’ve been putting it off: as profoundly helpful as I find his theoretical work, I’m kinda dreading revisiting the rarefied abstractions of Distinction, Practical Reason, and Reproduction most of all. Which is weird, because I totally loved Academic Discourse: reading it, it was like a light went on in my head, like the same feeling I had first reading Derrida or Foucault and going, “Wow!”

But I’m always grateful for any feedback, Donna — and I’d like to hear whether or not I have a fair handle on what you term the managerial unconscious, and how you see economic concerns playing out within the classroom.

By: Donna

Donna — Sun, 01 May 2005 22:32:50 +0000

This has been a great thread–thanks, Mike, Bill, Collin. I’ve been out of town and off-blogging for several days and need to catch up. I’d like to say more, but am not sufficiently focused at the moment. So I’ll just ask a question: are you using Bourdieu at all, Mike? The argument about how we see as extra-economic all these transactions that are very much economic reminds me of arguments he makes in Practical Reason and elsewhere.

By: mike

mike — Sun, 01 May 2005 20:05:23 +0000

Thanks, Collin. That was actually a big point my 4Cs presentation made: turnitin.com and cheathouse.com make visible — via monetization — the economic aspect of student paper-writing labor. Is plagiarism-for-hire worse than plagiarism-for-friends? In the context of the writing classroom, I don’t think it makes a difference: the use value of an essay assignment inheres in its labor, and if the student doesn’t do that labor, the fact that she’s failed to learn from the assignment has nothing to do with whether or not money changed hands for the essay she turns in.

By: collin

collin — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 17:56:16 +0000

Great post, Mike (and comments, Donna & Bill). If:

“This is kinda connected to the point I made recently about housework not being visible as economic labor until it was monetized by housekeeping services: Ward was always the economic producer, not June.”

I wonder, then, if we could say the same about composition in light of the fear currently circulating about Internet plagiarism and paper mills, which actually do monetize the writing our students do. I’ve never really understood the depth of that fear, since paper mills always seemed roughly analogous to the legendary fraterntity/sorority file cabinets to me. That is, plagiarism wasn’t invented with the Internet But one potential difference is this monetization–is plagiarism-for-hire somehow worse to us than plagiarism-for-friends? If so, then it suggests that we have a stake (whether conscious or not) in preserving that illusion of student work as extra-economic, I think…

cgb

By: mike

mike — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 22:54:02 +0000

You’re right, Bill; in my dissertation tunnel vision, I’m often forgetting that the issues that are front-and-center to my research are not front-and-center for other folks — and you’re also right that I should have tempered my language somewhat about the focus on working-class students: there’s certainly good stuff that doesn’t execute that myopic move that I’ve just admitted to making myself; it’s just that — in talking about working-class issues — it’s so, so easy to slip into a certain kind of discourse that I find deeply frustrating. But thanks likewise for helping push my thinking on this, and helping me to rein it in, as well, when I start making big, sweeping claims.

By: Bill

Bill — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 20:29:50 +0000

Really smart stuff. Thanks for further clarifying an interesting (and important) analysis of the scholarly conversation. I’m hung up on what I see as an imperative to foreground the monetized transactions-as a means to keeping front and center the material circumstances of all agents involved in the work of higher education-but you’re helping me see the materiality of transactions that transcend monetized transactions and commification. As the term comes to a close, I’m trying to imagine what’s going on in my classes through this lens–thanks so much. The economic dimension is theoretically “obvious,” as you say, and yet our scholarly constructions of students, of ourselves, of administrative/wpa work, etc., etc. too often ignore the commodifications (which, yes, are problematic, but still need to occupy that front-and-center position in our consciousness). I agree it’s not just about working-class students and yet I think the naming is important–precisely because the implications are different for working-class students. And I think focusing on working-class students doesn’t have to lead to the kinds of myopia you mention (though you’re right–freqnetly it does!)–I see class as an identity marker that affects how we see “the economic conditions operating prior to, outside of, and successive to the classroom” AS WELL AS the economic conditions inside of the classroom. Sorry if this is fragmented…thanks again for these thoughtful posts–you’re pushing hard at how issues of class circulate in the field, which I really appreciate.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 16:49:42 +0000

Well, what I’m arguing is that student labor within the writing classroom can be seen as being economic without being a monetized transaction. Furthermore, I’d suggest to the contrary that non-instrumentalist motivations for going to college lead to understanding school work as the non-exploitative production (i.e., the student’s appropriation of her own surplus labor) of knowledge and education, whereas what instrumentalist motivations lead to are the reproduction of knowledge and hierarchy and the exploitative (tuition > evaluation > certification > paycheck) commodification of learning. Furthermore, this isn’t just about working-class students; it’s about all students. Focusing on working-class students, while important, leads to a myopia that sees only the economic conditions operating prior to, outside of, and successive to the classroom, because the classroom gets constructed as some liminal extraeconomic space — and so, in such circumstances, our perceptions of the transactions we call “economic” remain largely restricted to transactions that are in some way monetized, whether it’s mom & dad’s working-class jobs, the student’s full-time job, or the instrumentalist motivation of a post-college job. I’m not really talking about any of those things as economic, because it’s obvious that they are so, just as the monetized transactions of university employees (professors, adjuncts, grad students, staff, administrators) are economic in ways that are obvious to all of us. But the point that’s really hard to get a handle on is that within capitalism there are many types of economic transaction that do not involve money or commodification (see Collin Williams, “A Critical Evaluation of the Commodification Thesis”, and the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham), despite the post-1970s efforts of the Chicago school to center all neoclassical economic discourse around money, and despite the still overwhelming urge among many Marxian economists to center their discourse around commodification. And these diverse economic transactions within capitalism that go beyond monetization or commodification represent opportunities — both theoretical and practical — for the work that we and our students do that offer ways out of our currently anemic, atrophied, and attenuated conceptions of class.

By: Bill

Bill — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 14:48:22 +0000

While I don’t think that compositionists perceive the labor of students to be “monetized,” I think that many of our students very much see their work in the classroom as having the kind of economic power you describe. In particular, working-class students and other students who (increasingly–as Bousquet’s and Bartlet’s work shows) work full time. So-called instrumentalist motives for going to college lead, I think, to a conception of school work as production. A student working fifty hours a week and raising two children and taking nine credit hours oftentime sees the boundaries of her “work life” blur. Bousquet’s (and other who publish in Workplace) work forces us to think about the economy of the university–grad student labor, professorial labor, the labor of unclassified and classified staff, AND the labor of students, on and off campus. What is and isn’t “monetized” blurs when we perform the kinds of analysis Bousquet et al advocate. I like how you frame the literature as being generational–a useful way to think about the shifting rhetorics of class in our field.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 03:14:26 +0000

Donna, you’re right that Bousquet’s essay — in its conclusions — begins to see student labor in the classroom as economic labor, and for that reason, I’m very interested in his perspective. But he also takes pains to declare that this is “not-capitalism,” and I disagree. Bousquet, of course, is coming from a socialist perspective and wanting to claim students as socialists, and I think his reason for wanting to call it “not-capitalism” is because, again, it’s not monetized — which is mistaken, because there are many non-market, non-monetized transactions within capitalism. Bousquet’s Marxism/socialism is a perspective that wants to see capitalism as monolithic, and so there can only be capitalism and not-capitalism, with the goal of not-capitalism being the systematic overthrow of the capitalist system in favor of another system. There are other ways of seeing capitalism: as diverse, contradictory, riddled with spaces of non-market, non-monetized, non-exploitative economic transactions, transactions that students can be seen as engaging in without making it necessary to see them as hopelessly exploited or vocationalized.

It may be that I’m trying to perform the same sort of uncovering that strikes me as so valuable in your work on “The Managerial Unconscious,” a making-visible of student labor within the writing classroom that moves away from the (frequently masculine) ‘teacher as laboring hero at the center of the classroom’ trope so prominent in much of the discourse associated with working class concerns in composition studies. If I’ve read your work correctly, you’re arguing that teacher-talk can obscure the economic concerns associated with management; my argument would be that it can also obscure the economic concerns associated with the work students perform within the classroom.

I was going to try to put together a longer post on this topic tonight, but you’ve usefully complicated my thinking, so I think that longer post might have to wait until I puzzle things out a little further. But thanks for the reminder about Bousquet’s argument, and for pushing my thinking about this. I’m going to have to go back to Berlin’s last book, too. And Chapter 2 suddenly looks like it might get a good bit longer. . . .