I thig I hab a subber code.

I feel lousy, achy, tired, and congested, which is why I got so easily impatient with last night’s post. On the good side, I took Tink to the vet this morning, and she’s not dying; just a typical kittenish upper respiratory thing. So she’s off the terramycin ointment in the eye treatment, and on the amoxicillin down the throat treatment: not much of an improvement, girl; I’m sorry. I’m sure she’s thinking that at this rate it’s only a matter of days before my cruelty takes the form of suppositories.

Anyway: despite my subber code, I’ve knocked out a couple hundred pages of reading, and have a couple of minor insights from Resnick and Wolff — although the case with Knowledge and Class is kinda odd, because it’s sufficiently un-useful that I’m relieved to not be stopping every couple pages to take notes. Following is what I did note.
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I finished Jameson today, running through the big first portion and several other chapters of Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, as well as a skim of the conclusion.

Jameson offers some useful (and occasionally familiar) ideas. One big point is that reification — the conversion of social relations into things — has become second nature to us. This has been a theme of The Baffler since its very first issue (as manifested in the tongue-in-cheek slogan, “Commodify your dissent!”), but it’s also something I need to keep in mind if I’m going to be asking first-year writing students about social class. Other familiar stuff: I really liked the definition of postmodernism as “the consumption of sheer commodification as process” (x).
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Some useful clarifications from the last bit of Wolff and Resnick. I wondered recently who the capitalists were; here’s my answer: “In modern capitalist enterprises, called ‘corporations’ for historical reasons, the role of capitalist is played by a group numbering typically between 9 and 20 individuals: the board of directors” (211). Interesting that our universities have similar boards who meet on a similar quarterly basis, but the objection might be that the university (at least the public institution where I am, and where many composition programs are: as pointed out before, elite private institutions often don’t have first-year writing requirements) isn’t yet a corporation harvesting surplus labor. But I think there’s still something to be said for the construction of education as commodity, especially give the insightful discussions about instructor exploitation (streamlining the workplace, harvesting surplus value from academic or so-called “immaterial” labor) at Invisible Adjunct.
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No wonder I’ve been having such difficulties trying to put education into a Marxian class framework. According to Wolff and Resnick, “Only the processes of surplus labor appropriation and distribution refer to class, while ‘nonclass,’ by definition, encompasses all of the other processes of social life. Marxian theory inquires whether and under what specific historical circumstances some of these nonclass processes provide conditions of existence for the capitalist fundamental class process” (203). For Wolff and Resnick, one must produce commodities (the market-sold products of labor) in order to be a part of the class process. The students in the writing classroom, as Susan Miller contends in her account of composition-as-carnival, are historically constructed as preeconomic. This is an assumption that runs entirely contrary to what I’m trying to do.
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I haven’t left town yet — another hour or two before I get on the road — so I thought I’d get in one last post, since what I wrote yesterday was rather unfocused. (Although I have to say I was mightily proud of that godawful pun.) A few days ago, I cited Wolff and Resnick’s distinctions about the foundational assumptions of neoclassical and Marxian economic theories. Chris’s insightful comments on that post indicate to me that I need to think a little more about how those foundational assumptions affect students’ reasons for going to college. On the one hand, the Marxian focus on exploitation would lead me to view college as preparing students to take their proper places within the exploitative hierarchy, with the vocational and liberal education models putting students into the same relative places because class hierarchies in the base and the superstructure are roughly isomorphic. (No, I have absolutely zero support for this assertion. Fire away.) This is an understanding of class that simply feels much too monolithic to me. On the other hand, the neoclassical understanding of the student who always acts rationally and in her own best interests, in order to maximize the utility she receives from her work and life, feels far too rationalist and idealistic for me. People don’t always act in their own best interests, or even think about what they’re doing all the time.

So why do people go to college?
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The temperature’s plummeted in the past hour. Still and humid nineties down to cool and breezy seventies. The leaves of the trees have all turned up their pale undersides. It’s going to rain.

Wolff and Resnick, as their title (Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical) might indicate, usefully contrast Marxian and neoclassical theories of economics. Neoclassical theory, of which Hazlitt and Mankiw are exponents, “emphasizes individual behavior, which, it argues, is motivated by rational self-interest. The economy, as neoclassical economists theorize it, is the aggregate end product of individuals maximizing their own material self-interest.” On the other hand, “Marxian theory emphasizes social structure more than individual behavior,” to the point where “The economy, Marxists theorize, is the place in society where exploitation occurs and exerts its powerful influence over the rest of social life” (7). I suspect that most students would be highly unwilling to claim a Marxian view, not only because of its unpopularity in contemporary American culture, but also because the ideology of going to college is one of self-interest, and because students believe that they are acting in their own best interests by going to college. I’d be a jerk and a fool to argue.

I’m asking about student perceptions because Charlie’s questions of whether or not students would claim certain terms and models as their own seems to me both important and difficult, and because various recent discussions of the uses of language make me ask: who is this research for?

It’s for your committee, Mike. That’s all you need to think about.

Do I believe that?
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There’s an insightful discussion of the academic labor market over at the consistently excellent Invisible Adjunct. Reading the posts there led me to ask whether I should rethink the way I’ve circumscribed my examination of class to focus on students: after all, if I’m going to argue that class structures are enacted, negotiated, altered, or reproduced in the college writing classroom, teachers are certainly components of those class structures. As instructors, teachers may be reasonably expected to foster a student’s class mobility, while at the same time standing as a member of a class to which the student does not belong.
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