Deborah Kimmey: As the instructor for English 111J—or, more fittingly for the medium of a course blog, as the editor and publisher of twenty-odd authors—I’ve posted this entry to introduce new readers to the basis of the course.
Buzz Words and Blanket Phrases
First, a little back-story. Around February of this year, I was assigned to teach one of UW’s composition-through-literature courses. In years past, I’ve approached these gen-ed comp courses by zeroing in on a topic of heated public debate—since that’s one sure way of designing a course that has relevance for students who hail from diverse disciplines.
This year, capitalizing on the contemporary moment became a challenge for me as an educator. In the two years since I last taught a composition course, a lot has changed in higher education, particularly in relation to composition. First, the writing skills that students need in the “real-world” now go far beyond the five-paragraph essay or the 8-page term paper. Good communication skills are still necessary for advancing in most industries, yet those skills are increasingly channeled through new media and digital technologies that haven’t been integrated into higher-ed. At the same time, the instability of the market in the current recession meant that the blanket phrase I usually offer as incentive for sticking with college— “it’s hard to get a decent job without a degree”—is itself becoming suspect, as rampant job cuts call into question the real job security an education offers.
Around this time, I also became aware of the sheer ubiquity of another blanket phrase. In nearly every social exchange that I was a party to—with friends and strangers alike—it seemed as though every topic of conversation could be amended by one clause that, while small, nevertheless spoke volumes. “In this economy.” From official emails about tuition hikes and budget cuts, to friends’ Facebook statuses and even my yoga class, everyone was talking about the market and the state of the national economy. One might say they were “subjecting” themselves to the market in the very literal, linguistic sense: as an utterance, “in this economy” brackets all of us as subjects whose actions, aims, and ambitions are conditioned by the market.
The cultural studies student and scholar in me was settled: this was a course focus that could address (at a meta-level) the pedagogical challenge of teaching real skills for future occupations while also staging conversations inside the classroom that contribute an “added edge of consciousness,” in Raymond Williams’s terms, to how we reflect on culture and society.
Market Watch
Borrowing on my recent work as program coordinator for Keywords for American Cultural Studies, I placed “market” as a keyword at the core of this course. On a philosophical or speculative level, I’m interested in how markets condition narrative: that is to say, what stories about historical or material realities can be told through markets, and what stories are obscured through a type of market thinking which cultural critics and others have referred to as neoliberalism.
Given this approach, it made sense to include Karl Marx and classical Marxism into the mix. As one of the most prescient critics of capitalism, Marx spent his entire career wrestling with the stories that could be told through the market. Marx didn’t set out to write against the market; rather he set out to write against the grain of the market. He didn’t abandon the market as insufficient for articulating social inequality and political protest; rather he went deeper into it in order to expose its internal contradictions. Notably, in the first chapter of Capital, Volume One , with its famous articulation on commodity fetishism, Marx turns to commodities themselves to try to access the social history that gets obscured through the very process of commodification. This strategic move still blows my mind. Speaking to the inverted logic (a perverted logic, Marx would say) which becomes “natural” to our ways of thinking under capitalism, Marx turns the study of political economy on its head. Marx reorients our vision so we reach an understanding of social history and material inequalities not by leaving the market behind, but by looking further, deeper, and more incisively into the character of the market. This is the “secret of the commodity” that reveals itself when we listen to the “intercourse of the commodities themselves.”
Market Fictions
To animate these questions in a composition-through-literature course, I decided to choose three texts that I’ve read, reread, and returned to again because their stories about the market are precisely so compelling, and the intricate texture of their narratives reward such close engagement.
The first text is perhaps expected: “Bartleby, the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street.” This classic text sets forth—in pristine allegorical dimensions—perennial problems of the wage-labor market. The story fictionalizes the paradox at the core of capitalist mode of production: that it requires living human labor in order to produce capital; yet, at the same time, it treats workers as mere things.
The second text is “The Bear” by William Faulkner. At face value, this story abstracts the “moral dimensions” of human history from the taint of “vulgar markets;” or, to put it simply, it tries to pry “nature” away from “culture.” Yet, all of this “conventional” work (as in genre conventions) is undone by a family secret about enslaved women that is recorded only in the family’s business ledgers. The haunting dimension of this story, to my mind, is that if human life is reduced to being a mere object of property, as in the case of chattel slavery, there are some stories that can only be told through the market itself.
The last text is a recent film, The Constant Gardener. I will leave any commentary on the film for my fellow authors to flesh out in the coming weeks. I’ll only say here that, like “Bartleby” and “The Bear,” The Constant Gardener offers its narrative from a deeply entrenched perspective or a subject position that isn’t subjected to the brunt of the market that the story ultimately discloses. And, because of this, it similarly has to foreground investigation, interpretation and the stuff of reading itself in order to fully glimpse the social history and material inequality of the film’s particular market strain.
Still … Questions Remain
As we discuss more this quarter, there are a number of questions that I have about our contemporary moment—and particularly as they relate to Meredith McGill’s survey of “market” as it’s been examined within American Studies and cultural studies.
- Is our current crisis one in which the distinction between the “market in general” and “particular markets” is collapsing?
- How might attending to the market, to the disparities between “main street” and “wall street,” be generative for reorganizing centers of wealth and privilege, and how might the “crisis of the middle class” still fail to grasp the global reach of poverty?
- How can we as a culture of heterogeneous groups and diverse affiliations come together to discuss the very terms through which we understand “the market”? And how can we work to make the practice of cultural critique, which Marx engaged in more than 150 years ago, become part of our public discourse?
"Market" as depicted by visualthesaurus.com.
