Subverting Crisis in the Political Economy of Composition

Author(s): Tony Scott

Source: College Composition and Communication , September 2016, Vol. 68, No. 1,
SPECIAL ISSUE: The Political Economies of Composition Studies (September 2016), pp. 10-
37
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

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Tony Scott

Subverting Crisis in the Political Economy of

Composition

In an era of normative austerity in US higher education, composition is being trans-

formed by budget cuts, retrenchment, and marketization. Nevertheless, the fields
scholarship continues to compartmentalize questions concerning the material
terms of practice away from questions of curricular philosophy. Because composi-
tion has not developed a deliberate, sustained inquiry into how scholarship and
teaching are being shaped by the perpetual crisis of austerity economics, we are
compelled to adopt myopic and reactionary stances toward our work. As a means
of subverting compositions perpetual crisis, Scott advocates disciplinary work that
not only imagines new, globally focused, and politically conscious curricula but
also actively pursues the creation of the work and learning environments that are
necessary for their successful realization.

c
^/hina Mieville's near-future, genre-bending novel, The City and the
City , is a study of how order is maintained through the threat of crisis. The
novel is set in two cities: one, Beszel, is decaying and shabby, grey concrete
buildings, weedy lots, half-finished public projects and unmaintained parks
littered with debris. In contrast, Beszels neighboring city, U1 Qoma, is expe-

CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 2016

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 SCOTT / S U B VE RTI N G CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

riencing relative economic prosperity. Its buildings and public

better maintained; it is undergoing new construction and ope
foreign investment; its citizens carry themselves with more
What gives The City and the City its primary tension and perva
crisis is that the economically depressed Beszel and the more pr
Qoma occupy the same material space. Beszel and U1 Qoma hav
cultures and local governments, but they are spatially crossha
economies of the two cities are likewise at once materially inte
and conceptually separate in the imaginaries of the citizens: t
tercommerce, but the full economy remains murky and unack
Through years of conditioning, the citizens of the two cities
other as they go about their daily lives. The novel calls this "un
it is a primary theme: each city exists in the periphery of the oth
are conditioned not to integrate socially and resist developing
sense of the whole. People learn to notice and then quickly un
differences in architecture, clothing, smells, behaviors, how
and talk. When a "breach," some instance of unseeing or cross
does occur - a car suddenly swerving out of Beszel and into U
is referred to as a "crisis," and though crisis is a constant conce
becomes the object of direct deliberation and understandin
balancing the threat of crisis with a lack of acknowledgment o
anxious equilibrium is maintained.
The City and the City is a durable metaphor describing life i
porary, global publics that are largely economically, racially, an
segregated. Adjacent and deeply interdependent, they are also
mentalized, composed of people sharing spaces with others
in myriad ways, but largely without consciousness that we ar
and occupying these spaces very differently. It is not only pos
in diversity without much direct contact with people who are
like us - and without a sense of the full materiality and conn
a global economy - but our cities and cultural imaginaries
compartmentalization. Segregated into fortified enclaves and
our social and geographic infrastructures proceed from a logic o
contact. Political economic order is maintained in no small par
fear, and conditioned unseeing of the myriad ways that we ar
nected, as bodies in the same spaces, as political subjects, as
of resources, as variously positioned agents within a globally

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 201 6

technologized, and policed system of labor, valuation, an

Like the citizens of Beszel and U1 Qoma, we learn to liv
tors that we don t pursue and a normative, politically, a
induced sense of anxiety.
Political economic study is concerned with examining
lationships between political processes, institutions, wor
and everyday assumptions, relations, and behaviors. Togg
granular and the aggregate, it strives toward making sens
lars relate to whole ecologies constituted by mobilized r
ideas, struggles, and emotions. This essay presents an argu
economic method as a response to compositions pervasiv
in a time of austerity. It argues that normative crisis is a
ing characteristic of neoliberal political economy, and the
of fear is creating avoidance, dissonance, and perhaps ev
composition studies as marketization operationally subsu
composition teaching and learning. While compositionist
terms that are not of our making, the profession might sub
focusing its energies more deliberately on composition s p
and directly engaging the complicated, ethically fraugh
which compositions work is imagined, performed, and va

Ambient Crisis
Crisis is nothing new in the field of composition and in literacy education
more generally. It has been such a familiar element of compositions scholarly
discourse that its function as a disciplinary trope is itself worthy of more
extensive exploration. Harvey Graff famously makes the case that crisis
serves an integral function in the literacy myth, wherein periodic literacy
crises historically parallel broader public crises arising during times of
political economic upheaval. In an essay published in 1991, John Trimbur
argued that writing teachers and administrators were opportunistically
capitalizing on the literacy myth and its rhetoric of crisis, pointing out that
a substantial expansion in first-year writing, technical writing, and writing
across the curriculum programs had occurred in the wake of the national
sense of crisis in literacy education spawned by the 1975 Newsweek article,
"Why Johnny Can't Write" (277). Compositions advancement in relation to
crisis rhetoric came with strings though. Driving the ready national accep-
tance of the existence of a literacy crisis was a broader, reactionary cultural

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 SCOTT / S U BVE RTI N G CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

project aimed at restoring the hegemony of the (mostly whit

and its grounding, self-legitimating belief in meritocracy
argued that opportunistic rationales for growth in respo
even if not deployed with complete sincerity, were changing
fundamental sense of purpose and mission, turning the fie
its history of political progressivism, expanding access to e
promoting democratic participation. As the field of compos
more academically established and distinctly professionalize
teachers, scholars, and administrators were becoming "deep
in the reward system, division of labor, and meritocratic or
privatized literacy" (294). Thus, in noting how compositionis
tunistically used the perception of literacy crisis as rationale
sion, Trimbur named another, in his view, more legitimate a
the implication of the professional field within the political
project of promoting more singular, privatized, and racially
cally exclusive forms of literacy. To repurpose the work of wri
he called for a return to 1960s and 1970s era social activism that focuses on

democratizing higher education through increasing access.

Though more difficult to recognize in 1991, other trends that came to
be called neoliberalism were underway, and they were having a profound ef-
fect on the organization and lived relations of higher education in the United
States. The term neoliberal can now mean many different things in research
and critique though. I therefore want to clarify the specific ways that I use it
in relation to the political economy of higher education with a view toward
understanding the effects of perpetual crisis in composition. Specifically,
drawing on my work with Nancy Welch in the collection Composition in the
Age of Austerity, I want to develop the relationship between neoliberalism,
austerity, and crisis in composition (see Scott and Welch 7-12).
One often-cited manifestation that global neoliberal political economy
has assumed is direct, government-facilitated, private sector intervention
into public services and social domains. Under neoliberal political economic
reorganization, global economies have seen a forty-year trend toward the
privatization of everything from local mail delivery to national security and
intelligence to public education. In education in the United States, state
governments facilitate private market interventions through such means as
mandating textbooks, assessments, and curricular technologies produced
by the private sector; contracting with private entities to manage teacher

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 201 6

training and certification; and channeling public money t

schools through tax incentives, charters, and voucher sys
tutional- and state-facilitated intercession
Technocratization and marketization
of the for-profit education industry is often
go hand in hand. Because brought about by what Chris W. Gallagher
composition
has called the "Trojan horse" of mandated
is largely taught by an institutionally
outcomes assessment, which can be used as
contingent labor force without full
a rationale for the alignment of curriculum,
professional status and protections,
teaching, and assessment through a rapidly
composition work is particularly vul-
expanding array of products (see also Davis;
nerable to technocratization,and the
Larson; Simon). Technocratization and
sheer number of courses and students
marketization go hand in hand. Because
involved makes it attractive to private
composition is largely taught by an insti-
industry as a market.
tutionally contingent labor force without
full professional status and protections,
composition work is particularly vulnerable to technocratization, and
the sheer number of courses and students involved makes it attractive to

private industry as a market.

Political economic critiques point out that neoliberalism is not just
the direct privatization of public services and social domains though: it is
the embedded commonsense principle that most spheres of human life are
better perceived, managed, and evaluated as markets (see Peck 67-73). In
neoliberal political economy, organizational values and procedures that had
formerly been more contained within the realm of commerce are promoted
across an expanded range of societal domains. More aspects of human
life and relations are subsumed by market logics. As sociologist William
Davies argues, regardless of what established political party has majority
power, marketization has achieved the status of state-endorsed cultural
normalcy in liberal Western societies (37). This is an important point that
can easily be missed in public political discussions. In spite of a global
shift in liberal governance that has often been politically couched as an
opposition between bloated, oversized, and overly regulatory governments
and individual freedoms and creative affordances, governments have not
become anachronistic or lost authority in liberal Western countries because
neoliberal economy requires aggressively interventionist states that work on
behalf of private enterprise - for instance, through providing targeted tax
incentives, creating and managing the terms of international trade deals,

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 SCOTT / S U B VE RTI N G CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

enforcing patents, developing and maintaining stable, civic infrastru

subsidizing loans, and so forth (Harvey 28; Peck 4, 9). Sovereign, pow
governments are also necessary to provide the military, surveillan
security/prison apparatus that maintains order within conditions
and growing inequality and social unrest (Harvey 60-61).
The steady expansion of marketization into social domains that
formerly been considered public or civic has gone on for four decade
though Western economies have, on the whole, experienced gradua
clining social and economic mobility, and citizens have endured inc
personal debt and steady losses in public services and entitlements d
this period. As a host of economists,
MoreMila-
including Paul Krugman, Branko of human life becomes economi-
novic, Thomas Picketty, and cally
Amartya
rather than politically governed, an
Sen, have documented, the neoliberal-
realms of human life that were formally
ized economy has concentrated capital
seen as public and political have been
accumulation without creating greater
conceptually cleaved away from politics
economic growth, which has greatly
increased inequality and instability. Nev-
ertheless, until recent years neoliberal policies have shown the rema
ability to elide consequential political critique. This may be due, in
to the appearance that they are not enacted in alignment with a b
political economic ideology, but are rather apolitical economic s
manifesting at the everyday operational level as common sense (see
and Milonakis; Mirowski). The spread of neoliberal policies has also
aided by widespread acceptance of the assumption that most domai
life benefit from marketization because markets rationalize human rela-

tions in ways that procedurally reward efficiency, innovation, and risk, while
penalizing complacency and promoting accountability. More of human
life becomes economically rather than politically governed, and realms of
human life that were formerly seen as public and political have been con-
ceptually cleaved away from politics. So problems like income inequality or
rising debt have been seen and treated as individualistic and not related to
larger interdependent, ideologically constructed, and changeable "political"
economies. Davies thus describes the transformation of political economy
under neoliberalism as "the pursuit of disenchantment of politics by econom-
ics" because so many aspects of human relations are moved outside of the
domain of consequential, democratic disputation and into a realm of seem-
ingly neutral, technocratic, and market-driven decision making (21-22).

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 201 6

Wendy Brown more bluntly characterizes global neo

as the use of marketization to overwhelm democracy and
change the orientation and status of the liberal democratic
argues that the subject-citizen of neoliberalism, homo oec
different from the subject-citizen of classic liberal capita
Adam Smiths creature propelled by the natural urge to 'tr
exchange,' today s homo oeconomicus is an intensely c
governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and
competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary
etary) portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues
As economics disenchants politics, ones relative status wit
systems of valuation becomes more important than the rig
sibilities of citizenship within a democratic state. Myriad
life for homo oeconomicus are more governed by operationa
individual performance vectors- ongoing tracking, assessm
and risk scores, and predictive forecasting- than through
moral deliberation. Failures, such as the financial industry
are likewise cast as technical mistakes rather than as a more foundational

failure of governing ideology, and the responses are likewise technocratic

"corrections," rather than political dialogues that envision more fundamen-
tally different ways of doing and being.
Austerity policies and the crises they are intended to evoke have been
an important aspect of neoliberal political economy, and change in higher
education in the United States has been facilitated by austerity econom-
ics. In general use, austerity describes policies enacted by governments to
reduce budget deficits during the shock of especially bad economic times,
so it has historically been associated with drastic but temporary responses
to emergencies. The term came into broad public use with this meaning
during the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan used
economic crisis as justification for austerity measures initiated in response
to the economic crises of the 1970s, but then many of the fundamentad
changes made in liberal capitalist governments in the 1980s grew to become
a permanent austerity regime. A raft of austerity policies that included a
more regressive tax structure and decreases in the social safety net and in
proportional spending on education helped promote a social order that
relies on fear as a motivator for both compliance and efficiency-driven
innovation. As a relentless motivator for market virtues, austerity became
the new normal.

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 SCOTT / S U B VE RTI N G CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

The short-term period of heightened crisis post-2008 has onl

ated the cuts of a longer-term period of austerity that has been
in US higher education since the 1980s, and though the US eco
entered a period of (uneven) recovery, state funding for higher
has not returned to already diminished pre-
2008 crisis levels. Losses of revenue in some Higher education in the United States
states actually increased after the stimulusis now in a mode of seemingly peren-
funding from the American Recovery and nial economic crisis that has been
Reinvestment Act ended in 2012 (State
brought about by neoliberalism's
Higher Education 7). Higher education
austerity regime and the opportuni-
in the United States is now in a mode of
ties for more radical reorganization of
seemingly perennial economic crisis that
academic production it has created.
has been brought about by neoliberalism's
austerity regime and the opportunities for
more radical reorganiżation of academic production it has created. States
have transferred even more of their share of funding for higher education to
students, where it has manifested in increased debt that is owed to private
lenders.1 Wage freezes, cuts in staffing, and program retrenchment are at
once obvious responses to budgeting shortfalls and a part of a larger and
more fundamental debt-driven restructuring and shift of authority at the
operational level.

The Disenchantment of Composition by Economics

In 2013, the US Department of Education informed colleges and universities
that they could apply for federal aid for students enrolled in competency-
based education (CBE) programs. This caused little national fanfare, but
it was a major moment in a shift toward using "direct assessment" rather
than course hours to mark progress toward a college degree (see Gallagher
26-30). With CBE, the distinction between teaching and assessment is di-
minished or erased entirely: measurement becomes education as teachers
are marginalized or eliminated, more instructional cost becomes surplus,
and the burden to learn and perform learning according to preset outcomes
is shifted more fully to students. Compositions neoliberalization has not
been effected through explicit ideological arguments or arguments among
scholars about pedagogical theory. Rather, at many sites, composition has
been transformed by operational blueprint through CBE; increases in the
use of adjuncts and teaching assistants who work under exploitive terms;

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 201 6

increases in course caps; explicitly planned or de facto

university writing to dual credit programs, private firms,
colleges; and the proliferation of online writing classes tha
standardize pedagogies and writing and continually ma
teachers and students.

Though in 1991, Trimbur was relating the changing shape of literacy

education to a broader political economy, he addressed an audience of
professional educators, presumably with the assumption that they had the
power to galvanize as a group around a common view of literacy and form
a scholarly consensus that would then become a consensus pedagogical
practice. That composition scholarship shapes composition practice has
largely remained a prevailing disciplinary assumption. The missing piece is
how scholarship actually does shape practice. How does scholarship relate
to the institutional apparatus and relations of labor through which it must
be mediated if it is to be consequential? The scholarly field has sometimes
inquired deeply into isolated classroom environments. It has also focused on
raising awareness of the terms of labor for composition teachers, usually as a
social justice and labor rights issue, rather than also as an issue that directly
affects curricula and pedagogy. Composition has not made an imperative
of inquiring into how pedagogical theory and research relate to the vexed
and changing material terms of academic labor as a whole- even as these
changes threaten to sever the field s always precarious connections between
scholarly research and pedagogical practice (see Scott and Welch 5-6).
The ways that academic work is valued creates barriers to creating
a fuller relationship between research and pedagogical application, as
scholars are encouraged to manage their own careers as academic homo
oeconomicus , self-entrepreneurs who publish and bring in external fund-
ing.2 In graduate courses in composition and rhetoric students continue to
learn what Donna Strickland has called the "official" scholarly field, studying
composition mostly as conversations about ideas among scholars - research
building on research, and theory responding to theory in dialogic chains
and trees that developing scholars learn to trace and create for their own
understanding and to build their professional careers. Meanwhile, the
"unofficial" education happens in the broader material sites within which
graduate courses are situated, where graduate students also teach mostly
introductory writing courses as TAs; work alongside, and often themselves

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 SCOTT / S U BVE RTI NG CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

work as, part-time teachers; and perform managerial functions as

assistants. Scholarly publication is still the work that is most le
and rewarded within academic institutions and disciplinary spher
continues to have high professional exchange value for tenure-lin
sionals in composition.
Because it is a pedagogical field, however, the exchange v
composition scholarship has also had a necessary connection to u
in writing education: it is produced with an at least implicit ass
that disciplinary and institutional
relations exist that will provide the
Davies claims that neoliberalism is the pu
means through which composition
of disenchantment of politics by economics
scholarship might shape within
pedagogi-
postsecondary writing, neoliberal
cal practice. Yet it is still not a com-
in higher education has similarly created
mon methodological expectation
conditions for the pursuit of the disencha
in the profession for theories of
ment of composition by economics.
pedagogy to attend to the political
economic factors that constitute

the teaching and learning environments of writing education - as if what

we do is not affected by how we do it. The "scholar-teacher" teaching writing
courses that is still a commonly hailed audience of composition scholar-
ship is a statistical rarity, yet the administrative mechanisms, relations,
and non-research-active teachers that are required to connect theory to
teaching on a large enough scale to make it consequential remain unseen.
Davies claims that neoliberalism is the pursuit of disenchantment
of politics by economics ; within postsecondary writing, neoliberalism in
higher education has similarly created the conditions for the pursuit of the
disenchantment of composition by economics. The need for a special issue
on political economy in College Composition and Communication is itself
evidence of how often the economics of writing education is categorically
cleaved from its scholarship. As the use value of composition scholarship
is realized primarily through circulation for itself, much of what is shaping
writing education has functioned beyond the scope of scholarly inquiry
and concern, and pedagogical practice is ceded to the economic. The dis-
enchantment of composition by economics has contributed to a pervasive,
consequential sense of crisis in the field that is now fundamental to com-
positions professional work. At the root of the crisis is that neoliberalism
functions as an operational schema that cant be adequately understood

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 2016

or addressed through scholarly argumentation about

pedagogy alone. As composition scholarship creates a
plinary imaginary where its influence is assumed, co
at its sites of teaching and learning are subsumed an
that need not reference the scholarship at all and of
metaphor from The City and the City , composition
political economic terms of its own production and
For instance, while the call for papers for the 2015
of the Conference on College Composition and Comm
does not explicitly name a crisis, it certainly conveys
is driven by an assumption that there is an unmistak
response. Announcing "Risk and Reward" as the conf
call encourages participants to overcome fears, inno
be entrepreneurial because "our organization and
demanded more engagement," and "we need to risk g
comfort zones" (Carter). While the call solicits urgen
tion and innovation, suggesting that compositionist
crisis, there is no explicit identification of what people
asserts that people are demanding more engagement,
who is demanding engagement and what the engage
urgent action therefore seems its own exigency and e
articulated causality, the reasoning is therefore stra
crisis in the call is fear and lack of response (Scott 20
Somewhat similar to the 2015 CCCC call, the mos
R. Watson conference had responsivity as its theme,
explores "what it means for teacher/scholars of rhet
to be responsive to communities both within and be
Just as with the CCCC call, the Watson conference ca
invitation to explore the nature of the exigencies for
of informing the avenues that responsive engagemen
responsivity is the unifying objective and seemingly
that centers on doing responsive things with rhetor
being so broad that it comes close to not being func
all, and in a brief introduction to a special issue of th
Composition published in coordination with the conf
appears to address this potentially thin pretext when
issue's contributions share: a "felt urgency" and sense

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 SCOTT / SUBVERTING CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

response (49). Comparing academics to professionals in oth

have seen their authority diminish in recent years, Horner
in academia that relates to professional power and expert
disciplinary professionals," he argues, "are increasingly los
the means to the production of knowledge- now accomplis
ship with business and industry- and its circulation, in pu
teaching" (51). Horner questions whether rhetoric and com
achieved disciplinary status in the traditional mode, but he
lack of institutional legitimation actually makes composition
if not a discipline) both more threatened and potentially b
to respond to changes in higher educa-
tion than more established disciplines
Without the status and correspond
(53). Horner argues for an acceptance
authority over curricula that comes
of compositions lack of some
full disciplin-
measure of institutional reco
ary status in higher education and an
of compositionists' expertise in writ
embrace of the field's expertise and
education, what makes professiona
power as it is manifested in use value.
credentialed compositionists more
Eschewing the pursuit of disciplinary
fied than others to lead programs,
status in favor of "humility," he em-
curricula, or even teach compositio
phasizes that composition, more than
other fields, is directly involved in the
labor of teaching. Because composition has "a deep familia
necessity of labor to the ongoing realization of the value o
is actually better positioned [than other disciplines] to acco
that ongoing work of producing use value from knowledg
provocative argument evokes questions of authority and do
ence. Expertise in academia is under threat because it interfer
to further economize and open up the operations of high
the private sector. Without the status and corresponding
curricula that comes with some measure of institutional
compositionists' expertise in writing education, what mak
credentialed compositionists more qualified than others to
shape curricula, or even teach composition? Likewise, with
ity, what apparatus will exist to sustain research in compo
its application in practice or develop the kinds of profess
for ethical and responsible practices in such areas as lang

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 20 16

assessment, plagiarism, and terms of labor that many of u

make local arguments?
In a recent review article, Elizabeth Wardle also descri
of professional focus and expertise in composition, bu
whether the field is still willing to assert that it actually p
ists in writing education. Reviewing publications that are o
composition pedagogy yet don t really theorize pedagogic
assert disciplinary authority in the teaching of writing, W
damental questions about the relationship between profes
the pervasive use of graduate students as teachers, an
disciplinary authority:

What is there to know about writing and teaching writing? Ho

come to know these things? How can new writing teachers
prepared to teach? Why is it that our very own programs see
subject of our study and place graduate students with no discip
at all into a writing classroom? Who benefits from such inexp
does such a system persist? ("Considering" 670)

Finding several of the books she reviews mute on these poin

ders whether composition and rhetoric still has "a cohere
subject of study" that addresses writing pedagogy as a prac
ing" 664). In contrast with Horner, Wardle suggests that co
a stronger and more defined disciplinary focus, as well as
to the effects of its reliance on teachers without academic credentials in

composition.
Disciplinarity is also a concern in Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline
Rhodess recent important book on the status and possibilities of multi-
modality within what they describe as a "divided" discipline that is at a
"crossroads" (2-3). They argue that notions of authorship, textuality, and
what it means to compose have been so anchored in the alphabetic, the
essayistic, and the legacy of print that the discursive bounds of the disci-
pline have become a hindrance. Alexander and Rhodes are concerned that
composition might be colonizing multimodality: truncating its possibili-
ties by anchoring it within now antiquated disciplinary conceptual frames
and pedagogical practices that are inadequate to foster its possibilities.
They warn that clinging to our "much-prized disciplinarity" may lead to a
"fail[ure] to meet our students most pressing needs as communicators" (5).

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 SCOTT / S U B VE RTI N G CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

A disciplinary, or multidisciplinary, change in how scholars are co

of composition and modality might better meet students needs.
When seen through a political economic frame, this argument
the question of whether the colonization of multimodality is pri
shortcoming of scholarship or a condition of the learning environ
which multimodality might be practiced. Essayistic literacy is ent
in high school curriculums, advanced placement assessments,
sessments, institutionally negotiated outcomes, and many postsec
program assessments. It is also still often a mode of choice for w
in English literature programs where a considerable portion of w
teachers get their graduate training. To what extent is the coloniz
multimodality Alexander and Rhodes describe embedded in the fact
constitute the everyday material learning environments in which
education is conducted, rather than a problem of disciplinary colon
caused by shortcomings in research? Rather than casting discipli
an isolated obstacle to fuller transformation of the practice of com
pedagogy toward multimodality, we might also ask what needs to
in terms of labor, teacher expertise, and institutional infrastruc
create the learning environments in which research-informed, mu
pedagogies can have larger consequence.
Also locating composition within scholarly discourse that
lated from institutional conditions and practices, Byron Hawk has
counter-history as a redress for what he suggests is an exhaustion
within a discipline whose assumptions have become too fixed
goal is to recover vitalism from entrenched disciplinary historie
have categorically subsumed it within romanticism and expressiv
therefore dismissed it. Arguing that composition theory should
from the "classicism/ Romanticism" dichotomy, Hawks counter-
seeks to open up new ways of seeing invention and pedagogy. Giv
Hawks theory of composing is grounded so firmly on the immed
composing moments- on embodiment, ecological complexity, a
nomenology-it is surprising that his study makes almost no men
compositions institutional contexts or terms of labor. Hawks hist
composition is mostly a history of scholarly exchanges: the mater
compositions work, its development and continuance as econ
shaped and constrained practice within the contexts of institutio
organized programs, is largely elided from this historical map. The

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 201 6

of whether a history of composition can be a history of sch

writing is related to whether entrenched pedagogical pra
be adequately addressed through changing scholars ideas a
In a controversial argument for the separation of com
from composition research, Sidney I. Dobrin asserts th
"suffers from narrative sickness," and its theories of pedag
thin, no longer offering answers that satisfy emerging q
writing in its networked, hyper-circulatory condition" (18
sponse in Postcomposition involves attempting to disrupt
in part through eschewing the responsibility for the teac
altogether and focusing more narrowly on developing the s
as an academic specialization not bound to pedagogy. Amo
of this move away from the teaching and administration o
writing, which Dobrin distinguishes from its intellectual
would enable the scholarly field to escape the problems o
(94). This, he reasons, would allow writing theory to "rem
questions of contingent labor, questions
Is composition's crisis a failure of
have relegated composition studies prima
intellectual imaginationidentity
in scholarly
and most of its anxieties to q
discourse or a failure tions
of scholarly
of labor and labor management" (1
influence in practice?
The questions, the people, and the terms
their labor and its consequences wouldn't
away, of course; scholars would just more fully relinquish r
considering them. To draw on the metaphor from Mieville
proposes that the city somehow unsee the city. Shedding t
limitations of composition theory through escaping teach
an attempt to escape political economy - the economies th
work like Postcomposition (and this article) are written. Ev
books as sophisticated and specialized as Postcomposition w
and circulated among interested audiences through an eco
that didn t involve considerable amounts of institutional
sources secured by the labor of other people - support fo
and other resources - what sustained audiences and underwriters will

writing scholarship have when there is no longer an even thin, implied

connection to pedagogical application? With what public would the work
gain influence or relevance other than among a small, cloistered realm of
rhetorical scholars?

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 SCOTT / SUBVERTING CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

Is compositions crisis a failure of intellectual imagination

arly discourse or a failure of scholarly influence in practice?
ner relates crisis in composition to terms of production wit
economy. Tracing the effects on composition of neoliberal tr
of higher education, Jeanne Gunner asks, "What if all is chang
utterly?" in composition (639)? Gunner warns of a possible ne
which compositions expertise and scholarship
As the programs
might be irrelevant, as composition terms of production that
have
become more purely commercial sustained it are being
enterprises
that are effectively severed from any academic
changed, composition is being
field of study. She speculates that in a "de-dis-
challenged by a diminishing abil
ciplinized" composition, administrators
to sustain will
connections between
function primarily as marketing profession-
academic research and teaching
als who develop and promote their programs
practice, which is leading to que
independent brands, while "the disciplinary
tions concerning the authority
knowledge of the field gives way to its market-
influence of scholarship in relati
able form" (638).3 Gunner asserts that the work
to that of the for-profit educatio
of postsecondary writing education is being
industry;
pushed ever further from traditional the nature of the field
academic
expertise and focus of research;
disciplinary structures and influence.
Responses to shock are ofteneven whether writing scholarsh
dissolution
of the social orders, like professionalcontinue
should fields to be concerned

and disciplines, that stand in the way

with of fuller
writing pedagogy.
marketization. As the terms of production that
have sustained it are being changed, composition is being ch
diminishing ability to sustain connections between academic
teaching practice, which is leading to questions concerning t
and influence of scholarship in relation to that of the for-pr
industry; the nature of the field s expertise and focus of resea
whether writing scholarship should continue to be concerned
pedagogy. This dissonance seems like a potential precursor to
end that Gunner describes: a more complete professional dis
which "composition" no longer connotes any scholarly pract
connection to a scholarly field, but is rather just an industry
practices, products, and specialized services that deliver p
writing without any necessary unifying theories, inquiries, o
ideals beyond the profit imperative.

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 20 16

Subverting Crisis
To accept that neoliberalization is inevitable and that we can t
secondary writing education in a way that is research-informed
conscientious, and engaged with the realities of global commun
labor is to miss signs that, especially after the 2008 collapse, th
paradigm is rapidly losing its cultural authority. It is also to acc
economic system is permanently hegemonic or wholly determi
than being continually produced and
Rhetorics of fear and crisis therefore
thereforehave
politically changeable.
To explore
their own operative, consequential power alternatives to per-
petual crisis,
in neoliberalism, and among their effects
it is useful to understand
crisis
is the dissolution of social bonds itself
that haveas a function of political
economy. Catherine Chaput examines
been formed around values and goals
how the rhetoric of fear and the power
other than profit and consumption.
of its "affective energy" circulate and
function in global capitalism. The con-
tinual production of fear in the current political economy, sh
a politically consequential force that compels people to act urg
see myopically, without examination of larger questions that m
strategies for fundamental, meaningful change:

Eschewing the economic as well as the systemic, both the interp

productive discourses of fear tend to highlight localized political a
differences as either the cause of dangerous situations or the site
tion. In the process, these discourses ensure the capitalist status quo
to take account of broader rhetorical and political economic situ

Rhetorics of fear and crisis have their own operative, conseque

in neoliberalism, and among their effects is the dissolution of
that have been formed around values and goals other than prof
sumption. As Naomi Klein describes in The Shock Doctrine , fea
have actually been used quite deliberately as strategies for neo
nomic reorganization on local and national scales. When compo
identify crises within our own scholarly discourse and leave u
the broader political economic terms of our professional work a
spheres of influence, we diminish our own relevance.
In part because cyclical crises have been mainstays of moder
capitalist economics, political economic analysis offers framew

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 SCOTT / SUBVERTING CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

finding pathways to alternatives to crisis. In the classicall

of Western liberal governance, capitalist economies cycle
of normalcy in which there is reasonable confidence in the
of the economy and general efficacy and justness of the so
that surround it. In the modern liberal ideal, when econom
cessions or depressions, publics enter into periods of dou
to crisis - with the crisis being a deviation from establish
relative stability. During crises, possibilities open for mo
radical critiques of fundamental societal structures an
(Boltanski; Davies 149-50; Brown, Edgework 18-20). These p
doubt, and critique are procedurally deliberated in proces
and the eventual formation of a consensus narrative that
ture of problems and how they might be addressed and pe
from happening again. This consensus seeks a new stas
which may closely resemble the old, or they could be a s
ture - including a changed political economic structure. S
critique, economic crisis has also been connected to de
and how they go about processes of deliberation, colle
and decision making. Crisis is perceived as having a cause
corresponding solutions.
Crisis, in this formulation, is also temporally limited.
tional period during which anxiety, questioning, and urge
in contrast to periods of stability, which is the desirable c
which deliberative responses to crisis have striven. Rheto
are integral to this cycle. Brown observes that critique is
Greek root krisis and, "in ancient Athens, krisis was a juri
identified with the art of making distinctions, an art cons
judging and rectifying an alleged disorder in or of the democ
5). Because it necessitated urgency and action in the worl
requisite critical discernment. Whether it has always bee
bringing about stability is another matter, but in liberal
linkage between crisis, deliberation, critique, and cons
has been assumed.

Neoliberal political economy compels a change in the duration and

perception of crisis itself- as it is experienced by people in our daily lives,
and as it functions politically. Within those realms that have been rel-
egated to the market, realms that have steadily expanded to include many

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 20 16

domains of human life that were not formally considered

beneficially subject to market logics, the fear and uncert
are no longer experienced as a temporally contained perio
that can and should be addressed and remedied. Rather, f
ered a necessary and desirable human quality- it circulate
what Chaput describes as a living "rhetorical energy, a pr
that connects different events throughout the overdeter
situation of global capitalism" (4). Individualized fear and
promoted and even celebrated as necessary and desirab
ficiencies, spurn competition, and promote innovation an
In order to perpetuate a culture of perpetual uncertainty,
is compelled through precarity: the elimination of social
deregulation of credit and debt, the diminishment of emp
tions, the commercial production of personal inadequacies
More generally, acceptance of the need for uncertainty n
making it seem a manageable, even reasonable state of be
are compelled to strive and compete through fear, econom
have the tools through which this uncertainty can be rend
empirical, intelligible and manageable" (Davies 149). So doi
bay more fundamental critique and change, particularly i
threats to status quo free market capitalism. This competit
thus stands in contrast to "political uncertainty," which p
lenges the very terms on which doubt can be focused and
be performed" (Davies 149). In political uncertainty, a dee
and a more radical critique of, systemic assumptions and
principles are effected. Because neoliberalism "disenchant
economics," questions about foundational economic policie
can seem primarily mathematical and apolitical. In contras
uncertainty comes the possibility of more fundamental t
including the imagination of alternatives to neoliberal rela
tion and subjectivities.
Much postsecondary composition education now fun
petual responsivity to flux, precarity, and intervention -
conditions that compel the myopic perspective and rel
tinual tactical compromises of neoliberalisms technocr
Composition scholarship can often seem far removed from
production- the institutional spaces and immediate social

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 SCOTT / SUBVERTING CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

relations that sustain it. Subverting

Composition doescom-
need disruptive new
position's crisis will mean transcending
ideas, and those ideas can be fundamen-
the field s tendency to unsee tally relationships
transforming when they engage
and dissonances between research and
composition work at the ground-level
the material labors of administration
political economies where it is actually
and pedagogy. Composition does need
being performed.
disruptive new ideas, and those ideas can
be fundamentally transforming when they engage composition work at
the ground-level political economies where it is actually being performed.

Living in the Interstice

Unsettling the hegemony of capitalism involves opening up conceptual,

discursive, affective, and political spaces for enlarging our economic and
political imaginary. It requires exploring also what circulating forms and
norms of surplus appropriation the formalistic preoccupation with neoliberal
economics wants to obscure. I think it is critical that we pay close attention to
the ways in which neoliberalism is not just a mode of economic management
and corporate governance, but rather, and even more significantly, a "political
rationality" (in concurrence with Wendy Brown) or a matrix of intelligibility
that works to replace the political with technocratic, corporate, post-political
governance. (Athena Athanasiou, in Butler and Athanasiou 40)

I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city" (Mieville 312).

To extend Brown and Athansiou's arguments for unsettling the political

rationality, neoliberal capitalism might involve responding to crisis though
channeling fear toward an economic and political imaginary that is capable
of envisioning fundamental changes that lead beyond responsivity and the
entrepreneurial subjectivity of academic homo oeconomicus. Composition-
ists are opening up new ways of seeing and doing through focusing more
intellectual energy on critical understanding and struggle against the
marketization of writing education, finding ways to close the gap between
theory and enactment.
Often this form of committed activism looks decidedly unromantic.
For instance, plagiarism software detection is now a huge and growing
globed business, and software companies are rapidly producing and mar-
keting products- Turnitin, Copyscape, Plagiarism Detect, Urkund, Com-
pilado, and Plagware just to name a few. The use of plagiarism and other
curricular software aligns with broader trends of market encroachment

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 201 6

into higher education, and the rationalization of human

technologies of economization. Turnitin, which has beco
giant with a global reach, offers not only plagiarism softwa
of other products, including teacher professional develop
assessment software, which is advertised as a means of
efficiency, and consistency of practices. Meanwhile, res
tion raises serious questions about the effectiveness, val
consequences of instructional and assessment software (
Herrington and Moran; Herrington and Stanley; Hess
University of Texas Center for Skills and Experience, w
teaching of the schools core requirements, recently issu
caution about the shortcomings of plagiarism detection s
of problems with accuracy, legal and professional ethics
effects on student learning (University of Texas). The sta
statements on plagiarism detection software issued b
on College Composition and Communication and the Cou
Program Administrators that likewise warn of its limitat
sional statements are built on decades of research that fo
on plagiarism in writing (see Howard and Watson), but al
on disciplinary consensus on best practices in literacy a
have manifested in those professional standards.
Statements like that issued by the University of Tex
backed by and resonate with the language of CCCC a
ments, might be seen as isolated happenings and relatio
a singular issue in the field, or they might be more expl
within the larger frame of neoliberalization and aligned
of purposeful professional activism. More empirical wor
efficacy of these products and their effects on pedagog
needed, though, is a robust political economic theory in
connects important work at particular institutional site
of the whole, to enable critical discussions of such quest
what assumptions about work in higher education are c
and distance learning initiatives responding and what are
What ideas about authorship, agency, language, learning,
are embedded within plagiarism detection software? Ho
investments in curricular software position research in w
to pedagogical techniques and goals?

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 SCOTT / SUBVERTING CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

We might also link pedagogical theory more explicitly

tional settings through which it would need to be mediat
influence in actual application. The argument that Elizabe
Doug Downs make for their version of Writing about Wr
pedagogy doesn't just make the case for how the pedagog
the fields research; they also envision the pedagogy as a po
addressing the exploitation and related lack of professiona
status of many composition teachers. In an article in Comp
Wardle argues that in order to teach using a WAW approa
be informed by the relevant research, and
Wardle and
acquiring the necessary expertise Downs propose a pe
in the
research requires institutional investment
cal model that is explicitly attun
in teachers. When teachers
the have expert
material learning environme
knowledge, stability, and professional
including the terms of teacher lab
status, Wardle argues, there is no
that areneed for for its adoptio
requisite
a technocratized program with required
standard materials, and teachers "can be engaged and rew
colleagues, rather than labor to be managed' ("Intractable
Downs are critically acting in response to the economizatio
cation through insisting that the success of a research-inf
is contingent upon the support of expert teachers with le
sional status who aren't being relegated to the role of tec
a scalable, standardized curricular model. Leaving aside
scholarly debates about the philosophy of WAW, this ped
ship attempts to highlight and actively address the neces
between terms of labor for teachers and the viability of re
writing education. Wardle and Downs propose a pedago
is explicitly attuned to the material learning environmen
terms of teacher labor, that are requisite for its adoption.
A recent collection by David Martins on transnational w
administration offers examples of how important it is to
people who are engaging writing education at the granular
teaching and administration. In the introduction, Martin
WPA trying to work through how to help make the program
Institute of Technology more transnational, he faced many
economic challenges. As Martins describes it, he was "work
not of [his] own making, conditions which seemed increas

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 201 6

more by economic interests (e.g., potential revenue and r

than educational ones (e.g., student learning and faculty e
Accreditation and assessment in the United States is incr
outsourced to other countries, and the creation of infrastru
education will likewise facilitate the global outsourcing of
leges and universities are quickly establishing brick and m
branch campuses. US classes are now more multicultural a
than ever, and the education industry is producing and ma
that export US-produced writing curriculums. Global neoli
transnational writing education are deeply intertwined.
Many of the chapters in this collection by Martins trac
both promising and troubling happenings within rapidly
and they help readers make sense of how particular elem
tion learning and teaching environments relate to globally
settings that are explicitly political and economic. For ex
transnational feminist analytical frame, Rebecca Dingo, R
and Jennifer Wingard present an account of an instance in
tor of business law and ethics at the University of Housto
grading of her students' writing using a company called E
based in Washington, DC, and employs graders from Bangl
and India. The chapter strives toward robust contextualiz
how factors like academic labor, global outsourcing, and in
agreements relate to this decision and the infrastructure th
ble. The goal is not just mapping, though; it is explicitly activ
"to analyze and intervene in uncritical labor and pedagogica
global university, recognize the impact and reach of global
view this global reach as a site of political intervention"
that examines standardized English practices in two-year
Olson theorizes transnational composition as "a social/m
. . . shaped by materiality, history and possibility" (304). De
program administration as "both an apparatus and an age
she blurs the distinction between theorizing and doing at
In another chapter, Doreen Starke-Meyerring locates poli
struggle in composition in how "learning environments [
what kind of learning they will facilitate, who gets to pa
learning with/ from whom, and whose knowledge counts"
her experiences with teaching in globally networked learni
she describes the "cross-boundary knowledge making"

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 SCOTT / SUBVERTING CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

when mutually invested relationships are developed betw

teachers, and students. New understandings of learning a
emerge from these co-constructed learning environments
sionals have authority and agency. Pedagogy, in this model
and context-sensitive, and the focus on learning environ
the degree to which learning at particular sites is inextr
with political economic imperatives constructed by cultu
assumptions and prerogatives. Rather than stopping at pr
gogy with a specific theoretical or ideological blueprint,
ideologically aware intervention into the structure and t
environments at the center of the pedagogical philosophy

In The City and the City , living in compartmentalized c

a continual sense of anxiety among the novels characters
happen outside of a framework of understanding that is ad
what they see and unsee in their daily lives. The main charac
by the end of the novel to "live in the interstice," a con
enables him to see both cities together as a richly compl
neoliberalization of composition does not happen through
ments that are more persuasive than their counterargum
operationally through the transformation of learning en
the terms of labor of the people who work within them. E
therefore involves being in positions that
The goal
enable us to understand with theof intellectual
help ofwork is a
better
robust disciplinary frames world provide
that in which crises signal the
models for intervention at the level of need to transform rather than becom-

practice. Innovative, activist, potentially

ing a permanent way of being.
transformative work is happening in writ-
ing education that is "in the interstice" between theory and practice: work
that is striving to be global and imaginative in its consciousness and opera-
tional in its focus. This work might be more at the forefront of disciplinary
work in composition that both imagines new pedagogies and also explores
and actively pursues the creation of the just, ethical work and learning
environments that would need to be in place for them to be realized. The
goal of intellectual work is a better world in which crises signal the need to
transform rather than becoming a permanent way of being.

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 CCC 68:1 / SEPTEMBER 201 6

Acknowledgments
I would very much like to thank Nancy Welch: our work togethe
cent projects substantially formed the basis of my thinking in t
also like to thank my anonymous reviewers and Lil Brannon f
and engaged feedback they gave me.

Notes

1. Since 1991, a phase of continued enrollment growth has been paralleled by

steady reductions in state funding per full-time student. The result has been
a massive shift in the economics of higher education. In 1987, tuition and fees
were required to cover only 23 percent of costs at public institutions, but by
2012, that number had doubled to 47 percent (State Higher Education 22). By
2010, for the first time, "net tuition brought in more revenue than did state and
local appropriations at the average public research and master s institutions"
(Desrochers and Kirshstein 1).
2. See Slaughter and Rhoades for an extensive description of academic entre-
preneurialism.
3. See also Keith Rhodes for a discussion of marketization and branding.

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Norbert Eliot and Les Perelman. New ing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed.
Richard Bullock and John Trimbur.
York: Hampton P, 2012. 425-37. Print.
Portsmouth: Boynton Cook, 1991.
Rhodes, Keith. "You Are What You Sell: 277-95. Print.

Branding Your Way to Compositions

University of Texas at Austin Center
Better Future." Writing Program Ad-
for the Skills and Experience Flags.
ministration 33.3 (2010): 58-77. Print.
"Statement on Plagiarism Detection
Scott, Tony. "Animated by the Entrepre- Software." Web. 24 June 2015.
neurial Spirit: Austerity, Disposses-
Wardle, Elizabeth. "Considering What It
sion, and Compositions Last Living
Act." Welch and Scott 205-19. Means to Teach 'Composition in the
Twenty-First Century." College Compo-
Scott, Tony, and Nancy Welch. "Intro- sition and Communication 65.4 (2014):
duction: Composition in the Age of 659-71. Print.

Austerity." Welch and Scott 3-17.

Simon, Stephanie. "No Profit Left Be- Problems, Kairos, and Writing ab
hind." Politico 10 Feb. 2015. Web. 10 Writing: A Profile of the University
Nov. 2015. Central Florida's First-Year Compo
tion Program." Composition Forum
Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. (2013). Web. 2 Feb. 2015.
Academic Capitalism and the New
Economy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Wardle, Elizabeth, and Doug Down
UP, 2004. Print. "Teaching about Writing, Righting
Misconceptions: Re-envisioning
Starke-Meyerring, Doreen. "From 'Edu-
'First-Year Composition as 'Writin
cating the Other to Cross-Boundary Studies.'" College Composition and
Knowledge-Making: Globally Communication 58.4 (2007): 552-8
Networked Learning Environments Print.
as Critical Sites of Writing Program
Administration." Martins. 307-31. Welch, Nancy, and Tony Scott, eds.
position in the Age of Austerity. Lo
State Higher Education Executive Offi- Utah State UP, 2016. Print.
cers. "State Higher Education Finance,

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 SCOTT / SUBVERTING CRISIS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

Tony Scott
Tony Scott is associate professor in the Writing Program at Sy
where he is also director of Introductory Writing. His sch
Dangerous Writing: Understanding the Political Economy of C
State UP 2009) and the coedited collections Tenured Bosse
Teachers : Writing Instruction in the Managed University ( So
2004) and Composition in the Age of Austerity (Utah State UP
and coauthor Lil Brannon won the Richard Braddock award
Struggle, and the Praxis of Assessment" (CCC).

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