A Cultural Studies-Critical Pedagogy Tag Team

To be honest, Lindquist’s article was probably the most challenging of all for me—mostly because I found the first 13+ pages problematic at best (and unnecessary and irrelevant, at worst) and because—probably due to my own poor understanding of her analysis—it appeared to me that she missing the big picture when it came to cultural studies and its possible use within a critical pedagogy.

Muksian-Schutt seemingly validates a cultural studies approach, and her engagement of it is refreshing. She recalls how when examining Pat Bizzell's model of contact zones, she was "intrigued by the use of multiple forms of 'text' as a way to help students access their positions" and that "It seemed only logical that since art forms such as musical lyrics impact students, using these art forms in an argument class might provide students with the tools to study and express their positions and perhaps even to understand their positions better, 340). Muksian-Schutt uses lyrics from The Boss’ “Nebraska” in her piece, and I’ll use a few lines from arguably one of the best lyricists of all time, Jarvis Cocker, frontman for arguably one of the most underrated bands of all time, Pulp, to vent my frustration here. Pulp’s biggest hit (#2 on the UK charts) was a song called “Common People” (William Shatner does a cover of it for his album _Has-Been_, for those playing at home).

The song’s persona meets a fellow art student at university; she comes from a wealthy family but she “wants to live like common people"--she finds glamour in poverty (this is sometimes referred to as “class tourism”). The chorus of the song is:

“Rent a flat above a shop
Cut your hair and get a job
Smoke some fags and play some pool
Pretend you never went to school
But still you'll never get it right
`cos when you're laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all (yeah)

You'll never live like common people
You'll never do whatever common people do
You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view

And then dance, and drink, and screw
Because there's nothing else to do”

Did anyone else get the impression that this was the kind of life that Lindquist led as a *grad student*, tending bar at a *restaurant* in a *suburb* of Chicago? She sets herself up as being from the area and identifies herself as “working class”--and this “authenticity” is crucial for her, in a way, until 15 pages later when she pulls the rug out from under herself and admits it’s “bullshit." I wouldn't care either way, really, except that the tone she strikes toward the "working class" throughout the piece--one I would refer to as mildly disdainful--belies both her self-representaion (even if *some* of the "regulars" picked fights--and it seemed to me like it was more like teasing) *and* her conclusions. But first, the set-up. On page 170 she says, “As a teenager growing up in a blue-collar neighborhood, I experienced bars as an important rite of passage from childhood to adulthood—one that has a functional parallel, I would venture, the passage undertaken by young middle-class adults first going ‘away’ to college. My experience, while perhaps not universal, is far from unique.”

She’s right—her experience was neither universal nor unique. I had a very similar experience, myself—minus the great bartending gig at a restaurant in a suburb of one of the wealthiest cities in the country. I’m a first generation college student. I came up in a pretty much all-black neighborhood (did any one else notice that Lindquist’s “working class” seems to be all white? I mean, she comes out and says it at a couple of points--but usually she just uses "working class," unqualified). My moms were both factory workers. They frequented a bar, pretty much nightly—and so I often frequented that bar when I was younger (a real dump--no restaurant attached) a few nights during any given week—but not to tend bar, just to have a place that was relatively warm and well-lit enough for me to read and do my homework. I think I have a pretty good idea of what constitutes any approximation of a “working class” in the U.S. (a problematic formulation, by Lindquist’s own admission). I gotta say—I don’t think she’s representing it. It’s way too multifaceted, too complex, for any one to speak of accurately using the homogenizing, reductionist language that she does. Class in this country is bound up with issues of race, gender, political affiliation, regional identity (urban vs. rural), industry, and so on. To gloss over these differences is to miss a big part of the conversation, and the problem is that her whole piece basically rests on this construction (even though she claims several times that she knows there is no such thing). At other moments, she seems to concede that what she's really talking about is what I'd be more apt to refer to as political affiliation and cultural identity (that's different than class). She talks about these students' "apparent political conservatism" (184) and the piece is peppered with references to "red necks," even if she puts the words in other speakers' mouths.

Lindquist's overall project, in my opinion, (eventually) relates back to seeing the *classroom* as a kind of contact zone, which connects her back, of course, to Muksian-Schutt (and Pratt), Shen and Bean (for reasons I discussed in my last post a couple days ago). After spending 13+ pages of (faux-) “ethnography” establishing a false dichotomy between a monolithic (all white, all suburban, all conservative, all "redneck") "working class" (one that she extrapolates from an infinitesimally small sample and in a country that barely acknowledges “class” as a significant category to begin with) and what she considers to be the "middle class" university establishment (I won’t even get into that—I could write a second post as long as this one), Lindquist finally gets to what I think is the heart of the matter. On page 183, she asserts that, "The way to persuade working-class students of the value of what-if, then, is to openly acknowledge functional parallels between the rhetoric of the barroom and that of the classroom. This means that we would make the nature of institutional discourse the focus of our pedagogy, and would encourage students to think about how speculative rhetoric can be of value to them as capital, how it can be useful as currency in the marketplaces in which they wish to participate. Examining how what-if can be useful as an instrument in the academic marketplace might then invite inquiries into how much philosophical and instrumental rhetorics are differences in kind, and to what degree they suggest differences in context. The language of action and use may help to invest us with the authority to persuade students that writing has important uses even when it isn't being useful."

I like the self-reflexive idea of making “the nature of institutional discourse the focus of our pedagogy” but I’m wondering how she wants to do that. From what follows this dictum, it looks like she’s saying that we have to bring the classroom situation into stasis (“openly acknowledge functional parallels between the rhetoric of the barroom and that of the classroom”) and/or we have to learn from Rogerian argument and be able to have a meaningful dialogue with these students. One we’ve accomplished that, we have to demonstrate for them that reading, writing, and thinking critically has use-value for them now as students and then after they leave college for whatever career they pursue (“encourage students to think about how speculative rhetoric can be of value to them as capital, how it can be useful as currency in the marketplaces in which they wish to participate”). This is all along the same lines that Rebekah Nathan discusses in the excerpt I posted last week. So, I guess that, without the consideration of class (which I think Lindquist fails at doing), I don’t see anything too revolutionary here. She doesn’t have much to say about how to persuade “working class” students, just vague generalities, some quotes from others and the use of her concept of “what-if” way too often. Sub sole nihil novi est.

What's really frustrating about Lindquist’s conclusion here, though, is that immediately before it and immediately after it, she *does* touch on a possible way to enact a solution. On the way to getting there, however, I’d like to mention Leta’s citation of the question Virginia Anderson asks towards the end, and what Leta has to say in response to it. Anderson questions if activist teachers don’t find solidarity in their own (opposing) radical stance rather than with their students, so in other words the students are constructed as “Other,” and in a pretty decent approximation of Hegel’s Master-Slave relationship. Setting aside my resistance to the presumption behind the question itself and the conclusions Lindquist herself draws from it for a moment, I’d actually like to instead turn to Leta’s question, one she posits in response to what she sees as Anderson’s “warning”: “Can I teach writing in a non-classist way, realizing that not everyone participates in my academic mindset, valuing learning for its own sake, and that it is alright that they don’t?”

This brings me back to what I see as a solution—both to Lindquist’s call to “encourage students to think about how [rhetoric] can be useful as currency…” and to Leta’s concern about having a “classist” attitude towards teaching writing. In my opinion, Lindquist herself uncovers a possible solution when she recounts how students in another teacher’s class “upon being asked for their responses to essays critical of popular culture forms for an advanced composition course, were more interested in figuring out what the critics stood to gain in their rhetorical performances than they were in evaluating the validity of the critiques themselves… [they] suspected that the critics were motivated by an urge to assert class distinction at the expense of the average, unenlightened reader” (182). So help me God, I still can’t figure out if Lindquist is bemoaning this or celebrating it. She immediately precedes this anecdote with a seeming parallel that “In making conventional symbols of middle-class capital the subject of our critical performances, we not only set ourselves in opposition to the discourse of working-class institutions but also demonstrate class privilege...” (a bad thing) and she follows the anecdote with the realization—at long last—that she constructed and over-generalized her good pal and debate buddy Walter as a “redneck”, “working class” stiff (182, ditto). A little later (184) she also says “It is certainly true that working-class students' obvious lack of (middle-class) cultural capital, combined with [again] their apparent political conservatism, may tend to frustrate and alienate teachers whose political views and teaching philosophies work together as valuable symbolic resources within the institution" (she goes on to qualify these students further as "white working-class students"--the first time she does this, as far as I can see--she characterizes the suburb and the bar regulars as all white, but this is the first time race has been used to qualify this monolithic term "working class").

It seems to me that--to borrow a phrase about Marx and Hegel--Lindquist came along and found cultural studies, right-side up, and proceeded to turn it upside-down. She talks about “Cultural studies-derived pedagogies aim[ing] to have students interrogated the material conditions of their lives, and thus to help them arrive at a fuller understanding of their own (and others’) socioeconomic predicaments” (168). Lindquist admits that she sees “this as a worthy goal [but she questions] the means, which seem not to put nearly enough energy into the enterprise of learning what is at stake (an in particular, what is at stake for working-class students) in assenting to such critiques, into figuring out what resistance to cultural-studies projects might mean” (168-9). This is the starting point for Lindquist—she wants to “look beyond the university to see what happens in institutions where working-class identities and values are publicly invented and ritually affirmed” (169). But again, take way the bar ethnography (I can’t find one lesson to extrapolate from it—other than Lindquist’s apparent self-discovery) and the monolithic working class, and that last sentence is a little thin. Instead of lamenting the students’ questioning of the critics of popular culture, why not engage those cultural artefacts themselves—or some very much like it? It takes imagination—and probably stepping outside your own “middle class” values—but doing so is what engages you in this contact zone (like Miksian-Schutt did with the song lyrics, media clips, etc.) or Third Space or what-have-you. Meet your students half-way.