While my grandfather took part in WPA road construction (before entering the War), he had nothing to do with the arts side of the WPA this site's posters depict. I'm arbitrarily drawn to this poster (the rule of thumb in digital invention, follow the avant-garde practice of "accident"; I don’t know why I arrived here, but I will use it anyway):
It’s an example of the WPA attempting to institutionalize morality and daily habits. It's not unlike the initial (and continuing) goal of literacy acquisition whose roots are in Christian morality. Reading and writing will provide moral individuals (as Graff writes).
Then there is this one:
The promise of order (following the rules/learning to live as a citizen) also is intertwined in literacy's origins. We still cling to the idea of either servicing the university by producing these ordered beings or we service the nation as well (literate beings will maintain a democracy). The language we desire must be "ordered," "safe," clear, and coherent. Ordered thought produces ordered beings. Out of order will come justice, equality, fairness, etc. There is little proof of this, but it is still a common trope in the field used to justify our teaching.
Yet I think about my own grandfather working the highways as anything but ordered. Later in life, yes, but for other kinds of reasons. As a high school drop-out hitchhiking across America, earning what he could in a public works program, going off to war for five years, coming back to an America which wouldn't let him rent a room in Missouri because of his religion, where is the order?
That story in itself is not unique, and oddly enough, also serves many literacy narratives like those published by Deborah Brandt and Mike Rose. The narratives these writers tell almost always end in order, though. The racial/economic/gendered barriers Americans face are overcome by literacy acquisition (the WPA-L model).
Not really so. The story I want to tell doesn’t end that way.
So what does this have to do with digital invention? I use the puncept to provoke a series of questions not about equality and religion and World War II America (the question, i.e., of referentiality and eventually cultural studies). No. I read the WPA-L through this puncept and question its (i.e. composition studies) dependence on "order" as a governing principle of methodology and pedagogy.
More later.
