Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
3. "according to c.b. macpherson, 'possessive individualism' is the seventeenth-centruy view that the right to possession is the keystone to human freedom. the individual is a free agent in the economic and political market place, able to enter into relations where he or she wills, capable of making his or her own decisions, sole authority for the exchange of goods that he or she produces. in this scheme, the individual possesses natural rights to liberty, privacy, self-development and self-reliance, as well as social and self-responsibility, because he or she possesses property and goods. to put this another way, just as possession is the soruce of privilege, privilege is the result of possession. failure to own is a mark of disgrace, of a lack of initiative, a reason for being powerless and subjugated." of course, the 17th-cent. is over: "in late-capitalist market places, individuals are not self-determined; they are controlled by capital relations to which most never gain access"; nonetheless "the theory of possessive individualism and the liberal democratic ideals it sanctions do not seem to be in danger of being reputed"
4. the terms of the product/process debate "have hindered useful, even necessary, discussion because, as any comprehensive survey of composition texts and theories will demosntrate, one person's product' approach to writing instruction is another person's 'process' approach";
5. even more important than their definitions & their differences are their similarities, esp. "their mutual reliance on the theory [of] possessive individualism": in the product approach, "students are conceived of as individual interpreters and creators of discourse" & "the relative success or failure of their writing is their affair. after all, they are the ones who must decide [to] apply themselves and 'fix' their errors for they are always obliged to 'own' the grades that they…'get.'" & "grades are more than mere statements of student performance, they are also harbingers of future economic success….and because ownership is linked to honor or disgrace in the ideology of possessive individualism, grades imply the extent to which students are deserving of the rights shared by all market-participating individuals. the fact is that grades are currently, however much educators profess otherwise, statements about the worth of individual students"
6. particularly in product classrooms, "grades…are based not on what students have written, but on a subjective assessment of how they have written it. this form of assessment…affronts a student's dignity as a maker of meaning because their relationship to the meaning that they make is undermined, resulting in alienation and statements like 'i can't write'"; process theories, alternately, "because they seek to authorize students to be writers…do much to restore the dignity of students by automatically inviting them to join as equal members, or at least pretending to do so, of the discourse community of the composition classroom"—yet still "with its entailed neo-kantian, romantic views of the individuality of writers, its conception of the solitary nature of the composing pfocess, and with its valorization of privacy and self-expression, the 'process' approach conceives, like the 'product' approach, though for different reasons, of students as individual creators of discourse" who "are responsible for the texts they make"
7-8. & the grades still arrive & mark students' worth. he doesn't advocate anarchy as a solution, "but we may still productively ask ourselves what sort of social order it is that we are seeking to advance," as currently "our curricula support the promise of upward mobility for possessive individualists at a time when economic realities suggest that upward mobility is a myth and possessive individualism is valid for early, not late, capitalistic societies": or, in other words, get real: "we are currently beginning to recognize how meaning is produced in social, rather than individual, processes, yet as they are currently constructed, our composition curricula seem to protect the individual right to possess meaning. this incongruity leads me to believe that without an understanding of how our rhetorics reflect economic ideologies, we may never know what we are helping our students to achieve"