Industrial Revolution revisited

Given the amount of attention we paid to the invention of the printing press over the last two weeks, I have to say I am a bit taken aback by the lack of attention the Industrial Revolution receives in A Short History of Writing Instruction. Yes, I know the printing press was mainly discussed by Eisenstein’s book and far less by The Rhetorical Tradition and SHWI. That said, I have to employ Jameson’s idea of the political unconscious here—a move that examines the social, political and historical forces at play during this revolution. While there is no direct causal relationship in this revolution, the relationship between the materiality and society is far more complicated than described by SHWI.

            In the Short History the Industrial Revolution is most noted for making the materiality of literacy really cheap. The authors also note that the classrooms of the Industrial Revolution “asked students to demonstrate original contributions” (217). I have to take issue with this. Last spring I read Collins and Halverson’s Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology that examined the effect of the Industrial Revolution on classrooms in far more detail. The direct effect of the Industrial Revolution on the school system according to Halverson and Collins is that universal schooling became a thing—a notion not altogether foreign in this week’s readings (54-60). But more important than universal schooling is that the school system reflected the mechanization of society. (i.e We have students at their stations/desks performing tasks from rote memory a la the factory laborer.) The point of view afforded in Murphy’s book seems to gloss over the implications of the capitalist mentality that (yes, according to Fred Jameson) is symptomatic of the twentieth century. (And, in a separate argument I may posit that it is overlooked because Murphy & Co. are too invested in the capitalistic university system.)

            While I don’t see the effect of the Industrial Revolution stated outright in this week’s readings, I do see the implications manifesting elsewhere. Gold, Hobbs, and Berlin note the rise of Current-Traditional Rhetoric and its lack of attention to invention, and concern with style and arrangement “with instruction emphasizing the modes of discourse, clarity, and correctness” (237).  Like the mechanization described by Halverson and Collins, the Industrial Revolution takes writing from the more artful (something reclaimed by the expressivists in the 60s and 70s) to what Gold et al call “more objective scientific rhetoric” (237). This sort of divide between the perspicuity of Blair and the belletristic rhetorics and the romantic expressivists also creates class. In the former we have a working class—an industrialized workforce to produce the mechanized prose—while in the latter we have an artful class endowed with the gift of writing as an art form. I do not see them as one or the other—or as two competing schools of thought cropping up out of two distinct time periods. History is too interlinked and fluid for that. Rather, the revolutions work together through the unconscious to create what would ultimately plague the university system for the rest of the century—class conflict.