#3. From Post-Fordism to AI: Rethinking James Berlin’s Vision for Writing Instruction

Last quarter, while conducting research for a seminar paper on the New Abolitionism, I came across the 1996 book Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change, which collects twenty three papers presented at the eponymous Conference on Composition in the 21st Century in 1993. The book includes a history by Robert Connors that traces abolitionist impulses in composition studies back to the first writing requirement at Harvard University in the 19th century. Through some querying on CompPile, I discovered that Connors' piece was published a second time in the 1995 book Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, so for good measure, I also decided to check out this book to see if there were any differences between the two versions. Upon procuring both books, I learned that Reconceiving Writing contained an updated version of Connors' paper, which I decided to use for my own seminar paper.

The title page of the collection. 

While no longer needed for the immediate task at hand, I was still very intrigued by the contents of Composition in the Twenty-First Century. The book is organized into eight sections (which correspond to the panel presentations at the conference), each centered on a question related to the future of composition studies as a field. Some examples of these questions are included below (p. vii-viii): 

"What Is Composition and Why Do We Teach It?"

"What Issues Will Writing Program Administrators Confront in the 21st Century?" 

"What Direction Will Research in Composition Take and How Will Research Affect Teaching?

To my further delight, the panel speakers / authors engaging with these questions include many former superstars of the field: David Bartholomae, Sharon Crowley, Peter Elbow, John Trimbur, Stephen North, James Berlin, Linda Flower, Andrea Lunsford, as well as others. What could be more relevant to the theme of this blog than an early 1990s academic conference full of compositionists dooming about the turn of the century? Briefly looking over the papers in the collection, the authors are mostly thinking about the present situation in the early 1990s and how these circumstances might inform potential directions for the field. While I would wager that all of the papers in this collection are worth a retrospective, since I am limited in the time that I can spend working on this blog, I ultimately decided to write about James Berlin's paper, titled "English Studies, Work, and Politics in the New Economy," for two important reasons: 1) Berlin's paper is about the role that college writing instruction plays in greater society, particularly in preparing students for the job market. Considering the rise of AI writing tools in academic contexts, along with the growing dread that these tools will replace humans, perhaps Berlin has some wisdom for us to learn from thirty years later. 2) The collection is dedicated to the memory of James Berlin, who passed away sometime after the conference and before the publication of this collection. I am a big James Berlin fan, and I love his history Rhetoric and Reality, so perhaps this post can serve as my own tribute to Berlin, who impressed the field greatly before his passing.

Here is a quick summary of the paper: Berlin starts with some facts that sound just as relevant today as they probably were back then: While more students are graduating with university degrees, the unemployment rate is higher than ever before. Not only this, but Berlin laments that universities are not providing adequate preparation for the contemporary job market. Implicating the prevailing economic and political conditions, Berlin observes that the economy is in the midst of shifting from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy. Whereas a Fordist economy is characterized by factory workers and standardized procedures, with managers respecting the will of organized labor, the post-Fordist vision that Berlin illustrates is much more fraught. Globalization and the removal of corporations and manufacturing from American industrial centers have led to a destabilization of the social order: This shift has led to a more transient workforce with less and less desirable managerial positions. While the work itself was previously standardized and predictable, Berlin writes that within the new status quo, workers need to be adaptable and adept at collaboration and communication. 

The collection is dedicated to Berlin.

Berlin highlights the problem of scarcity that characterizes this new model. While college degrees were less common when the Fordist model dominated, this meant that there wasn't as much competition for the desired managerial positions. Within the current post-Fordist model, while college degrees were more common, managerial positions are more scarce. Berlin concludes with two suggestions for what the field can do to confront these circumstances. First, with a more accommodationist affect, Berlin acknowledges that the field of composition studies is capable of meeting the moment and argues that writing instructors should make it their mission to prepare students for the idiosyncrasies of the new economic landscape. Second, while Berlin doesn't explicitly state that writing instructors should use their classrooms as activist spaces to organize resistance against an imbalanced post-Fordist economy, he seems to be subtly advocating for an awareness of the dangers of such a system, as he argues that the field, along with preparing students for the workforce, should continue to inculcate virtues of democracy and citizenship within students so that they can better shape and influence the impacts of these larger political and economic forces. 

Mark Fisher, who also wrote about the Fordist / post-Fordist shift in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, comes to a wholly different conclusion than Berlin. Fisher's concept of capitalist realism refers to a resigned acceptance of capitalism as a domineering and inescapable force that oversees human relations. While modernists in the 20th century genuinely believed that labor organizing and Marxist political movements could effectively resist the forces of capitalism, Fisher argues that in a postmodern world, these traditional forms of resistance have become passé. Within this vein, Fisher might say that the sincerity of Berlin's call to action is ultimately confronting postmodern problems with modernist solutions. 

What other ideas do we have though? As a postpostmodern compositionist, Berlin's sincerity resonates with me. I don't think that what he is saying is rocket science, and I would bet that the majority of writing instructors, both then and today, still have it as their mission to prepare students for the workforce and the citizenry. In 2026, as we move beyond the post-Fordist economy and into a new, AI-driven phase of economic life, I will make the bold claim that writing instructors should continue to prepare students for the changing nature of work. In his article, Berlin makes a rather quaint reference to a course model being implemented by Lester Faigley (I personally love Faigley's 1986 history on process pedagogies), in which all of the writing for the course is conducted through a "network computer system," where students learn "the difficulties of communicating exclusively through electronically produced texts" (p. 222). While I imagine this format was probably pretty progressive back then, this basically describes the current norm of writing instructors conducting their courses through Canvas (Perhaps I could dedicate some blog posts to articles that depict the early forays of the field into computer technologies). At the same time, I would argue that Berlin is right to celebrate this innovation, and in the event that AI technologies create opportunities for new jobs, we as writing instructors should be preparing students for these jobs.

What happens in the hypothetical scenario where AI replaces many forms of (or all) work? I am not in the business of making predications, but regardless of whether this happens, I would say that the second part of Berlin's advice still stands. Writing instructors (if we are not replaced by robots or chatbots) should still be trying to educate students to be involved citizens who have a stake in our rapidly changing society. Depending on how extreme the societal changes are, perhaps this mission will take precedence as the main purpose of education. Everything is quite precarious, existential, and unstable, but I think we are going to keep doing what Berlin said we should do. 

References

Berlin, J. A. (1996). English studies, work, and politics in the new economy. In L. Z. Bloom, D. A. Daiker, & E. M. White (Eds.), Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change (pp. 215-226). Southern Illinois University Press.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.