Questions: Use and Exchange

I write differently when it doesn’t have to be true. Maybe that’s a lesson for the dissertation. That last post, the American Tarot thing, is something I’ve had pieces of hanging around the hard drive in various forms since my MFA days. Not quite a story, not quite anything; never knew what to do with the pieces. But I write differently: the language simultaneously more and less self-conscious, less necessarily attached to me as a person with thoughts, ideas, an agenda. Speaking through a carnival mask, which is why Wealth Bondage came to mind. It’s a nice change from my usual self-halting stumbles and rationalizations and equivocations. I notice, also, that it’s easier for me to write when I’m channeling someone else, which is why the sayback of Donna’s feedback felt like it worked so well. Metafilter does Flash Friday and other folks do the Friday Five; maybe I’ll have myself a Fiction Friday. (I really want to make that last one into three Fs, but I know I’ll later regret the language. Perhaps — thinking of masks again — this weblog needs a potty-mouthed alter ego, to say the things I feel I can’t. Perhaps, but not yet.)

In any case: in talking about Donna’s feedback, I noted that she offered me some questions for future research. They follow, as well as some thoughts about the use and exchange value of writing, and whether I ought to continue to construct this weblog as a research weblog.

Donna asked: How might I use Habermasian concepts of communicative and instrumental rationality in order to help me see the ways wired writing need not necessarily be linked solely to purposes of exchange in the classroom? I haven’t read the book in question yet, of course, but from what I understand, instrumental rationality involves using things for a particular purpose or end, while communicative rationality is tied more to participation and the needs of the community. (Those who have read more than this soul, correct me please?) In which case, the exchange value of writing — the student doing it in order to receive a grade from the teacher, in order to be a better writer for other college courses — would seem to be on the instrumental side, whereas John Schilb’s use of the notion of the circulation of writing, influenced by Marx’s Grundrisse, might align more effectively with communicative rationality. How can writing have use value, in and of itself?

Donna observed that the ‘old’ models of pedagogy in the field of computers and composition focused on teachers using technology to enact process pedagogies of writing in order that students might learn to use technology more effectively while they learned to write more effectively, while ‘newer’ models understood technology as contributing to a classroom space bounded by additional relations of power stemming from the computer. Donna asked: How might I try to see technology itself as dynamically interacting with the power relations in the classroom, rather than just helping to create the space for those power relations to exist? It’s a tough question, and I’m not sure if I even understand it entirely or paraphrased it correctly. I think this may have been what I tried and failed to get at with my examination of fisking; failed, I think, largely because I was looking at technology and intention as entirely independent variables.

Donna observed that I seem to be taking a fairly structural approach in my readings (and added that this may be entirely due to all the economics content) in looking at how all these hierarchies impinge on the student rather than on how the student negotiates various class identities through the concentric circles of all these hierarchies. Donna asked: How might I see the economies of the wired writing classroom as defining the relational context in which Bourdieu’s relational classes operate? I asked this already in an earlier post, and the question feels to me like the one that’s currently most shaping my perspectives.

Finally, Donna asked the ‘So What?’ question Charlie asked as well: How will my analysis of writing economies help pedagogy? Furthermore: How might my answers depend on whether I ask, “What does pedagogy do?” or whether I ask, “What could pedagogy do?” and do I need an additional question mark?

Time for my questions, I suppose. Why should I include the above questions here? If this is a research or dissertation weblog, like that of Erin Karper, why not construct them as musings, as “I need to…” recommendations to myself?

Yeah, they’re pretty much rhetorical questions. Here’s a circuitous answer: when I uttered my angry little non serviam a few weeks ago, I was reacting to the construction of first-year composition as an service course, as a course with no content save for its value to students in future courses: a course, in short, that offered nothing but exchange value, and in such a sense, commodified writing. Constructing this weblog as a ‘research weblog’, as solely serving the degree I hope to earn, does the same thing: it says that the value of what I write here is only exchange value, never use value. It’s a commodity. Which I don’t think is true, and which I don’t want to be true. I put the American Tarot thing there partly in the hope that it might entertain you, Reader; in the hope that it might be an enjoyable change from all this stuff about use and exchange value, about socioeconomic class and computers as agents of commodification and inadequately theorized pedagogies. And also because I enjoyed working on it, tinkering, revising, making the style consistent, double-checking details, tweaking trochees and spondees, making it fit: use value.

This weblog, I hope, serves several interests. I enjoy watching the play of masks at Wealth Bondage, and the way those who comment play with the masks, always able to walk away. The same holds true for what Jill Walker does, and what the Invisible Adjunct does, among others: they serve ends other than their own, which seems to me to be a crude and inchoate start on a definition of the intersection between use value and communicative rationality. I might wish the same for these faults, sins, abuses.