Yanis Varoufakis, in Foundations of Economics, uses the Roman story of Tarquinius Superbus and the Sibyl of Cumae to argue that “information is not like other commodities”, because “you cannot know its value (not even have a good estimate of it) until you have it” (68). For an immense sum of gold, the Sibyl offers Tarquinius Superbus the nine books containing the entirety of human knowledge; Tarquinius refuses, responding that the price is too high. The Sibyl burns three of the nine books and then offers Tarquinius the remaining six for the same price. Tarquinius again refuses. The Sibyl burns three more books, and Tarquinius finally caves in, purchasing the remaining three books for the price of the original nine.
I would suggest that “information is not like other commodities” for other reasons, as well, including — of course — Walter Benjamin’s notion of reproducibility, but the unknowability of information before one has it is part of the motivational problem at the heart of education.
My good friend teaches at a high school for emotionally troubled students, and continually runs into the difficulty of convincing the students of the value of actually doing the work: often, they won’t truly know that schooling is a worthwhile thing until after they have gone through it.
This demonstrates to me some of the problems inherent in attempting to apply an economics of production — even a Marxian economics — to an understanding of how students learn to write, at least in terms of pedagogical practice. Such an economic understanding certainly still seems useful, however, in understanding how students produce texts; i.e., in understanding how they write. But in the first-year composition classroom, don’t the acts and processes of writing overlap with the acts and processes of learning writing? Isn’t it one fundamental and common tenet of our discipline that we learn by doing, and the direct method of instruction is the most easily defensible?
Part of the bind I’ve put myself into here springs from the split between material and immaterial (informational) production. My impulse is to take a step back and say that informational production is a material process, as well, but at the moment, that doesn’t help me to see a way out of the paradox.
Anyway: I’ll continue to try and work this out. Varoufakis, by the way, continues to be excellent; he’s offered several incredibly useful critiques of mainstream economics that I’ll have more to say about soon. Right now, I need to get my presentation ready for tomorrow.
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