The Sea Change

Varoufakis acknowledges the implication from Aristotle’s work “that living a successful life is more complicated than satisfying our own desires”, and contrasts it to the subsequent evolution of the “notion of a market in which one pursues profit” and its association “with the freedom to be unapologetically happy” (77). In fact, “Wanting to be happy thus emerged as a perfectly defensible philosophical ambition”, and Varoufakis explicitly connects the philosophical and economic consequences of this emergence to Thomas Hobbes and his “idea of the person as a sovereign individual” (77).

I wrote briefly on Thursday about the ways in which individualistic ideologies create problems for the study of class. I also believe that individualistic ideologies create problems for the ways I might attempt to theorize the economies of the wired writing classroom, and this is a question I need to think through further: how does the ideology of individualism (or its counterpart, which — from an etymological standpoint — one would think ought to be called “socialism” or “communism”, but both of those are rather loaded terms and not all that close to what I mean) intersect with the infinite digitial reproducibility of information goods? (Recall here the point Varoufakis makes about how information is something radically different from other commodities.)

The idea of utility maximisation — the idea that people will act in their own best interests in an environment of scarce resources — is short-circuited by infinite digital reproducibility. On the Web, texts can be made scarce only artificially, and the work of Charlie Lowe and others is showing us how we need to start reconceiving our ideas of information as the sole property of a sovereign individual. In the wired writing classroom, how do we understand information as property, or as something other than property? Who produces it, who consumes it, who owns it, and how is it exchanged and circulated?

In composition studies, and in higher education in general, I would contend that conventional notions of individual ownership fail to serve — and, in fact, directly contravene — what economists would construct as students’ maximisation of utility. MIT’s recent practices demonstrate that educators want information to burst the bounds of individual ownership, to be distributed as widely as possible. (OK, I need to ease back on this stuff a little, before I start sounding like a John Perry Barlow zealot.) The individual ownership of information for the sake of individuals’ utility maximisation points us back towards gatekeeping and hierarchizing practices, and back towards the anti-collaborative idea of the dog-eat-dog university, where instructors ask students: If you want a better grade than your classmate, what are you going to do for me?

Let’s complicate this just a little more. Varoufakis remarks that consumers “buy commodities and then proceed to consume them. In effect the consumer acquires property rights over the consumption ‘inputs'” (123). In other words, neoclassical economics expects consumers to own commodities before consuming them (or perhaps at least at the point of consumption). But, again, information is a strange commodity, whether it’s a student paper, an instructor’s lecture, a peer’s comments, or a weblog entry. What if I didn’t have a Creative Commons license: would you have “owned” this entry before “consuming” it? What did you exchange for it? What would your marginal rate of exchange have been for this entry versus an entry on Clancy’s weblog? Are you maximising your individual utility by reading this entry? (OK, don’t answer that last one.) And what about me? What’s my opportunity cost for blogging this entry? I think that, since it’s an information good, even I can’t know until after I’ve produced it. In that sense, I think weblogging does an interesting job of blurring the lines between the benefits of production and the benefits of consumption, and perhaps points towards a less reductively binary economics, towards an economics of circulation rather than of production and consumption.

An economics of circulation might help us to think of ways around the understanding of information as a unique and individualistic experience good, and so also might help us find a way around the neoclassical economist’s forbidding of any interpersonal comparisons of utility, and back towards Bentham’s concerns with the common good. In the writing classroom, students, peers, teachers, and authors find themselves in consistently dialectical relationships, where the lines of production and consumption are perpetually shifting. If I were to look to the future, I might (hopefully) suggest that a massive revision of our ideas about intellectual property is going to be the next sea change in composition studies.