Is work the same thing as production? Before we get back into Varoufakis, let’s think about the question in the context of the writing classroom. My work as a teaching associate — measured by my Big State U at 25 hours per week — “produces” something which is paid for in part by students’ tuition fees and in part by state taxes. That thing that gets produced is not quite the same as the Bachelor’s degree, but is marked by the degree. Work and production are here, by definition, separate. But I think they’re separate in education because the labor — the work — of students is also essential to the production of education.
Varoufakis notes that “economics texts” define production “as the costly generation of utility” and adds that “according to (neoclassical) economics, for a comedian to be recognised as a production worker, she must produce laughter at personal cost” (166). According to neoclassical economics, for the teacher to be recognised as a production worker — and for education to be produced — teaching must be done at personal cost. In other words, “the neoclassical definition of production (as the costly generation of utility) opens the way to the criticism that people who love their work, and who would still do it for free if they had to, are not considered to be producers (because work in their case is indistinguishable to leisure)” (167). So much for my motivation for teaching composition: since my teaching days are the best parts of my week, I’m apparently producing nothing, but rather engaging in a leisure activity. Neoclassical economics demands that each of us utters the daily mantra, “I hate my job.”
Or perhaps not. Varoufakis continues: “The counter-argument is that everything has its opportunity cost” to the point where “the loving mother who feels that she is not giving anything up to stay at home, or even the workaholic architect who would rather die than go on holiday, are both giving things up in order to do what they love”: the problem with this is that “every utility generating activity, normally associated with consumption, would constitute production: from listening to music to building a bridge” (167). And here, I think, we’re back at the same old problem with understanding information as a good or commodity. Listening to music is an activity that many (especially including the RIAA) would see as a consumptive practice. You put on that fine Ninjatune compilation, you ain’t producing nothing, troop, or so the logic goes.
Which leads me to ask: is the act of reading always and only an inevitably consumptive act? Mariolina Salvatori would argue differently, I think.
I’d be grateful for other perspectives on this.
Here goes nothing. I haven’t made time to dig up the specific reference to Marx’s “reproduction of labour-power,” but as I understand it, the phrase applies to periods of regeneration and rest. Using a much more simplistic model than the one you’re building here, we talk about this in my intro to humanities class, borrowing from Camus’ contention that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy. Going one more, we take apart the notion that the interstice–the break from labor–defines and even classifies work (if we’re given to taxonomic hierarchies).
The idea that our work is reclassified by our regenerative periods, down time, or leisure, dismantles the common economic t-chart of production and service by preferring the antithetical–the doing that’s done when we’re not producing-serving. Because our occupations with teaching and learning through reading and writing are concerned with text (broad, widely imagined ensembles of texts, in this case), we are never separate from it or otherwise outside it. And the materiality of such text(s) is irregular, I guess.
Following a long-accepted model of continuous exertion (eight-ten hours, say) followed by continuous regeneration (or “reproduction of labour-power”), “text” has a commonplace association with leisure. Reading, writing, noticing (noscere-to get to know?), mediating, and so on are done solely for pleasure, leisure. This is a gross simplification, of course. But in composition, the exertion of labour-power and its reproduction are intertwined, irregular to the extent that separations are not easy to share or to make visible. Our occupation isn’t merely those three hours in class or the 8-430 scuttle. I’m feeling vertiginous (can you tell I’m going in circles already?). What I want to suggest is that with texts at the center of our work, we are burdened by the economic pressure to make texts material (publishing is privileged); but, moreover, we’re charged with empowering students to those textualisms, opening discreet discourse systems, fostering agency, transgression, compliance, etc., in language.
This leads me to suppose that reading is not always consumptive; in fact, I’d be more inclined to say that it’s always productive, always reproductive, always generative, always regenerative. As is writing. I wonder if that’s the “opportunity cost” for comp/rhetors–the constancy of language, the challenge of negotiating between leisure and laborious in after-hours (?) textual interludes, and the trouble proving the legitimacy and value of this bind to those who can’t see beyond the more traditional, pervasive economic work-structure and the more common relegation of text as rest in it.
An aside: Maybe this connects to what John was suggesting last week when he mentioned “focal energy” as the channeling needed to read a set of essays with care and complete attention.
I should stop for now. Is this way off?
Derek,
I think you’re right on target, actually, and it strikes me that your notions about the break from labor being what constitutes labor and our inseparability from text could come straight out of Of Grammatology or Writing and Difference: you’ve done a nicely Derridean turn on Marx, and perhaps shown the composition classroom as one site where the reductive binaries of reading/writing work/leisure consumption/production really do break down: I completely agree that “in composition, the exertion of labour-power and its reproduction are intertwined, irregular to the extent that separations are not easy to share or make visible”. I think also of Barthes’s contention that the only thing that the text can do, when placed before the seminar, is become that which it is not — and John’s “focal energy” is perhaps both the labor and the reproductive pleasure that re-shapes the text in consuming it. (I’m just all French today.)
Thanks for the extended and insightful comment.
One addition: as I briefly alluded to in my original post, I think the reproductive/deconstructive reading you’re talking about is very much in line with the excellent and careful insights Mariolina Salvatori offers in “The ‘Argument of Reading’ in the Teaching of Composition” (from Emmel, Resch and Tenney’s Argument Revisited, Argument Redefined), “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition” (College English 1996), and “Towards a Hermeneutics of Difficulty” (from Louise Z. Smith’s edited collection Audits of Meaning). All three are well worth checking out if you’re interested in thinking about reading as productive practice, and have had a profound effect on my pedagogical practice.
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