Varoufakis makes the pointed critique that “economics ends up without a convincing definition of how consumption and production differ”, and “This failure echoes the same theory’s earlier difficulty in separating utility from dis-utility” (167). Definitions of utility and production and consumption are highly individualistic: Varoufakis gives the example of the work of parenting as both production (in that it’s creating utility for other members of the family) and consumption (in the pleasure, or utility, one takes from being a mother or father). Furthermore, since different societies see different activities as constituting work and leisure, those definitions are also culturally bound.
Further points: “At least part of the firm’s profit is due to the exercise of social power by employers over their employees” and so “the moment we regognize that labour is not a traded commodity (as bananas are), we recognize implicitly that profit is not just a reward for the productivity of capital. At least partly, it is also due to the exercise of social power” (184). Pretty straightforward stuff, but with interesting implications: “if profit is the product (at least partly) of the firm’s social power over workers, then capital is a manifestation of that power too”, and so “the admission that labour is a human activity irreducible to the status of commodity leads us to the subversive thought that capital may not be a plain commodity either” to the point where “Capital suddenly emerges as a social relationship” (184). A nice summary of the Marxian perspective, although Varoufakis also seems to take Marxian technological determinism without really questioning it.
Some of it certainly helps my look at class as social relation in the classroom, as well as an understanding of the labor that goes on in the classroom, but it also slightly clouds my perspective on technology.
Keep plugging away, I guess.
I wonder about the mediational role of technology (of whatever type) in the classroom. Even in the least “wired” of classrooms, the technology I use (chalk board, overhead projector, TV) is explicitly and unquestionably in my power, both a refiguring of the existing power differential between student & teacher and a signal that the technology that is used is sanctioned as Useful, Official, and Powerful. In distance-ed contexts, internet teaching, or even a wired classroom, nearly all communication is mediated by the technology, and the tech is, largely, in the power of the teacher and serving the same kinds of semiotic usefulness.
This brings up the interesting issue of backchanneling in a wired environment, and what it means if that backchannel (chatter amongst students or even between student & teacher via unofficial channels) is enabled or impeded by the technology itself. Consider: students in your class are sending IMs to one another during your teaching. Is their chatter necessarily unproductive because it doesn’t take place under the aegis and via the conduit officially sanctioned by you, Mr. Teacher Man. So what role do classroom technologies play in exercising social power by the institution over the individual, and how does that profit the institution? How does backchanneling subvert that, and what do the technologies do, generally, to control/harness social power to “the greater good” as presented by the institution?
As someone who passed notes and left graffiti on chalkboards as an adolescent, I think technologies of writing have always served multiple relations of power in institutional contexts. But that’s a more instrumental perspective than I’m comfortable with: I’d also say that the technology of pen and paper used to pass notes also constructed a subjectivity of student-as-docile-and-quiet, as someone who didn’t talk while the teacher was talking, even if the student was doing other inappropriate things. So yeah, you’re right; the backchannel phenomenon illustrates how technology goes beyond tool and is actually constitutive of our subjectivities. In that way, technologies — again — are never neutral. Maybe there’s another link for me: technologies compose class hierarchies and relations, and are not merely “used” by people for mobility within those relations and hierarchies. Again, that’s back more towards Marxist technological determinism than I think I’m comfortable with, but it also helps me avoid the instrumentalism that I find really problematic.