CW2004 Presentation

After an afternoon of swimming and enjoying the sun and sand (and a brief, sunny cloudburst) at Kailua beach, I’ve got that terrific comfortably weary feeling, and I’m sitting out on the lanai behind the cottage at about 8:30 p.m. Hawaii time, watching the garden’s lush abundance of tropical plants wave in the evening breeze, watching the geckos chase one another up and down the garden wall, and there’s an old calico tom who rubs up against my legs and complains to be petted. No internet access here, so I’ll have to wait until I go to the internet caf� tomorrow to post this, but I couldn’t ask for a nicer night. One of these mornings, I’ll have to get up early enough to catch a sunrise on the beach. The last time I was at the beach was eight or nine years ago, when I was in the Army, and we had a mission hauling eight or ten trailers’ worth of military intelligence spook stuff — electronic surveillance gear — down to the Naval Air Station at Key West for drug interdiction. After being here in Hawaii for a few days, I’ve gotta admit that eight or nine years is way too long.

Anyway. At Computers and Writing, I was on a panel with Matt Bunce and Joan Latchaw, and was delighted to discover the coincidence that Joan and I both earned our creative writing MFAs from the University of Pittsburgh, although hers was in poetry, ten years before I earned mine in fiction. Matt and Joan both gave fine presentations — I wish I’d taken better notes on what they had to say — and we had some excellent and insightful questions from our small audience. Mine was a little bit long, and I had to sprint some, which probably wasn’t very good for its intelligibility, since heavily theoretical stuff only gets worse if you rush it. And, like all my early drafts, it’s really quotation-heavy. Many parts of it may look familiar to those of you who’ve been so generous helping me shape, revise, and this material in comments here and posts elsewhere, and I hope the following text at least begins to do justice to the insights you’ve offered.

“Who Computes?” Now: Class and Computers in the Global Information Economy

In his 1987 essay, “Who Computes?”, C. Paul Olson offered a prescient examination of the promises and problems offered by the intersections of computers and literacy with class and economics. As Charles Moran points out, scholars in computers and writing have since treated Olson’s essay as the first and final word on how economic and class concerns affect our field: aside from works by Moran, Cindy and Dickie Selfe, Donna LeCourt, Jeffrey Grabill, and a few others, the topic has been largely ignored. In this presentation, I will contend that economic issues are of deep concern to scholars and teachers in computers and writing, and ought to be more explicitly addressed.

In a recent retrospective article, Moran points out that computers and writing has constructed the functions of technology in the wired writing classroom as fostering either efficiency (making the production and circulation of writing easier) or equity (making the classroom a more democratic space). Both efficiency and equity are concerns associated with economics, as N. Gregory Mankiw, current Chairman of the President’s board of economic advisers points out, and with class, as well. Marxian economists point to increased efficiency as an increased rate of exploitation, and privilege equity as the highest economic value, while mainstream neoclassical economists contend that an equitable society can serve and be served by a highly efficient economy. Moran notes that a reference to the “increased productivity” (347) computers can bring to student writing is symptomatic of the common early view that computers would make writing more efficient, and that Donna LeCourt’s hope that “technology offers a way to provide students with the means to critique how their textual practice participates in ideological reproduction” (292) reflects the growing view that technology can be used to serve critical pedagogy’s end of fostering a more equitable classroom.

Both views — efficiency and equity — obscure the class functions they stand for: increased productivity versus protection from exploitation, functions which stand diametrically opposed to one another. Furthermore, both views rely on an assumption that computers themselves will help to bring about the changes imagined within the uses to which they are put. In other words, technology is imagined as a neutral and transcendent tool, able to be used to bring about changes to the contexts within which it is used, with the nature of those changes being determined entirely by the intentions of the user.

This perspective would at first seem to be similar to Olson’s, who writes that “What computers are, plain and simple, is a very efficient tool for processing information” (182). I don’t agree with this instrumental perspective (which, it should be noted, Olson later complicates), so I’d like here to examine its problematic consequences as one way to point towards some possible alternative perspectives that might finally ask not only who computes, but what is computing?

Olson describes how “the computer allows substitution of capital intensive processes for what were formerly labor intensive ones” (184). Increasing productivity “means substituting capital for labor” (Olson 189), and “if work processes are being reorganized around greater efficiencies afforded by computers, then anyone not reskilling will move down and out, not up and in” (194). Educational “reskilling” is itself classed: “The curriculum form in [middle-class] schools. . . tends to be general, emphasizing cognate skills, industry, generalizability, and language and programming skills,” and “tends to have transferability across content. The use of computers in working-class schools, by contrast, tends to be rote and is either based on mechanical skills or involves operations of games” (195).

Such a classed hierarchy of educational practices is not unique to work with computers, as Anyon, Bernstein, and others have demonstrated, and this should remind us once more that writing itself is a technology, and — as such — far more than mere instrument or tool. Olson notes that “Tools are used by people for particular ends,” and “no tool autonomously organizes and employs itself” (182). But just as writing did, “the computer as a tool does fundamentally reorganize material relationships and organizations of production and our thoughts about what production is” (183, emphasis in original). Many understand class as a manifestation of relations of production. In such a context, our field’s dearth of engagement with class issues seems even more striking. By and large, for Olson and for many others, the computer exists as a fetishized commodity whose instrumental qualities are parts of its inherent nature rather than functions of the social relations surrounding it. Furthermore, the computer has become inextricably linked to to the immaterial labor of writing within the broader context of the information economy.

Consider the scene and the nature of this labor. In the classroom, a student essay always has at least one value, its exchange value: it’s worth a certain grade. Most teachers also agonize over that paper having a second value: they want the paper to have some use value to the student; they want it to be worth more than just a grade, more even than just some skill students use in other classes or in the workplace to earn a salary, since those are forms of exchange value as well. But the first value — the exchange value — is a given. So how do writing teachers measure that exchange value? There are, again, two models. The current-traditional model — the assumption that some people are “just good writers” and others aren’t — relies on the tastes and preferences of neoclassical economics to distinguish between good papers and bad papers: we know good writing when we see it. The process revolution introduces the labor theory of value into the evaluation of student writing. The process model, when asked to give a student a grade, asks in response: how much work did the student put into prewriting and revising activities? How much did the paper change as a result of the student’s labor? Both models stand as instances of commodity fetishization: they construct their valuation of the papers as a result of qualities belonging to the paper itself. Both models ignore the complex of socioeconomic relationships surrounding the production of the paper, particularly the common construction of higher education as a site of employment selection.

Bruce Pietrykowski quotes David Noble’s examination of “the identification of the campus as a significant site of capital accumulation” resulting “in the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property” (300), and suggests that “the introduction of computer-based technologies may well signal a new terrain of struggle over the purpose and nature of higher education” (Pietrykowski 300). Computer literacy education make freshly visible the economic commodification of higher education.

Cindy Selfe has pointed to the Clinton administration’s repeated invocation of national economic productivity and competitiveness as the driving force behind computer literacy education. So, too, today we hear the Bush administration declare that computer literacy education is the only way to keep Americans competitive in the global information economy. This economy is typically constructed as transcendent, as beyond intervention, as monolithic, market-driven, capitalistic, and immaterial, as evidenced by the discursive connections often drawn between the dreams of bodily and material transcendence of difference offered by the Web and the dreams of “what Bill Gates calls the ‘friction-free’ capitalism of the twenty-first century” also offered by the Web (86).

Andrew Feenberg cites the observation that education has been “reorganized to provide capitalist industrialism with the type of workers it required” (22). So, too, Stanley Aronowitz notes that “Even for those schools that lay claim to the liberal intellectual tradition, the insistent pressure from many quarters to define themselves as sites of job preparation has. . . clouded their mission and their curriculum”, and goes on to suggest that “Perhaps the most urgent questions today concern whether the academic system has a genuine role in providing the space for learning, whether or not its curricula are useful to the corporate order” (125). He also points out that “One clue to the instrumental orientation of core curricula in major universities is their universal privileging of ‘skills’ acquisition” (139), and it isn’t even surprising when he notes that “many universities “include ‘information literacy’ among the basic skills ” (139-140).

What end does this vocationalization of higher education serve? Why the privileging of skills over learning? Most often, the rationale given focuses on competitiveness. We are asked to understand that competitiveness is important, and that accountability is essential in education, lest our students be denied the skills they need in order to compete in a global information economy. An economy cannot exist without competition, we’re told: without competition, people will not work, they will not innovate, they will not improve productivity. One has to be competitive, or one will be left out. What remains unspoken is that competition insures that someone will, in fact, be left out. Competition relies on two notions being tied together: scarcity and individuality. Neoclassical economics takes scarcity as one of its foundational principles, and competition insures that scarcity will be found: a family will undergo financial ruin, someone will spend a winter night sleeping on a steam grate, or shoot himself for losing his job, or take an overdose of sleeping pills for not passing her exams. Competition ensures that someone with less money will do violence to someone with more money precisely because of that difference in the amounts of money they possess: because of scarcity. And the commonly given reason for competition becomes evident in that final example: we are made to understand that there isn’t enough to go around. Enough money. Enough employment. Enough land. Shelter. Food. Water. As we see from recent discussions of American national policy, there isn’t even enough education to go around: students and schools need to get competitive. By this reasoning, we can see as well that there aren’t enough A’s to go around in the academic economy. We understand that there are always a limited number of passing grades.

Don’t we?

The economist J. K. Gibson-Graham points out the “shift from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society” has relied upon a “move through which representations of economy have slipped from their locations in discourse and landed ‘on the ground,’ in the ‘real,’ not just separate from, but outside of society” (1). The economy is understood as transcendent, technologically driven, and all-consuming, just as technology itself is understood by many economists (and some compositionists, as well) as transcending its local economic contexts. Technology and the economy are both beyond location: they are not only multinational but transnational phenoma, the embodiment of so-called “footloose capital” that knows no bounds, existing in the “space of flows” described by Manuel Castells. And yet the global democratization and homogenization predicted by some as a result of the ascendance of transnational capital has not yet come to pass: technology critics decry the way “technology increases discrepancies in wealth and control between classes within industrial countries and between technological societies and Third World countries” (Olson 181), and contend, with Olson, that “On the one hand, the computer offers an almost assured potential to increase our real wealth by giving us access, control, and processing of information with unprecedented speed and efficiency. Yet, on the other hand, in the area of distribution, it is potentially a multiplier of the inequalities that stratify classes, genders and First and Third Worlds” (203).

Economist Michael Porter offers another counter to this transcendent and delocalizing discourse, describing the business advantages of what he calls “clusters”: “A cluster is a geographically proximate group of interconnected companies and associated institutions in a particular field, linked by commonalities and complementarities” (199). In pointing out the absence of an understanding of the significance of location in the literature on management, Porter suggests that “It is as if linkages, transactions, and information flow took place outside time and space” (223), as if they were abstract and immaterial and ungrounded in the concrete and localized particulars of individuals’ lived experience. The cheerleaders of the information economy do the same, constructing information as free-flowing and transcending any material context.

Yet there is some reason for this construction of transcendence. Information is not like other goods, especially not when it’s digitally reproducible. Immaterial products — information, “experience goods”, things like education or essays — demand an understanding of the notions of property, production, exchange, and consumption entirely different from that of the material. The ideology of individualistic economic competition is short-circuited in its interaction with the infinite digital reproducibility of information. 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.

So 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, 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. The individual ownership of information for the sake of utility maximisation points us back towards the problems associated with competition.

Some today see contemporary higher education as serving the “technocratic regime” that privileges ideologies of competition and individual ownership, and argue that “Technology presents itself as inherently ‘useful’ for meeting an infinite variety of human purposes. Anyone who challenges the value of this knowledge and invention is immediately labeled a Luddite [. . .] the role of the humanities and the non-policy social sciences in producing knowledge that may be politically and ideologically significant, but has little commercial utility, is given short shrift.” (Aronowitz 45). Again: technology has immediately apparent utility, which is why we find it so easy and compelling to pursue understandings of better ways to apply it. Our impulse is to look at technology and ask, “How can we use it effectively?” Technology, after all, is inanimate, unthinking: how can it have effects on us, the shrewd and rational calculators who made it?

One answer: in precisely the ways by which it reproduces that ideology of utility and control.

Yet we declare our opposition to “commercial utility” as the instrumental standard by which to value education, and seek an alternative in education that is “politically and ideologically significant” (Aronowitz). Such an education would be difficult to attach any utility-based value to, and of course, those on the political right loathe such positions, clamoring for a university impossibly free of ideology, ignoring the political freight carried by the status quo. But isn’t that precisely the way that many think about technology? Free of politics and ideology; free of values; existing only as a neutral tool? We have an understanding more than two millenia old that a writing technology can indeed be “politically and ideologically significant”, and one wishes more of today’s cheerleaders for technological education would remember this, when, “As job-panic has escalated, public colleges are responding by transforming themselves into vocational and technical schools” (Aronowitz 55). When the economy drives all other concerns, we forget the lessons of the past. The Catch-22 becomes that while we may decry the ways in which things are valued according to how well they serve The Economy, and while we may hope to attempt to come up with some extraeconomic mode of valuing intellectual labor, many also decry a system that reproduces economic inequality. The two are inextricably intertwined. The obvious course, then, should be to ask: is there a way to think about technology via alternative modes of valuation that can also help us reduce economic inequalities? But that brings us right back to the set of circumstances where all ends serve the economy.

So let’s turn it around: what would it mean to reduce economic inequalities in order that higher education might find itself able once more to serve masters other than the economy — and is such a thing possible?

Perhaps. Neoclassical economics is an economics of production, exchange, and consumption. Clearly, it fails to adequately fit our discipline: in the writing classroom, who is producing, and who is consuming? What is being produced, and what consumed? Essays? Education? How are they exchanged? Rather, an economics of circulation might help us to get beyond the understanding of information as a unique and individualistic experience good, and revising our conceptions of textual ownership may be one move towards reducing the inequalities associated with competition.

Some have lately questioned the logic of absolute textual ownership, and their questioning has largely been in the context of the open source movement, which understands the value of texts as being dependent upon the free and open exchange of ideas. The logic of the open source movement understands the inherent reproducibility of texts as contravening conventional understandings of scarcity, and so opens up a space of possibility for the de-commodification of those ideas. This presents one way we might avoid constructing the composition classroom as privileging the exchange value of student writing. Furthermore, the open source movement is inextricably linked to computers, electronic publication, and digital reproducibility. In this sense, computers and writing are connected in a profoundly non-instrumental way: values and practices associated with the computer as a material artifact of culture can be seen as interrupting and fragmenting conventional scarcity-based understandings of economics. The open source movement may metaphorically indicate to us ways in which technologies such as computers and literacy can help us to rethink concerns and valuations of ownership that themselves rest as the foundations of our rationalizations of class inequality, by making visible the cracks and fissures within those foundations.

Let me point to some of these cracks and fissures. J. K. Gibson-Graham demonstrates that the global economy is not necessarily capitalistic and market-based, but fragmented and contradictory, stitched together as a patchwork of a million smaller interrelated economies: the state economy of taxes and services which interacts with the corporate economy of products and investments which interacts with the cultural economy of ideas and fashions which interacts with the social economy of relationships and communications, all of them and more subdividable into even smaller economies of processes and commodities and goods and services and gifts and ideas and so on, into smaller and smaller spaces. These small spaces are where change takes place.

Furthermore, if we understand the economy as exploded, contradictory, and incoherent, rather than monolithic, market-driven, and all-consuming, this might necessitate seeing class structures and definitions themselves as exploded and incoherent, and therefore changeable. So, too, might the open source movement offer opportunities for imagining computers as something other than the instruments of increased production within a capitalist economy, opportunities heretofore inadequately examined in the literature of computers and composition. Coupling these re-seeings may offer the only real opportunity for imagining how the wired writing classroom might be constructed as a space in and from which the economy itself, its associated class structures, and its technologically embodied material artifacts and cultural practices — literacy and the computer — might themselves undergo progressive change rather than reification as mysterious, transcendent, and beyond human intervention.

This is not a mere re-thinking of a perspective. It offers the possibility for material change, and as such goes far deeper than the economics of access, boring straight down to the bedrock of use and utility, exchange and commodification, and the very purposes of education. Consider Fredric Jameson’s argument that “The technology of contemporary society is [. . .] mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital” (38). Jameson is suggesting that the figure of the computer itself serves as a metonymic representation of global capital, and so functions not just as a device that helps that capital to circulate, but as a circulating part and representation of capital. When we consider that first-year composition with computers is the sole across-the-university site where all students produce digitally reproducible texts, we must understand ourselves as having an ethical obligation to facilitate such circulation.

Not only do computers make freshly visible the economic commodification of higher education, they also offer a point of possible intervention into that commodification. But not if we continue to think of them as mere tools, and not if we continue to ignore the immense economic implications of instrumental pedagogical practices in the context of the global information economy.