Not Bodies

I’ve been quiet for a while. It’s taken me some working-through to put this post together, but it felt important enough to post as one long piece rather than a series of short reflections, as I hope might be apparent. What I’m trying to do here is set up a classroom context for how my revised formulation of class functions in the information economy, which is the focus of my dissertation’s chapter 4; as such, this post follows directly from my last one. Some of the ideas here are wobbly and underdeveloped, so if you’ve got the patience, I’d be grateful for feedback.

I concluded that last post with a reference to Clancy’s deployment of the feminist axiom that “the personal is political” in the context of the World Wide Web and, by extension, in the context of our contemporary information economy. Digital technologies have profoundly altered the relationship between the personal (as specific, lived, material, and embodied experience) and political economy, and the consequences of that alteration are as visible in the conclusions Maxmin & Zuboff draw about the shift from mass production and consumption to individuated production and consumption in The Support Economy as they are in online gaming sweatshops’ transformation of individuated leisure activity into market-based profit. There’s something strange going on here, though: in conventional mainstream representations of the economy, capital is always understood to be, in the now-familiar formulation, “footloose capital.” As an impersonal, faceless (and, in many representations, uncontrollable) force, it transcends the material boundaries of nations, cultures, and bodies. Even as neoclassical economists and their fellow travelers discursively construct an economy driven by ostensibly individual tastes and values, the metaphors they choose — pareto curves and aggregate geometries — immediately abstract the personal into the general. However, they only do this for capital: in the immaterial and abstracted “space of flows” described by Manuel Castells, it’s capital that flows, not labor.

Not bodies.

In the mainstream discourse of economic globalization, the commonplace understanding is that abstracted capital transcends all boundaries, while material and embodied individuals transcend no boundaries. Labor, as bodies, cannot flow across borders. Certainly, it migrates, but only in a disembodied fashion: an absence here is a presence there, and the mobility of capital moves poverty and exploitation from place to place, but the people themselves do not move. The labor of individual bodies is in many ways regulated (consider the ongoing American debate about immigration), and in some ways circumscribed by its own materiality and individuation.

So what happens when we examine these ideas in the context of the writing classroom? Do first-year writing teachers, in some ways, seek to keep the personal and the material outside the classroom door? And what does that mean for the political economy of the composition classroom?

According to Bruce Horner, “In Composition, the social is recognized only as something already formed, in the past, which affects what students may bring with them to the course (e.g., literacy skills or lacks), not as a process operating during and within the course,” but the “personal” is defined as “difficulties of the individual student beyond the realm of composition” (36). As such, the social is constructed as transcendent and pervasive and beyond intervention, and never seen as operating within the quotidian material and experiential context of the classroom. In other words: in composition’s discursive representation, The Social is a lot like The Economy. (See, again, my last post.)

When Horner urges, then, that “we need […] to treat students as Authors, with autonomous intentions, separate from the demands of institutions and other representations of the social” (39), he’s proposing a pedagogy that explicitly acknowledges and engages the specific, lived, material, and embodied experiences of students during and within the context of the course. In other words, “the social” is not restricted to spaces previous to or outside the course, and as such is not abstracted and free-flowing: rather, it must be understood, in the context of the classroom, as being in some ways circumscribed by its own materiality and individuation. Political economy is personal.

Mainstream neoclassical economics, in privileging economic efficiency, favors the free flow of immaterial capital. Many political conservatives who endorse the ideals of neoclassical economics also favor the regulation of laboring bodies: they do not want labor to transgress national boundaries in the same way capital does. Marxian economics inverts these preferences, seeking the restriction of the interests of immaterial capital and freeing of laboring bodies. Those on the political right seek to loosen restrictions on business and tighten immigration policy, while those on the political left tend to want to tighten restrictions on business and loosen immigration policy. But what does any of this have to do with the writing classroom?

I’ve talked at length in the past about how I see student writing as holding not-necessarily-commodified economic value. Writing is a form of capital, and today’s digital technologies allow that capital to circulate much more freely and easily than it has in times past. As Lawrence Lessig has noted, conventional economic understandings of scarcity and value don’t always apply to certain goods whose value increases the more they are used. Writing, in its circulation, is one such good; one such form of capital. As a teacher, I want writing to become a sort of “footloose capital,” transgressing the boundaries of the classroom and the institution and escaping into Castells’s “space of flows.” And yet, as a teacher, I strongly believe in the value of the work students and I do in our classroom, and that’s why I have an attendance policy and a lateness policy, and why I ask students who are not in the class to leave the computer lab before class starts, and why I ask students not to use their mobiles during class, and why I close the door once class has started. In so doing, I regulate the movement of students’ laboring bodies (and am regulated as a laboring body). The lived and embodied experience of valued and valuable classroom work is regulated by its materiality and individuation.

But the crucial point here is that weblogs as a technology and as a genre (because, after all, they’re both) begin to collapse this binary of bodies versus capital. In final conferences, I was talking with one student about her perception of the usefulness of students keeping individual weblogs for the course, and she noted the odd oscillations in her language in the various entries she wrote. Some, she said, were sloppy and silly, “But they were me,” and in others she tried to be “more academic sounding.” Being “more academic sounding,” of course, is abstracting one’s language into a widely accepted medium of exchange; it’s allowing one’s intellectual capital to circulate beyond the classroom — even as in other entries the student perceived a strong connection to lived and embodied experience. While weblogs are a relatively new and protean technology/genre, they carry that protean quality not as an abstracted asset but as a genuinely material asset: they bind quotidian and embodied experience to the footloose circulation of intellectual capital.

Horner argues that in pedagogies closely connected to “the personal” — i.e., those of a certain generation that are described as “process” or “expressivist” — there is a “denial of the material, social, and historical operating within and outside the classroom, and also, and more significantly, within as well as outside student consciousness. Instead, the classroom experience, and the teacher and writer, are redefined as free-floating, privileged sites discrete from material contingencies of the curriculum, the economy, and past, ongoing, and future history” (42). I certainly see that denial in some pedagogies, but I don’t agree with Horner that the denial is exclusively connected to pedagogies of “the personal”: in fact, as I’ve argued before, it’s quite common, even in so-called “critical” pedagogies. The thing is, though, that those “material contingencies of […] the economy” are changing radically today, as Zuboff and Maxmin indicate, and digital technologies are an inescapable component of that change, drawing together economic circulation and material and embodied experience.

We ignore such change at our peril.

So how long’s it going to take to get that Kenny Loggins song out of your head?