“Here, See for Yourself”

I see direct application to composition studies for two complementary social impulses that Yochai Benkler describes as being characteristic of the shift from industrial mass capitalism to a networked economy. I’m trying to get an article written now that condenses some of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years — not all of the dissertation, but some of it, the new stuff I have to say about being careful in talking about writing studies and political economy, particularly in relation to the digital — and Benkler has been useful in helping me re-see how what I’m looking at isn’t just Pollyanna Web 2.0 evangelism plugged into the writing classroom or critical pedagogy fodder for jeremiads about access.

Benkler characterizes one impulse — the one more characteristic of our evolving networked economy — as that of “here, see for yourself.” He opposes that impulse to one more characteristic of mass media and industrial mass capitalism: the impulse to say, “trust me, I have authority.” That second move — “trust me, I have authority” — is immediately recognizable to almost all practitioners in composition. For student composers, it is the vexed question of Aristotelian ethos that constitutes the core issue of David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University.” I think Bartholomae’s essay helped define a generation of composition studies (and I’m rather fond of Harriet Malinowitz’s “David and Me”). And the alternative? “Here, see for yourself”? I don’t know if any pieces do it better, or in a more revelatory way, than Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence”. I’d love to put together an assignment that asks students to do something similar — like some kind of disguised research essay, maybe? Or not even a disguised research essay, but a personal essay hidden in research essay garb, with the markers of that garb relegated to the footnotes, as Lethem does.

In any case: there are clear further correspondences with composition studies in Benkler’s work that I’m trying to address, as well. For instance, Benkler asserts in The Wealth of Networks that “the emergence of the networked information economy has the potential to increase individual autonomy,” and that this is partly a result of the way it “provides nonproprietary alternative sources of communications capacity and information, alongside the proprietary platforms of mediated communication. This decreases the extent to which individuals are subject to being acted upon by the owners of the facilities on which they depend for information” (133). Such an increase in individual autonomy and reduction in individual subjection to capitalists, particularly in the context of the production of information and culture, seems to me to be one of the most prominent goals of the ways composition has taken on Freirean critical pedagogy.

But I think the so-called social turn in composition studies, of which I would consider Bartholomae a part, has focused on institutional subjection as an aspect of the social, and so turned away from the figure of the individual. What’s remarkable for me in economics is the way that Adam Smith so carefully accounted for the figure of the individual and the ways that individual actions aggregate — and I wish that I wouldn’t find it so easy, based on my schooling, to turn to notions of “hegemony” and “interpellation” and suchlike, which locate agency outside the individual in abstract forces. It’s comp’s version of good microeconomics gone bad macro, of which I’ll have more to say in a bit, in the context of a recent piece by Herbert Gintis.

In any case: Benkler, following Smith, privileges individual autonomy and insists that “we must observe the conditions of life from a first-person, practical perspective” (141). I hear the social constructionists and critics of expressivism sharpening their knives, but Benkler isn’t a romantic individualist. In fact, he’s quite the materialist: “If we accept that all individuals are always constrained by personal circumstances both physical and social,” he argues, “then the way to think about autonomy of human agents is to inquire into the relative capacity of individuals to be the authors of their lives within the constraints of context” (Benkler 141). Is this not the central conflict of Linda Brodkey’s “Literacy Letters” essay? In a similar way, J.K. Gibson-Graham thoroughly critiques the ideologies of mass capitalism in order to show how economies operate on an individual scale — and how that individual scale offers opportunities for economic agency and change.

That’s my classroom scale. In composition, economy is deeply linked to the social, particularly in the way that class constitutes a point of articulation between the two, and economy is deeply linked (as Benkler shows) to technology, as well. In a materialist perspective (which I would argue must be a component of any pedagogy that looks at how writing works in the world), neither technology nor class can be considered outside of their relation to economy. This isn’t the “access” discursive trump card that Jeff and Collin have rightly critiqued, or an attempt to construct a way of discussion. It is, though, an attempt to say: hey, here’s this thing we need a vocabulary for, because it’s a big part of what we’re talking about.