Author: preterite

The Teleology of Capitalism

preterite Class (Marxian), Economics, Politics

Does capitalism have a particular teleology? If those who believe strongly in the virtues of unfettered free-market capitalism were to think teleologically, what ideal end-state would they imagine, and for whom?

Popular critiques of vulgar or orthodox Marxism understand its ideal goal to consist of class struggle leading to socialist revolution followed by a worker’s utopia wherein “after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Critique of the Gotha Program). Critiques of various forms of Marxism that admit a more sophisticated understanding still often find a solid target in teleologies that imagine some remedy to the appropriation of unpaid labor and a loosening of the bourgeoisie’s private ownership of the means of production: so, yes, Marxisms by definition often imagine some future circumstance toward which they work.

Do the advocates of free-market competition similarly imagine some ideal future circumstance — and if so, what does it look like?

Paying Attention as an Aggregation Problem

preterite Computers, Economics

Last semester, our FYC students read an article by William Deresiewicz that indicted the dangers posed to the focused and individually attentive reflective mind by today’s digital technologies of multitasking. I’ve been thinking about that article more lately, both in the way that it intersects with my concerns of the economic valuation of writing as a form of immaterial labor and in the way it intersects with other articles I’ve been reading about the our evolving understanding of the function of attention. N. Katherine Hayles usefully outlines (behind a paywall, but partially available here) the binary of “Deep Versus Hyper Attention” (to be taken with all the usual necessary Derridean caveats about binaries), Eric Gordon and David Bogen investigate how we might rethink configuring the parameters of situations requiring (forms of) attention (and in so doing lead me to other interesting things to read on the topic), and Christine Rosen offers a perhaps more balanced critique than she usually does but one that engages in much of the sloppiness (track her use of the word “this”) typical to arguments over technologies of attention. (When Deresiewicz came to talk to our FYC students, he wound up hyper-qualifying so much of his argument as to essentially offer nothing beyond the blandest platitudes.) Attention is such a protean thing that it skates away like mercury, as Gordon and Bogen do an excellent job of showing. One good point, though, that Rosen starts to get at and that Hayles try to set up some limits for is the definition of “multi-” in our use of the attention-related term “multi-tasking.” What exactly counts as “multi-tasking,” anyway?

For some of the participants in the debate (Rosen and Deresiewicz in particular), the digital technologies that serve today as the most obvious tools for multitasking — the ones we most readily notice — become metonyms for the activity: if you’re doing more than one thing at once with a technology that didn’t exist ten years ago, you’re multitasking. On the other hand, if you’re reading a bedtime story for a child who’s sitting in your lap — in other words, engaging in the data-processing activities of taking in words and pictures, understanding the relations between them, performing them for an audience, monitoring that audience’s affective response to your performance, assessing your interpersonal interaction with that audience, while at the same time engaging in the kinesthesia of making that audience comfortable and relaxed while sitting in your lap, turning the pages, and keeping the book at an appropriate eye level — well, no, that’s not multitasking; that’s reading a bedtime story.

What happens, I think, is the same thing that folks who do work with digital technologies have known for a long time: the digital tools make relations and activities formerly taken for granted newly visible. To borrow from C. Paul Olson again, digital technologies replace labor-intensive processes with capital-intensive processes. As a form of immaterial labor, paying attention is work, but as anyone who uses Google Reader (or any RSS aggregator knows), paying attention is itself something that can be streamlined and compressed via technology into what feels like firehose force. Richard Lanham offered at least a good start in The Economics of Attention: information is (in many contexts today) hardly a scarce commodity. The problem Lanham ran into was an excessive focus on those two areas of neoclassical economic interest: scarcity and commodities. His proposed solution was to examine how we redistribute attention as a scarce commodity, which I think goes in the wrong direction: attention is not a commodity. It’s a form of work; of labor.

As such, attention requires examination and conceptualization as a factor of economic production. While I’m not in any way suggesting here that I adhere to a labor theory of value, I do think that understanding the work of attention as a form of immaterial labor and thereby as a form (at least in some cases) of production results in the phenomenon of multitasking showing itself as a sort of Sraffian aggregation problem.

(As I work through the ideas above, I’m realizing even more that my dissertation work gave me a glimpse of only the tiniest corner of the types of questions that I want to investigate. What I’m increasingly asking myself as I do so is: why? What do I hope to learn? What types of questions — yes, hello, stasis — do I want to pursue? Am I interested in how the work described above happens? No, that’s a problem of production, of techné.

Shankar via Lunsford: Spriting Talkuments

preterite Computers, Teaching, Writing

On pages 9-10 of Writing Matters, Andrea Lunsford cites a number of terms Tara Shankar invents in her 2005 dissertation, including

the key term spriting. By ‘sprite,’ a portmanteau combining speaking and writing, Shankar means speaking that “yields two technologically supported representations: the speech in audible form, and the speech in visual form. Spriting, therefore, equally encompasses digital speech recorders, speech editing tools, and any speech dictation recognition tools that would use speech in addition to text as an output mode” (15). The product of spriting she identifies as a spoken document, or talkument. . . Finding that students produce talkuments collaboratively with the greatest of ease, Shankar concludes that “spriting seems to admit even closer, more integral collaborations than does writing, perhaps because spriting can more easily incorporate conversation as both planning and composition material” (236).

I find this particularly interesting as I begin the Spring semester and ask my students to engage in some brief, regular low-stakes writing; in keeping a daybook. Last semester when I did this, the daybook took a variety of forms from blog to paper journal to daily text file, and as I’m increasingly syncing my composing media (phone to laptop to index cards to notebook to work and home computers), I’m realizing that I’ll be composing via the spoken word as well as the written word, and that I should give my students the same latitude.

The Clear Use of Sources

preterite Intellectual Property, Military, Openness, Rhetoric

I’m looking at a quotation that I don’t know what to do with: it’s confusing me. I ask you, reader, to help explain it to me; to help me figure out how the author is using a particular source. Here’s the quotation, in context, from pages iii-iv of the Preface by Marshall Sahlins to The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual:

As deconstructed in the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, the applied anthropology of the US Military may be described something as follows: a planetary strategy of research and destroy, involving the deployment of armed and largely culturally-illiterate American forces from among the thousand or so garrisons now distributed on foreign soil, sometimes complemented by second rate mercenary academics, all charged with an investigation of the cultures of the local peoples sufficient to determine if and how they can be subjugated or, failing that, taken out.

Here is anthropology as a weapon in dubious battles, as the critics rightly claim. For as it is put by a certain Lt. Colonel cited in the counterinsurgency manual:

“There will be no peace… The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To these ends, we will do a fair amount of killing. We are building an information-based military to do that killing.”

But then, whose side are you on, Petraeus? Although the counterinsurgency manual pretends to be based on up-to-date social science, it lacks the critical reflexivity of the latter, since what it dare not address is the Americans’ own presence as an invading and occupying power.

My question is about that “There will be no peace” quotation that goes up to “killing”: how is Sahlins using it? What’s the purpose? There seem to me to be several problems with the quotation. First, the “certain Lt. Colonel” is never cited in the counterinsurgency manual: the quotation comes from a xenophobic 1997 editorial piece by the then-Major Ralph Peters, published quite clearly not as scholarship but as opinion, and in its content clearly superannuated by the work that went into the counterinsurgency field manual. If we are to believe that authors work with a sincere commitment to the words they write, that work strikes me as creditable, and should in no way be related to the execrative fustian offered by Peters ten years earlier.

So: the material leading up to the quotation says some nasty things about the military and about the authors of the field manual, and about the intentions of its authors in using anthropological scholarship. The material following the quotation directly addresses General David Petraeus, who directed the authorship and publication of the Field Manual that Sahlins critiques.

Why, then, does Sahlins use a quotation (itself not cited at all in the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: I found the Peters source via Google) from an author he doesn’t name? Is this guilt by association? Is there an implied equivalency between the opinions of the author of an editorial piece and military doctrine? If so, how is the quotation supposed to relate to General Petraeus? Should we understand from the way the quotation is positioned that General Petraeus is to be held to account for the opinions of the now-retired Peters? In sum: what are we to understand as the intended relation of the Peters quotation to FM 3-24?

Halloween Music

preterite Asides, Music

I’m enjoying listening to the Dead Kennedy’s “Halloween” tonight, especially the following bits:

So it’s Halloween
And you feel like dancin’
And you feel like shinin’
And you feel like letting loose

Whatcha gonna be
Babe, you better know
And you better plan
Better plan all day

Better plan all week
Better plan all month
Better plan all year

[…]

Why not every day
Are you so afraid
What will people say

After Halloween

Because your role is planned for you
There’s nothing you can do
But stop and think it through
But what will the boss say to you

And what will your girlfriend say to you
And the people out on the street they might glare at you
And whaddaya know you’re pretty self-conscious too

I’m celebrating my 40th birthday this year on Halloween (I was born on November 1), and I’m excited about it, but it’s also kind of a big milestone that’s got me looking back.

I first heard the Dead Kennedys when I was 9th grade — can that be right? Yes, that’s got to be right — and man, they were scary, and they were cool as hell. There was a mix tape that made the rounds and got duplicated and reduplicated, with Black Flag, Government Issue, Black Market Baby, and the Dead Kennedys, and it was garbled and hissy and recorded from a vinyl LP so there was a brief scratch and skip in “Trust Your Mechanic” that I still miss every time I hear the version I have now, and the climactic fantasy moments from “Riot” and “Forest Fire” were the first times I realized that music could do that energizing, subversive stuff, and the ominous bass melodies for “Holiday in Cambodia” and “I Am the Owl” were like nothing I’d ever hear until Primus, and I’ll still contend that the opening guitar riff for “Government Flu” is one of the best and most underrated in all of rock ‘n roll, up there with Suicidal Tendencies’ “The Miracle.” So yeah: back then, at a virginal 13, this was wicked-scary, dangerous, very cool stuff, as tinny and hissy as it was on that Maxell Gold cassette.

And I still like it, thinking back on my skinny nerdy self 27 years later, not as skinny but still plenty nerdy, gone from spiky hair to mullet to bleached mullet to fat mohawk to long hair to spiky again and then to the crew cut and finally to the shaved head: not really punk now, no.

Why not every day
Are you so afraid
What will people say

After Halloween

But I guess I was punk once.

Ostrom’s Nobel and Lanham’s Economy

preterite Economics

Yes, it’s been too long since I’ve posted here: other concerns, other priorities. I’ve got a milestone coming up, though, after which I’ll likely be posting more.

To that end, an observation: I was glad to see that Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for economics. I’ve only read those who’ve been influenced by her work, even though clew pointed me her way six years ago (d’oh!), so now I need to get a copy of Governing the Commons from the library. But the accounts I’ve looked at lead me to wonder: Lanham talks about the so-called information economy being actually an economy of attention, and then undertakes a wholly market-based discussion of that economy. But what if that economy of attention isn’t a market (as I’m pretty sure it isn’t), driven by scarcity and competition?

What if attention is a commons?

Meth Lab; Fusion

preterite Asides

This weekend’s brief respite from the steadily quickening pace of helping to facilitate the department’s Arriving Faculty Workshop and preparing to administer the fall semester’s first-year composition course was a trip into the city to take in a gallery exhibition and a meal, and for L. to meet her friend.

The exhibition was Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s “Black Acid Co-op,” and it was remarkable. The NY Times slide show gives a taste, and the accompanying review’s characterizations of the installation as “an immense, labor-intensive, maniacally contrived walk-through environment” and a “warren of some dozen rooms, interiors, and passageways [that] includes a burned-out home amphetamine lab [and] a red-carpeted gallery of pseudo-artworks” are apt. The word I would have chosen, I told L., was “methodical”: there was a remarkable and consistent phenomenological attention to the most minute details of the experience of the space.

One walks into a dark wicker-lined room strewn with paper trash. A book of polaroids lies in a corner of the concrete floor. There are thermal-printer astrological charts with attached polaroids pinned to the walls. And there is an uneven hole in the wall, the first of many, leading to a brightly, badly fluorescent-lit space, exposed wires hanging from the light fixtures, a scabrous analogue of run-down strip-mall commercialism.

wigs and foil

The wigs are clotted with paint and cement. The hole beckons.

wigs and hole

There are multiple paths. Inward, toward the heart, they all lead through iterations of meth labs.

Black Acid Co-op @ Deitch Projects

In deeper, one climbs into an open refrigerator and out the back.

Read more

Silvan Idyll, Part 2

preterite Asides

Lauralea and I went for a short, hilly run this morning — net change in elevation of 350 feet, repeated several times over 2.5 miles — and then went to Lost River State Park for a hike up Big Ridge (elevation 3200-3300 feet) on White Oak Trail. On the way, we passed groves of trees that looked almost exactly the way I imagine the edges of (nerd alert) Lothlórien looking.