Economics

Economy’s Far Horizon

preterite Composition Theory, Economics

Until recently, the discourse of socioeconomic class has been the chief means by which composition has addressed economic concerns in examining students’ day-to-day work in the writing classroom. While I’m approaching those concerns from a Marxian point of view, neoclassical economics remains the dominant paradigm in American culture today. Classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo focused their attentions on large-scale problems like economic growth, unemployment, and accumulation; neoclassical economics, evolving out of that thought, shifted its attention to the tastes and preferences of individuals within the economy, and how those individuals make decisions based on marginal cost and marginal utility. With their diagrams, curves, graphs, and equations, neoclassical economists seem to be doing everything they can to discursively represent economics as a scientific discipline (much is made in introductory economics textbooks of the distinction between “descriptive” and “normative”), despite the fact that it borrows its metaphors from geometry and its principles of application and its structure of explanation from physics. In fact, several scholars have noted the curious tendency of economics to represent itself as a sort of social physics with a historical perspective, despite reservations about constructing neoclassical economics as scientific, such as those expressed by conservative economist Friedrich August von Hayek at his Nobel Banquet Speech in 1974. Neoclassical economists occupy a broad range of political perspectives, from Hayek and Milton Friedman to John Maynard Keynes and Amartya Sen; all, however, share a belief in the utility-maximising individual who (in an ideal situation) is free to make choices about how to maximise that utility. This focus on the individual, and on free choice, allows neoclassical economics to rhetorically align itself with democracy. Neoclassical economists also tend to privilege efficiency, self-interest, rationality, and scarcity as their key concepts, while critics of neoclassical economics argue that it is overly positivistic, that it unrealistically assumes perfect knowledge and rationality, and that its idealized notions of competition excessively rely on conceptions of sameness and homogeneity while real-world competition is fundamentally based in difference, and that it bears a myopic focus on market transactions as the only economic transactions worth investigating.

Deborah Brandt is likely the most prominent compositionist dealing explicitly with economic concerns from a neoclassical perspective. Brandt begins “Writing for a Living” (Written Communication April 2005) with the statement that “Writing is at the heart of the knowledge economy” (166) and goes on to propose that “Writers put knowledge in tangible, and thereby transactional, form” (167). The very act of writing itself, it would seem, can be understood as an act of commodification. This understanding of writing as something to be transacted is not new, of course: James Britton used the term “transactional” to characterize instrumental, getting-things-done writing in 1970’s Language and Learning. What is new is the way that Brandt connects this understanding of writing to an economy that involves “knowledge-making and knowledge-selling” wherein writing is “a chief vehicle for economic trade and profit making” (167). In fact, Brandt argues, writing can be understood “as a manufacturing process in knowledge work” (176), and “Workplace writers can be likened to complex pieces of machinery that turn raw materials (both concrete and abstract) into functional, transactional, and valuable form, often with great expenditures of emotional, psychological, and technical effort” (176). This focus on “Workplace writers” is important, because Brandt’s interest in “Writing for a Living” is explicitly on an intercorporate environment in which “knowledge must be protected and even obscured to maintain competitive edge” (189) and “literacy as a human skill is recruited as an instrument of production in the knowledge economy” (179). This does not necessarily mean that Brandt sees all writing as commodified: in fact, she characterizes written knowledge as a “leaky property” (191) that circulates in arenas other than that of the marketplace.

However, what’s absent in her account in “Writing for a Living,” at least explicitly, is any connection between the classroom and the workplace: we might infer some conclusions about literacy instruction from Brandt’s account of the economic functions of writing, but the focus is very much on workers. Elsewhere, though, Brandt does explicitly connect economic pressures to literacy instruction. In “Losing Literacy” (Research in the Teaching of English February 2005), Brandt proposes that “A lot of teaching and learning–especially around communication–is for the purposes of stimulating consumer desire” (308), and points out that literacy instruction is often centered around concerns of profitability. Writing about educators in the “learning economy” (307), Brandt argues that “Literacy and knowledge, once the domain of the humanistic tradition, are being redefined within a production imperative” (307-308). She expresses strong reservations about such a circumstance, but offers no indication that she percieves any viable alternative to the demands and the workings of market capitalism. In fact, these two essays are both profoundly immersed in the logic of neoclassical economics, and the implicit conclusion for literacy educators would seem to be that whether we like it or not, our classrooms serve the market economy, and that students and workers internalize literate practices that privilege assumptions of efficiency, self-interest, rationality, and scarcity. Furthermore, the value for students in internalizing such practices is in how well those practices will help them to succeed in the marketplace: in other words, the value of work in the composition classroom has a distant horizon; it is understood as serving the student after the course is over, in other classes and ultimately in the workplace. Writing essays for their own sake, or for their use value in the near term, is not considered.

Weblogs as Liminal Oscillation

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

While I work from a fairly strong cultural studies perspective, I’m finishing my dissertation in a graduate program with a rather significant and well-known intellectual inheritance from the work of Walker Gibson, Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow. I didn’t get as many questions about that as I might have anticipated when I was on the job market — most of the search committees seemed to have actually gone through my materials, which makes me more fortunate than some other folks I’ve talked to — but there were a few interviewers (no, not the one who was asleep) who blinked when I mentioned John Trimbur or Bruce Horner in relation to my research. Those of us in this graduate program well understand all the critiques of that so-called expressivist intellectual inheritance, and have often agreed with those critiques or proposed extensions of those critiques. Still, institutions shape perspectives, and my recent readings of some technical communication-oriented scholarship got me thinking about questions of perspective and value.

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Affect and Pedagogy

preterite Class (Cultural), Economics

As a student or a teacher, are you emotional in public?

And if so, what did you make of the fierce review offered by James D. Williams in the November 2005 College English? I was looking at it again for its angle on the personal, but on a second read, it struck me as absolutely blistering in its privileging of rationality above all else, and it made me — someone who scores so far over at the “T” end of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that it’s not even funny — uncomfortable in that regard. Williams was talking about standards of evidence for academic texts, and while I agree that careful analysis quantitative data for such purposes is essential, I’d also propose that alternative forms of evidence are equally as important. In fact, I wonder whether the bruising critique Williams offers, in its supreme privileging of hyper-rationality and alleged objectivity, fails to allow for alternative possibilities.

Laura Micciche, in an essay I find somewhat problematic for its generalizations (“When Class Equals Crass,” in Blundering for a Change, Tassoni and Thelin, eds., Boynton/Cook 2000), suggests that working-class students are encouraged to “exercise ‘appropriate’ emotions” (25) because “emotions such as anger, rage, and sorrow are generally considered unacceptable in the classroom” (31). But the perspective Micciche offers is important for its view on the work of affect, although I worry that it’s too easy to perpetuate a binary that equates emotion with the working class and logic with the middle class, and I think that’s a class-bigoted simplification — not that Micciche is performing it, but I worry that the distinctions she sets up make it an easy place to which to go.

There’s an simple question: Are working-class students more emotional?

It’s a bad question, and the wrong question. Lynn Worsham argues (nod to the recent UMass guest speaker) that people separated by the reason/emotion binary are taught that emotion should be subordinate to reason and so that people categorized as “emotional” should take subordinate positions in society as well. Indeed, Micciche cites Spelman’s observation that “while members of subordinate groups are expected to be emotional, indeed to have their emotions run their lives, their anger will not be tolerated” (Spelman 264, qtd. in Micciche 33).

I’ve quoted before Hardt and Negri’s assertion that in today’s emerging economy, there are three varieties of immaterial labor: first, “an industrial production that has been informationalized,” second, “analytical and symbolic tasks,” and third, the emotional work involved in “the production and manipulation of affect” (293).

Political economy is personal, and the economy is affectual. This holds true for the classroom as much as for any other space.

A Digital Working Class?

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

In Cory Doctorow’s excellent short story “Anda’s Game” (which Michael Chabon included in the 2005 Best American Short Stories), a Tijuana labor organizer named Raymond explains to the title character that the missions she’s being hired to complete in a massively multiplayer online game similar to World of Warcraft are actually destroying the avatars of in-game sweatshop labor, who lose their (real) day’s wages when “killed.” Unfortunately, the scenario isn’t only fictional: such sweatshops actually do exist, and stand as remarkable evidence of the ways in which virtual online economies are increasingly intersecting with today’s “real” economy of individuated production and consumption — and having real and concrete effects on the ways people experience socioeconomic class.

Today’s individuated economy is making newly heightened demands on certain classes of people (the in-game sweatshop workers; the people holding down two jobs who take online higher education classes when they get home at night in the hopes of securing better employment) while opening up new opportunities for others (those who exploit the in-game sweatshop workers; the digerati who have the access and training to construct and manipulate new digital texts). So the immediate question to ask would seem to be: who are the new digital working classes, now that increasing efficiencies of production and the changing economy are reducing the ranks of such conventionally working-class occupations as machinists, farmers, and factory workers? Besides online in-game sweatshop workers, who else might we understand as being working class in the context of digital technologies — and how might composition pedagogies account for such people?

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Generation-Gapped

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Economics

Note: I’ve somewhat revised this rather overstated post in response to Kelly Ritter’s generous comment, although I’ve left what I originally wrote intact and visible for honesty’s sake, since I think it’d be unethical for me to here do any retroactive erasing of my mistakes.

Clancy points to a new article on online paper mills from Kelly Ritter, an article that covers much of the same ground and invokes much of the same ideologies as Ritter’s original CCC article. I was intrigued by Ritter’s first article because of the way in which its use of the term “economics” stands as usefully characteristic of composition’s conception of economic concerns: for Ritter, and for most scholars in composition, economy is discursively equated to cash-based market commerce.

(A wonderful exception to this is Amy Robillard’s brilliant January 2006 College English piece, which I hope to have more to say about soon, particularly in terms of the ways it draws together notions of affectual immaterial labor with theories of economy and class.)

Ritter proposes that “the advent of digital technologies that allow access to completed papers… has created valid concern among faculty, especially among those involved in the teaching of writing” (25), constructing digital reproducibility as the lightning to Walter Benjamin’s Dr. Frankenstein, with the monster being Plagiarism Itself. The problem, however, lies not merely with the technology: rather, “student patronage of [online] paper mills is reinforced… by students’ disengagement from academic definitions of authorship” and by “their overreliance on consumerist notions of ownership, especially in Internet commerce” (26). For Ritter, the brain of Frankenstein’s Monster, and its destructive potential, is embodied in the “consumerist” economic ideologies of today’s students.

But what are “students’ definitions of authorship”? Are today’s first-year composition students, in their literate practices, as venal and avaricious as Ritter makes them out to be?

I don’t think so. Look at (as Danielle Nicole DeVoss has done) the hundreds of revisions of the Star Wars Kid video; look at (as Casey Burton has done) collaboratively-authored fanfic and commons-based peer icon creation; look at, again, Robillard’s recent examination of Young Scholars. As much as I admire the rigor of Ritter’s work, it seems immediately apparent to me — particularly given her prominent citation of Bartholomae — that she has no desire or intent to inhabit the emerging perspective of today’s student. (Added after her comment — see below: Kelly does, in fact, clearly seek to understand the emerging perspective of today’s student, such being the purpose of the assignment she proposes.

In fact, Kelly Ritter, you’ve been generation-gapped. Today’s information economies of individuated production and consumption, and their constituent students as economic agents, have left you fulminating without a target in their wake. (Added after her comment — see below: OK, that direct address really came across as being in full-on attack mode. And it’s unfortunately vague, as well.)

For Ritter, the student’s values must bend to the will of the academy, and the academy can apparently never shift to accomodate alterations in societal values brought about by technological and economic change: the culture of the academy always drives change in the culture of the student, and never the other way around. This, in itself, is an ideology of mass capitalism; a superannuated ideology — and is it any wonder that the students Ritter writes about so wholly reject an ideology that makes no attempt whatsoever to engage their (Lessig, Barbrook, Benkler) values?

In fact, Ritter’s repeated assertions that first-year composition lacks a subject might surprise teachers and scholars in nationally-recognized writing programs who have long argued with force and rigor that the subject of the first-year composition course is, in fact, writing. But perhaps that is illustrative of the values Ritter brings to her pedagogy — which is, after all, the subject of her essay. I might suggest that a teacher who thinks her course doesn’t have a subject will likely send a strong message to students about the value of the work in that course. (Added after her comment — see below: I stand corrected.)

But what is the value of that course? What’s it for? Ritter describes “the highly valued commodity of academic agency that academia seeks to bestow on students and employers” (47), and makes the problem quite clear: she constructs academic agency as a commodity for exchange, rather than seeing students as literate agents already critically producing culture. Ritter’s economic ideology — that the only value for the product of the labor of writing is its exchange value — is, in fact, precisely the thing that creates the problem she seeks to critique. When she argues that “Our task as writing faculty is to strike a balance between helping students to become literate professionals and shaping their writing consciousness in ways still palatable to our own ethics” (32), she presumes that students have no ethical agency of their own. (Added after her comment — see below: OK, I overstated that some, although it still seems to me that there’s an opposition being drawn, with the old-school ethical stance of faculty being privileged over students’ emerging ethics of the remix culture and the economy of individuated production and consumption.)

Wrong answer.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: students are political, economic, and ethical beings, and they don’t shed that status when they cross the transom into the classroom.

Kelly Ritter would do well to recognize that. (Added after her comment — see below: she does recognize it, and in fact she suggests that it’s strongly implied by her argument.)

Miss Manners and Me

preterite Economics, Writing

Judith Martin, AKA Miss Manners, delighted me on Christmas Day, even beyond her wonderful response to the reader who ignored his mis-set dessert spoon and scandalized his dinner party’s hostess by sipping his soup from the bowl (“It sounds to Miss Manners like a successful dinner party,” she wrote, since “It is so hard to shock people nowadays”). Ms. Martin, in fact, offered me a reason for happily deleting my Amazon wish list, the act of which I’ll do my best here to extend into a theoretical rationale concerning commodities and value.

Do you remember that Onion story about the guy with “Tuesdays with Morrie” on his wishlist, and how people kept buying him copies of it even though its placement on his wishlist was an act of consumptive identity-creation? I’ve lately run into a similar difficulty with someone new to the internets who seemed to think that the goal was to be the person who made sure the most wishlist items got bought. While I’m grateful for the gifts, I’ll here risk the appearance of ingratitude by proposing that such reactions destroy the crafted persona-construction of the wishlist, which in odd ways combines a deferral of desire with a statement about self-identity. When you obliterate someone’s wishlist through expenditures of cash, you’re in some ways also obliterating that person’s representation of self, and on the internets, the consumptive self is a rhetorical construct.

Miss Manners proposes that “By coming up with the cash gift, the gift certificate and the gift registry, […] [a]ll the work of giving was eliminated, leaving only the expense,” which is sort of what UC Irvine anthropologist Bill Maurer is getting at in his essay “Uncanny Exchanges” (Society and Space 21) when he asks, “Does the ability of money to render the qualitative into the quantitative flatten social relations” (317)? Cash makes immaterial — it abstracts — concrete and experiential relations between people. If the gift is a social and immediate act of knowing another person, the Amazon wishlist negotiates that knowledge in sometimes vexed or uncanny ways: as characterized above, it can be an aspect of rhetorical self-representation, but to those who already know you, it can also short-circuit the affective weight of the social bonds that the gift is ordinarily supposed to reinforce. Miss Manners makes an essential point:

there can be a deeper joy in receiving than in just getting the goods. That is where thought comes in. Sure, it is great to receive something you have always wanted. But to receive something that someone guessed that you always wanted is a double thrill. Knowing that someone has studied you carefully enough to know what will please you is a priceless present in itself. Even the near guesses and wrong guesses are endearing if they show thought. Thought doesn’t just count — it is the point of the custom.

So what does all this have to do with teaching writing? Well, not so much, unless we think about the value of writing (and how we value the labor that produces that writing) in ways that go beyond the mere exchange value of a grade or the bluntly instrumental value of intellectual work (“It’ll help you do better in other classes” and/or “It’ll help you get a better job”). Writing exists to be read, and as such is always inherently social — which, of course, is completely obvious, but when I think about Steven Gudeman’s assertion in Postmodern Gifts that “making a gift secures, probes, and expands the borders of a group” (3), something clicks there for me.

Under market-based commodity capitalism, cash sometimes takes the place of human interaction. But in the economy of acknowledgement that is an integral part of the FLOSS Movement and that I want to adapt to the composition classroom, embodied and material human relationships operate concretely, without the short-circuiting abstraction of cash or the short-cut of the wishlist. Sure, it’s more work, and as such, it’s difficult — but, y’know, I’m a big fan of the value of difficulty.

Not Bodies

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

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?

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Immaterial and Abstracted?

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

In Terms of Work for Composition, Bruce Horner notes that “one argument made against teaching ‘on-line’ is that the process of placing coursework on-line not only restructures that work, allowing for greater control and scrutiny of faculty performance and course content and intensifying the work of teaching, but it also better enables institutions to claim ownership of those materials and take possession of faculty’s knowledge and course design skill embodied in the course materials” (6). There’s a lot embedded in this quotation: Walter Benjamin’s argument about reproducibility restructuring schemata of value, relationships of exploitation in academia, and concerns of ownership. But the most important argument here is one that’s familiar to any scholar familiar with the work of Lawrence Lessig: the digital technology of copying — of reproducibility — profoundly alters relationships between creator and consumer, between maker and remaker, between the original source, the mix, and the remix — and its subsequent derivations. It makes the individual and personal expertise of the teacher public and claimable.

Contrast this to the conventional classroom situation in which, according to Horner, “the student’s self […] is imagined as fixed, uniform, and autonomous, even when it remains inaccessible to the student, rather than being seen as socially produced, the site of struggle between official and practical consciousness played out in the material process of writing” (40). Here, in the first context Horner describes, the classroom “is imagined” as a neutral, abstract space, as is the persona of the student. The second context Horner describes is an attempt to imagine that classroom context for the embodied student as more material and concrete. What happens, though, when we attempt to apply either context to the “online” scenario described above? For Horner, in either case, the (necessarily material, particular, and concrete) act of placing a text (a class, an essay) online seems to result in its increasing abstraction. The text, in Horner’s eyes, enters the online equivalent of the utopian no-space Joseph Harris critiques as the uselessly abstracted “discourse community.” And here I return to the point I recently made: that abstracted online utopian no-space, in the discourse of composition, is figured both as “the economy” and as “the classroom.” The three are not congruent, certainly — but in the shape of the discourse that embodies them, they are unignorably isomorphic.

The problem with this, of course, is that we know from Harris, Lu, and others that the classroom is hardly an immaterial and abstracted space. The same holds true for the economy, as Gibson-Graham, Ironmonger, and others demonstrate. Why, then, does Horner suggest that the simple act of moving a text from the classroom to the Web somehow makes that text more abstracted, immaterial, and commodifiable? Is publishing the equivalent of commercialization; does placing more eyes on a text make it necessarily less material, less concrete, and therefore more easily subject to commodified market-based exchange? I don’t think so, and I think Clancy Ratliff’s research stands as strong evidence why not: from my scant understanding of some of the projects she’s worked on, Clancy’s work investigates the abstracted representations of gender roles assigned to online discourse, and proposes that such representations are largely mistaken in light of the concrete evidence of female bloggers: to be crudely reductive, Clancy proposes that in many women’s public blogging practices, the personal is indeed political (and, I’d add, material and embodied) when it goes online. The blogosphere, contra Horner, is a concretized and personal space for its users, and in its materiality and engagement is deeply and necessarily political.

My goal here is to perform the analytical about-face, and take Clancy’s insight concerning the blogosphere and apply it to the overlapping representations of the classroom and the economy. More on this soon: yes, I’m back to my practice of working through dissertation chapters on the blog, and I’m happy with where Chapter 4 is going.

Present and Future, Scarcity and Value

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Economics

In my dissertation’s Chapter 4, I’m arguing that the classroom work of students may be seen as carrying economic value beyond that of the commodity, particularly in the production and digital circulation and reproduction of student writing: in short, students are not the “preeconomic” beings Susan Miller describes. In order to make that argument, I’m looking at two spheres — the classroom and the economy — not as the generalized abstracted spaces of pedagogical and economic discourse, but as specific, embodied, heterogeneous, and material spaces.

In Terms of Work for Composition, Bruce Horner makes a distinction between work and labor: in our discourse, he suggests, “work” is immaterial, scholarly, commodified; “labor” is material, pedagogical, and more resistant to commodification — and so also less valuable than “work.” (As is typical of composition’s discourse on economy, Horner’s analytical focus here is on the work of teachers.) According to Horner, the materiality of scholarly writing (as opposed to teaching) is often obscured, and the more that materiality is obscured, the more the scholarly work is made to seem an individual autonomous intellectual product performed independently of any interaction with other intellectuals — and therefore more ownable (6-7). By implication (and, yes, I’m aware that this is a familiar point), composition’s focus on teaching is expected to be more material and less commodifiable, and therefore less valuable in its non-ownability.

But if we understand the distinctions Horner makes as taking place in specific, embodied, heterogeneous, and material spaces, rather than as the generalized and abstracted objects of discourse, the barrier between classroom and economy collapses. They are, together, an overlapping space, and in that space, writing has economic value. Of course, this has been understood in American history since Article I Section 8 of the Constitution and the Copyright Act of 1790. Despite this understanding, though, Miller’s characterization of the “preeconomic” student is the one that has dominated representations of the higher education classroom, even though the intent of the Copyright Act of 1790 — an explicitly economic document — is characterized in its very first line as “the encouragement of learning.” In this light, the words declaring the intent of the Constitution’s Article I Section 8 bear revisiting: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” There’s a tension there, between the phrases “exclusive right” and “limited times.” “Exclusive right” carries a synchronic concern and an attention to the economics of the present moment, while “limited times” makes clear a diachronic concern with economic change and an attention to the future. And the conventional representation of the purposes of the composition classroom is diachronic: it looks to economic change in the future, and at its most crass, suggests that the dominant purpose of education should be to help students be competitive in a global information economy. On the other hand, scholarship — Horner’s “work” — is understood synchronically, in its concern with the present production of knowledge.

Neoclassical economics, with its essential assumption of scarcity, and its assumptions about how the tastes and values of individuals shape economic activity, is largely synchronic in character. It’s concerned with the present. Marxian economics, with its goals of economic change, is largely diachronic in character. It’s concerned with the future. Neoclassical economics, however, has lately been much vexed by the ways in which the information economy disrupts conventional assumptions of scarcity. As Lawrence Lessig often points out, some resources — like information — take on more value the more people use them, and the less commodified or expensive they are, the more people will use them. (Note that I’m using the meanings of value and price as distinctly independent of one another here.)

These ideas about work and labor, present and future, scarcity and value, are at the core of my dissertation’s Chapter 4, but as is likely apparent, they’ve also had some influence on my teaching lately. When we understand that there are values other than that of the dollar, Siva Vaidhyanathan assertion that copyright “is supposed to be an economic incentive for the next producer, not a guarantee for the established one” takes on some interesting implications for the writing students produce in the classroom.