Economics

Capitalonormativity

preterite Economics

I’ve lately been talking a lot about “the diverse economy” and how I wish there were a broader understanding that economics is not limited solely to the analysis of cash transactions. Here, I’ll try to explain why, and also explain why understanding the economy as necessarily diverse and heterogeneous is so important to composition. (This is also one of the last chunks of my dissertation’s Chapter 3, which I’m working this weekend on putting together into a semi-coherent early draft.)

As Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff point out, “The contemporary economic (and therefore also the social) field is represented as dominated by […] capitalist exploitation” (Class and Its Others 13): in other words, we tend to talk about “the economy” as comprising only monetized capitalist market transactions. There are dangers in this essentialized view, however, and “When we refer to an economy-wide imperative of capital accumulation, we stand on the same unsafe ground […] that we tread when we refer to a maternal instinct or a human drive to acquisition” (Gibson-Graham 16). The essentialized equation of economy to money, and its concomitant assertion that the only economic activity operates in the service of the accumulation of money, simultaneously naturalizes a complex set of social relations and interactions, and places that naturalized economy on a transcendent plane, beyond human intervention, beyond question. But “to the extent that the economy has been taken from us — represented as removed from the forces of social and discursive construction — it becomes imporant and urgent to take it back, not as a homogenous and unified level, sphere, or system, but as a discursive terrain” (Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff 2): to do otherwise is to allow for the rationalization and naturalization of economic inequality, to shrug our shoulders and say, “Nothing to be done,” to unconcernedly cast the less privileged into the outer dark, where there will be a weeping and a gnashing of teeth.

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About That Carnival

preterite Composition Theory, Economics, Writing

Kelly Ritter, in the abstract to her June 2005 CCC article, “The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition” (CCC 56:4 601-631), suggests that “the consumerist rhetoric of the online paper mills construes academic writing as a commodity for sale,” and that “such rhetoric appeals to students in first-year composition, whose cultural disconnect from the academic system of authorship increasingly leads them to patronize these sites” (601). In this prefatory one-sentence abstract of Ritter’s article, there are things that immediately jump out at me. First, terms: note that “commodity” indicates an object with a certain exchange value, but that the modifier “for sale” indicates a monetary exchange value for the object. This distinction between exchange value and monetary exchange value is both hidden in and central to Ritter’s subsequent discussion of what she terms “economics.” Second, note the interrelationships already evident among the terms “economics,” “cultural,” and “academic.” In their treatments of socioeconomic class, such scholars as Ira Shor, James Berlin, Henry Giroux, and Lynn Bloom all perform a move similar to the one that Ritter performs in her article’s concluding recommendations: they name an economic (or, for Ritter, monetized) problem, and then suggest a cultural (for Ritter, non-monetized, or academic) solution. This is an all too common practice: to perceive some economic problem, but to also see the economy as beyond intervention, and so to suggest a remedy for the problem as action within an non-economic sphere. Bloom, in her (famous or notorious) articles on class, admits that inequality in wealth and income (i.e., monetary inequality) is what drives class distinction, and then recommends that students adopt and internalize certain cultural practices to remedy such inequality: society’s structural problems are internalized into identity politics. Ritter, in the conclusion of her article, strongly suggests that the internalization of identity politics is a viable (perhaps the only?) solution to our contemporary problems associated with plagiarism, digital reproducibility, and intellectual property.

I think there’s much of value in Ritter’s article, particularly — as others have noted — in her deployment of the distinguishing term “whole-text plagiarism,” and although I wish she’d done more with the excellent work of Rebecca Howard and Margaret Price, I found her extended and multifaceted treatment of authorship issues a helpful spur to the work I’m trying to do on student intellectual labor and intellectual property in the classroom in my dissertation’s fourth chapter. But, as is likely already clear, I’m coming from a very different perspective on what Ritter calls “economics,” and so I’ll here try to be as respectful as possible in pointing out why I think Ritter’s perspective on property, labor, and economics is somewhat limiting.

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That’s Not It

preterite Class (Meta), Computers, Economics, Writing

In my dissertation’s Chapter 2, I survey composition’s broad and self-interested array of class definitions. Chapter 3 is centered around adding one more perspective on class that we don’t see much in composition: Bourdieu’s. For Bourdieu, class is overdetermined, performative, relational, and historical, and I want to argue that these four descriptors are ones that composition can ill afford to ignore, for reasons that will be apparent by the end of this post. I know I’ve recently had a lot to say about Bourdieu, but today I’m going to take a step back and take a look at Raymond Williams in order to try to set up the theoretical synthesis that I see as driving Chapter 3.

So I’ll start with some givens: first, industrial capitalism is a relatively new phenomenon. (If you were to ask me what the single most culturally significant event of the year 1776 was, my answer would be Adam Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations.) Second, as Marx, Williams, and many others have noted, industrial capitalism facilitates the maintenance of human divisions of classes. There is no hierarchical structure of class domination: rather, domination exists, but it is enacted as a relational process. (This is, in Distinction, Bourdieu’s fundamental insight.) Williams, like Bourdieu, sees class as overdetermined, so I’d like to return to his concerns briefly and lay some groundwork for a future further class analysis based on Bourdieu’s work. Basically, Williams traces the literary changes in the meaning of the word “culture” and argues that “the questions now concentrated in the meanings of the word culture are questions directly raised by the great historical changes which the changes in industry, democracy, and class, in their own way, represent” (Culture xiii, emphasis in original). Williams analyzes in detail the way changes wrought in culture reflect technological, economic, and societal change, asserting in Marxism and Literature that “the recognition of literature as a specializing social and historical category” stands as

decisive evidence of a particular form of the social development of language. Within its terms, work of outstanding and permanent importance was done, in specific social and cultural relationships. But what has been happening, in our own century, is a profound transformation of these relationships, directly connected with changes in the basic means of production. These changes are most evident in the new technologies of language, which have moved practice beyond the relatively uniform and specializing technology of print. The principal changes are the electronic transmission and recording of speech and of writing for speech, and the chemical and electronic and composition and transmission of images, in complex relations with speech and with writing for speech, and including images which can themselves be written. None of these means cancels print, or even diminishes its specific importance, but they are not simple additions to it, or mere alternatives. In their complex connections and interrelations they compose a new substantial practice in social language itself […]. For they are always more than new technologies, in the limited sense. They are means of production, developed in direct if complex relationships with profoundly changing and extending social and cultural relationships: changes elsewhere recognizable as deep political and economic transformations. (53-54, emphasis in original)

Much of this is familiar to technorhetoricians, those of us who deal with the intersection of writing instruction with digital technologies — but what Williams introduces is a twofold attention: first, to the means of production (both economic and cultural), and second, to technological anti-essentialist overdetermination. As Williams puts it, “The shaping influence of economic change can of course be distinguished […]. But the difficulty lies in estimating the final importance of a factor which never, in practice, appears in isolation. […] For, even if the economic element is determining, it determines a whole way of life” (280-281). In other words, the interplay of industry, technology, art, and democracy in conjunction with economy allow one to examine the result of that interplay in what Williams calls “culture.” This studied and complicated interplay is what Gibson-Graham describes as “the anti-essentialist presumption of overdetermination” (16), which “involves an understanding of identities as continually and differentially constituted rather than as pre-existing their contexts or as having an invariant core” (16).

Because I’m defining class as the overdetermined space of articulation between economy and culture, a train of necessary arguments follows: if economic change is overdetermined, having a diverse and varied core (Gibson-Graham’s point), then I must argue as well that changes in class relations — and class itself — are overdetermined, which is the unavoidable implication of the views of Williams on changes in class, and of the views of Bourdieu on class position. As the Post-Autistic Economics movement argues, we can no longer make the neoclassical error of attributing microeconomic change solely to change in the tastes and values of individuals, and we can no longer make the neoclassical error of attributing macroeconomic change to simple fluctuations in supply and demand. Williams makes the historical observation that “In industry, there was the first rejection, alike of machine-production and of the social relations embodied in the factory system. This was succeeeded by a phase of growing sentiment against the machine, as such, in isolation. Thirdly, in our own period, machine production came to be accepted, and major emphasis transferred to the problem of social relations within an industrial system of production” (Williams 296). We’ve of course seen a similar series of reactions today (consider the changing social status of the computer geek over the past twenty-five years, and the evolution of representations of computers starting with HAL 9000 and the WarGames WOPR), and Williams suggests that similar changes were taking place in the nineteenth century, leading to what he describes as a world of “mass democracy” and “mass communication” (269).

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Analytical Scope

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Culture, Economics, Metadissertating

In Bourdieu’s Distinction, one way class inequality gets expressed is in the dominant classes’ distancing themselves from acknowledging the materiality of life. The judgement of distinction is a privileging of the abstract and the idealized and the rarefied and the immaterial; small portions over large portions; classical over jazz over pop. The more capital one possesses, the less one is affected by the quotidian concerns of the material world, and so one attempts to demonstrate one’s superior class position by enacting and performing that distance. The converse is also true: note the emphasis “vulgar” art — including musical forms like country, gangsta rap, and bluegrass — place on authenticity, on “keeping it real,” on the representation of the materiality of everyday lived experience. This trend, of course, is also highly visible in Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, particularly in his analyses of Coleridge, Carlyle, and (very much) Matthew Arnold.

In the Industrial Revolution of Williams’s analysis, technological advance was one of the chief driving factors of economic advance, and I’m arguing that much the same is true today. Steam, railroads, telegraphs, electricity: the emergence of these technologies produced immense and immensely unequal economic growth, just as the emergence of newer technologies has done today, and while the twentieth century’s division of labor led to a staggering increase in the volume of class positions, the class positions at the top are moving further and further away from the class positions at the bottom. But the core of the argument Williams makes is that economic changes, in confluence with changes in such factors as art and democracy, produced radical change in our understandings of class and culture: this is no mere techno-economic determinism. I’m saying much the same thing, although some of the other changes in causal factors Williams might note today include things like globalization, the post-ironic aesthetic, ethnic nationalism, and the conflict between energy consumption and environmentalism. My scope is considerably more narrow: I’m simply looking at the way certain (rather than all) factors — technology, economy — are helping to drive change in our understanding of class and its relationship to a certain aspect of culture: namely, the practice and instruction of literacy.

Come Together (Bourdieu)

preterite Class (Meta), Economics, Rhetoric

Economists rely on metaphors. Graphs, diagrams, the visual logic of geometry: these are especially favored among neoclassical economists for their explanatory power, even as neoclassical economics has been increasingly critiqued (see, for example, the post-autistic economics movement) for the ways in which these metaphors seem to be better at explaining themselves in a sort of idealized hermetic circle than they are at actually explaining the real workings of the world. Bourdieu, in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, follows the lead of the economists with his graphs, diagrams, and curves (see, especially, pages 17 and 81 for figures that seem to explain more than they truly do): geometry, after all, has a rigor and a logic, and what sociologist would not want to borrow some of that power?

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Hubris

preterite Class (Meta), Economics, Metadissertating

I’ve now made it most of the way, again, through Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, and the book reminds me, again, as to why Williams holds such immense intellectual stature. Williams demonstrates how

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of words, which are now of capital importance, came for the first time into common English use, or, where they had already been generally used in the language, acquired new and important meanings. [. . .] The changes in their use, at this critical period, bear witness to a general change in our characteristic ways of thinking about our common life: about our social, political and economic institutions; about the purposes which these institutions are designed to embody; and about the relations to these institutions and purposes of our activities in learning, education, and the arts. (xiii)

In my dissertation’s Chapter 3, I use J. K. Gibson-Graham’s definition of “Economy” in New Keywords as the starting point for an examination of how we are seeing a similar “general change” today, a change that is both cause and symptom of changes in technology, subjectivity, and economy. In Chapter 2, I metonymically charted the parameters — in that term’s senses both of variables and of boundaries — of composition’s discourse on class; Chapter 3 examines economy starting from the perspective of Williams as the sine qua non parameter of class, and composition’s contemporary re-orienting of our notions about class in relation to economy. One obvious symptom of this re-orienting is in the frequent deployment of a class rhetoric of the authenticity of lived experience: while class is understood to have a variety of causal factors — power and exploitation, occupation, wealth and income, education, tastes and values — it also has a rhetoric of idiosyncratic and individuated lived experience; an individuated rhetoric that reflects a societal turn from an economy of mass production and consumption to an economy of individuated production and consumption. And this societal turn is driven, in part, by our embracing of the technological turn to the digital.

In other words: there’s a reason we call it the “personal” computer, and that reason carries deep and incompletely examined implications for economy and subjectivity.

So here’s my problem. Relying on Williams, I shouldn’t have too many difficulties in Chapter 3 demonstrating the specifics of past connections between economy, technology, and subjectivity. The case Williams makes — using the work of Burke and Cobbett, Southey and Owen, Carlyle and Arnold and on through the Romantics and the 1880-1915 “interregnum” into the twentieth century — is, to say the least, compelling. But he’s showing what happened, demonstrating the existence of a trend, avoiding — with immense wisdom — reductive and unprovable analyses of how such a thing happened. I worry that in my attempts to connect Williams on change to Bourdieu on class and Gibson-Graham on economy, I’m making exactly the sort of hubristic mistake Williams avoids.

CW05: Materializing Resistance

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Economics, Writing

Apologies for taking so long to put up my last panel notes — kind of got a whole bunch of different things going on right now. I was also kind of anxious because, to be honest, it was one of the best panels I saw; Jim Ridolfo and David Sheridan and Tony Michel fit their presentations together really well thematically speaking; but I also liked it because I saw so much in it that intersected with my research interests and offered me some new and startling insights. All three focused, in one way or another, with the intersection of multimodal discourses with the discourse of the civic, as their panel’s subtitle (“Digital Rhetoric as a Civic Technology”) might demonstrate, but all three were very careful to acknowledge a sophisticated awareness of the many problems associated with the privileging of civic discourse, which made me happy — one so rarely sees, in our field, an acknowledgement that the public sphere was initially theorized as a bourgeois space.

Jim’s presentation, “Rhetorical Veloooocity!!!: The Economics of the Press Advisory and Tactics of Activist Delivery,” dealt with his work at Michigan State with the Worker Rights Consortium, composing activist press advisories with the knowledge and intent that the language of those advisories may be appropriated by the press. Basically, using the example of the sequence of rhetorical production and circulation of these releases, Jim demonstrated the deep connections between rhetorical delivery, re-seen economic theories — of production, distribution, consumption, appropriation, and re-production — and activist strategies for economic change. In fact, Jim argued, the rhetorical canon of delivery can be theorized through the lens of economy, including — in particular — the rhetorical situations in which the mass delivery, redistribution and re-appropriation of writings are the rhetorical objective. In the context of distribution defined as a tactic of delivery planned for economic circulation, Jim’s term “rhetorical velocity” refers to an accelerated delivery tactic (or cycle?) fostering the appropration of texts. He offered the example of a “News Advisory” sent to local papers concerning a protest event that used the words “students will dance vigorously”: two newspapers that actually sent reporters did not use those words, but the paper that did not send a reporter — only a photographer — described the event as “vigorous dancing,” and offered no reporter’s name on the news piece that ran following the event. Jim then showed a timeline demonstrating how quickly that cycle of appropriation operated: press release on Tuesday, event on Thursday, the appropriated-language news piece on Friday. In his conclusions, Jim compared the activist economy, the economy of the reporter, and the economy of media, all on immediate, near, and long-term scales, and noted that these three economies overlap in the ways different parties construct the economic value of a distributed text. Brilliant stuff, and this too-brief description doesn’t do it justice.

David Sheridan’s presentation on “Materializing Ethics and Multimodal Civic Rhetoric” described how different forms of production and semiotic affordances can open up shifting civic opportunities, working from the perspectives of the different but intersecting axes of understanding rhetoric as a material practice and rhetoric as an ethical practice. (And I know that sentence is a huge, mangled tangle of David’s language; I’m hoping he’ll set me straight.) In other words: how do material considerations intersect with rhetorical ethics?

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CW05: Copyright Anxiety

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics, Openness, Politics, Writing

Dánielle Nicole DeVoss, Nancy Allen, and Stephanie Vie gave a presentation titled “Copy-Right Anxiety: File Distribution and Intellectual Property,” and I’m not sure what the hyphenation means — maybe foregrounding the question of whether it’s ethical or right to copy? I didn’t hear them explain it, but that certainly didn’t detract from the quality of their presentations. Dánielle’s focused on using examples of video pastiche to theorize some implications of new media convergence, while Nancy’s had a deeply pedagogical focus on the implications of open source practices for the classroom, and Stephanie’s examined the intersection of students’ attitudes about peer-to-peer file-sharing and their attitudes about plagiarism; the three, taken together, sparked a lively discussion and composed a sort of collective matrix of insight about the nature of intellectual property online.

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CW05: The Politics of Digital Literacy

preterite Class (Economic), Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Economics, Politics

Casey and I got our presentations out of the way (the bare-bones version of mine is here: I had the rather stressful experience of a kernel panic and hard crash the night before while I was trying to put together some accompanying PowerPoint slides), and we’re happy to have that done. We got lots of insightful comments from generous respondents, and I hope our presentations have enough in common that we’ll be able to smush them together into something publishable.

Anyway: what I want to talk about here is the really impressive first panel I went to, on “The Politics of Digital Literacy: Cases for Institutional Critique,” since Kris Blair, Mary Hocks, and Michelle Comstock all gave enviably smart and well-put-together talks that intersected in productive and provocative ways, especially in that — while sharing a common theme and associations with large, diverse urban or state universities — Mary’s focused on institutional concerns, Michelle’s on community concerns, and Kris’s on personal concerns.

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