Economics

Paris and Me, Part 2

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Economics, Education, Writing

Digital reproducibility profoundly alters the relationships between production, consumption, the individual, and the economy. As Zuboff and Maxmin note, “the individuation of consumption [. . .] means that people no longer want to bend to the antiquated rule of business” but rather “want to be the subjects of a new commerce in which they are recognized as the origins of a new form of economic value [. . .] realized in individual space” (11). A careful reading of Raymond Williams, I think, gives considerable historical nuance to Foucault’s concerns with the nature of power (particularly in the economic sense), and while I’m certainly not enough of a new-economy fool as to dismiss Foucault’s work, I do think that context is important — and Foucault was writing in the context of an economy of mass production and consumption, when it was impossible to imagine any other situation. As a discipline, composition is in similar straits today: our big names, our super-scholars, are baby boomers. They grew up with three superpowers, three car manufacturers, and three TV networks. When Zuboff and Maxmin contend that “Rather than being diluted, the value of information can increase as it is distributed, allowing more people to do more with more, as it enables collaboration and coordination across space and time” via digital technologies (293), it’s genuinely startling to such scholars, turning the conventional economic wisdom, with its assumptions about scarcity and value, on its head.

Former Harvard president Derek Bok has observed, among others, that many academics seem to want to construct higher education as a space somehow outside of or immune to economic interests. This is rather foolish when we understand the economy as involving “making, holding, using, sharing, exchanging, and accumulating valued objects and services” (Gudeman 1), but perhaps not so foolish when we understand the widespread commonsensical notion that economics=money. Indeed, economist Colin Williams suggests in “A Critical Evaluation of the Commodification Thesis” that “The view that predominates is that the overwhelming trajectory of economic development is towards a commodified economy. Although the extent, pace and unevenness of this process is open to debate [. . .], the process of commodification itself is not” (527). Williams’s contention about the unquestionable trajectory towards commodification sounds very much like the transcendent and agentless power Gibson-Graham suggest contemporary views ascribe to the economy, as when they point out in “The Diverse Economy: Constructing a Language Politics” that there has been a “shift from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society” and that this shift has relied upon “a hegemonic move through which representations of economy have slipped from their locations in discourse and landed ‘on the ground,’ in the ‘real,’ not just separate from, but outside of society” (1).

Bloggers and writing teachers know, not just in theory but in practice, that value is contextual and anything but monolithic.

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Paris and Me, Part 1

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Composition Theory, Culture, Economics

What follows is a very early draft of the first half of the Computers and Writing presentation I’ll be giving in Palo Alto next week. I hope you might read it and tell me what’s redundant, what’s missing, and what’s foolish. The presentation’s major logical steps (of which tonight’s argument comprises points 1 through 3) are as follows:

  1. Rhetorical self-production can be understood today as an act of product differentiation or branding; conversely, consumption of products or services can be understood today as a technology of rhetorical self-production.
  2. Foucault’s governmentality — as the relation between technologies of self and technologies of power — is enacted in online writing on blogs and in the relation between individual and commercial institutions. [Sometimes, as implied by (1), the individual and the commercial can blur: see Paris Hilton and Jason Kottke.]
  3. This relation can be problematic in the case of public schools because of unequal power relations and the possibilities for domination. The massive resources of advertisers can change minds and shift opinion in undemocratic ways; more money can equal a larger voice and an increasingly unequal society.
  4. However, (3) is a characteristic of the environment of a mass economy. Today, self-production via branding is indicative of a move towards a distributed, peer-to-peer economy (facilitated by digital technologies) where the power relations we associate with a mass economy are being fragmented and replaced by other relations we haven’t yet completely fathomed.
  5. In this individuated peer-to-peer economy, not all transactions are market or commodified, and the most promising and interesting possibilities for individual agency may exist within non-market, non-commodified transactions.

Here’s the first half, with the second half to follow tomorrow:

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The Mask of Altruism

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

According to Elspeth Stuckey, “The current high profile of literacy is symptomatic of a speedy, ruthless transition from an industrial to an information-based economy. This economic shift accentuates literacy’s role in economic growth, class structure, and social estrangement. Literacy, to be sure, is a powerful, unique technology. Yet literacy remains a human invention contained by social contract, and the maintenance of that contract in education betrays our ideas of humanity as surely as our use of literacy enforces them. Are we helping those in need of economic and social opportunity, or those (including ourselves) who wish to maintain their own economic and social advantage?” (Violence viii). This was largely the point of my post yesterday: the mask of altruism worn by many folks in the field of computers and writing is nothing more than a mask. Indeed, some highly respected scholars have gone so far as to say, essentially, “Fuck the poor.”

I’m not writing to them. I know I don’t stand a chance of ever changing their minds: we’ve all seen how institutional comfort can harden overnight into conservatism. But in light of such conservatism, consider Stuckey’s quotation of Henry Giroux’s acknowledgement that in public debate, “the issue of literacy has been removed from the broader social, historical, and ideological forces that constitute its existence” (Stuckey 52). I would argue that those who advocate an engagement with digital literacies on their own terms, apart from the social and the material (again, see yesterday’s post), are attempting a similar remove. So why is this important? Because this remove is exactly the same move that J. K. Gibson-Graham describes in the discourse of economics, a shift “from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society” via “a hegemonic move through which representations of economy have slipped from their locations in discourse and landed ‘on the ground,’ in the ‘real,’ not just separate from, but outside of society” (1).

It’s learned helplessness in the service of political, economic, and pedagogical conservatism. And I’d hope that any good teacher might ask that her students turn their faces not to the past, but to the future: to possibility, and to the hope of a more egalitarian society, where those in positions of privilege work to help the disenfranchised, rather than exclude them.

Personal Branding

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Economics, Metadissertating, Writing

I’ve had this idea I’ve been working at from different angles for a few weeks; an idea that feels like the germ of the idea that’s at the heart of my dissertation’s final chapter. In Chapter 1, I argue that the discipline of composition has a really difficult time talking explicitly about economic issues, and that teaching writing with computers is one of the big places in composition that makes economic inequality really, really visible. So I go through chapters on class and economics, and come back to the economics of computers and composition at the end, where I talk about how open source perspectives can help to de-fang the effects of economic commodification in the writing classroom. But I haven’t been able to connect those issues all that well to class, until lately, especially with some prodding from a colleague over dinner tonight.

At Wealth Bondage, CEO Candidia Cruikshanks rages that The Happy Tutor is trying to steal her “brand equity” — said equity, of course, embodied in all that attitude and oh my those boots. Naomi Klein recently argued elsewhere (can’t find the link now — help me out?) that personal identity is itself an act of branding. And I’ve argued that class is the point of articulation between economics and identity. What I’ve neglected to investigate, in my considerations of the (economic?) use value of personal writing, are the ways in which identity/self/persona in and of itself, as enacted in writing, takes on both commodified and non-commodified (market and non-market; monetized and non-monetized) economic value. At Wealth Bondage — perhaps as nowhere else — we see personae qua personae ventured, offered, exchanged, and rejected in market, feudal, slave, and gift transactions. So — rhetoricians, compositionists, bloggers — what are the values of the personal selves you compose and enact on your weblogs? Some of those values are easily commodified: technorati, blogshares, comments; promotion, hiring, tenure. So, too, for students: my professor tells me this weblog entry is worth a C minus. But what about those other types of economic transactions; the non-commodified ones?

And how might those non-commodified values shift when we move from considering the various blog personae of teachers to considering the various blog personae of students?

Generational Economics

preterite Class (Economic), Composition Theory, Economics

We had a guest lecturer come and give a talk a couple weeks ago, and I had the opportunity to ask him a question about his work and its economic implications for the work performed by students in the writing classroom. His response — which eventually led to a comment on the work of James Berlin — really got me thinking. Basically, my comment was that — with a very few exceptions — the only way composition can address the economic aspects of class within the writing classroom is by talking about the class of teachers and their economic labor. In other words — and I know I’ve said this before, but I’m going somewhere different with it this time — compositionists (except John Trimbur and Bruce Horner) do not discuss the labor of student writing in economic terms. In my question, I tried to set this difficulty within the context of our economic shift from mass production and mass consumption to distributed or individuated production and consumption.

The respondent suggested that James Berlin, like himself and other prominent compositionists of their generation, spent most of their lives within an economy of mass consumption and mass production, an economy with three brands of car and three television networks, an economy wherein all economic transactions were monetized transactions. Hence the reason why the labor performed by the teacher in the classroom can be constructed as economic by members of that generation, while the labor performed by the student cannot: the labor of teaching is monetized.

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On Wealth

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

Sometimes the New York Times gets it wrong, as with Bruce Bawer’s recent ridiculously myopic piece asserting that Norway is not a rich country because Norwegians bring their lunches to work. OK, I’ll go a step further: this isn’t just myopic, it’s stupid. Percentage of the population in Norway living below the poverty line: zero. Yes, that’s right: zero percent poverty. Percentage of the population in the U.S. living below the poverty line: twelve. Yes, that’s right: nearly one out of every eight people in the U.S. lives in poverty. One in eight, Bruce. The Gini index of the distribution of family income as a measure of a nation’s economic inequality goes from 0 to 100: if income in a country is distributed perfectly equally, the Gini index is zero; if income in a country is distributed with complete inequality, the Gini index is 100. For economic inequality, Norway scores a 25. Gini index for the U.S.? 45. Yeah: our national economic inequality is on a par with that of Kenya, Uruguay, and Uzbekistan. Apparently, Bawer is happy to see 2.3 million homeless Americans, as long as he can get himself a lunchtime cheeseburger at Applebee’s.

And sometimes the New York Times gets it right, as with Guy Trebay’s recent Fashion & Style piece, “Who Pays $600 for Jeans?”: the answer apparently being, “Lots of people.” According to Trebay, “blue jeans have suddenly shed their proud proletarian roots and turned into what retailers call a status buy,” and so-called “luxury” denim is now common: “jeans with price tags of $200 are now everywhere.” But what does $200, or $300, or $400 get you in a pair of jeans? In part, it gets you — and this is where things get, economically speaking, kinda freaky — “special treatments that abrade, distress and generally torture a pair of trousers until it has achieved just the right luxuriantly ratty patina of something that has been dragged behind a truck.” OK, let’s think this through: jeans are a classed economic artifact, but their class status is changing. Barry Schwartz is quoted in the article as pointing out that “Every consumer decision now carries with it class and status implications in a way it didn’t used to.” Indeed. But when one pays for jeans that are marked as being no longer new — as having a history in that “luxuriantly ratty patina”; as having an age — then one is paying for work time made fabric. Their value is a quality realized in the time and labor (performed by someone else, not the wearer) that produced their experiential history, and their value is then publically displayed as a $200 (or $300 or $400 or $500, you get the idea) badge of class distinction. As Trebay notes, it’s “like the punch line to some elaborate Veblenesque joke”: these jeans represent the commodification of everyday lived experience in precisely the same way that paid housekeeping services turned the labor of housework into economic labor, and in precisely the same way that offering term papers for sale made the labor of education into economic labor. Luxury denim makes experience itself — the embodied passage of time — economic. Consider, then, the article’s closing quotation from Lawrence Scott: “No matter how good the wash or the detail or the label, if it doesn’t look good on a behind, it won’t sell.” Indeed, and that’s the message: class, via your body, is destiny. Even if it costs a lot more.

So, class, your homework: using quotations from these two articles, as well as from Harry McClintock’s “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and the Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor”, compose a brief essay describing why America Is Number One.

Left Behind

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

Collin’s post a while back, and the discussion that followed, got me thinking; it troubled me some in ways I couldn’t put my finger on. It’s not that I don’t think Collin makes good points in his post — he does, many of them, foremost of which being that the Hochman/Dean piece to which he responds is rather dated in its perspectives on technology and doesn’t represent the cutting edge — or even the blunt edge — of research in computers and writing.

And it’s not that I’m one of those people he blasts as being “behind” and orders to catch up: at age 12, I was installing additional RAM in my Atari 800 to kick it up from 8K to a whopping 48K, programming in BASIC, and — as Collin puts it — “futzing around with sound.” By 1987, I was on Usenet, and passing an 800K disk with a copy of Michael Joyce’s seminal hypertext “afternoon, a story” from friend to friend. 1988, I had a good grasp of basic Unix commands and was writing Turing machines in Philosophy class (it was Carnegie Mellon, which should explain a lot). 1989, I was learning how to program in LISP (which I’ve since completely forgotten) and making my own hypertexts (Apple called them “stacks”) with Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard. And so on. These days, I’m good with CSS and HTML, having been one of the first in my writing program to tinker with visual Web editors and the first to get sick of them; I know some ActionScript, a little PHP, a tiny smidgen of Perl, and I’ve forgotten lots of javascript; I can write a good regex without struggling too much; I have a part-time gig maintaining a godawful database cobbled together out of Oracle, ColdFusion, and a crawler that nobody supports; I’ve installed and tweaked and tinkered with various versions of Movable Type, WordPress, and Drupal (and completely fouled up installing two different types of wiki); and I can make various pixel-pushing digital-imaging applications stand up on their hind legs and bark in three-part harmony. (Yes, I’ve got that last one as a line item on my CV.) And, to borrow Collin’s words again, I even “know how to put together a QuickTime movie.” So no, I’m not behind.

But upon seeing Sharon’s response, I realized that it was the “behind” part of Collin’s post that bothered me some, and — thanks to Sharon — I also realized why it bothered me.

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Personal, Political, Economic

preterite Economics, Openness, Politics, Writing

Geoffrey Nunberg just did a fine piece on NPR about the discourse of the “personal” versus the “private” and the accompanying rhetorical concerns of ownership. His piece stands as good evidence why copyfighters — of whom, yes, I’ll finally admit to being one — need to be thinking about the work of both Peter Elbow and J. K. Gibson-Graham, about how the act of engagement with ongoing discussions about intellectual property constitutes the seam or suture joining personal, political, and economic concerns.

Sorry I’m late.

4Cs: Owning Knowledge

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Economics, Openness, Writing

I gave my presentation this morning, along with Krista Kennedy (as read by John Logie) and Charlie Lowe. Charlie was in his usual relaxed, easygoing talking-through-the-points mode, while John did a fine job of reading Krista’s stylistically compelling sophisticated theoretical essay. I didn’t do quite so well, largely because I was trying to talk a point-by-point presentation for the first time; in the past, I’ve always read my presentations from papers, and I do a fair job of that, I think. But my lack of comfort with the talking-through-the-points format was highly apparent in my voice, in the somewhat rushed delivery, and in my hesitation to deviate from those points. As is the case with students whose papers display a marked increase in correctness errors when they grapple with materials or genres unfamiliar to them, my presentation was marked by my delivery’s evidence of my inexperience with the genre. Which is disappointing; with the preparation I put into this, I would have liked to have done a better job.

If you check out the presentation, you’ll see that it’s highly inductive and paratactic, and those qualities are only accentuated by the cuts I made after rehearsing it and having it come out at around 22 minutes: I tried to get rid of the points that seemed least essential, but that resulted in a highly “gappy” feeling in a number of places. What I was trying to do in the presentation was simply to look at ownership issues as connected to student writing through an economic lens, in the hopes that such a lens might help the audience see how student writing — when considered and practiced as “open source” rather than as scarce and solely owned — can give an increased and more diverse valuation to the labor of everyone (students, teachers, researchers, and the various permutations thereof) in the community of first year writing. An additional difficulty, I think, is that the complexity of the theoretical stuff I was trying to present actually really doesn’t lend itself to the and/and/and qualities of parataxis, and is much more easily understood via the subordinating conjunctions of hypotaxis. Which I knew intellectually, but — since I’d never tried to do a presentation like this before — not practically.

On the good side, these points comprise the core logic of Chapter 5 of my dissertation, so I’ve got my revision work laid out for me. I’ll also say that I think my classroom focus served as a nice complement both to Krista’s flights of Deleuze and Guattari high theory and to Charlie’s explicit working-through of the implications of the Open Source development process for composition, and this seemed to play out in the really excellent Q&A that followed our presentations, where a lot of people offered insightful and provocative comments and questions (including several from Bradley Bleck that I couldn’t answer, which gave me considerable material for future thought) linking Krista’s rhizomes, Charlie’s development process, and my own concerns of valuation. So sometime in the next week or so, I’ll be cleaning up the presentation some; right now, I’m grateful to Charlie, Krista, and John, and to all the folks who joined in the discussion.

Doctor Chadwallah (who was apparently attending incognito, and who Krista explicitly referenced in her presentation) offered no questions, to the regret of many who were present.

On Scarcity

preterite Asides, Computers, Economics, Writing

For the first time in a long time, my blogroll extends. The limitations imposed by my “twenty” theme were problematic: the theory I’ve been working through for my CCCC presentation suggests that scarcity often serves as a technology of domination. This is, of course, an obvious economic insight, but one that I’d never thought to apply to writing.