time yet for a hundred indecisions
Via Amanda at Household Opera (congratulations on the fellowship, Amanda!) comes a link to the interesting perspective on “Academic Calvinism” offered at Crooked Timber, discussing the same Chronicle story on the Invisible Adjunct that’s been making the rounds in other places:
“Some tenured or tenure track commenters on IA
Varoufakis offers two thought experiments demonstrating different problems with the way neoclassical economics deals with scarcity. I’m trying to think out how they might play out or not play out in the classroom, which is actually kinda interesting, because Varoufakis uses the practice of grading to frame them.
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Is work the same thing as production? Before we get back into Varoufakis, let’s think about the question in the context of the writing classroom. My work as a teaching associate — measured by my Big State U at 25 hours per week — “produces” something which is paid for in part by students’ tuition fees and in part by state taxes. That thing that gets produced is not quite the same as the Bachelor’s degree, but is marked by the degree. Work and production are here, by definition, separate. But I think they’re separate in education because the labor — the work — of students is also essential to the production of education.
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Varoufakis on some of the further problems with neoclassical economic theory: “neoclassical economics models the labour process as a simple transaction between workers and bosses. It is as if workers and their employers are not involved in any fluctuating power/social relation with one another” (157). I need to think more about the problems of drawing parallels between the student/teacher relationship and the worker/employer relationship — one might suggest that students appropriate their own labor in writing papers, rather than having the value of that labor appropriated by teachers — but students often see themselves as producing texts “for” a teacher, so perhaps there’s transferability. The thing is, this shows just how problematic neoclassical economic models are for the discipline of composition, because so much of composition’s attention is focused on the process of textual production, and how that process of production is bound up in the social relations between student and teacher and student and institution. Varoufakis again: “along with the social relations within the firm, the neoclassical model dismisses the actual process of production. Indeed the whole complex process of producing a commodity is collapsed to that one instance during which workers and firms agree to exchange labour for capital at a given price. It is as if production is a procedural, automatic matter that occurs in some unspecified manner after the exchange between workers and employers” (157). The compositionist might say that the neoclassical economist completely ignores the rhetorical canon of invention; the educator might say that the neoclassical economist completely ignores pedagogy and the ways in which education-as-commodity gets produced.
I’m all sniffly and head-coldy. Changes in weather, maybe, going from the 30-degree Northeast to 80-degree San Antonio and back again? And now it’s rainy and wet and snowy and windy and chilly and wretched. Old winter spits its last breath for hate’s sake, with snow and freezing rain sinking all coffins and all hearses to one common pool, and roars with its gusty breath: from hell’s heart I stab at thee, New England.
OK, well maybe the weather’s not that bad. But it’s not exactly pleasant, either.
Varoufakis acknowledges the implication from Aristotle’s work “that living a successful life is more complicated than satisfying our own desires”, and contrasts it to the subsequent evolution of the “notion of a market in which one pursues profit” and its association “with the freedom to be unapologetically happy” (77). In fact, “Wanting to be happy thus emerged as a perfectly defensible philosophical ambition”, and Varoufakis explicitly connects the philosophical and economic consequences of this emergence to Thomas Hobbes and his “idea of the person as a sovereign individual” (77).
I wrote briefly on Thursday about the ways in which individualistic ideologies create problems for the study of class. I also believe that individualistic ideologies create problems for the ways I might attempt to theorize the economies of the wired writing classroom, and this is a question I need to think through further: how does the ideology of individualism (or its counterpart, which — from an etymological standpoint — one would think ought to be called “socialism” or “communism”, but both of those are rather loaded terms and not all that close to what I mean) intersect with the infinite digitial reproducibility of information goods? (Recall here the point Varoufakis makes about how information is something radically different from other commodities.)
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Varoufakis gives a basic definition of instrumental rationality: “A person is instrumentally rational if she applies her resources efficiently in order to satisfy her preferences” (44). Later, he summarizes the equi-marginal principle: “Stop acting when the marginal utility (i.e. the contribution to utility from the last unit of activity) comes as close to (without being less than) the marginal dis-utility (i.e. the losses of utility following that last unit of utility)” and suggests that, “According to instrumental rationality, the rational person chooses the quantity which best satisfies her preferences all things considered (e.g. cost, fatigue, etc.). If preferences are translated into utility, to be instrumentally rational is to maximise utility subject to various constraints (e.g. fatigue, cost, etc.). And since utility is maximised when the Equi-marginal Principle is satisfied, the instrumentally rational person must always respect this principle” (50). Furthermore, Varoufakis notes the neoclassical economic contention that the equi-marginal principle “applies generally to any situation in which you have to choose between different quantities of a single ‘experience'”(51).
My interests are in trying to figure out how these principles might play out in the wired writing classroom: after all, if I’m writing about class, and if one consistent factor across all the definitions of class I’ve seen is that they carry either an explicit or implicit economic component in their definitions of position and mobility, then it would serve me well to attempt to apply the principles of that economic component of the definition of class to what happens in the writing classroom.
Let me offer one more quotation from Varoufakis on neoclassical economic models before I ask a few questions trying to figure out some of the economic workings of the wired writing classroom.
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I don’t have the title of the CCCC presentation given by Pam Takayoshi, Gail Hawisher, and Cyndi Selfe in front of me, but all three focused on hidden, subordinated, or otherwise alternative literacies associated with computers. I’ll admit that I had just come from a fantastic presentation on mentoring by Emily Bauman, Malkiel Choseed, Jen Lee, and Brenda Whitney, and found myself a bit underwhelmed: the computers-oriented presentations held little of the careful nuance, complex argumentation, and sophisticated reflexive richness of the mentoring presentations, instead favoring a straightforward, unadorned, and eminently practical outlining of real-world research findings. I’ll hasten to point out that this is much more an issue of my own personal preferences regarding academic work than it is any comparison of the relative merits of the two panels: I’ve read enough of the work of Takayoshi, Hawisher, and Selfe to have seen that their scholarship is pretty much unimpeachable. So before I get myself in any more trouble, maybe I’d best just go ahead and describe what I saw.
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Yanis Varoufakis, in Foundations of Economics, uses the Roman story of Tarquinius Superbus and the Sibyl of Cumae to argue that “information is not like other commodities”, because “you cannot know its value (not even have a good estimate of it) until you have it” (68). For an immense sum of gold, the Sibyl offers Tarquinius Superbus the nine books containing the entirety of human knowledge; Tarquinius refuses, responding that the price is too high. The Sibyl burns three of the nine books and then offers Tarquinius the remaining six for the same price. Tarquinius again refuses. The Sibyl burns three more books, and Tarquinius finally caves in, purchasing the remaining three books for the price of the original nine.
I would suggest that “information is not like other commodities” for other reasons, as well, including — of course — Walter Benjamin’s notion of reproducibility, but the unknowability of information before one has it is part of the motivational problem at the heart of education.
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I haven’t done anything with the wiki software this weekend; actually, I spent a lot of my time putting together a cat tree for the girls to climb out of 2 x 4s and 1 x 12s. Broke two drill bits; wore out a saw blade. Maybe I’ll post pictures.
Anyway: Feenberg cites the observation from Bowles and Gintis (201k PDF link; well worth reading) that education has been “reorganized to provide capitalist industrialism with the type of workers it required” and couples the observation to Harry Braverman’s work in order to conclude that “the problems [that economic concerns shape education] are not confined to the workplace but shape cultural and social life as a whole” (22). Braverman’s focus, as I understand it (I hesitate to add yet another book to my reading list), was what he called the “deskilling” of labor, by which capitalist firms “simplify tasks into mechanical routines that can be quickly learned” (42). My contention is that this happens not only in capitalist firms, but in the university, and in fact is inherent in the frequent demand from students that they be taught “marketable” skills. So one question might be: when we do things with technology, with computers — what is it that isn’t marketable?
The good Chris Worth, and others, have recently forwarded some excellent links; here are three around a common theme — communication and the circualtion of ideas as one aspect of the university’s academic commons — that I thought far too good to keep to myself. I’ll try to have more to say about them soon; tonight’s kind of an off night, with still a lot left to do (including responses owed to a number of people, bills to pay, et cetera: talk about a lame Friday night).
Crisis and Transition: the Economics of Scholarly Communication (PDF link); a very conventional neoclassical perspective, in which Dorothea and Charlie and others might have a few holes to poke.
Open Source Content in Education: Developing, Sharing, Expanding Resources; an article that borrows some points from the one above, but offers a different perspective — although I’m uncomfortable with the separating-out of “content”.
Commons and Communities in the University: Some Notes and Some Examples (PDF link); another critique of the neoclassical market perspective as applied to the university.
More tomorrow.
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