Writing

CCCC07: IP Caucus

preterite Composition Theory, Conference Notes, Openness, Writing

I’m in New York, where the 2007 meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication got underway today. I’d meant to finish up Cadet Casey’s story before the conference started, but time got away from me, so I’ll see if I can make the time to do so tomorrow before serious conference-blogging gets underway.

The Intellectual Property caucus was engaging and productive. From what I understand, a lot of what went on will be summarized at the CCCCIP site in days to come, and it’s late with an early day for me tomorrow, so I’ll be brief in my notes here. Karen Lunsford started the meeting, and while she made a number of important points and exhortations, what I found most interesting was her description of the University of Kansas’s March 10, 2005 University Council resolution, which declared the importance of access to scholarly information and called on all faculty members to ask publishers for permission “to permit the deposition of a digital copy of every article accepted by a peer-reviewed journal into [an open access] repository.” According to other people at the meeting, the University of California system is working toward a similar initiative. Such a move would have profound implications for scholars and the circulation of knowledge, and one can only hope more institutions follow suit. Charlie Lowe followed Karen, talking some about Creative Commons and the IP Caucus Open Source Software resolution, encouraging schools and faculty to explore the possibilities offered by OSS in their work and their students’ work. John Logie then spoke for a while about the relationship between the CCCC IP Committee and the CCCC IP Caucus: the caucus is essentially a task force, he said, while the committee has “administrative teeth.” While the Committee is the formal arm, he suggested, the Caucus is more of a grassroots space where radical, powerful ideas take shape. He talked about the annual “Top IP Stories” he’s working on, where people discuss the most important news stories involving intellectual property in the past year, such as the 2006 US Appeals Court decision in Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley wherein the Court ruled that the remixed re-publication of Grateful Dead concert posters qualified as fair use under Section 107 of U.S. copyright law.

After Logie spoke, the caucus broke into work groups. I was in a group dedicated to unpacking IP issues in the classroom: as Carol Havilland put it, we as composition scholars have a habit of engaging intellectual property concerns in complex conceptual ways, but then turn around and teach our students simple rules without helping them explore the rationales behind them. We wound up talking about what it would look like to teach an “ethics of citation” and what such an ethics would do and how it would work. Brian Ballentine was the one taking notes, and I’m sure he’ll recap the session with more grace and facility than mine at ccccip.org. Our small group session closed with Havilland offering an interesting proposal: it might be useful, she suggested, to look for cases to share with our colleagues where the rules we express to our students come into conflict with other rules, with institutional principles, or with what we see as ethical behavior.

Enough for tonight. Tomorrow, I present, and I’ll be attending more than a few sessions and meetings — I’ll see how well my note-taking holds up.

Update: Bradley’s blogged it, as well.

Economies of Possibility

preterite Class (Meta), Economics, Writing

In “Can Economics Start from the Individual Alone?” Geoffrey Hodgson points out that around the middle of the 20th century, economics came to be defined as “the science of individual choice,” wherein the focus is on “allocation of scarce means between alternative uses, as a universal matter of choice for every individual in a world of scarcity” (57). As I started to try to get at last week, that focus on the individual as isolate actor embodying tastes and preferences mappable as indifference curves is inaccurate and inappropriate in its ahistoricity and its inability to account for time, change, and context. We know that people act from diverse motivations (e.g., Benkler’s different behaviors in seeking profit-based rewards, social-psychological rewards, and intrinsic-hedonic rewards; to which I might add the idea of political motivations, as well), but those actions are historical processes and motivations alter over change and in response to other actions and motivations. What we should be talking about, then, is the way people engage in the processes of interconnected textual work (which can consist of various combinations of production, reproduction, and distribution), appropriation, ownership, and use. These processes constitute a network and always must be understood as taking place over time, especially given Benkler’s key insight that “Information is both input and output of its own production process” (37). As Rebecca Moore Howard has recently pointed out, “from an intertextual point of view, all writers are always collaborating with text,” and “intertextual theory asserts the appropriation of text as an inescapable component of writing” (9). The information Benkler describes is both valued in itself and, as Donath and boyd point out in their work on signaling behaviors, indicator of value: see again their assertion that “The expenditure of energy to maintain a connection is a signal of its importance and of the benefits it bestows” (81). Seeing the cycle of textual work, appropriation, ownership, and use as economic act (as I do, following Benkler and Gibson-Graham), then, allows us to see Benkler’s information production process as an intentional economy: economic activity is not some faceless juggernaut, a massive agentless agency removed from human intervention, as some would have us believe.

Such a determinist perspective on the economy can only promote stasis. As we well know, many of those who work from a Marxist economic perspective are just as guilty (if not more so) of such determinist perspectives as capitalist free marketeers, particularly in the more conventional ways they’ve attempted to interpret Marx’s notions of base and superstructure. In writing of the determining economic base and determined cultural superstructure of industrial capitalist commodity production, Raymond Williams points out that much confusion has come out of the multiple meanings of the word “determine,” and suggests that we would do far better to understand determining as “setting limits and exerting pressures” rather than in the theological sense of total “prefiguration, prediction or control” (4). Williams argues at length:

We have to revalue ‘determination’ towards the setting of limits and the exertion of pressure, and away from a predicted, prefigured and controlled content. We have to revalue ‘superstructure’ towards a related range of cultural practices, and away from a reflected, reproduced or specifically dependent content. And, crucially, we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and towards the specific activities of men [sic] in real social and economic relationships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic process. (6)

That understanding of dynamic process, of economic activity as being something done intentionally by people in specific material contexts, is key, particularly when applied to to today’s information economy, when — as Jameson points out, following Marx — culture and economy are increasingly blurred. That blurring is itself a space for intervention, a space of possibility, a space not governed by Shapiro and Varian’s eponymous “information rules” but by human activity and intent, and that understanding of our location in what Jameson calls late capitalism is key, as well: to borrow the language of Williams again, we might do well to see Shapiro and Varian’s “rules” as another instance of the “laws, constitutions, theories, ideologies, which are claimed as natural, or as having universal validity or significance” which “simply have to be seen as expressing and ratifying the domination of a particular class” (7) — or, of course, domination by a particular class, which in this case would be Robert Reich’s “symbolic analysts.” We no longer live in the industrial economy that gave arguments about working-class identities so much of their force, and we need to move away from the circumstance described by Gibson-Graham wherein “attachment to a past political analysis or identity is stronger than the interest in present possibilities for mobilization, alliance, or transformation” (5). Much of the focus in composition’s literature on the working class — the most common way in which composition has tried to engage economic concerns — has been either on the past, as one’s background, or on the future in the form of vocationalist concerns. To me, such a static focus and avoidance of engaging present and immediate economic activity is deeply melancholic (and, indeed, such melancholy is an abiding characteristic of much of the literature on the working class), but more importantly closes off any possibility for progressive change.

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven, CT: Yale, 2006.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2006.

Hodgson, Geoffrey. “Can Economics Start from the Individual Alone?” A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics. Edward Fullbrook, ed. London: Anthem, 2004. 57-67.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Understanding ‘Internet Plagiarism.'” Computers and Composition 24 (2007): 3-15.

Shapiro, Carl, and Hal R. Varian. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Networked Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School, 1999.

Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” New Left Review 82 (1973): 3-16.

Individuals and Generations

preterite Culture, Writing

I’m putting off the update to Mala’s story until tomorrow, Friday proper. However, parts of it find their basis in what I’m going to write about here, as has been the idea with the serial as a whole: imagining the future practices of composition.

Geoffrey Hodgson uses the work of the economist Alexander Field to demonstrate that economic analysis cannot start from the figure of the lone individual and his microeconomic tastes and preferences, as so much neoclassical economic analysis has attempted to do with homo economicus. The gendered language is wholly intentional here, and intended to illustrate that some forms of labor — historically, those gendered as male — are deemed economically valuable and productive, while others — historically, those gendered as female; e.g. the caring professions, household labor — are defined as being outside the economy. Hodgson explains that in all economic attempts at explaining or analyzing behavior, “some norms and rules must inevitably be presumed at the start” (59). In other words, even if the individual’s neoclassical microeconomic tastes and preferences help to shape and create supply and demand, that individual is never ahistorical, and never outside a context, even as much as the neoclassical models of Pareto indifference curves and perfect competition might always wish it were so. In fact, we might take Hodgson’s assertion about economy as an analogue to Burke’s construction of the rhetorical parlor: the structures of economic activity have always preceded us, are always evolving, and will continue after we leave, no matter how important or irrelevant our own contributions might be to the conversation in that economic parlor. The individual’s tastes and preferences are not the sole originary point of economic valuation, no matter what conventional microeconomics might want to suggest in its ugly oversimplifications: value is social, networked, and historical, particularly in regard to information goods and experience goods.

Danah Boyd’s work has highlighted this social value and its connection to signaling behavior in networked communities, and there is — as Emily Nussbaum points out (and apparently continues to be amazed by) — a generation gap in the way people evaluate these relationships of value. Nussbaum clearly doesn’t want to be seen as a fuddy-duddy, and she italicizes her channeling of her own opinions so they won’t quite seem to come from her:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Nussbaum’s piece is representative of an increasingly popular genre: the generational lament at perceived famewhoring. How dare, Nussbaum’s tone scolds, these kids want to be famous: aren’t there better, finer ambitions? You know, that whole romantic thing, or that other protestant work ethic thing, and doesn’t being a famewhore make you into Paris Hilton and so you can never do any sort of societal good, so why don’t you damn kids just get jobs and stop all this social foolishness?

(Perhaps we might here detect a tonal analogue to a certain recent under-discussed listserv post on techrhet that called bloggers assholes because they’re famewhores, or something like that. One has to at least admire the circumspection and restraint of those who were so disinterpellated by the post’s author: apparently, These aren’t the bloggers you’re looking for.)

Here’s the thing: the increasing sociality of value comes straight out of Adam Smith. It’s self-interest (Wealth of Nations) and altruism (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) linked not to romantic self-interested isolate behavior, but to the network, wherein the motivation for producing, circulating, distributing, reproducing, and appropriating the value of texts both alters the value of those texts and is altered by the value of those texts, particularly in our contemporary circumstance where appropriation is unavoidable and an economic signal behavior. As Johndan Johnson-Eilola reminds us, “symbols are now a class of material objects, conceptual objects, with market value, social force, and dimension” (4): in a preexisting circumstance of the circulation of fame, of reputation, we see the ongoing evolution of norms and rhetorical context for a cultural conversation, but there are those — like Nussbaum, like the techrhet poster — who want to freeze context and define it synchronically.

What’s interesting is that such synchronic definition is always performed in relation to another earlier time. It’s a deeply conservative move: let’s look at things in this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

Which is a total Army mentality.

Hm.

Not Necessarily Complicitous

preterite Economics, Writing

I’ve been on a paper-grading binge the past week and I’ve got company this weekend, so the next update concerning Cadet Casey will be delayed a few days.

Which isn’t to say I’m not thinking about her. Certainly, neither she nor I are under any illusions about our roles as arms of the twenty-first century’s new imperial hegemony. We want to believe we’re making a difference, raising consciousness, contributing to the evolving understanding of the military as peacekeepers rather than warfighters under a regime of ubiquitous and ongoing distributed conflict, but we understand as well that ideological and economic and geopolitical pressures exerted by our own government and others work to sustain that regime. We are, we know, agents of capital.

Which isn’t to say we’re wholly complicitous.

We understand — we assert — we want to believe, at least, that it’s possible from the inside to work against “the assertions that capitalism really is the major force in contemporary life, that its dominance is not a discursive object but a reality that can’t simply be ‘thought away,’ that it has no outside and thus [our] so-called alternatives are actually part of the neoliberal, patriarchal, corporate capitalist agenda” (Gibson-Graham 2). The clickstream is an economic space, with its transactions of value and its signaling behaviors, and as such, it’s a site of intervention. It’s a space where multiplicitous economies can take root, have taken root, have in fact spread and dispersed from node to node with remarkable haste. In observing this behavior, perhaps writing teachers might move further towards understanding writing as an economy of circulation, and towards understanding “economy as a site of decision, of ethical praxis, instead of as the ultimate reality/container/constraint” (Gibson-Graham 87).

More on Mala soon.

Production and Appropriation

preterite Computers, Economics, Writing

Last Friday night, I was having dinner and seeing Pan’s Labyrinth with my attorney (she was drunk, of course, and amazed me yet again by somehow fitting a twelve-pack of St. Ides, an enormous Smith & Wesson 460 with the 8-inch barrel, and a two-pound venison tenderloin for snacking on into the hunting vest she wore beneath her DKNY wool coat), so the next installment of Cadet Mala Casey’s story will have to wait until this coming Friday.

Tonight, I went into the city for dinner (vegetarian on Curry Hill at Pongal, on Lexington between 27th and 28th: excellent, excellent Indian food but indifferent service) with some new acquaintances, some old friends, and my Master’s thesis advisor, and so had a stretch of useful focused reading time on the train. And it helped me put together some stuff about value and appropriation that I’ll likely talk about at CCCC.

First: in an article on social networking sites in BT Technology Journal, Judith Donath and danah boyd offer a brief discussion of the ways economic signaling theory can be used to analyze the way people display (wear? badge? perform? publicize?) their connections in social networks. While Donath’s and boyd’s discussion is largely confined to social networking sites like Orkut and Friendster, their conclusions are generalizable to our increasingly networked culture in general, and to blogs in particular: “The expenditure of energy to maintain a connection,” they argue, “is a signal of its importance and of the benefits it bestows” (Donath and boyd 81), or–in other words–a signal of its value. When I leave a comment on a post by Bradley, Jeff, or Joanna, I’m signaling its subjective value to me in ways that are socially reinforced, to varying degrees, by other commenters, while at the same time creating additional value for myself through the labor expended in creating my comment on the post. In much the same way, if Chris or Liz or Amanda leaves a comment here, they’re also producing additional value that can be appropriated by the broader community constituted by our various blogrolls, and the semi-invisible (to us, at least) community of lurkers. And as we know, the scholarly apparatus of citation is another form of value-signaling.

But the concerns emerge when we start to talk about the appropriation of value. We know that information is a non-rivalrous and non-scarce good, but with the intellectual DRM of plagiarism policies, we treat it as rivalrous and scarce. While plagiarism policies predate the information age, they’ve become inextricably embedded in its evolution. In Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion, John Logie (I’m a bit late, but thanks for suggesting it, Clancy!), approvingly deploys Andrew Ross’s 1990 description of “the ongoing attempt to rewrite property law in order to contain the effect of the new information technologies that… have transformed the way in which modern power is exercised and maintained” (Ross 10, qtd. in Logie 31) in order to help illustrate “the degree to which the state depends on the maintenance of stable property lines” (Logie 31). Logie offers a strong critique of the ways bureaucratic attempts to respond to the digital reproducibility of information have wholly failed to account for its not-rivalrous nature. At the same time, though, Logie points out that “U.S. courts have repeatedly rejected the notion that creators of intellectual property are entitled to any special consideration based on their investment of labor,” and cites Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s insistence in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service that “the public’s interest in access to information can trump the creator’s expectation for a return on effort expended” (55).

This is a clearly economic argument, and an apparent rejection of the labor theory of value. (I think. Other perspectives?) Do I agree with it? Well, it’s law, so it doesn’t really matter whether I agree or not–but it strikes me as interesting that the rationale inheres in an emphasis on the consumer rather than on the supplier of information; on the appropriation rather than on the production. Part of my project for this CCCC presentation, then, should be to come up with a basic and rudimentary rhetoric of the process of production, appropriation, distribution, and reproduction of value in writing. (Which might help me compose an answer to Jenn’s important question.)

For Daniel

preterite Academia, Writing

My friend Daniel, in his military career, spent two nights in an Israeli prison for attempting to buy guns on the black market, as he’d been tasked to do by his Special Forces unit.

There are other things, worse things, that happened to Daniel beyond the weapons market. And as much as I like this poem that makes me think about him, it isn’t so good in the middle part: it hectors, Daniel would have said. That stuff about the American death, blue uniforms, barrels, hands: too easy, facile, and the title as well. Cheap, almost.

The Al Harishma Weapons Market

At midnight, steel shutters
slide down tight. Feral cats slink
in the periphery of the streetlamp’s
dim cone of light. Inside, like a musician
swaddling a silver-plated trumpet,
Akbar wraps an AK-47 in cloth.
Grease guns, pistols, RPGs —
he slides them all under the countertop.
Black marketeer or insurgent —
an American death puts food on the table,
more cash than most men earn in an entire year.
He won’t let himself think of his childhood friends —
those who wear the blue uniforms
which bring death, dying from barrels
he may have oiled in his own hands.
Akbar stirs the chai,
then carries his sleeping four-year-old,
Habib, to bed under glow-in-the-dark
stars arranged on the ceiling. Late at night
when gunfire frightens them both,
Habib cries for his father, who tells him
It’s just the drums, a new music,
and the tracery of lights in the sky
he retraces on the ceiling, showing the boy
how each bright star travels
from this dark place, to the other.

And then there’s that ending, with the stars. That wasn’t Daniel’s ending, but I want to hope that maybe it was his sister’s. He worried about her, about her boyfriends, about their parents. Worried about whether she was pregnant.

Daniel never caught a break. He ate a bullet in a New Mexico hotel room.

[Edited after the fact: the poem is by former Sergeant Brian Turner, from his exceptional collection, Here, Bullet.]

A Lesson

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Politics, Writing

Imagine you’ve been working with your students on productive strategies for paraphrasing and summarizing. Imagine you’ve been working with them on properly formatting their quotations and lists of Works Cited, as well. Imagine that you offer them a passage from a text and a set of ways of using that passage that are either (1) acceptable, (2) plagiarized, (3) erroneous, or (4) both plagiarized and erroneous. You ask them to work in pairs to come up with evaluations and rationales for those evaluations.

Does the fact that one pair of students uses the scissors, paper, rock method of evaluation to arrive at their decisions indicate to you that this is (1) the last class on a Friday afternoon, (2) the last class on a Friday afternoon, or (3) the last class on a Friday afternoon?

My boss came by and stood in the door and watched while this was happening, and we couldn’t do anything other than laugh. The cadets in question already had the answers, and were clearly making fun of the instructorial panopticism. I don’t know how to adequately describe the situation, aside from saying that my boss is both a PhD scholar and an Infantry branch Lieutenant Colonel, and all eyes in the classroom immediately noted his rank. And as for the cadets in question: well, if you’re going to get in trouble for doing something, and you’ve been spotted doing it, why stop?

There’s something about the authoritarian structure here that promotes a counterhegemonic engagement in (a very few) certain students; an engagement I’ve seldom seen elsewhere. And I’ll confess: I like that engagement.

Declamation and the Digital

preterite Computers, Rhetoric, Writing

In Lester Faigley’s “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal” (CE October 1986, 527-542), this analogy stopped me:

In organizations where computer technologies have become commonplace, people have taken advantage of opportunities for horizontal communication on topics of their choice through computer ‘bulletin boards,’ which function like radio call-in programs. (538, emphasis mine)

It’s an early metaphor, certainly, and a notion that’s been addressed in various ways in our nascent literature about writing and blogging. But I love the shift there, the look to older technologies, and the way we understand those older technologies today as the domain of an apoplectic Rush Limbaugh or a low-key Tom Ashbrook. (No offense, Tom: I like your show a lot. But NPR, as the smart counter to Rush, sometimes tries too hard to make its programming chamomile-tea mellow and inoffensive.) Usenet as late-night call-ins from the cranks and tin-foil hat crowd.

Blogs, of course, have been widely represented as the same, and I hope we’re past that now. But what about the aspect of declamation? What about the late-night crank phone call to the radio station where the listener offers a half-hour raving systematization of gray aliens, the Zionist Occupational Government, black helicopters, man-hating bra-burning feminists, the United Nations, and the general incompetence of teachers of writing?

What happens if we understand those as instances of Seneca the Elder’s suasoriae and controversiae in the context of their relation to the hegemonic force of mainstream discourse? As, in fact, counterhegemonic uses of genre that in their deployment of genre serve to either (1) indict the way that discourse functions under an oppressive regime or (2) praise the operation of discourse under that regime, depending on who’s reading.

No answers. But I keep coming back to that Faigley quote as a moment of interesting rupture. Its juxtaposition of qualities and modes.