Writing

Government Property, Public Property

preterite Composition Theory, Economics, Writing

The arriving faculty workshop at West Point continues, with an interesting briefing several days ago from USMA’s intellectual property attorney. The primary point of the briefing had to do with contracts and copyright, and it was this: any intellectual property I produce while at West Point in my official capacity as a faculty member, government employee, and representative of the United States Army does not automatically inhere to me as it would under conventional copyright law. Instead, inasmuch it is produced in the service of the United States Government, it is immediately released into the public domain.

Yeah. Wow. And, given my views on intellectual property, I think that’s pretty cool, although the IP attorney’s acknowledgement of the forthright application of institutional hegemonic force was a little unsettling: most of the time around here, they hide the iron behind velvet for civilian faculty.

There are other implications, as well. Ethical regulations make very clear that I can’t use my position as a West Point faculty member to push a book or an essay, which of course would seem obvious until one raises concerns (as I did with the IP attorney) of context and venue: essays published by West Point faculty in Military Review carry considerably different appeal and considerably different connotative freight from those published in Rethinking Marxism.

The thing that’ll be most difficult for me to get used to, however, is that I won’t be able to ask my students — plebe cadets, this first semester — to make a choice about the status of their essays as intellectual property. Anything they write in and for my class is instantly released into the public domain, and they therefore don’t have to engage with the concerns of choice, motivation, and textual ownership that have lately been so important to me.

Unless, of course, we begin to productively blur the line between work performed in an official capacity and work performed in a personal capacity. Like an institution-wide cadet blogging initiative might do.

Hmmm.

Best Academic Weblog

preterite Writing

I was very happy to hear that this year’s Kairos John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award, for the academic weblog which has made a significant contribution to the field of rhetoric and composition, goes to Clancy Ratliff’s CultureCat.

As a public intellectual who regularly engages other academic webloggers both within and beyond composition and rhetoric, Clancy has long been at the leading edge of discussions of new and emerging intersections of technology, rhetoric, and pedagogy. Her blog entries maintain an engaging and often witty balance between the academic and the personal, and she’s a reliable leader in pointing to new resources, new developments, and new debates in our field. Finally, she’s generous in her linking practices, and has been responsible for helping more than a few new academic bloggers get established.

I can’t think of a more deserving recipient. Give Clancy your congratulations at KNews or at CultureCat.

SERE and the Essay

preterite Politics, Writing

There was a decent episode of The Unit tonight that dealt with SERE training: scary stuff, from all accounts, and training I simultaneously found myself grateful that I never had to do and at the same time very much wished I’d had the opportunity to try and prove myself in. I was a lowly non-elite active-duty soldier and NCO, but I had some opportunities to train with guys from the 1st of the 75th, and they and the 3rd of the 160th SOAR were a visible presence where I was stationed, and my friend Daniel was Special Forces. (OK, so all that makes me sound like even more of a wannabe. Guilty as charged.) Out of all of them, Daniel and the two Rangers who’d done SERE training were the only ones who didn’t have that JSOC swagger; who didn’t have that cock-of-the-walk strut. And it’s funny, because that swagger was so much what I wanted to have: when I was getting near the end of my enlistment and thinking about how much I liked books, how much I liked reading and writing and how appealing being in higher education might be, the one thing that almost made me re-up was when the reenlistment NCO told me, “Sergeant Ed, I can get you a Special Forces contract.” But I went for the books instead, and now — years later — I’m happy to be headed to West Point as a civilian professor. (With the occasional second-guessing of what I might’ve done.)

Though the show never uses the word, The Unit is of course about Delta. The show’s a David Mamet project, and his writing made the first episode’s dialogue particularly snappy and engaging, but in the succeeding episodes, the writers and producers have clearly done their research. With the focus split between conflict abroad and wives waiting at home, the show’s cultural and political ideologies are very much designed to appeal to a conservative demographic — but I’d argue, as a political liberal, that that’s not much of a reason not to watch it. The show focuses on the tactical rather than the strategic perspective, and in fact often uses the tactical perspective to question the strategic perspective, as many soldiers do. The proliferation of supportive wives is overdone and reinforces unfortunate gender stereotypes, and in some ways moves the representation of post housing a little bit closer to Stepford with each episode — divorced JSOC soldiers are plentiful, for obvious reasons, so why aren’t they represented on the show? — but also makes a necessary statement about all the difficulties that military spouses manage to endure.

And then there’s the flip side to the way that the popular media tries to thrill you with representations of covert war: “The Desert One Debacle.” The story is yet more impressive reporting from Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down (forget the movie: if you want to know what really went on, read the book, and even the book is considerably sanitized). Read it all the way through, and you’ll see how stuff never works the way it’s supposed to in the military. People simply don’t learn that things never go the way you expect them to go. Nobody who’d been through SERE training ever talked about it much. They wanted those who hadn’t done it to not know, to not anticipate. And dive training? The first thing they do, we were told, is drown you. You’re held under water, at the bottom of a pool, until you take a breath, two breaths, more, and fill your lungs with water. They do it to get you over your fear of drowning, and then they rescuscitate you.

So I wonder, as I move from a deeply liberal civilian institution to a rather more conservative military institution of higher education: how might one ask a student who’s been drowned or gone through SERE to write the personal essay?

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.

Remixing Composition

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Openness, Writing

A bit past our semester halfway point, I asked students to (anonymously, if they chose, as many did) evaluate the course: what they were or weren’t getting out of the class, which types of work were most and least useful to them, which aspects of my teaching practices were least or most productive. The results were informative and helpful, and also fairly consistent. What was most helpful were their perspectives on what types of writing they already felt fairly comfortable with, and what types of writing they felt hadn’t yet been adequately addressed in the class.

As I recently described, Essay 1 asks students to choose a personal context, to examine their own relation to that context, and to draw some conclusions about that relationship, supported by examples from experience. Essay 2 asks students to engage with a difficult text in the sophisticated ways that academia expects, to understand and then move beyond its argument and draw broader conclusions, and to support those conclusions using accepted forms of citing textual evidence. Essay 3 asks students to chart the complex rhetorical and logical interrelationships among a group of texts on a given topic, to analyze those relationships, and then to make an argument to a specific audience based on that analysis, supporting their arguments with examples appropriate to their audiences. Essay 5 will ask students to perform an analysis of their own writing both within and beyond the context of the course, looking not only at their own writing since September, but also to the past and future and synthesizing possible trends and tendencies. Looking at those assignments, and at my students’ progress, I anticipated (correctly) that they’d probably be burnt out on citation-format stuff by this point in the semester, and also that there might be a desire for more engagement with the nuances of style and questions of genre, since they seem to be doing quite well in terms of their writing’s content and structure. (More evidence that they really are a bright bunch this semester: in semesters past, working with students on structural concerns in their essays has sometimes felt like the teacherly equivalent of pulling teeth.)

And I was right. Their written responses to the mid-semester evaluations indicated a strong interest in tone and style and the authorial motivations for deploying certain stylistic strategies, an interest in the rhetorical strategies associated with other genres (including, from several students, concerns with film and visual literacies), an interest in textual juxtaposition, and from an overwhelming majority of students, an interest in doing “creative” work. This last interest is somewhat problematic, for two reasons: first, to be blunt, College Writing is a course in the essay. But that first reason supposes that essays are somehow less creative than other genres — which is, of course, the second problem.

And so their responses — along with some insights from Joanna, Amber Engelson, and Amanda Carr — led to my new Essay 4 assignment, where I ask students to remix a text.

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CFP: Writing, Teaching, Technology

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

The UMass Amherst English Department is co-sponsoring a K-college Conference on Writing, Teaching, and Technology on April 7 and 8, 2006. From the Call for Proposals:

The rapid development of computer capabilities is providing new venues for writing for people of all ages: personal web pages, web diaries, and blogs make it possible for people to write and share their work around the globe. As technology facilitates writing, it also challenges our very notion of writing. Writers can compose not only with words, but also with images and sound. Software programs are moving far beyond spell-checking; some are being marketed claiming to evaluate writing. Finally, technology also provides new opportunities for teaching writing (for example, electronic writing portfolios; software, like WebCT, that organizes courses and facilitates sharing of drafts; distanced education platforms). This conference aims to allow teachers from different backgrounds and with different interests to share methods, ideas, and projects for using technology effectively in the writing classroom.

I’m not involved with organizing the conference, but I know some of the folks who are, and it looks like this’ll be pretty cool, especially with the cross-grade-level focus. Kathleen Yancey will give the opening address, and Charles Moran will be the speaker for the closing session. If you’re within a few hours’ drive and have an interest in technology and teaching, I’m sure they’d love to see a proposal from you.

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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Dirty Data

preterite Computers, Writing

Cameron Marlow, a PhD candidate at the MIT media lab, has put together a survey about weblogs to further his dissertation research, and it looks like a lot of folks I know have filled it out. As a fellow dissertator, I was glad to be able to help him out, and I think the project is a great idea. (From his links, he’s also doing all sorts of other cool stuff, as well.) However, I’ve got to say I found myself a little frustrated with the limits set by his questions in my attempts to respond to his survey. The MIT media lab, I think, could use a research methods seminar.

The survey’s minor infelicities — it asks if you met your family online; there’s no selection for “colleague” when it asks how you know someone; it requests occupational data in categories that reveal more about the author than about possible respondents — don’t take away from its value. More problematic, though, are the ways it frames the crawl it does on your blog: upon finding 'a href' tags (er, including in my case a link to an explanation of the 'rel' attribute that may have been helpful to Marlow), it asks you to classify the link, offering these options: weblog, weblog entry/post, personal homepage, part of my weblog, other. Are these really the only sorts of pages to which webloggers link? (I’ve heard a number of qualitative researchers observe that “other” often tends to get a whoooole lot of responses.) Actually, though, this may have been a really smart reason for Marlow’s limiting of the form’s options — but I fear he might have sacrificed research accuracy for research efficiency. As one commenter observed, it’s also troubling to see what the survey’s list of transactional motivations for blogging doesn’t include: learning isn’t on there, for example. Nor is the pleasure of writing.

Like I said, the project seems important, smart, and well-intentioned — but I also worry it’ll likely return some problematically dirty data.