CCCC07 C.26: Textual Transgressions

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Conference Notes, Writing

Collin Brooke acknowledged at the outset of this panel that there were technological difficulties coordinating this panel’s presentations, and the start of the presentations was delayed by six minutes as Collin (the chair) and others worked to overcome those difficulties. The panel’s full title was “Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis,” and the presenters offered a useful body of insight into the various ways that textual appropriation functions online, and how those various functions of appropriation serve to illuminate our practices and preconceptions surrounding the teaching of writing.

Clancy Ratliff’s presentation, “Negotiating and Regulating Plagiarism in Everyday Blogging Practices,” began from a personal example: her weblog, CultureCat, has been repeatedly plagiarized, in various and interesting ways. Ratliff has posted a brief recap with slides of her presentation, but I think she’s being too modest in the account she gives: as is typical of her work, her presentation was insightful, witty, and focused. The first example of weblog plagiarism she offered came to her via an email that read: “You hv posted a very kewl blog. I have stolen a few things from It just to start with my own blog.”

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CCCC07 E: The Global Economy and Class Identity

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Theory, Conference Notes, Economics

Note: I’ve made some corrections in what follows in response to requests by presenters.

I struggled somewhat to follow the highly abstract train of reasoning in Min-Zhan Lu’s presentation. Lu’s talk was more densely theoretical than the following talks by Tom Fox and Joseph Harris, which isn’t a criticism on my part, but an acknowledgment that I had to work harder to follow the complexity of her argument, and in fact failed to follow quickly enough at times — so any instances of incoherence in the following account should be taken as failures on my part, and not Lu’s. Lu began her talk on “Rethinking How We Talk About Class in the Global Free Market” by pointing to higher education’s increasingly prevalent invocation of the language of job security, career advancement, and marketable job skills. These terms, Lu noted, are not self-evident. They are, however, associated with a class of students increasingly subjected to the demands of global capital. If we’re going to develop a pedagogy that takes seriously our students’ economic concerns, we need to address their career goals as well as the increasingly volatility of global flows of capital and people, and in this sense, we would do well to keep in mind the additional meaning of career as unrestrained headlong rush. Lu expressed reservations about the limitations of the conventional stratifying markers of class, and proposed that we look instead to the extraterritorial mobility of the global elite as marker of class distinction. The conditions of the global free market today push the economy towards production of the volatile, the ephemeral, and the precarious, and the extraterritorial careering of the global elite constrains the middle class.

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CCCC07 B.30: My Presentation

preterite Composition Theory, Conference Notes, Economics, Writing

I think I’m beginning to learn how to give a good conference presentation.

Or maybe at least the kind of conference presentation from which I tend to learn the most. I know I don’t learn well when people read papers, no matter how eloquently they’re written: written prose, when performed, has a fundamentally different quality. We see things in drama that the page does not show, and vice versa. But the model of the talk guided by slides doesn’t work well for me either: it feels too paratactic, too off-the-cuff, a series of impressions. Lawrence Lessig’s CCCC presentation seemed to me an ideal middle ground, and I’ve lately seen Collin and Clancy taking similar approaches, and so I tried this year to do something similar. I think the resulting presentation was the best I’ve so far done.

I first wrote a long paper, maybe 20 pages double-spaced, that worked through my argument. It’s something that I’m going to be trying to expand into a journal article over the next few months. I then went through and cut, cut, cut it down to somewhere near conference length: nine pages, double-spaced. After that, I put together a slide show to go with key terms and phrases and concepts in the paper, in imitation of Lessig, and also following the excellent format that I’ve seen Clancy and Collin start to turn toward. After some coaching and feedback from friends and colleagues, I cut it down further, and turned my writerly prose into bullet points from which to read, so as to avoid the deep hypotaxis that becomes so difficult to follow when listening to someone read a written paper: basically, I index-carded it.

I was happy with the result. I got out from behind the speakers’ table, walked around, used my wireless clicker to advance the slides, and talked it. I’d be curious to hear what the audience thought, because for me, it was the most energetic and engaged presentation I’ve done: it was fun, impassioned, and — to me — far more lucid and to-the-point than other presentations I’ve given.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the technology to record as I presented, so what I’ve got to share here is the presentation’s static counterpart: my written talk; the extended prose that I cooked down to bullet points.

If you’re interested, though, you’re also welcome to take a look at the slide show and the bullet point script that I used to talk through that slide show.

slide show (1.1 MB, .ppt file)

bullet point script (55 KB, .doc file)

I’m especially grateful to my colleague Karen Peirce for her feedback and suggestions for revision.

Presentation prose follows.

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CCCC07 A01: Institutional Forces

preterite Composition Theory, Conference Notes

(Note: I’ve made some changes at the request of presenters.)

Joanna Castner started this session by offering an initial overarching framework of techné, based on Janet Atwill’s conception of an always changing, never static, transformative “productive knowledge” that works to disrupt lines of power. Techné, Joanna suggested, can be used as an operating procedure and a way of looking at overdetermined (q.v. Althusser, Freud) situations as spaces of possibility. In this sense, techné is not knowledge but the production of knowledge, deeply associated with the kairotic moment and the importance of local factors. Castner then used John Alberti’s hierarchy of differently classed institutions of higher education to assert that so-called working-class institutions — second-tier open-admissios regional institutions where many students hold jobs and other material concerns that lie beyond the scope of the classroom — are now to be considered the norm or the typical case in higher education. (Castner here also cited Johnathan Mauk’s scholarship on working class students.) In such a way, Castner asserted, Mauk’s physical and human material geography of the institution (or, perhaps more properly, the material context of the institution) constructs student identities and the way those identities intersect and interact with the classroom context.

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In the Clickstream, Part 6

preterite Friday Fun

(This is the sixth and final episode of a piece of serial speculative fiction attempting to explore what future database composition might look like. For context, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.)

The Cadet system of communication is secure and monitored, but otherwise not much different from the way civilians use the net. Their browsers are larger, perhaps twice the size of the latest model civilian information appliance, but still small enough to slip into a cargo pocket, with the bulk coming from the weatherproof hardened frame and soldiers’ need to thumb the screen in gloves in field environments. The distributed public database that stores their compositions is the same network used by civilian universities, albeit with a firewalled secure area for Cadets’ projects for their Department of Military Instruction classes and other secure-classified topics. It’s browsable by those outside higher education, but even for those who haven’t used it, the concept is likely familiar: projects incorporating a variety of forms of information — writing, visuals, tabular data, video, spreadsheets, music and audio, interactive — are sorted and cross-indexed into various categories and tagged with keywords by authors and users. Users can add comments in a similar variety of formats and rate and rank the projects, and the database automatically creates maps — clickstreams — of the the associational trains of links between projects and tracks the traffic on those clickstreams. In a remarkable hybrid of the song remix and the debates that range across academic journals, users create their own projects building on or responding to other projects, quoting and paraphrasing and parodying and mashing-up, and tag the associated clickstreams, so that one can map over time the emerging parameters of a discussion or argument in the informational topography of the database. When used as a tool for managing information, it’s immensely complex and powerful, and Cadets have an entire plebe course dedicated to teaching them the various methods for navigating it, as well as a cow course — mine, Database Composition — teaching them the most productive ways of manipulating and adding to it.

What the military didn’t count on — what nobody counted on — was that somebody would do the same with the swarms.

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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.

In the Clickstream, Part 5

preterite Friday Fun

(This is the fifth episode of a piece of serial speculative fiction attempting to explore what future database composition might look like. For context, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and Part 4. For excellent articulations of the fundamental principles underlying what might constitute database composition, see the work of Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Jeff Rice, and Derek Mueller.)

I open the door. Today’s Friday, a training day, when all Cadets should be in ACUs and gear rather than the dress gray. The uniforms of the three soldiers outside my door tell me a lot. One’s an MP, enlisted, Sergeant Restrepo, clearly uncomfortable. Like most base personnel who aren’t involved directly in some aspect of Cadet instruction, he’s in the Army’s conventional duty uniform of camouflage ACUs and black beret. Because he’s an MP, he’s got the powered composite body armor, the web belt with sidearm, and the black shoulder brassard. The two Cadets he’s with are upperclassmen, wearing their gray tunics with Cadet rank. Which means this is official, but there’s no actual officer above the Cadet chain of command with them, so that also means that on the Corps of Cadets side, they haven’t yet put everything together.

It also works to Mala’s advantage that I know both the Cadets. One, Cadet Nestor, was in a section of plebe composition I taught three years ago. Usually earnest and well-intentioned, but also a bit of a joker, she’s worked her way up the Cadet ranks to platoon sergeant status — which tells me something, as well: this has another few hours before it hits serious urgency. The other, Cadet Cohan, I recognize as well: a five-foot-tall martinet and Cadet Honor Sergeant who I’ve seen in two Cadet-run trials for violations of the honor code. I extend my hand to Cadet Nestor. “Amy!” I say. “How are you?” She shakes my hand, a bit bashful, clearly still working out how to best handle the situation. I make a show of looking at Cohan and Restrepo, then step back into the office and open the door wide. “I take it this isn’t a visit for facetime and essay help,” I say. It’s the bluff Amy would be expecting from me, and it’s also the response that gives Cohan the chance to look like a hardass. So I cut it off.

“I know,” I say. “It’s about Cadet Casey. She’s in trouble, and you missed her by about eight minutes.” Cohan gapes. Nestor regroups and nods. I make eye contact with Sergeant Restrepo. “Sergeant?” I ask. “Why are they dragging you along on a morning this hot?”

Cohan speaks quickly, before Restrepo can respond. “Sir,” he says, “It’s an evolving situation. Are you in contact with Cadet Casey?”

“Not currently,” I say. Technically, it’s not a lie: at present, Mala is low-profile and incommunicado. “Like I said, she was here not long ago, and clearly agitated over,” and I pause and borrow his word, “evolving honor concerns.” I turn to Amy. “She’s my student, Cadet Nestor. What kind of trouble is she in?”

Amy frowns. She doesn’t quite know. None of them do. “Sir,” she begins.

“Listen, Cadet Nestor,” I say. “I don’t want to waste your time, and I’ve got things to do. The three of you clearly need to find Cadet Casey. I’ll tell you what: if she’s in contact with me again, the first thing I’ll do will be to immediately send her to her chain of command, and the second thing will be to send information of that contact up the chain. Does that work?”

Cohan nods to Amy, and Amy nods to me. Sergeant Restrepo, with scant interest in the affairs of Cadet officers-to-be, is looking at the art prints on the walls of the English department’s halls. The Cadets are satisfied, thinking of themselves and the Cadet chain of command that exists primarily in the barracks as the only elements of Mala’s chain of command.

They’re mistaken. After Cadets Nestor and Cohan and Sergeant Restrepo depart — one can only assume for Mala’s B hour classroom in Thayer Hall — I sit down and relax. Faculty, both military and civilian, are components of Cadets’ chain of command, as well. While upperclassmen are deeply concerned with their own roles on the Cadet side of the chain of command and how they interact with their superiors and subordinates and their TAC officers, they sometimes forget the faculty aspect. And I’m hoping I’ve just exercised that forgetting to my advantage: I will, indeed, put Cadet Casey in contact with her chain of command, and send notification of that contact up the chain to my superior, who will likely be concerned about the allegations surrounding Cadet Casey and the way they reflect upon the department.

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CCCC Preview

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Economics

Here’s a brief preview of what I’ll be talking about on Thursday afternoon.

Imagine three doctoral candidates in rhetoric and composition at a large state university. They are friends, and also constitute an informal writing group; meeting twice a month to discuss progress and offer advice on one another’s dissertation chapters and other works in progress. All three have undergraduate loans — one from a religious baccalaureate institution, one from a public baccalaureate institution, and one from a private baccalaureate institution — but one has a teaching assistantship with one section of first-year composition, one has a research assistantship working and writing for a senior scholar, and one has a tuition fellowship and teaches sections of composition and literature at other nearby institutions for income. One is highly active in performing writing for a professional organization; one is a prominent member of several online communities and weblog collectives; one receives tuition remission for her work with the writing center, where she advises undergraduate work-study tutors. One is a returning scholar with a teenage child, whom she regularly tutors on writing assignments; one works with students to contribute to a growing repository of documentation for open-source software; one occasionally makes supplementary income by tutoring high-school students for the SAT. They all use in-class peer response in their teaching, they all have assigned the graded research paper essay to show mastery of a topic at some point in their teaching careers, and they all engage in writing as a reflective learning process for their own benefit. One discovers that a student has purchased the turned-in research paper from one of the online paper mills, and fails the student. Another has two students who turn in the same paper, and fails them both. The third recommends seeking or hiring a regular tutor to her ESL student. The third one assigns ungraded private journals in her class, while another maintains private message boards for her students, and another asks her students to keep public weblogs.

They all go to MLA. They all dazzle the search committees. They all get offers. One doesn’t like any of the offers she receives, and struggles to make a growing name for herself as an independent scholar, publishing and consulting. One likes the impressive salary and benefits that a for-profit online institution offers, and goes to work for private higher education. And one is excited to go to work as WPA-in-training for a small state school.

Nothing described above is remarkable. In composition, we know the things described above as the quotidian work of the teaching and learning of English.

However: their commonality is that everything above is an aspect of economic activity, and represents the immense ways in which which conventional representations of economic activity are deeply impoverished in their suggestions that everything in today’s information economy is about capitalism and market activity. This is mistaken. Not only do we see in the representation of our daily work the inescapable idea that economic activity inheres in market transactions and wage labor performed in the context of the capitalist enterprise; we see as well alternative market and nonmarket transactions, alternative paid and unpaid forms of labor, and alternative capitalist and noncapitalist forms of enterprise.

Capitalism is not the economy, and the economy is not the market.

I’m again using here J. K. Gibson-Graham’s sorting taxonomy of transaction / labor / enterprise and its index of various capitalist / alternative capitalist / noncapitalist forms.

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

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.