Preterition

According to Shapiro and Varian’s Information Rules, “Technology changes. Economic laws do not” (2).

Well, they’re half right.

The “laws” are not laws. They’re observations about how people act. And as Shapiro and Varian’s text itself demonstrates, people act differently under different circumstances. Shapiro and Varian’s assertion about unchanging economic laws is a foolish and mistaken attempt to bluster out an assertive and authoritative ethos in the face of the fact that economies and cultures change. It strikes me as something akin to Covey’s claims about the Seven Habits: a rhetorical system composed not so much for the way it might produce knowledge as for the way it might sell books.

In fact, economic “laws” — or, more properly, observations about the ways economies work — change. In a culture driven by the engine of slave labor, understandings of scarcity, competition, and social welfare shape economic activity in ways profoundly different from the ways in which our contemporary understandings of the same phenomena — scarcity, competition, social welfare — shape economic activity.

And Shapiro and Varian’s suggestion of a constancy of economic principles is interesting in a volume that seeks to engage and understand the ways that economic change influences the way we produce, distribute, and use information. For example: they make the point that “production costs of an information good involves high fixed costs but low marginal costs. The cost of producing the first copy of an information good may be substantial, but the cost of producing (or reproducing) additional copies is negligible” (3). Sure; yes, we know this. But according to Shapiro and Varian, the capitalist must therefore “price your information goods according to consumer value, not according to your production cost” (3). OK: so when we produce an information good — a text — its value is reckoned out there in the world, and in terms of what it does for other people. And we know that information goods, especially as essays, carry higher value when they proliferate; when they’re non-scarce. In that sense, textual value is, to a degree, social and affective: when a hundred people read a personal essay, whether it’s poorly written or a polished piece, the value of that personal essay — because of the affective connection those readers are making to what the author’s saying — increases.

This understanding of textual value as social and affective might offer interesting ways for us to think about Lester Faigley’s worries in “Judging Writing, Judging Selves” that as writing teachers, we tend to like (value) the personal essay perhaps too much and for inappropriate reasons. (Yes, I admit that’s a crude and reductive summary of Faigley’s point.) But it should also point us toward the ways Amy Robillard uses Julie Lindquist’s College English essay on “Class Affects, Classroom Affectations” to re-think the affective value of student’s written labor/work, and remind us that student work is part of that immense below-the-waterline portion of the diverse economic iceberg described by J. K. Gibson-Graham following Duncan Ironmonger’s time-use studies demonstrating that less than half of gross domestic product consists of cash-commodified market transactions. It might even help to counter the arguments of those who see Peter Elbow’s points in “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking” as somehow frivolous, uncritical, or silly, given that the behaviors Peter describes are, in fact, elements of the construction of one form of economic value as aspects of consumer choice — although, again, we should understand that that form of economic value is not the only one.

And this goes back to the concern Faigley raises and Robillard elaborates: it’s easy to see and acknowledge the affective value of the personal essay, but we’re not often inclined to admit the affective value of other genres, the affective value of other forms of intellectual labor. Which is foolish, because the ways that we like instances of those other genres is an affective relationship, as well, and those ways contribute to their increased value. This is the toughest move for me to make, though: I’m not sure how willing I am to admit that simply liking a circulating instance of intellectual labor/property is an economic act.

Shapiro and Varian help me out, though in some of the key strategies they offer for entrepreneurial success. Here are two:

• Personalize your product and personalize your pricing. This is easier to do on the Internet than on virtually any other medium since you communicate with your customers on a one-to-one basis.
• Know thy customer. You can learn about your customer demographics by registration and about their interests by tracking their clickstream and search behavior analysis. Analyze this information to see what your customers want. (43)

Information is social, we know, and they indicate that the ways we shape and circulate it are simultaneously personal and economic. Shapiro and Varian’s advice, while grounded in a market-based perspective, offers us some interesting ways of thinking about writing and its value. Certainly, it’s in one way the same old “know your audience” advice rhetors have been familiar with for 2000 years, but when we put it into the cycle of work, appropriation, ownership, and use, it takes on a different meaning. And I love that phrase “tracking their clickstream” and want to apply it to our discipline’s thoughts about process, reading, and citation, which I think I’ll try to do in my next post.

Until then, I’ll close and say that I very much like the following texts:

Elbow, Peter. “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out Three Forms of Judgment.” College English 55.2 (1993): 187-206.

Faigley, Lester. “Judging Writing, Judging Selves.” College Composition and Communication 40 (1989): 395-412. Rpt. Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing. Ed. Peter Elbow. Davis, CA: Hermagoras, 1994.

Ironmonger, Duncan. “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product.” Feminist Economics 2.3 (1996): 37-64.

Lindquist, Julie. “Class Affects, Classroom Affectations.” College English 67 (2004): 187-209.

Robillard, Amy. “Young Scholars Affecting Composition: A Challenge to Disciplinary Citation Practices.” College English 68.3 (2006): 253-70.

Shapiro, Carl, and Hal R. Varian. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 1998.

Here’s a cheesy graphic that looks like it belongs in Microsoft’s Clip Art portfolio. Unfortunately, I’m afraid, it’s also my attempt to think about (1) how economic activity works qua writing and (2) how writing works within our discipline as economic activity.

Sure: another simplistic attempt to represent how writing happens; an obvious, boring, and self-evident attempt to talk about The Process. Well, OK, not so fast, pardner: there are economic points of intervention here. Locations of heterogeneous practice and valuation.

First, on Work: this is Bruce Horner’s nuanced definition of work. This is the understanding from Terms of Work for Composition that our discipline regards and values Work in different ways, as scholarship, as pedagogy, and as the quotidian student activity of the classroom.

The value of each of those forms of work is somehow appropriated, and appropriated — according to Gibson-Graham and Resnick and Wolff — by different parties at different points in the progression from production to distribution. At the point of production, value can be appropriated in slave relations wherein the producer has no control over the conditions under which he produces (prison labor; the work of intellectuals under Stalin), feudal relations, market relations (you publish an article in order to put it on your cv and be promotable), gift relations, independent relations (you appropriate the value of your own labor), and others. I don’t have a sufficient grasp on rhetoric and the economics of distribution to be able to talk about those practices of appropriation here, but folks like Jim Ridolfo and Amy Robillard are doing smart and admirable work in that area.

Appropriation, as unavoidable economic practice, leads to various forms of textual ownership. Capitalism, as a mode of thought, concerns itself with private ownership. Socialism, as a mode of thought, concerns itself with state ownership. Communism is a mode of thought that inadequately addresses and fails to encompass public ownership, and I don’t think we yet have a term that is more adequate to that task. And as a term that addresses or attempts to address non-ownership, “The Commons” is certainly fraught with difficulties, as is “The Public Domain.” Nevertheless: work’s value is appropriated and becomes property, non-property, or something in between.

And we build upon that which has gone before; that which any entity owns. The verb that relates this act to property is “use,” and I don’t have a vocabulary for it, but “use” clearly takes us back to “work.”

I need to show this, I think, in projects — both students’ and my own — and then connect this cycle to my critique of how comp’s discourse has failed to engage a vocabulary of economy, and offer some concrete examples of work > appropriation > ownership > use > work et cetera. But that circuit, so far, is the happiest definition I have for what “economy” means in composition.

Does it work for you, or have I missed or ignored key considerations?

Scholars have trajectories, traced by the contrail arcs of their intellectual projects. As a newly minted professor, I’ve been thinking about what mine might be: how do I characterize what I’ve been working on and what I want to continue to work on as a line across the sky of my discipline?

What I’m doing, I think, is trying to develop an economic phenomenology of student writing, and with it a language of value that can talk about why people want to write that moves beyond the instrumental. Instrumentality we know quite well: do X and get Y. Barter and exchange: simple transactions. The richer field, though, is the motivation that inheres within the moment, the act of writing for writing qua writing. So I’m putting together unlikely bedfellows — Elbow and the so-called expressivist compositionists with Gibson-Graham and the so-called Marxian economists — but with a specific attention to moment, to the temporally present acts of writerly production, circulation, and distribution. I’m not much interested in questions of history — “Where did this come from?” and “What will this lead to?” — except as phenomenologically enacted: “What is this doing now?” This isn’t to say that I support any sort of ahistoricity: it’s just that economic analysis as applied to composition pedagogy too easily lends itself, as we see in the literature, to an abnegation of responsibility; to the sometimes irresponsible assertions that current problems are best thought about in terms of their past causes or future consequences, rather than considering — as Elbow, Emig, and others show us — possible immediate interventions.

J. K. Gibson-Graham describes some problematic tendencies in economic thought that I see some of the literature in composition as still taking for granted as foundational assumptions: “the tendency to represent economy as a space of invariant logics and automatic unfolding that offered no field for intervention; [and] the tendency to constitute ‘the’ economy as a singular capitalist system or space rather than as a zone of cohabitation and contestation among multiple economic forms” (xxi). (See, as an outstanding example, Giroux’s recent JAC piece.) As writing teachers, I believe we understand that such ways of thinking are inadequate, and yet the vocabulary with which we have been left to understand economic concerns is so fundamentally incommensurate with our understanding of day-to-day pedagogical practice — with the daily fact of being and teaching and writing in the classroom — that we simply don’t talk about economy except as something taking place outside the classroom. Our economic attitudes remove us from the classroom scene and moment of the creation of intellectual and affectual value.

That’s, as I see it, my contrail. It starts in definitional concerns and the idea of an economic vocabulary for composition, develops into notions about the multiplicity of valuations for writing, and attempts to begin to address the place of open source economic concepts in the the classroom. Beyond that, I’m not sure what it might look like, other than a thin and incomplete white line across a wide blue sky.