rap sheet of gnomic compressions
It looks like The Happy Tutor and crew have decided to hang things up. It’s too bad: Wealth Bondage was the best damn satirical website out there, bar none; at once funny and brilliant and provocative, with the smartest bunch of commenters since The Invisible Adjunct shut down. You’ll be much missed, Phil.
In my inbox today: a beyond-the-grave email from none other than the eminent Austrian himself.
FROM: Freud
What did the good doctor want? Why, to sell me some VIAGRA FOR AS LOW AS $1.62 A DOSE, of course, because I apparently NEED 15 MINUTES TO BE READY FOR ACTION. Who knew?
Pfizer couldn’t ask for a better spokesman, I suppose. One blue pill, and — well — the ego is not master in its own house?
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.
Grades went in Thursday morning; gifts got wrapped Thursday night. After Sunday — happy holidays! — it’s a one-day break before I’m off to MLA and The Serch.
And the MLA Job Information Center is in the Ballroom of the DC Omni Shoreham, which is a room I haven’t seen since my senior prom was held there, years and years ago.
Yeah. Tell me about it.
I’ve been quiet for a while. It’s taken me some working-through to put this post together, but it felt important enough to post as one long piece rather than a series of short reflections, as I hope might be apparent. What I’m trying to do here is set up a classroom context for how my revised formulation of class functions in the information economy, which is the focus of my dissertation’s chapter 4; as such, this post follows directly from my last one. Some of the ideas here are wobbly and underdeveloped, so if you’ve got the patience, I’d be grateful for feedback.
I concluded that last post with a reference to Clancy’s deployment of the feminist axiom that “the personal is political” in the context of the World Wide Web and, by extension, in the context of our contemporary information economy. Digital technologies have profoundly altered the relationship between the personal (as specific, lived, material, and embodied experience) and political economy, and the consequences of that alteration are as visible in the conclusions Maxmin & Zuboff draw about the shift from mass production and consumption to individuated production and consumption in The Support Economy as they are in online gaming sweatshops’ transformation of individuated leisure activity into market-based profit. There’s something strange going on here, though: in conventional mainstream representations of the economy, capital is always understood to be, in the now-familiar formulation, “footloose capital.” As an impersonal, faceless (and, in many representations, uncontrollable) force, it transcends the material boundaries of nations, cultures, and bodies. Even as neoclassical economists and their fellow travelers discursively construct an economy driven by ostensibly individual tastes and values, the metaphors they choose — pareto curves and aggregate geometries — immediately abstract the personal into the general. However, they only do this for capital: in the immaterial and abstracted “space of flows” described by Manuel Castells, it’s capital that flows, not labor.
Not bodies.
In the mainstream discourse of economic globalization, the commonplace understanding is that abstracted capital transcends all boundaries, while material and embodied individuals transcend no boundaries. Labor, as bodies, cannot flow across borders. Certainly, it migrates, but only in a disembodied fashion: an absence here is a presence there, and the mobility of capital moves poverty and exploitation from place to place, but the people themselves do not move. The labor of individual bodies is in many ways regulated (consider the ongoing American debate about immigration), and in some ways circumscribed by its own materiality and individuation.
So what happens when we examine these ideas in the context of the writing classroom? Do first-year writing teachers, in some ways, seek to keep the personal and the material outside the classroom door? And what does that mean for the political economy of the composition classroom?
In Terms of Work for Composition, Bruce Horner notes that “one argument made against teaching ‘on-line’ is that the process of placing coursework on-line not only restructures that work, allowing for greater control and scrutiny of faculty performance and course content and intensifying the work of teaching, but it also better enables institutions to claim ownership of those materials and take possession of faculty’s knowledge and course design skill embodied in the course materials” (6). There’s a lot embedded in this quotation: Walter Benjamin’s argument about reproducibility restructuring schemata of value, relationships of exploitation in academia, and concerns of ownership. But the most important argument here is one that’s familiar to any scholar familiar with the work of Lawrence Lessig: the digital technology of copying — of reproducibility — profoundly alters relationships between creator and consumer, between maker and remaker, between the original source, the mix, and the remix — and its subsequent derivations. It makes the individual and personal expertise of the teacher public and claimable.
Contrast this to the conventional classroom situation in which, according to Horner, “the student’s self […] is imagined as fixed, uniform, and autonomous, even when it remains inaccessible to the student, rather than being seen as socially produced, the site of struggle between official and practical consciousness played out in the material process of writing” (40). Here, in the first context Horner describes, the classroom “is imagined” as a neutral, abstract space, as is the persona of the student. The second context Horner describes is an attempt to imagine that classroom context for the embodied student as more material and concrete. What happens, though, when we attempt to apply either context to the “online” scenario described above? For Horner, in either case, the (necessarily material, particular, and concrete) act of placing a text (a class, an essay) online seems to result in its increasing abstraction. The text, in Horner’s eyes, enters the online equivalent of the utopian no-space Joseph Harris critiques as the uselessly abstracted “discourse community.” And here I return to the point I recently made: that abstracted online utopian no-space, in the discourse of composition, is figured both as “the economy” and as “the classroom.” The three are not congruent, certainly — but in the shape of the discourse that embodies them, they are unignorably isomorphic.
The problem with this, of course, is that we know from Harris, Lu, and others that the classroom is hardly an immaterial and abstracted space. The same holds true for the economy, as Gibson-Graham, Ironmonger, and others demonstrate. Why, then, does Horner suggest that the simple act of moving a text from the classroom to the Web somehow makes that text more abstracted, immaterial, and commodifiable? Is publishing the equivalent of commercialization; does placing more eyes on a text make it necessarily less material, less concrete, and therefore more easily subject to commodified market-based exchange? I don’t think so, and I think Clancy Ratliff’s research stands as strong evidence why not: from my scant understanding of some of the projects she’s worked on, Clancy’s work investigates the abstracted representations of gender roles assigned to online discourse, and proposes that such representations are largely mistaken in light of the concrete evidence of female bloggers: to be crudely reductive, Clancy proposes that in many women’s public blogging practices, the personal is indeed political (and, I’d add, material and embodied) when it goes online. The blogosphere, contra Horner, is a concretized and personal space for its users, and in its materiality and engagement is deeply and necessarily political.
My goal here is to perform the analytical about-face, and take Clancy’s insight concerning the blogosphere and apply it to the overlapping representations of the classroom and the economy. More on this soon: yes, I’m back to my practice of working through dissertation chapters on the blog, and I’m happy with where Chapter 4 is going.
One student to another, upon seeing the project she’d prepared for class today: “That’s so cool!”
In my dissertation’s Chapter 4, I’m arguing that the classroom work of students may be seen as carrying economic value beyond that of the commodity, particularly in the production and digital circulation and reproduction of student writing: in short, students are not the “preeconomic” beings Susan Miller describes. In order to make that argument, I’m looking at two spheres — the classroom and the economy — not as the generalized abstracted spaces of pedagogical and economic discourse, but as specific, embodied, heterogeneous, and material spaces.
In Terms of Work for Composition, Bruce Horner makes a distinction between work and labor: in our discourse, he suggests, “work” is immaterial, scholarly, commodified; “labor” is material, pedagogical, and more resistant to commodification — and so also less valuable than “work.” (As is typical of composition’s discourse on economy, Horner’s analytical focus here is on the work of teachers.) According to Horner, the materiality of scholarly writing (as opposed to teaching) is often obscured, and the more that materiality is obscured, the more the scholarly work is made to seem an individual autonomous intellectual product performed independently of any interaction with other intellectuals — and therefore more ownable (6-7). By implication (and, yes, I’m aware that this is a familiar point), composition’s focus on teaching is expected to be more material and less commodifiable, and therefore less valuable in its non-ownability.
But if we understand the distinctions Horner makes as taking place in specific, embodied, heterogeneous, and material spaces, rather than as the generalized and abstracted objects of discourse, the barrier between classroom and economy collapses. They are, together, an overlapping space, and in that space, writing has economic value. Of course, this has been understood in American history since Article I Section 8 of the Constitution and the Copyright Act of 1790. Despite this understanding, though, Miller’s characterization of the “preeconomic” student is the one that has dominated representations of the higher education classroom, even though the intent of the Copyright Act of 1790 — an explicitly economic document — is characterized in its very first line as “the encouragement of learning.” In this light, the words declaring the intent of the Constitution’s Article I Section 8 bear revisiting: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” There’s a tension there, between the phrases “exclusive right” and “limited times.” “Exclusive right” carries a synchronic concern and an attention to the economics of the present moment, while “limited times” makes clear a diachronic concern with economic change and an attention to the future. And the conventional representation of the purposes of the composition classroom is diachronic: it looks to economic change in the future, and at its most crass, suggests that the dominant purpose of education should be to help students be competitive in a global information economy. On the other hand, scholarship — Horner’s “work” — is understood synchronically, in its concern with the present production of knowledge.
Neoclassical economics, with its essential assumption of scarcity, and its assumptions about how the tastes and values of individuals shape economic activity, is largely synchronic in character. It’s concerned with the present. Marxian economics, with its goals of economic change, is largely diachronic in character. It’s concerned with the future. Neoclassical economics, however, has lately been much vexed by the ways in which the information economy disrupts conventional assumptions of scarcity. As Lawrence Lessig often points out, some resources — like information — take on more value the more people use them, and the less commodified or expensive they are, the more people will use them. (Note that I’m using the meanings of value and price as distinctly independent of one another here.)
These ideas about work and labor, present and future, scarcity and value, are at the core of my dissertation’s Chapter 4, but as is likely apparent, they’ve also had some influence on my teaching lately. When we understand that there are values other than that of the dollar, Siva Vaidhyanathan assertion that copyright “is supposed to be an economic incentive for the next producer, not a guarantee for the established one” takes on some interesting implications for the writing students produce in the classroom.
For the company who shared my table tonight, and for friends and family and colleagues.
I was worried when my oven broke a few days ago. My landlords, though, when they couldn’t get it fixed in time, gave me the key to the restaurant they run downstairs, and let me use the kitchen there. So I’m thankful to them, as well.
We inaugurated my mom’s china and silver — since I have it now, there seems to me no sense in not using it on special occasions — and the food, cooked collaboratively, came out well.
There’s the cut-up turkey, roasted and then stewed for the last 40 minutes in the manner of doro w’et; the giblet gravy; ayib be gomen, an Ethiopian side dish with chopped collard greens and spiced cottage cheese; the turkey stuffing; the mashed potatoes; and a salad of lamb’s lettuce, tangerine slices, roasted pistachios, and pomegranate seeds, with a vinaigrette made from orange juice, rice vinegar, shallots, and pistachio oil. Not pictured: for dessert, a honey-pecan tart with bittersweet chocolate glaze.
Reader, I hope your Thanksgiving was fine, as well.
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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