Preterition

6. Dependent: what requirements follow

This post picks up from Part 3, where I set out what the embodied agnostic subject inherits from economics and what it declines to claim.

The subject I’ve been defining—to step again here into the stilted langage of specification—is a body that is materially particular, formed in time it cannot recover and existing in a structure of address, whose interior is real and access to that interior is unreliable from any position, its own included. Here I try to set out what such a subject requires of an economy of writing, and what it permits that other accounts of the subject do not.

Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff redefine class from a social grouping by economic categories to a process. Their term class identifies and distinguishes the performing, appropriating and distributing of surplus labor: someone performs labor beyond what their own reproduction requires, someone appropriates that surplus value, and someone distributes it onward. A single subject operates across multiple class processes, each process overdetermined by the others, none the direct cause of any other. Put writing through that definition and the circuit John Trimbur imported from Marx to composition—production, distribution, exchange, consumption—becomes a set of sites at which textual surplus value is produced, appropriated, and apportioned. Authors, editors, publishers, reviewers, formatters, archivers, students, readers and now machine agents each take from a text and add to a text, from its making to its remaking. The subject changes position as the text moves.

The model of circulation I propose departs from Trimbur’s circuit at two joints: it splits at reception and adds a stage after use. The subject engages in embodied labor over historical time to perform the learning and reading required to write and produce a text; the text is distributed along publication channels with labor and material costs, and parties appropriate surplus value at the sites of distribution labor; the text reaches someone who pays a cost to take it up, and at that moment it goes into exchange or into use or into both, each carrying an appropriation of value. A reader who only exchanges is not a reader but a bookseller. Exchange takes money and non-money forms; the model tracks textual labor: the writing of a text, the formatting and delivery conventions that carry it, and the rhetorical and interpretive work of reception. Use shifts into reproduction, as a reading subject internalizes, responds, cites and quotes, so that for anyone who writes, reproduction returns to production and the cycle of appropriation begins again.

The split stands if a subject positioned at the use term does more than receive. Exchange can operate as a transfer between accounts; use cannot, because use is where productive consumption happens, and productive consumption requires a subject. The preceding specification must hold consistently at every stage: writers and readers fall under the same access regime, and the same person as author and, later, as reader of that text counts as two subjects, the later reader recovering what the earlier writer was doing no more reliably than a stranger could.

The requirements that follow bind systems rather than writers. No stage of circulation may be designed to depend on access to an interior. Every stage contracts on observables instead: the textual record and the connections among its components, as they accumulate in drafts, revision histories, corpora, editions and archives. No stage contracts on the report of an interior at an instant. A model’s reasoning trace offers no better a window than a human think-aloud protocol; both are texts produced on request to display thinking, and both are read as texts.

The prohibition runs in both directions. A system that’s safe only so long as its participants carry good motives will break; no improvement in the inspection of motive can repair it. (The relevant example here, which I’ve cited before: the terror of Domitian and the necessarily unacknowledged exigency for Quintilian’s vir bonus dicendi peritus.) The subject’s silence about motive is correct where the question is what a system may request of a writer. That silence becomes a hazard when the question concerns what a system assumes about its own integrity: a platform that trusts its contributors because it cannot read them has mistaken agnosticism for faith. Agnosticism about the interior obliges a design that holds whatever the interior contains.

Populating the use term with a subject completes Trimbur’s circuit. A circulation with no one at the use term describes products in motion, a distribution model. An economy of writing needs someone for whom the products move: a historical subject completing and reproducing them.

7. Enables: what possibilities follow

The rational agent of economics fails the specification by construction, its preferences arriving already known; so does the writer of James Berlin’s social-epistemic rhetoric, articulated along matrices of language and culture; so does the intending author of literary theory, who fixes meaning at an instant of intention no one else may enter. Each builds causes on a reliably accessible interior, and the embodied agnostic subject’s prospects follow from declining to do so.

With that subject in place, I suggest Phillip Nelson’s typology depends on who is asking. In many accounts of economies of writing, the party who pays for the privilege of consuming a text and the party who experiences producing it differ. An employer pays for a report, a foundation for a grant narrative, a university for a dissertation, a publisher for a manuscript under advance. To the writer, generation is an experience good at the moment of production: its value arises in the doing and sometimes becomes known afterward. To the payer, the same generation is a credence good in Darby and Karni’s sense, unverifiable even after delivery. One act sorts into two goods because the payer is a third party to the doing.

Diachrony opens a further possibility, which I call self-appropriation. A writer returning to earlier work meets it as a stranger, and the earlier text is available to be taken up, reworked and folded into new work independent of its prior significance to the person who once wrote it. The archive here starts in 2003; its early entries are available to this writer—hello!—on the same terms as to any other reader: ideas or questions have shown up in publications re-formed years or decades after their initial surfacing. Self-appropriation operates as reproduction at the scale of a single author, and demonstrates the purpose of textual accumulation: the surplus of a writer’s own past labor, appropriated by a later self, with no requirement that the later self certify what the earlier was doing.

Self-appropriation licenses wider appropriation. Copying, writing under constraint and detournement become creditable writerly acts, which access models cannot price, since such work produces nothing that issues from an interior. The avant-garde treated reading time as formal material in the same years that composition’s process movement began observing writing time, and Lyn Hejinian’s open text, whose gaps a reader’s time completes, is a text built for the use term. Charles Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption” provides the operator’s manual, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler the case study.

The hermeneutics follows from locating value at consumption while leaving the reader opaque. Meaning is then constituted through a reader’s labor over time rather than fixed at the authorial instant, answering Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels and their claim that meaning is simply equivalent to authorial intention. The language model is the limit case of their claim: an agent with no moment of meaning-fixing, whose text places its duration on the reader’s side. Lester Faigley supplies a mechanism the hermeneutics must account for. Reading how examiners judged essays in 1929 and how teachers chose exemplary ones in 1985, Faigley finds one operation under opposed values: the reader judges the self an essay projects, and what secures the reader’s trust is the ease of recognizing that self. While Faigley’s evidence concerns assessors, I extend the observation to readers generally: recognition licenses trust. Readers credit a text’s claims about the world because they recognize the self it projects. Every forbidden inference runs from a text to an interior. Recognition runs the other way, from a projected self to the credibility of the text. A hermeneutics built on this subject tracks both motions.

Coupling Marx to Nelson again relocates value. If generation is an experience good for its producer, then a non-zero share of the value produced in any economy of writing is appropriated by its producer, in the doing, prior to and without requiring any exchange. Productive consumption holds that consumption produces; the experience good says where that product lands. J. K. Gibson-Graham name the resulting landscape a diverse economy. The textual economy of a workshop, a correspondence or a commonplace book runs on non-capitalist appropriative processes—self-appropriation, feudal appropriation, gift, commons, the labor a reader spends activating a text—which capitalist accounting cannot see and so records as valueless.

The subject is a precondition, not a program, specified for what it lets an inquiry leave out. My questions concern writing as labor and value, and every account of the interior imports what such an inquiry cannot use: an epistemology of how the interior is known, a metaphysics of what it is, a telos of what it is for. The agnosticism strips those and keeps what economy requires: a subject who labors, produces, consumes and appropriates, with agency at each of those moments and no claim about the source of the agency. The subject keeps what a theory of writing requires as well. Part ofhat makes writing a poem or reading a novel or polishing a memo worth doing is the experience good dividend, partly appropriated in the doing by the one who does it; those intangibles are the subject of language inquiry, and this subject can locate them precisely because it declines to explain them.

Human and machine meet at the boundary of labor and value. The embodied agnostic subject marks that boundary prior to a theory of technology. Machine agents operate in the circuit already, and the subject’s silence about what they contain parallels the silence it keeps about writers. Human and machine are commensurable on the observable side and nowhere else. What the agnosticism leaves standing is the body. A writer’s generation is an experience good to the writer; a machine’s generation is an experience good to no one. When Marx describes machinery as capital standing in for labor, the textual version is precise: a producer for whom the doing is worth something is replaced by one for whom it is worth nothing, and the payer, who only ever held a credence good, sees no difference, because the experience good was never theirs to see. The substitution meets scant friction; efficiency misnames what it removes.

The same distinction indicates where substitution removes nothing. Much of the labor around a text is apparatus—the filing, formatting, finding and organizing that carry it from one stage to the next—and can be described, like exchange, as a transfer between accounts. What Charles Moran characterizes as drudgery is labor whose performance carries no experience good for the one performing, and often exacts a cost: a machine that takes it up takes away nothing of value. The program my work follows is the line the subject permits between what can be described in its absence and what cannot: I seek to automate the first and protect the second. The value beyond the transactional, in James Britton’s and in Gibson-Graham’s sense of the word, offers itself for appropriation at the moments of production and use where humans perform the privileged work. Who appropriates value at each stage of circulation, and how human uses of technology complicate or obscure that appropriation, is a question for a theory of technology.

The series begins with Part 1.

References

Berlin, James. 2003. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva, 717–38. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Bernstein, Charles. 1992. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Britton, James. 2003. “Spectator Role and the Beginnings of Writing.” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva, 151–74. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Calvino, Italo. 1993. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. New York: Random House.

Darby, Michael R., and Edi Karni. 1973. “Free Competition and the Optimal Amount of Fraud.” Journal of Law and Economics 16 (1): 67–88.

Faigley, Lester. 1989. “Judging Writing, Judging Selves.” College Composition and Communication 40 (4): 395–412.

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

Hejinian, Lyn. 2000. “The Rejection of Closure.” In The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Knapp, Steven, and Walter Benn Michaels. 1982. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 723–42.

Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin Classics.

Marx, Karl. 1993. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin Books.

Moran, Charles. 2003. “Computers and Composition 1983–2002: What We Have Hoped For.” Computers and Composition 20 (4): 343–58.

Nelson, Phillip. 1970. “Information and Consumer Behavior.” Journal of Political Economy 78 (2): 311–29.

Resnick, Stephen A., and Richard D. Wolff. 1987. Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Trimbur, John. 2000. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 52 (2): 188–219.