At the moment, I’m trying to get a handle on Sraffian economics and I’m recognizing the deep poverty of my economic self-education. I’m struggling with stuff that’s beyond me, and feeling quite foolish. For a while, I’ve carried the outsider’s hubris of telling myself how smart I am for trying to import into my discipline concerns I see as hitherto ignored. I told myself I’d take a graduate course in heterodox economics, with a couple semesters of independent study as an introduction and a graduate directed study as a follow-up, and I’d be OK.

Well, not so much.

I can read some of the articles in the economics collections and journals, especially the ones that apply cultural studies or rhetorical perspectives to economic problems, like Timothy Mitchell’s excellent “The Object of Development: America’s Egypt” or Duncan Ironmonger’s “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product.” But I’m not so good with the equations, even the simple ones, until I read back through a couple times and see what’s being parsed, and even then I don’t often get it, and have to read further for context. Case in point: I’ve got Stiglitz’s 1974 review article on the Cambridge capital controversy in front of me, and it’s killing me. I know what it’s about, and I recognize the assertions, but I can’t parse the proofs. Even some of the recent evaluations of Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, which I want to use to help me get beyond the notion of marginality that neoclassical economics poses as an alternative to the labor theory of value, are giving me a hard time.

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When friends and family ask me what I do, I want to point them at this movie. The whole thing, yes, but especially from about 2:47 on. And O yes that last bit.

(Via Lanette via, of course and as ever, Jill Walker, who started so many of us.)

The new issue of Kairos is out, and it’s a good one. Of particular interest to some of my librarian peers, for whom I have much respect and whose scholarship I wish my discipline would more fully engage in conversation, might be James Purdy and Joyce Walker’s remarkable and compelling essay, “Digital Breadcrumbs: Case Studies of Online Research.”

Good stuff from my perspective, and I’m curious to hear what those respected expert peers might say.

The institutional powers at my school are terrified of the Web. All of the useful online tools — grade books, attendance records, even Blackboard — are only accessible via a school-issued computer and Virtual Private Network. Course web sites have to go through various layers of approval and changes have to be sent through an extradepartmental authority.

In some ways, I understand why: here, we’re a .mil as wel as a .edu, and there have been considerable .mil hacking embarassments in the past, including one incident last semester that DoD responded to in typical fashion by shutting down practically everything on the .mil network for two days; the proverbial locking the barn door after the horse is gone.

But still: making a course LMS unavailable except via VPN that one can only access via one’s work computer with smart card properly inserted? That’s paranoia past the edge of ridiculousness. Are we somehow worried that the Chinese are going to hack Blackboard and insert subtle anti-Taiwanese and pro-planned-economy rhetoric into my lesson plan on film, Istanbul, stereotypes, and composing cultural alterity? Is Al-Qaeda going to weaken my students’ moral fiber by making them think that plagiarism is more complex and sophisticated an issue than the MPAA’s anti-theft intellectual propery rhetoric suggests? (Oh, no. Wait. I already do that.)

One challenge I’m continuing to run into is the hierarchical and monolithic nature of IT here: the Army gives all the students and all the faculty their computers, and only certain programs and practices are approved. I can’t count on students accessing the course web site via Firefox on their Ubuntu laptop at the local coffee shop: here, it’s IE, Windows Vista, and 802.11i (!) all the way, no matter what. So I can encourage them to use Open software, but really, when Uncle Sam gives you all the corporate stuff for free, incentives and evangelizing become a bit more difficult. And I can’t exactly fight Uncle Sam on this stuff.

But still. It’d be so, so nice to have simple, secure FTP access to courseware of my choice on campus websites. To have a path to Perl and my own /cgi-bin.

In my first semester as a new professor, much of my attention is going either to managing the load of papers, committees, and other work or else to syllabus development and lesson planning (and my enjoyment of the time spent in the classroom), but I’m also aware of some of the unique aspects of the extracurriculum here. Consider, as one such aspect, the way certain discipline concerns are managed:

I’m not sure what else to say other than the practice of videorecording, editing, and distributing this film stands in an extremely interesting relationship to the exercise of discipline depicted in the film. There’s something of the repurposing there that Jim Ridolfo has talked about in his investigations of “rhetorical velocity,” and that repurposing does interesting things with the relation between representation and power. Note to self: this bears further investigation, especially at an institution like mine.

In Lester Faigley’s “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal” (CE October 1986, 527-542), this analogy stopped me:

In organizations where computer technologies have become commonplace, people have taken advantage of opportunities for horizontal communication on topics of their choice through computer ‘bulletin boards,’ which function like radio call-in programs. (538, emphasis mine)

It’s an early metaphor, certainly, and a notion that’s been addressed in various ways in our nascent literature about writing and blogging. But I love the shift there, the look to older technologies, and the way we understand those older technologies today as the domain of an apoplectic Rush Limbaugh or a low-key Tom Ashbrook. (No offense, Tom: I like your show a lot. But NPR, as the smart counter to Rush, sometimes tries too hard to make its programming chamomile-tea mellow and inoffensive.) Usenet as late-night call-ins from the cranks and tin-foil hat crowd.

Blogs, of course, have been widely represented as the same, and I hope we’re past that now. But what about the aspect of declamation? What about the late-night crank phone call to the radio station where the listener offers a half-hour raving systematization of gray aliens, the Zionist Occupational Government, black helicopters, man-hating bra-burning feminists, the United Nations, and the general incompetence of teachers of writing?

What happens if we understand those as instances of Seneca the Elder’s suasoriae and controversiae in the context of their relation to the hegemonic force of mainstream discourse? As, in fact, counterhegemonic uses of genre that in their deployment of genre serve to either (1) indict the way that discourse functions under an oppressive regime or (2) praise the operation of discourse under that regime, depending on who’s reading.

No answers. But I keep coming back to that Faigley quote as a moment of interesting rupture. Its juxtaposition of qualities and modes.

Looks like I’ll be in NYC this spring, and among fine company, judging by the rhet-comp blogosphere’s activity today. I submitted an individual CCCC proposal for the first time since 2000, and I’ve been placed into a panel titled “Capitalism, Commodification, and Consumerism,” so I’m definitely eager to see who I’ll be presenting with. And happy and grateful, as always, to have the opportunity to share what I’m working on.

My presentation’s current title is “Identity as Economic Activity: Representing Class from the Wealth of Nations to the Wealth of Networks.” I’m planning to do things differently this year: I’ll try to write it as a journal article first, and then condense it down to presentation length in order to (I hope) get some helpful feedback before sending it out.

Abstract follows, for those who might be interested.

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Let’s imagine a hypothetical economy. It’s a bit of an odd economy, since it’s partly “virtual” and partly “real,” at least by conventional economic reasoning — but in a way, part of what I’m trying to show with this hypothetical example is that conventional economic reasoning’s binary of “virtual” versus “real” has inadequate explanatory force. Furthermore, that inadequacy carries strong implications for the economic aspects of students’ work in the composition classroom.

Note: a lot of the following might feel a lot more clear if read in the context of the excellent Cory Doctorow short story, “Anda’s Game.”

Let’s ground this hypothetical economy in the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Everworld Galaxies of UltimaQuest. I write “ground” because the term “set” would imply that the economy is confined to the world bounded by the environment of EGOUQ, which — as will quickly become apparent — is not true: the game’s economy bursts the bounds of the “virtual” and spills over into the social “real.” And I know these scare quotes are gonna get irritating really quickly, but I hope you’ll bear with me: I’m using both terms, if I can be vulgarly Gallic, sous rature. Anyway: so we’ve got an economy, some aspects (we’ll call them “transactions”) of which take place in-game, others out-of-game. And the effects of those transactions cross that in-game/out-of-game boundary.

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While I work from a fairly strong cultural studies perspective, I’m finishing my dissertation in a graduate program with a rather significant and well-known intellectual inheritance from the work of Walker Gibson, Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow. I didn’t get as many questions about that as I might have anticipated when I was on the job market — most of the search committees seemed to have actually gone through my materials, which makes me more fortunate than some other folks I’ve talked to — but there were a few interviewers (no, not the one who was asleep) who blinked when I mentioned John Trimbur or Bruce Horner in relation to my research. Those of us in this graduate program well understand all the critiques of that so-called expressivist intellectual inheritance, and have often agreed with those critiques or proposed extensions of those critiques. Still, institutions shape perspectives, and my recent readings of some technical communication-oriented scholarship got me thinking about questions of perspective and value.

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Just moved to WordPress 2.01. It’ll take a little while before everything’s back the way I like it, but I’m hoping it won’t give you all those problems we were having with posting and reposting comments. Let me know what works and doesn’t?

(Most important things on the agenda: getting recent comments to show up in the sidebar, putting the sidebar in proper order so links to recent comments are near the top, and — probably last — putting together a nice theme with lots of bright green, inky black, and bold sans-serif fonts.

Cause I love that green and black.)

Update: Things seem to be edging back to normal. Firefox misaligns the footer image by 1 pixel, and only on the main page and on post pages with comments — posts without comments seem fine, and no other browsers I’ve tried do the same thing, so I’m puzzled. Archives are broken, so I’ll have to check the WP support forum.