I’m putting off the update to Mala’s story until tomorrow, Friday proper. However, parts of it find their basis in what I’m going to write about here, as has been the idea with the serial as a whole: imagining the future practices of composition.

Geoffrey Hodgson uses the work of the economist Alexander Field to demonstrate that economic analysis cannot start from the figure of the lone individual and his microeconomic tastes and preferences, as so much neoclassical economic analysis has attempted to do with homo economicus. The gendered language is wholly intentional here, and intended to illustrate that some forms of labor — historically, those gendered as male — are deemed economically valuable and productive, while others — historically, those gendered as female; e.g. the caring professions, household labor — are defined as being outside the economy. Hodgson explains that in all economic attempts at explaining or analyzing behavior, “some norms and rules must inevitably be presumed at the start” (59). In other words, even if the individual’s neoclassical microeconomic tastes and preferences help to shape and create supply and demand, that individual is never ahistorical, and never outside a context, even as much as the neoclassical models of Pareto indifference curves and perfect competition might always wish it were so. In fact, we might take Hodgson’s assertion about economy as an analogue to Burke’s construction of the rhetorical parlor: the structures of economic activity have always preceded us, are always evolving, and will continue after we leave, no matter how important or irrelevant our own contributions might be to the conversation in that economic parlor. The individual’s tastes and preferences are not the sole originary point of economic valuation, no matter what conventional microeconomics might want to suggest in its ugly oversimplifications: value is social, networked, and historical, particularly in regard to information goods and experience goods.

Danah Boyd’s work has highlighted this social value and its connection to signaling behavior in networked communities, and there is — as Emily Nussbaum points out (and apparently continues to be amazed by) — a generation gap in the way people evaluate these relationships of value. Nussbaum clearly doesn’t want to be seen as a fuddy-duddy, and she italicizes her channeling of her own opinions so they won’t quite seem to come from her:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Nussbaum’s piece is representative of an increasingly popular genre: the generational lament at perceived famewhoring. How dare, Nussbaum’s tone scolds, these kids want to be famous: aren’t there better, finer ambitions? You know, that whole romantic thing, or that other protestant work ethic thing, and doesn’t being a famewhore make you into Paris Hilton and so you can never do any sort of societal good, so why don’t you damn kids just get jobs and stop all this social foolishness?

(Perhaps we might here detect a tonal analogue to a certain recent under-discussed listserv post on techrhet that called bloggers assholes because they’re famewhores, or something like that. One has to at least admire the circumspection and restraint of those who were so disinterpellated by the post’s author: apparently, These aren’t the bloggers you’re looking for.)

Here’s the thing: the increasing sociality of value comes straight out of Adam Smith. It’s self-interest (Wealth of Nations) and altruism (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) linked not to romantic self-interested isolate behavior, but to the network, wherein the motivation for producing, circulating, distributing, reproducing, and appropriating the value of texts both alters the value of those texts and is altered by the value of those texts, particularly in our contemporary circumstance where appropriation is unavoidable and an economic signal behavior. As Johndan Johnson-Eilola reminds us, “symbols are now a class of material objects, conceptual objects, with market value, social force, and dimension” (4): in a preexisting circumstance of the circulation of fame, of reputation, we see the ongoing evolution of norms and rhetorical context for a cultural conversation, but there are those — like Nussbaum, like the techrhet poster — who want to freeze context and define it synchronically.

What’s interesting is that such synchronic definition is always performed in relation to another earlier time. It’s a deeply conservative move: let’s look at things in this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

Which is a total Army mentality.

Hm.

Collin beat me to the review, so I’ll simply say: if you’re a fan of weird fiction, Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is worth your time. I saw it with my attorney as my final Massachusetts art-theater moviegoing experience, and it was very, very good. In fact, I’d say that the movie version pulled together the incoherencies of the original text in much the same way that Blade Runner extrapolated from and pulled together DADOES.

It’s a movie that knows all about drugs, and the tweaks and former tweaks who see it will well appreciate the ethos and deeply paranoid logic with which it constructs its paranoid anti-drug and anti-paranoia theme. I’ve heard some sci-fi fans complain that the movie fails in that it neglects to replicate the suffocating dread and paranoia of the book, but frankly, those fans are missing one of the movie’s big points, and one of PKD’s book’s big implicit points as well:

Drugs. Are. Fun. That’s why people do them.

Which, in and of itself, constitutes the lure of addiction, and its danger. The movie, in following the book’s indictment of the drug culture and its horrible casualties, would be deeply dishonest if it didn’t show why people do stuff like Substance D. (It also nicely encapsulates the reasons why “Just Say No” is an ineffective campaign to attempt to sell to teens: the logic of “Just Say No,” as the movie indicates, actually creates desire.) The comedic and comedic-paranoid moments in the movie, in the way they get you to laugh along and see (and even empathize with) the skewed logic of intoxication, humanize Arctor and his friends, and that’s what gives the movie’s final act its emotional punch.

Check it out.

I’m not sure whether to characterize myself here as gentile or goy, since one term seems to carry offensive connotations and the other seems to name one as either Christian or non-believer, none of which I’d entirely want to apply myself — but as my last name likely indicates, I’m not of the Jewish heritage. Welsh and Scots, mostly. Raised Unitarian but with Methodist and Episcopal grandparents, atheist as a teen and agnostic for a time after that, but now I’d characterize myself as having an uncertain and nondenominational but ultimately believing capital-f Faith.

And when I look at religion, I think my instinctive desire for order and my love for ritual and history and esoterica make traditions like those of Catholicism and Judaism deeply appealing to me. But this started out for me as a post about food, which is to say: I’m deeply curious about the ritual aspects of the Passover Seder. Albeit with a nod to the necessary heterogeneity of religious and cultural tradition, I feel impelled to ask: traditionally, the z’roa and the beitzah are cooked but never handled or consumed? Can the z’roa, as a roasted lamb shank bone, be used in the preparation of other Seder foods, e.g. in soup broth — or does it carry its own necessarily independent semiotic value? Does the same hold true for the roasted egg beitzah? Is there a symbolic distinction between the things consumed and the things not consumed?

On Tuesday, March 30, I’ll ask my students to read an introductory collection of essays that introduces the “Adding to a Conversation” essay, where they survey the breadth of research and discourse and written conversation (in academic journals, popular press, and elsewhere) on a topic of interest, attempt to find the lacunae and interstices in that conversation, and add their own perspectives. The current edition of the textbook that I helped our Writing Program to construct includes model or sample conversations about guns and school violence, censorship and youth culture, and debates about stem cell research and evolution. I’ll have left the program by the time next year when they start thinking about revising the textbook, but on March 30, I think I might test-run an initial unit of readings that focus on the recent two-month perfect storm of controversy swirling around the Facebook and notions of academic and pedagogical freedom and restraint, with an eye towards suggesting it as a possible addition to the textbook.

Student Life on the Facebook
Teens’ Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools
Facebook Face-Off
Facebook Drama at SU
Of Free Speech and Student Materiality
When Journalists Attack!
Facebook, Online Student Networking, and Strategically Designed Student Selves

There are interesting subtle resonances, for me, with the things I’ve had to say about affectual labor and the commodification of identity, so I’ll be curious to see how it plays out and what my students’ reactions might be. Additionally, while I never, ever want to be the kind of teacher who requires his students to read his own texts, I wonder if there might be some way to get that article Casey and I did (if you want to make me happy, ask me for the link) on commodification and online identity in there, since it seems to be on (rather long) hold in terms of publication.

In Bourdieu’s Distinction, one way class inequality gets expressed is in the dominant classes’ distancing themselves from acknowledging the materiality of life. The judgement of distinction is a privileging of the abstract and the idealized and the rarefied and the immaterial; small portions over large portions; classical over jazz over pop. The more capital one possesses, the less one is affected by the quotidian concerns of the material world, and so one attempts to demonstrate one’s superior class position by enacting and performing that distance. The converse is also true: note the emphasis “vulgar” art — including musical forms like country, gangsta rap, and bluegrass — place on authenticity, on “keeping it real,” on the representation of the materiality of everyday lived experience. This trend, of course, is also highly visible in Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, particularly in his analyses of Coleridge, Carlyle, and (very much) Matthew Arnold.

In the Industrial Revolution of Williams’s analysis, technological advance was one of the chief driving factors of economic advance, and I’m arguing that much the same is true today. Steam, railroads, telegraphs, electricity: the emergence of these technologies produced immense and immensely unequal economic growth, just as the emergence of newer technologies has done today, and while the twentieth century’s division of labor led to a staggering increase in the volume of class positions, the class positions at the top are moving further and further away from the class positions at the bottom. But the core of the argument Williams makes is that economic changes, in confluence with changes in such factors as art and democracy, produced radical change in our understandings of class and culture: this is no mere techno-economic determinism. I’m saying much the same thing, although some of the other changes in causal factors Williams might note today include things like globalization, the post-ironic aesthetic, ethnic nationalism, and the conflict between energy consumption and environmentalism. My scope is considerably more narrow: I’m simply looking at the way certain (rather than all) factors — technology, economy — are helping to drive change in our understanding of class and its relationship to a certain aspect of culture: namely, the practice and instruction of literacy.

What follows is a very early draft of the first half of the Computers and Writing presentation I’ll be giving in Palo Alto next week. I hope you might read it and tell me what’s redundant, what’s missing, and what’s foolish. The presentation’s major logical steps (of which tonight’s argument comprises points 1 through 3) are as follows:

1. Rhetorical self-production can be understood today as an act of product differentiation or branding; conversely, consumption of products or services can be understood today as a technology of rhetorical self-production.
2. Foucault’s governmentality — as the relation between technologies of self and technologies of power — is enacted in online writing on blogs and in the relation between individual and commercial institutions. [Sometimes, as implied by (1), the individual and the commercial can blur: see Paris Hilton and Jason Kottke.]
3. This relation can be problematic in the case of public schools because of unequal power relations and the possibilities for domination. The massive resources of advertisers can change minds and shift opinion in undemocratic ways; more money can equal a larger voice and an increasingly unequal society.
4. However, (3) is a characteristic of the environment of a mass economy. Today, self-production via branding is indicative of a move towards a distributed, peer-to-peer economy (facilitated by digital technologies) where the power relations we associate with a mass economy are being fragmented and replaced by other relations we haven’t yet completely fathomed.
5. In this individuated peer-to-peer economy, not all transactions are market or commodified, and the most promising and interesting possibilities for individual agency may exist within non-market, non-commodified transactions.

Here’s the first half, with the second half to follow tomorrow:

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I’m taking a break from my struggles with the Computers and Writing presentation: thanks to a heads-up from Doctor Daisy, I picked up New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the, er, sequel to Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which itself was originally intended as an appendix to the excellent Culture & Society: 1780-1950. When I first heard about New Keywords (I saw a draft version of the entry on “Economy” in a graduate economics seminar), my immediate thought was: them’s some mighty big shoes to fill.

Despite the high caliber of J. K. Gibson-Graham’s entry on “Economy,” as well as a few other entries, my misgivings were not misplaced: New Keywords suffers from the same spotty, slapdash quality as most sequels, and it doesn’t even begin to live up to the standards of Williams’s original text. Certainly, the Revised Vocabulary fills in some of the gaps of the past thirty years, with entries like “Network,” “Power,” and “Self”; and there are some heavy hitters among the contributors. But far too many of the entries barely scratch the surface of their topics (the three-pager on “Class” I’ll save for a longer rant: suffice now to say that both in terms of quality and in terms of depth of coverage, it would still be complete and utter crap even were it not compared to Williams’s original, and it adds practically zero understanding to the topic) and end with empty platitudes.

Consider Karim Murji’s vapid concluding thoughts on “Race”: “The idea of race has been tainted, discredited, valorized, reclaimed, and contested. It retains positive and features that are both anachronistic and contemporary” (296). Or Craig Calhoun’s last words on “Private”: “The idea of ‘private’ remains contested” (282). And then on its counterpart, “Public”: “In short, both the ideas of what the public is and what is in the public interest remain subject to public debate” (286). There seems to be a consistent tendency here, evident again in André Frankovits on “Development”: “Development is bound to remain a contested term” (81).

One simply has to admire such breathtakingly steadfast commitment to equivocation.

In her essay “The Age of Egocasting,” Christine Rosen describes the “personalization of technology” by which “the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he [sic] consumes is nearly absolute,” and how such technologies “enable us to make a fetish of our own preferences” (1). Our preferences — as publicly enacted in blogrolls, in “100 Things About Me” lists, in the way we express tastes and preferences and likes and dislikes and praise and blame in weblog posts, in the way we hurry to post our own answers to online quizzes that tell us who we are, in our audioscrobbler and iTunes playlists, in the very weblogs we choose to comment on — are, in their performance and in our self-conscious sense and monitoring of that performance, ourselves. This, Rosen says, is egocasting: “the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s taste” (2).

We’ll return to the issue of the public construction of an online self (via egocasting) in a bit. First, though, I want to turn to the perspectives Thomas De Zengotita offers in Mediated on the individual and social practices and effects of (though he does not use the term) egocasting.

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So this idea’s got hold of me and I can’t leave it alone, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it’s unsettling my notions of where I thought the final chapters of my dissertation would go. And I think this is what I’m going to have to propose for CCCC because I can’t put it down, can’t let it go unexamined, and so I’ve been following trails of sources at the library and on the Web the past few days, a little apprehensive at where I see it going.

What got me started was Jenny Edbauer’s thoughts on the general equivalency of student essays written in the critical-pedagogical mode. The assignments required by critical pedagogues have become so common that they now show up — in all their generic characteristics — in the online term paper mills. As I tentatively concluded in my notes on Linh’s CCCC presentation, they’ve become our unmasking-hegemony equivalent of the New Critical close reading, only the object is culture rather than literature. And as Jenny points out, they’re so common that they’re easily exchanged, one for another, to the point where — as Doug Hesse suggested with his examples of the Intelligent Essay Assessor and the Essay Generator — no writing needs to be done, because it’s all been said. This is the end to which critical pedagogues have brought Paulo Freire: writing as the regurgitation of lecture, where the ultimate lesson the student takes from the teacher is this: “Do you now see how you’ve been duped by the dominant culture?” And of course the student will answer, outwardly: “Yes, teacher, I see.” And inwardly: “Yeah, sure. Whatever. Just give me the grade.” Because for all their hand-waving and hair-tearing about hegemony and ideology, many of the aging inheritors of Freire often forget that students are powerfully insightful cultural critics with a deep, thoroughgoing, and instinctive awareness of the performativity of culture, and the lessons that these inheritors of Freire would have them absorb about how meaning is constructed become so much lip-service bullshit, not worth writing about and simpler in its generic received-wisdom nature to download from cheathouse.com. Any individuated use value to the student is ignored in favor of exchange value for the grade.

This — Jenny’s “general equivalency” — is shallow writing in that it offers no room for personal inhabitation. We’ve forgotten Freire’s instruction that the subject must be the student’s own experience, not the facile unmasking of the hegemonic functions of assertions about capital punishment or tax reform. But use value subsists in what the writing means, directly, to the student, and that’s where I see an alternative offered by Peter Elbow’s “believing game” and the pedagogical possibilities of personal writing.

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OK, so it’s a little less ugly, now that I’ve borrowed atthe404’s Vesuvius layout. Haven’t ever worked with PHP before, so while the learning curve isn’t exactly steep, it’s still making my head hurt. Had to try a couple different hacks to show recent posts; I’m sure I’ll have to try a couple more to show recent comments. And I’m still not sure I like the layout; I want to get the pictures back on the left and the links and stuff back on the right, because — knowing that people read left to right — I want readers to see the attention-getting stuff first (the tall skinny semi-abstract greenish pictures), and then get to the meat of the entries, with the admin business (the links and such) saved for last, on the right. And that CSS skullduggery will take a non-technically-oriented person like myself a little bit of doing — so, yes, this layout is gonna mush around some over the next few weeks. But the green and gray will stay. I like the green and gray.

What else is going on? Not doing much reading; trying to get some chapter-drafting done. The cats are at peace, and Dad’s said that — after a long, long time — he’ll be happy to host the extended-family Christmas Day dinner downtown again, which means I’m in for big-time cooking and cleaning duties. Having inherited my mom’s recipe collection and some of her cookware — including a molded English pudding steamer — I’m on deck for doing the steamed-for-six-hours holiday plum pudding, so I’m going through a series of dry runs, making sure I can do this big involved recipe right when the time comes. (The recipes are all like, “Make sure the suet melts before the flour particles burst,” and I’m like: huh?) I’ve never asked a butcher for beef suet before; never even thought I’d do such a thing, especially not for a dessert. But that’s the odd thing, I guess: the radical disparities in the class backgrounds of my mom’s side of the family and my dad’s side of the family produced the strangest mishmashes of holiday meals; English puddings and birds cooked within birds alongside black-eyed peas or collard greens boiled with ham hocks. With my mom’s family, you had stilton and scallion puffs as an hors d’ouvre; with my dad’s family, you had pickled pig’s ears as a snack. Popovers versus cornbread; grits versus grapefruit; “highballs” served at 6 p.m. on Friday versus a Pabst Blue Ribbon with lunch after you mowed the back pasture.

I learned about cars from my dad. The first car that was mine’ to drive was Granny’s farm-use 1974 GMC Custom 1500: a big, old, rusted-out pickup truck, painted Creme de Menthe green. To work on the engine, you had to actually climb inside the hood and sit on the wheel well with your head bowed. The do-it-yourself orientation I learned from driving and fixing that truck has really informed the way I approach Web technologies: while knowing I’m a complete novice, I’m not too afraid to climb in under the hood and tinker a bit. (My greatest victory with that GMC was using two scraps of pine 2 x 4 and an empty plastic oil bottle to get the engine to limp home a hundred miles from Harper’s Ferry.) But see, until lately, until checking out my mom’s handwritten recipes and comparing them to the dogeared and wine-stained pages in her Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Fannie Farmer, Julia Child, and other cookbooks, I hadn’t figured out that she did the same thing in her cooking. In that realization, stratifications of class and gender, men’s work and women’s work, seem to collapse in odd ways.

I’m wondering how those stratifications might play out in Web work. Historically, doing code has been a more male-dominated thing, and design as a field has had (a few) more women — does that divide point to a class divide, as well? Is design more upper-class, more stylish, more chic? Do we expect coders to have dirt under their fingernails?