I met with a group of seniors today; students I’m mentoring in their writing projects as they apply for certain nationally-known graduate scholarships.

There’s a lot of interest among these soon-to-be Army officers, as one might hope and expect, in international relations. Perhaps less expected was the interest taken in international relations in conjunction with development economics.

But when one of the intelligent and well-read young officers-to-be elaborated upon a claim in his essay by proposing to us that the American campaign to end global terror might most effectively begin by seeking to remedy two of terror’s dominant causal economic factors — entrenched third-world poverty and gross international economic inequality — I steepled my fingers to hide my grin.

“You might want to put that in there,” I said.

In his chapter “Can Economics Start from the Individual Alone?,” Geoffrey M. Hodgson gives an account of how economics turned its attention as a discipline away from a systemic focus and toward the individual homo economicus as its sole starting point. As Hodgson describes it, within the span of a few decades, scholars in economics chose to make their topic the “allocation of scarce means between alternative uses, as a universal matter of choice for every individual in a world of scarcity. Instead of the whole system of production and allocation of the means of life, the choosing individual alone became the foundation stone of economic theory” (57). To the contrary, Hodgson proposes that “the isolated individual is not viable as an analytical starting point” (58), and I see in his argument some instructive parallels to the shift in philosophical emphasis that some in composition have called “the social turn.” One of the more widely recognized indicators of that social turn is James Berlin’s landscaping of the field, wherein scholars focusing on formal concerns were labeled current-traditionalists, others focusing on the mental processes of composing were labeled cognitivists, and those focusing upon the authorial choices of the composing individual were labeled expressivists, to whom Berlin counterposed social-epistemic rhetoric, with its examination and critique of the ways social structures and institutions construct knowledge and interpellate individuals into hegemonic ideologies.

Berlin sets up social-epistemic rhetoric as a strong critique of what he characterizes as expressivism’s focus on the authorial choices of the individual composer, indicting that focus as divorced from the social and thereby unable to engage in anything other than apolitical, disconnected writerly solipsism. So, too, does Hodgson see a shift in political economy toward an emphasis on the choosing individual, which his essay strongly critiques — but his critique takes a direction quite different from Berlin’s.

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I see direct application to composition studies for two complementary social impulses that Yochai Benkler describes as being characteristic of the shift from industrial mass capitalism to a networked economy. I’m trying to get an article written now that condenses some of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years — not all of the dissertation, but some of it, the new stuff I have to say about being careful in talking about writing studies and political economy, particularly in relation to the digital — and Benkler has been useful in helping me re-see how what I’m looking at isn’t just Pollyanna Web 2.0 evangelism plugged into the writing classroom or critical pedagogy fodder for jeremiads about access.

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Yochai Benkler describes “three primary categories of inputs” for the production of information and culture that I think bear considerable relevance for composition:

1. “existing information and culture,”
2. “the mechanical means of sensing our environment, processing it, and communicating new information goods,” or in other words, information technology, and
3. “human communicative capacity — the creativity, experience, and cultural awareness necessary to take from the universe of existing information and cultural resources and turn them into new insights, symbols, or representations meaningful to others with whom we converse” (52).

“Inputs” are here meant in the economic sense, in the same way that neoclassical economists looking at industrial capitalism talked about the “inputs” of labor, land, and capital being the most important factors of production. Writing and its teaching, of course, are deeply concerned with the production of information and culture. Benkler then goes on to point out that “given the zero [marginal] cost of existing information and the declining cost of communication and processing, human capacity becomes the primary scarce resource in the networked information economy” (52). In this statement, he seems to agree with the strong position Richard Lanham takes in The Economics of Attention about the contrast between a glut of information and a scarcity of attention — and that attention, that human communicative capacity, is composition’s chief disciplinary concern. At a fundamental level, it’s what compositionists teach.

But Benkler cautions that “human communicative capacity, however, is an input with radically different characteristics than those of, say, printing presses or satellites” in its individuated and non-aggregate nature (52) — and this is where I think Benkler’s analysis is more careful and useful than Lanham’s. Lanham seeks to apply economy as metaphor to the production, circulation, and use of information, and his economic metaphor is a capitalist one. Benkler’s analysis, on the other hand, deals with economy not as metaphor for something other than itself, but as actuality, and so illustrates with much more suasive force the ways in which “we live life and exchange ideas in many more diverse relations than those mediated by the market” (53). While Adam Smith powerfully illustrates how markets benefit from the individual’s self-interested actions, there are other spheres of economic activity wherein individuals acting on their own in diverse relations and for diverse motivations produce surplus value. As Benkler argues, “the economics of production in a digital environment should lead us to expect an increase in the relative salience of nonmarket production models in the overall mix of our information production system, and it is efficient for this to happen — more information will be produced, and much of it will be available for its users at its marginal cost” (56). I’m a little confused by that last bit, in two ways: first, what exactly is that marginal cost and how is it calculated? (This is why I was going on a while back about Piero Sraffa and the Cambridge capital controversy.) Second, I understand that there are costs (opportunity and otherwise, and Lanham’s focus on attention seems to me to deal chiefly with opportunity costs) accounted for in many forms of nonmarket and alternative market transactions, but I’m not sure what Benkler’s getting at here unless he’s being witty and expecting us to fill in the caveat that he’s already shown in pages previous that said marginal cost is zero.

Doubts aside, though, the question remains: what does this mean for the composition classroom? What happens when we consider how human communicative capacity, the diverse individuation of production, and the production of value in a diverse array of market and nonmarket transactions for diverse motivations? What does it mean in an economic sense when we understand that freewriting, peer response, drafting, revision, and reflection are deeply inefficient processes? There’s a fairly simple answer, I think. I’ve had students here who come to me, frustrated with their writing, frustrated with their drafts, and ask: “Sir, what’s the approved solution for this essay?” That approach gets me frustrated, as well, because it’s the Army ideology, the idea that there’s a single right answer that everyone can get to by using the same sets of steps, the substitution of the idea that there is a single unitary writing process for the understanding that writing is a messy, complicated, recursive multi-step process that differs from individual to individual; a process that needs to be learned on the diverse terms of those individuals. In that learning and understanding, nonmarket transactions and transactions that take place at economic locations other than the margin — the sloppy, inefficient transactions — are products and indicators of surplus. Going beyond the ideology of scarcity — beyond Lanham’s implications that we have only so much attention to give and must therefore ration it with maximal efficiency — is what produces and sustains growth.

Or, literally, “the writing student,” as an attempt to play on homo economicus. On Monday, Becky responded to my thoughts about the link between composition’s expressivism (which I do not in any way use as a term of condemnation: too frequently, folks who try to dismiss Peter Elbow’s work have failed to read him carefully) and Benkler’s re-thinking of political economy in the information age, and suggested some concerns with Benkler’s individualism. I’d meant to reply in the comments, but the stuff I was thinking about kept getting bigger and messier and more out-of-hand until I figured it merited its own post. Basically, my response is this: I read Benkler, especially given his title, as trying to re-imagine the evolution of classical economics into neoclassical economics in the steps of Adam Smith, who so carefully initiates his analysis from the figure of the individual in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. From Smith’s moves, we see how today’s microeconomics begets macroeconomics — and so, too, even in Marx, the architecture of base and superstructure always emerges from acts of production and appropriation performed by and upon the individual. I’m not seeking to deny that “the social” doesn’t exist as a concern in our disciplinary discourse, but I think that describing and accounting for and characterizing various things as components of “the social” is a homogenizing move that glosses over the heterogeneity of economic work, relations, transactions, enterprises at the individual level as undertaken in the composition classroom. Individualism — for Smith, for Marx, for Benkler — is a good and demanding thing, I think, because it asks us to pay attention to the way works and enterprises are transacted at the closest scale and lets us see the limit cases, the moves of production and appropriation that disrupt conventional macroeconomic expectations, and so doing complicate those expectations.

Consider Benkler’s assertion that

Because welfare economics defines a market as producing a good efficiently only when it is pricing the good at its marginal cost, a good like information (and culture and knowledge are, for purposes of economics, forms of information), which can never be sold both at a positive (greater than zero) price and at its marginal cost, is fundamentally a candidate for substantial nonmarket production. (36)

If writing teachers understand that marginal cost is the increase in total cost incurred per extra unit of production, the language becomes a little less scary: it’s costly to write that paper or that dissertation. It’s not so costly to (digitally) reproduce an extra copy. (Let’s not talk about Sraffa, counting inputs, and sunk costs right now, k thx?) Academic writing, by students and professors, is more likely to be produced and exchanged in nonmarket ways because of the nature of information goods, and as Benkler demonstrates, even the orthodoxy of neoclassical economics supports this. There is, as well, the flip side: as Benkler acknowledges (37), regulation of information goods — such as, for example, via copyright — is inherently economically inefficient. We maintain the institution of limited-term copyright not for the inefficiencies it creates, but for its incentive effects; the way it draws other creators into the production of an intellectual commons. As we’ve lately seen, though, copyright’s inefficiencies are not the only incentive (economic or otherwise) acting upon the individual composer. As Benkler points out, individuals produce information goods for a variety of motivations — for reasons of pleasure, politics, belonging, and gain, among others — and we understand beyond Benkler that such production requires work, and the value of that work is appropriated, whether by the individual producer or another or others, and that such appropriation leads into concerns of ownership and then into the use by the owner, and often back into the work of production by other individual writers and other individual composers.

The critique of expressivism as overly focused on the individual is a useful one, I think. But such a critique makes it also very easy to dismiss anything that might happen at the closest level, the individual’s personal and conscious choices and disruptions in composing, and instead scan for the homogeneities of the grand trends — economic, social, or otherwise.

In my CCCC presentation, I tried to mash together Yochai Benkler’s diverse motivations for production, my own thoughts about the work > appropriation > ownership > use > work cycle, and Gibson-Graham’s tabular charting of the various market, alternative market, and nonmarket forms of economic activity, and to apply that mashup to the composition classroom. Right now, I’m planning out how to turn that mashup into an article, and I’ve gone back to Benkler and re-stumbled across yet another table, on page 43 of The Wealth of Networks. Benkler charts three types of strategies for “Cost Minimization / Benefit Acquisition” across three domains: the public, the intra-organizational (he calls it “intrafirm” but I want to open up that term to more explicitly include noncapitalist or alternative capitalist enterprises), and the semi-private. His three strategies are those of rights-based exclusion (in other words, profiting from copyright and associated strategies), nonexclusion-market (producing information from which to profit, but not via exclusivity), and nonexclusion-nonmarket (e.g., reputation economies and the like). I think Benkler’s taxonomy is helpful, particularly in considering the domain/context/scope of activity, and I want to work to map it over Gibson-Graham’s and my own subsequent elaborations, but I also think it’s somewhat incomplete, particularly in light of Benkler’s own work on non-market motivations for information production.

Which is what I’ll be working on as soon as I see the light at the end of the end-of-semester forced march.

Note: I’ve made some corrections in what follows in response to requests by presenters.

I struggled somewhat to follow the highly abstract train of reasoning in Min-Zhan Lu’s presentation. Lu’s talk was more densely theoretical than the following talks by Tom Fox and Joseph Harris, which isn’t a criticism on my part, but an acknowledgment that I had to work harder to follow the complexity of her argument, and in fact failed to follow quickly enough at times — so any instances of incoherence in the following account should be taken as failures on my part, and not Lu’s. Lu began her talk on “Rethinking How We Talk About Class in the Global Free Market” by pointing to higher education’s increasingly prevalent invocation of the language of job security, career advancement, and marketable job skills. These terms, Lu noted, are not self-evident. They are, however, associated with a class of students increasingly subjected to the demands of global capital. If we’re going to develop a pedagogy that takes seriously our students’ economic concerns, we need to address their career goals as well as the increasingly volatility of global flows of capital and people, and in this sense, we would do well to keep in mind the additional meaning of career as unrestrained headlong rush. Lu expressed reservations about the limitations of the conventional stratifying markers of class, and proposed that we look instead to the extraterritorial mobility of the global elite as marker of class distinction. The conditions of the global free market today push the economy towards production of the volatile, the ephemeral, and the precarious, and the extraterritorial careering of the global elite constrains the middle class.

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I think I’m beginning to learn how to give a good conference presentation.

Or maybe at least the kind of conference presentation from which I tend to learn the most. I know I don’t learn well when people read papers, no matter how eloquently they’re written: written prose, when performed, has a fundamentally different quality. We see things in drama that the page does not show, and vice versa. But the model of the talk guided by slides doesn’t work well for me either: it feels too paratactic, too off-the-cuff, a series of impressions. Lawrence Lessig’s CCCC presentation seemed to me an ideal middle ground, and I’ve lately seen Collin and Clancy taking similar approaches, and so I tried this year to do something similar. I think the resulting presentation was the best I’ve so far done.

I first wrote a long paper, maybe 20 pages double-spaced, that worked through my argument. It’s something that I’m going to be trying to expand into a journal article over the next few months. I then went through and cut, cut, cut it down to somewhere near conference length: nine pages, double-spaced. After that, I put together a slide show to go with key terms and phrases and concepts in the paper, in imitation of Lessig, and also following the excellent format that I’ve seen Clancy and Collin start to turn toward. After some coaching and feedback from friends and colleagues, I cut it down further, and turned my writerly prose into bullet points from which to read, so as to avoid the deep hypotaxis that becomes so difficult to follow when listening to someone read a written paper: basically, I index-carded it.

I was happy with the result. I got out from behind the speakers’ table, walked around, used my wireless clicker to advance the slides, and talked it. I’d be curious to hear what the audience thought, because for me, it was the most energetic and engaged presentation I’ve done: it was fun, impassioned, and — to me — far more lucid and to-the-point than other presentations I’ve given.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the technology to record as I presented, so what I’ve got to share here is the presentation’s static counterpart: my written talk; the extended prose that I cooked down to bullet points.

If you’re interested, though, you’re also welcome to take a look at the slide show and the bullet point script that I used to talk through that slide show.

slide show (1.1 MB, .ppt file)

bullet point script (55 KB, .doc file)

I’m especially grateful to my colleague Karen Peirce for her feedback and suggestions for revision.

Presentation prose follows.

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Here’s a brief preview of what I’ll be talking about on Thursday afternoon.

Imagine three doctoral candidates in rhetoric and composition at a large state university. They are friends, and also constitute an informal writing group; meeting twice a month to discuss progress and offer advice on one another’s dissertation chapters and other works in progress. All three have undergraduate loans — one from a religious baccalaureate institution, one from a public baccalaureate institution, and one from a private baccalaureate institution — but one has a teaching assistantship with one section of first-year composition, one has a research assistantship working and writing for a senior scholar, and one has a tuition fellowship and teaches sections of composition and literature at other nearby institutions for income. One is highly active in performing writing for a professional organization; one is a prominent member of several online communities and weblog collectives; one receives tuition remission for her work with the writing center, where she advises undergraduate work-study tutors. One is a returning scholar with a teenage child, whom she regularly tutors on writing assignments; one works with students to contribute to a growing repository of documentation for open-source software; one occasionally makes supplementary income by tutoring high-school students for the SAT. They all use in-class peer response in their teaching, they all have assigned the graded research paper essay to show mastery of a topic at some point in their teaching careers, and they all engage in writing as a reflective learning process for their own benefit. One discovers that a student has purchased the turned-in research paper from one of the online paper mills, and fails the student. Another has two students who turn in the same paper, and fails them both. The third recommends seeking or hiring a regular tutor to her ESL student. The third one assigns ungraded private journals in her class, while another maintains private message boards for her students, and another asks her students to keep public weblogs.

They all go to MLA. They all dazzle the search committees. They all get offers. One doesn’t like any of the offers she receives, and struggles to make a growing name for herself as an independent scholar, publishing and consulting. One likes the impressive salary and benefits that a for-profit online institution offers, and goes to work for private higher education. And one is excited to go to work as WPA-in-training for a small state school.

Nothing described above is remarkable. In composition, we know the things described above as the quotidian work of the teaching and learning of English.

However: their commonality is that everything above is an aspect of economic activity, and represents the immense ways in which which conventional representations of economic activity are deeply impoverished in their suggestions that everything in today’s information economy is about capitalism and market activity. This is mistaken. Not only do we see in the representation of our daily work the inescapable idea that economic activity inheres in market transactions and wage labor performed in the context of the capitalist enterprise; we see as well alternative market and nonmarket transactions, alternative paid and unpaid forms of labor, and alternative capitalist and noncapitalist forms of enterprise.

Capitalism is not the economy, and the economy is not the market.

I’m again using here J. K. Gibson-Graham’s sorting taxonomy of transaction / labor / enterprise and its index of various capitalist / alternative capitalist / noncapitalist forms.

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

In “Can Economics Start from the Individual Alone?” Geoffrey Hodgson points out that around the middle of the 20th century, economics came to be defined as “the science of individual choice,” wherein the focus is on “allocation of scarce means between alternative uses, as a universal matter of choice for every individual in a world of scarcity” (57). As I started to try to get at last week, that focus on the individual as isolate actor embodying tastes and preferences mappable as indifference curves is inaccurate and inappropriate in its ahistoricity and its inability to account for time, change, and context. We know that people act from diverse motivations (e.g., Benkler’s different behaviors in seeking profit-based rewards, social-psychological rewards, and intrinsic-hedonic rewards; to which I might add the idea of political motivations, as well), but those actions are historical processes and motivations alter over change and in response to other actions and motivations. What we should be talking about, then, is the way people engage in the processes of interconnected textual work (which can consist of various combinations of production, reproduction, and distribution), appropriation, ownership, and use. These processes constitute a network and always must be understood as taking place over time, especially given Benkler’s key insight that “Information is both input and output of its own production process” (37). As Rebecca Moore Howard has recently pointed out, “from an intertextual point of view, all writers are always collaborating with text,” and “intertextual theory asserts the appropriation of text as an inescapable component of writing” (9). The information Benkler describes is both valued in itself and, as Donath and boyd point out in their work on signaling behaviors, indicator of value: see again their assertion that “The expenditure of energy to maintain a connection is a signal of its importance and of the benefits it bestows” (81). Seeing the cycle of textual work, appropriation, ownership, and use as economic act (as I do, following Benkler and Gibson-Graham), then, allows us to see Benkler’s information production process as an intentional economy: economic activity is not some faceless juggernaut, a massive agentless agency removed from human intervention, as some would have us believe.

Such a determinist perspective on the economy can only promote stasis. As we well know, many of those who work from a Marxist economic perspective are just as guilty (if not more so) of such determinist perspectives as capitalist free marketeers, particularly in the more conventional ways they’ve attempted to interpret Marx’s notions of base and superstructure. In writing of the determining economic base and determined cultural superstructure of industrial capitalist commodity production, Raymond Williams points out that much confusion has come out of the multiple meanings of the word “determine,” and suggests that we would do far better to understand determining as “setting limits and exerting pressures” rather than in the theological sense of total “prefiguration, prediction or control” (4). Williams argues at length:

We have to revalue ‘determination’ towards the setting of limits and the exertion of pressure, and away from a predicted, prefigured and controlled content. We have to revalue ’superstructure’ towards a related range of cultural practices, and away from a reflected, reproduced or specifically dependent content. And, crucially, we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and towards the specific activities of men [sic] in real social and economic relationships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic process. (6)

That understanding of dynamic process, of economic activity as being something done intentionally by people in specific material contexts, is key, particularly when applied to to today’s information economy, when — as Jameson points out, following Marx — culture and economy are increasingly blurred. That blurring is itself a space for intervention, a space of possibility, a space not governed by Shapiro and Varian’s eponymous “information rules” but by human activity and intent, and that understanding of our location in what Jameson calls late capitalism is key, as well: to borrow the language of Williams again, we might do well to see Shapiro and Varian’s “rules” as another instance of the “laws, constitutions, theories, ideologies, which are claimed as natural, or as having universal validity or significance” which “simply have to be seen as expressing and ratifying the domination of a particular class” (7) — or, of course, domination by a particular class, which in this case would be Robert Reich’s “symbolic analysts.” We no longer live in the industrial economy that gave arguments about working-class identities so much of their force, and we need to move away from the circumstance described by Gibson-Graham wherein “attachment to a past political analysis or identity is stronger than the interest in present possibilities for mobilization, alliance, or transformation” (5). Much of the focus in composition’s literature on the working class — the most common way in which composition has tried to engage economic concerns — has been either on the past, as one’s background, or on the future in the form of vocationalist concerns. To me, such a static focus and avoidance of engaging present and immediate economic activity is deeply melancholic (and, indeed, such melancholy is an abiding characteristic of much of the literature on the working class), but more importantly closes off any possibility for progressive change.

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven, CT: Yale, 2006.

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

Hodgson, Geoffrey. “Can Economics Start from the Individual Alone?” A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics. Edward Fullbrook, ed. London: Anthem, 2004. 57-67.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Understanding ‘Internet Plagiarism.’” Computers and Composition 24 (2007): 3-15.

Shapiro, Carl, and Hal R. Varian. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Networked Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School, 1999.

Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” New Left Review 82 (1973): 3-16.