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.

I’ve been on a paper-grading binge the past week and I’ve got company this weekend, so the next update concerning Cadet Casey will be delayed a few days.

Which isn’t to say I’m not thinking about her. Certainly, neither she nor I are under any illusions about our roles as arms of the twenty-first century’s new imperial hegemony. We want to believe we’re making a difference, raising consciousness, contributing to the evolving understanding of the military as peacekeepers rather than warfighters under a regime of ubiquitous and ongoing distributed conflict, but we understand as well that ideological and economic and geopolitical pressures exerted by our own government and others work to sustain that regime. We are, we know, agents of capital.

Which isn’t to say we’re wholly complicitous.

We understand — we assert — we want to believe, at least, that it’s possible from the inside to work against “the assertions that capitalism really is the major force in contemporary life, that its dominance is not a discursive object but a reality that can’t simply be ‘thought away,’ that it has no outside and thus [our] so-called alternatives are actually part of the neoliberal, patriarchal, corporate capitalist agenda” (Gibson-Graham 2). The clickstream is an economic space, with its transactions of value and its signaling behaviors, and as such, it’s a site of intervention. It’s a space where multiplicitous economies can take root, have taken root, have in fact spread and dispersed from node to node with remarkable haste. In observing this behavior, perhaps writing teachers might move further towards understanding writing as an economy of circulation, and towards understanding “economy as a site of decision, of ethical praxis, instead of as the ultimate reality/container/constraint” (Gibson-Graham 87).

More on Mala soon.

I’ve been trying to think about inputs and outputs. Production and value. The cumulative nature of the value of inputs for various goods. How one tries to add up all the aspects of the factors of production — labor, space, capital — to understand what goes into producing an information good. How those factors are rivalrous and exhaustible, while information goods are not. And then Yochai Benkler helps me see one of the things I’ve been looking past in this system of economic value and production:

“Information is both input and output of its own production process.”

(The Wealth of Networks 37.)

Last Friday night, I was having dinner and seeing Pan’s Labyrinth with my attorney (she was drunk, of course, and amazed me yet again by somehow fitting a twelve-pack of St. Ides, an enormous Smith & Wesson 460 with the 8-inch barrel, and a two-pound venison tenderloin for snacking on into the hunting vest she wore beneath her DKNY wool coat), so the next installment of Cadet Mala Casey’s story will have to wait until this coming Friday.

Tonight, I went into the city for dinner (vegetarian on Curry Hill at Pongal, on Lexington between 27th and 28th: excellent, excellent Indian food but indifferent service) with some new acquaintances, some old friends, and my Master’s thesis advisor, and so had a stretch of useful focused reading time on the train. And it helped me put together some stuff about value and appropriation that I’ll likely talk about at CCCC.

First: in an article on social networking sites in BT Technology Journal, Judith Donath and danah boyd offer a brief discussion of the ways economic signaling theory can be used to analyze the way people display (wear? badge? perform? publicize?) their connections in social networks. While Donath’s and boyd’s discussion is largely confined to social networking sites like Orkut and Friendster, their conclusions are generalizable to our increasingly networked culture in general, and to blogs in particular: “The expenditure of energy to maintain a connection,” they argue, “is a signal of its importance and of the benefits it bestows” (Donath and boyd 81), or–in other words–a signal of its value. When I leave a comment on a post by Bradley, Jeff, or Joanna, I’m signaling its subjective value to me in ways that are socially reinforced, to varying degrees, by other commenters, while at the same time creating additional value for myself through the labor expended in creating my comment on the post. In much the same way, if Chris or Liz or Amanda leaves a comment here, they’re also producing additional value that can be appropriated by the broader community constituted by our various blogrolls, and the semi-invisible (to us, at least) community of lurkers. And as we know, the scholarly apparatus of citation is another form of value-signaling.

But the concerns emerge when we start to talk about the appropriation of value. We know that information is a non-rivalrous and non-scarce good, but with the intellectual DRM of plagiarism policies, we treat it as rivalrous and scarce. While plagiarism policies predate the information age, they’ve become inextricably embedded in its evolution. In Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion, John Logie (I’m a bit late, but thanks for suggesting it, Clancy!), approvingly deploys Andrew Ross’s 1990 description of “the ongoing attempt to rewrite property law in order to contain the effect of the new information technologies that… have transformed the way in which modern power is exercised and maintained” (Ross 10, qtd. in Logie 31) in order to help illustrate “the degree to which the state depends on the maintenance of stable property lines” (Logie 31). Logie offers a strong critique of the ways bureaucratic attempts to respond to the digital reproducibility of information have wholly failed to account for its not-rivalrous nature. At the same time, though, Logie points out that “U.S. courts have repeatedly rejected the notion that creators of intellectual property are entitled to any special consideration based on their investment of labor,” and cites Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s insistence in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service that “the public’s interest in access to information can trump the creator’s expectation for a return on effort expended” (55).

This is a clearly economic argument, and an apparent rejection of the labor theory of value. (I think. Other perspectives?) Do I agree with it? Well, it’s law, so it doesn’t really matter whether I agree or not–but it strikes me as interesting that the rationale inheres in an emphasis on the consumer rather than on the supplier of information; on the appropriation rather than on the production. Part of my project for this CCCC presentation, then, should be to come up with a basic and rudimentary rhetoric of the process of production, appropriation, distribution, and reproduction of value in writing. (Which might help me compose an answer to Jenn’s important question.)

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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According to Shapiro and Varian’s Information Rules, “Technology changes. Economic laws do not” (2).

Well, they’re half right.

The “laws” are not laws. They’re observations about how people act. And as Shapiro and Varian’s text itself demonstrates, people act differently under different circumstances. Shapiro and Varian’s assertion about unchanging economic laws is a foolish and mistaken attempt to bluster out an assertive and authoritative ethos in the face of the fact that economies and cultures change. It strikes me as something akin to Covey’s claims about the Seven Habits: a rhetorical system composed not so much for the way it might produce knowledge as for the way it might sell books.

In fact, economic “laws” — or, more properly, observations about the ways economies work — change. In a culture driven by the engine of slave labor, understandings of scarcity, competition, and social welfare shape economic activity in ways profoundly different from the ways in which our contemporary understandings of the same phenomena — scarcity, competition, social welfare — shape economic activity.

And Shapiro and Varian’s suggestion of a constancy of economic principles is interesting in a volume that seeks to engage and understand the ways that economic change influences the way we produce, distribute, and use information. For example: they make the point that “production costs of an information good involves high fixed costs but low marginal costs. The cost of producing the first copy of an information good may be substantial, but the cost of producing (or reproducing) additional copies is negligible” (3). Sure; yes, we know this. But according to Shapiro and Varian, the capitalist must therefore “price your information goods according to consumer value, not according to your production cost” (3). OK: so when we produce an information good — a text — its value is reckoned out there in the world, and in terms of what it does for other people. And we know that information goods, especially as essays, carry higher value when they proliferate; when they’re non-scarce. In that sense, textual value is, to a degree, social and affective: when a hundred people read a personal essay, whether it’s poorly written or a polished piece, the value of that personal essay — because of the affective connection those readers are making to what the author’s saying — increases.

This understanding of textual value as social and affective might offer interesting ways for us to think about Lester Faigley’s worries in “Judging Writing, Judging Selves” that as writing teachers, we tend to like (value) the personal essay perhaps too much and for inappropriate reasons. (Yes, I admit that’s a crude and reductive summary of Faigley’s point.) But it should also point us toward the ways Amy Robillard uses Julie Lindquist’s College English essay on “Class Affects, Classroom Affectations” to re-think the affective value of student’s written labor/work, and remind us that student work is part of that immense below-the-waterline portion of the diverse economic iceberg described by J. K. Gibson-Graham following Duncan Ironmonger’s time-use studies demonstrating that less than half of gross domestic product consists of cash-commodified market transactions. It might even help to counter the arguments of those who see Peter Elbow’s points in “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking” as somehow frivolous, uncritical, or silly, given that the behaviors Peter describes are, in fact, elements of the construction of one form of economic value as aspects of consumer choice — although, again, we should understand that that form of economic value is not the only one.

And this goes back to the concern Faigley raises and Robillard elaborates: it’s easy to see and acknowledge the affective value of the personal essay, but we’re not often inclined to admit the affective value of other genres, the affective value of other forms of intellectual labor. Which is foolish, because the ways that we like instances of those other genres is an affective relationship, as well, and those ways contribute to their increased value. This is the toughest move for me to make, though: I’m not sure how willing I am to admit that simply liking a circulating instance of intellectual labor/property is an economic act.

Shapiro and Varian help me out, though in some of the key strategies they offer for entrepreneurial success. Here are two:

• Personalize your product and personalize your pricing. This is easier to do on the Internet than on virtually any other medium since you communicate with your customers on a one-to-one basis.
• Know thy customer. You can learn about your customer demographics by registration and about their interests by tracking their clickstream and search behavior analysis. Analyze this information to see what your customers want. (43)

Information is social, we know, and they indicate that the ways we shape and circulate it are simultaneously personal and economic. Shapiro and Varian’s advice, while grounded in a market-based perspective, offers us some interesting ways of thinking about writing and its value. Certainly, it’s in one way the same old “know your audience” advice rhetors have been familiar with for 2000 years, but when we put it into the cycle of work, appropriation, ownership, and use, it takes on a different meaning. And I love that phrase “tracking their clickstream” and want to apply it to our discipline’s thoughts about process, reading, and citation, which I think I’ll try to do in my next post.

Until then, I’ll close and say that I very much like the following texts:

Elbow, Peter. “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out Three Forms of Judgment.” College English 55.2 (1993): 187-206.

Faigley, Lester. “Judging Writing, Judging Selves.” College Composition and Communication 40 (1989): 395-412. Rpt. Landmark Essays on Voice and Writing. Ed. Peter Elbow. Davis, CA: Hermagoras, 1994.

Ironmonger, Duncan. “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product.” Feminist Economics 2.3 (1996): 37-64.

Lindquist, Julie. “Class Affects, Classroom Affectations.” College English 67 (2004): 187-209.

Robillard, Amy. “Young Scholars Affecting Composition: A Challenge to Disciplinary Citation Practices.” College English 68.3 (2006): 253-70.

Shapiro, Carl, and Hal R. Varian. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 1998.

Here’s a cheesy graphic that looks like it belongs in Microsoft’s Clip Art portfolio. Unfortunately, I’m afraid, it’s also my attempt to think about (1) how economic activity works qua writing and (2) how writing works within our discipline as economic activity.

Sure: another simplistic attempt to represent how writing happens; an obvious, boring, and self-evident attempt to talk about The Process. Well, OK, not so fast, pardner: there are economic points of intervention here. Locations of heterogeneous practice and valuation.

First, on Work: this is Bruce Horner’s nuanced definition of work. This is the understanding from Terms of Work for Composition that our discipline regards and values Work in different ways, as scholarship, as pedagogy, and as the quotidian student activity of the classroom.

The value of each of those forms of work is somehow appropriated, and appropriated — according to Gibson-Graham and Resnick and Wolff — by different parties at different points in the progression from production to distribution. At the point of production, value can be appropriated in slave relations wherein the producer has no control over the conditions under which he produces (prison labor; the work of intellectuals under Stalin), feudal relations, market relations (you publish an article in order to put it on your cv and be promotable), gift relations, independent relations (you appropriate the value of your own labor), and others. I don’t have a sufficient grasp on rhetoric and the economics of distribution to be able to talk about those practices of appropriation here, but folks like Jim Ridolfo and Amy Robillard are doing smart and admirable work in that area.

Appropriation, as unavoidable economic practice, leads to various forms of textual ownership. Capitalism, as a mode of thought, concerns itself with private ownership. Socialism, as a mode of thought, concerns itself with state ownership. Communism is a mode of thought that inadequately addresses and fails to encompass public ownership, and I don’t think we yet have a term that is more adequate to that task. And as a term that addresses or attempts to address non-ownership, “The Commons” is certainly fraught with difficulties, as is “The Public Domain.” Nevertheless: work’s value is appropriated and becomes property, non-property, or something in between.

And we build upon that which has gone before; that which any entity owns. The verb that relates this act to property is “use,” and I don’t have a vocabulary for it, but “use” clearly takes us back to “work.”

I need to show this, I think, in projects — both students’ and my own — and then connect this cycle to my critique of how comp’s discourse has failed to engage a vocabulary of economy, and offer some concrete examples of work > appropriation > ownership > use > work et cetera. But that circuit, so far, is the happiest definition I have for what “economy” means in composition.

Does it work for you, or have I missed or ignored key considerations?

Here is the first sentence of The Wealth of Nations:

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. (Smith lix)

Edwin Cannan footnotes the second word, “annual,” in the following way:

This word, with “annually” just below, at once marks the transition from the older British economist’s ordinary practice of regarding the wealth of a nation as an accumulated fund. Following the physiocrats, Smith sees that the important thing is how much can be produced in a given time. (Smith lix)

From Smith and Cannan, it’s quite clear: we must understand value as existing in and delimited by time. (This is why economic productivity, as a sort of value judgment about the quality and intensity of a nation’s workers, is measured over time.) So how do writing teachers talk about time? One obvious way, of course, is in our talk about process. Some of us even incorporate something like a Labor Theory of Value into the way we evaluate student writing, proposing to students that the work they put into composing stands in some relation of value to their performance in the course and the ultimate gradebook worth of their compositions. For writing teachers who base their pedagogies upon the process model, the Labor Theory of Value — for all its problems — is an economic reality in institutions that require grade-based valuation.

We’re familiar with the problems presented by the Labor Theory of Value. We know that Adam Smith tried to get away from it, David Ricardo promulgated it, and Karl Marx tried to re-think it. We know that contemporary mainstream economics has discarded it as thoroughly flawed and problematic, choosing to focus instead on the notion of marginality and how producers and consumers react to fluctuations in supply and demand at the marginal frontier. But I’d contend that the categories of “producer” and “consumer” are themselves too-easy oversimplifications in today’s information economy, and contend further that the notions of supply and demand are wholly inadequate in addressing the things that we can best characterize in economic terms as non-rivalrous experience goods: which is to say, essays.

I understand and largely agree with the critiques that have been made of the Labor Theory of Value, and I have strong reservations about how to enact the difference Marx draws between necessary and surplus labor. At the same time, though, understanding Time as the space in which Labor takes place seems to me an essential component of thinking about how the Value of that Labor gets used or appropriated. So here’s a question: if you’re a writing teacher, does part of your grading involve the Labor Theory of Value? Do you give students credit for the Time they take to do drafts, to do revision? And — if so — why? (I’ve got a tentative answer, but I’m curious to hear yours.)

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Ed. Edwin Cannan. New York: Random House, 1994.

Scholars have trajectories, traced by the contrail arcs of their intellectual projects. As a newly minted professor, I’ve been thinking about what mine might be: how do I characterize what I’ve been working on and what I want to continue to work on as a line across the sky of my discipline?

What I’m doing, I think, is trying to develop an economic phenomenology of student writing, and with it a language of value that can talk about why people want to write that moves beyond the instrumental. Instrumentality we know quite well: do X and get Y. Barter and exchange: simple transactions. The richer field, though, is the motivation that inheres within the moment, the act of writing for writing qua writing. So I’m putting together unlikely bedfellows — Elbow and the so-called expressivist compositionists with Gibson-Graham and the so-called Marxian economists — but with a specific attention to moment, to the temporally present acts of writerly production, circulation, and distribution. I’m not much interested in questions of history — “Where did this come from?” and “What will this lead to?” — except as phenomenologically enacted: “What is this doing now?” This isn’t to say that I support any sort of ahistoricity: it’s just that economic analysis as applied to composition pedagogy too easily lends itself, as we see in the literature, to an abnegation of responsibility; to the sometimes irresponsible assertions that current problems are best thought about in terms of their past causes or future consequences, rather than considering — as Elbow, Emig, and others show us — possible immediate interventions.

J. K. Gibson-Graham describes some problematic tendencies in economic thought that I see some of the literature in composition as still taking for granted as foundational assumptions: “the tendency to represent economy as a space of invariant logics and automatic unfolding that offered no field for intervention; [and] the tendency to constitute ‘the’ economy as a singular capitalist system or space rather than as a zone of cohabitation and contestation among multiple economic forms” (xxi). (See, as an outstanding example, Giroux’s recent JAC piece.) As writing teachers, I believe we understand that such ways of thinking are inadequate, and yet the vocabulary with which we have been left to understand economic concerns is so fundamentally incommensurate with our understanding of day-to-day pedagogical practice — with the daily fact of being and teaching and writing in the classroom — that we simply don’t talk about economy except as something taking place outside the classroom. Our economic attitudes remove us from the classroom scene and moment of the creation of intellectual and affectual value.

That’s, as I see it, my contrail. It starts in definitional concerns and the idea of an economic vocabulary for composition, develops into notions about the multiplicity of valuations for writing, and attempts to begin to address the place of open source economic concepts in the the classroom. Beyond that, I’m not sure what it might look like, other than a thin and incomplete white line across a wide blue sky.

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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