The arriving faculty workshop at West Point continues, with an interesting briefing several days ago from USMA’s intellectual property attorney. The primary point of the briefing had to do with contracts and copyright, and it was this: any intellectual property I produce while at West Point in my official capacity as a faculty member, government employee, and representative of the United States Army does not automatically inhere to me as it would under conventional copyright law. Instead, inasmuch it is produced in the service of the United States Government, it is immediately released into the public domain.

Yeah. Wow. And, given my views on intellectual property, I think that’s pretty cool, although the IP attorney’s acknowledgement of the forthright application of institutional hegemonic force was a little unsettling: most of the time around here, they hide the iron behind velvet for civilian faculty.

There are other implications, as well. Ethical regulations make very clear that I can’t use my position as a West Point faculty member to push a book or an essay, which of course would seem obvious until one raises concerns (as I did with the IP attorney) of context and venue: essays published by West Point faculty in Military Review carry considerably different appeal and considerably different connotative freight from those published in Rethinking Marxism.

The thing that’ll be most difficult for me to get used to, however, is that I won’t be able to ask my students — plebe cadets, this first semester — to make a choice about the status of their essays as intellectual property. Anything they write in and for my class is instantly released into the public domain, and they therefore don’t have to engage with the concerns of choice, motivation, and textual ownership that have lately been so important to me.

Unless, of course, we begin to productively blur the line between work performed in an official capacity and work performed in a personal capacity. Like an institution-wide cadet blogging initiative might do.

Hmmm.

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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Grump grump grump. I’m stuck at about the halfway point through the first draft of the final chapter — trying really hard to integrate open source practices with the rhetoric of the affective, trying really hard to figure out how to synthesize Benkler’s and Lindquist’s ideas of the personal dimensions of economic self-selection in the context of writing projects, and I know I need to write my way through it but right now it’s really huge and abstract and vague — so I’m switching gears and going back to previous chapters in heavy-duty revise revise revise revise revise revise revise revise revise mode (which I need to do anyway) in order to use that conceptual backtracking to shake loose the specifics of how I want to conclude.

I think one way I’m getting sidetracked is in wanting to explicitly contrast market-based economic approaches to open-source practices, and they’re not necessarily opposites or even all that opposed. My frustration, I think, comes from the ways in which laissez-faire free marketeers rhetorically construct markets as highly efficient self-organizing systems and then make the specious argumentative extension that all highly efficient self-organizing systems must be some species of market.

Nope. Doesn’t work that way, and folks who think it does clearly failed Logic 101 (and, yes, I’m aiming at a specific rhetorical target here, but I’m not willing to be much more specific until something I’ve got in the works sees publication): arguing that all schoolbuses are yellow is fine and good, but it does not mean that every yellow thing can be called a schoolbus. Open-source practices, as the work of Yochai Benkler indicates, can constitute highly efficient self-organizing systems, but that hardly means that they’re market-based systems — and the rhetorical invocation of the “marketplace of ideas” in economic argument is nothing more than the intellectually sloppy application of a bad metaphor: do you buy ideas like you buy artichokes?

Julie Graham, who constitutes one half of the feminist economic geographer author-function known as J. K. Gibson-Graham, gave an excellent talk tonight about her/their new book, A Postcapitalist Politics. And as I struggle/race/work to finish the final chapter of my dissertation, my head’s abuzz with their ideas. Some are familiar from The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), which — by the way — is in print again, in a new and more affordable edition, in case you missed it the first time. But I won’t here try to sort out the old from the new: suffice to say it’s all good, and if you’re interested (and maybe even if you’re not) in alternatives to mainstream discursive constructions of the all-consuming all-commodified wholly market-based economy, they’re well worth your attention.

Here’s why.

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That pretty much does it for my notes on this year’s 4Cs. I got to meet a lot of new people, see some old friends and colleagues, and attend some excellent presentations, most of which I’ve shared my notes on here. I got to hang out with Jen Beech at the Newcomer’s Station, and (very briefly — I had to run to set up my presentation) introduced myself to Julie Lindquist. Plus, after Mark Bauerlein’s sniping, the estimable John Schilb called him “lazy and paranoid” — my goodness!

I finally managed to sync up an audio reading of my presentation with the slides, so if you’re interested, check it out. (Eighteen minutes and thirty seconds of a 28.6 MB .mp4; right-click to download: I added some stuff and tried to read a little more slowly.) It’s a big file, and some of the slides are hard to read at 320 x 240, and my reading comes across as kinda stilted — I didn’t have the presence of mind to actually record while I was presenting, so it felt weird just reading it aloud a second time in my kitchen. Still, for a first attempt at a podcast, I guess it came out OK. Text of the presentation follows after the break.

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In composition, Marxist arguments typically construct the value of work performed in the classroom as carrying future rather than present value. Consider the College English “WPA Outcomes Statement,” which offers the political contention that “By the end of first-year composition, students should[...] Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating[...;] Integrate their own ideas with those of others [; and] Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power” (324). Writing here is understood to carry use value, instrumental value, social or communal value, and critical value in the way it is expected to interrogate ideologies of power — but in most of these aspects, that value is still a distant rather than present horizon.

In contrast, Lester Faigley uses a Marxist-influenced analysis to critique the distant economic horizon of the neoclassical economic perspective: following the work of Geoff Sirc, he rather caustically proposes that “Only after [the student] receives her degree will she learn if she has been granted all that has been promised: that you too can be a success if you go to college, work hard, and do what you’re told” (73). Faigley’s work in Fragments of Rationality offers a useful summary of many of the Marxist approaches common to composition. From Barbara Ehrenreich, he takes the notion that the identity of middle class students will be determined by their education, rather than by relative poverty or wealth (Faigley 53), and later characterizes Janet Emig’s and Peter Elbow’s expressivist classroom practices as reactions against an increasing corporate influence on education as manifested in the transactional purposes of writing (58) (which should likely bring to mind Raymond Williams and his observations on Romanticism as a cultural reaction to the economic shifts of the industrial revolution).

Furthermore, Faigley notes that Lisa Delpit, Myron Tuman, and Susan Miller all argue that early advocates of process pedagogies ignore and so perpetuate economic inequalities in their discourse that privileges middle-class communicative habits and practices — but, again, the Marxist critique here is largely ideological rather than economic. This Marxist ideological reaction to economic inequality is also visible in the work of Greg Myers, who writes in “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching” that he’s seeking “not for a new kind of assignment, but for more skepticism about what assignments do to reproduce the structures of our society” (434): in other words, “One teaches job letters to the business communications students who need to get jobs downtown, without teaching that a job downtown is the answer to their problems” (434). The work of the classroom is not viewed as necessarily carrying value in its own right, but in how it might enlighten the student and orient that student towards future productive change in society.

In a similar vein, Min-Zhan Lu writes with considerable concern of “the Fast Capitalist investment in turning the young people of China into eager Consumers and below-minimum-wage Labor for global corporations” (31), and describes, with some irony, “fast capitalism’s interest in prioritizing areas of our life, turning our life outside paid work and school work (in preparation for paid work)” (41). Despite the irony, however, the notion is still there that education serves the economy, even as she seeks economic critique within the context of education. Language use, for Lu, can help us to become critical of fast capitalism’s agentless “order” and “Our word-work can help to design a better world” (46): the value of such word-work, again, is understood to exist in the possibility for future change, rather than in the present.

The emphasis in Patricia Bizzell’s work is less explicitly economic. In “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies,” Bizzell acknowledges that compositionists make use of the titular “Marxist ideas,” but those ideas are ones that seek a political “critical consciousness” rather than addressing economic concerns. While Bizzell addresses socioeconomic class as a concern, it is brought up only as a concern of ideology (53), rather than of explicitly material circumstance; similarly, in “College Composition: Initiation into the Academic Discourse Community,” she cites research from Bernstein, Bourdieu, and Passeron demonstrating that “students from different social classes come to school with different abilities to deal with academic discourse” (107), but her interest is much more in discourse than in class. Furthermore, she acknowledges that she follows Jameson’s shift in “emphasis from economic to ideological relations” in examining the modes of production “of meaning and the struggle over who controls it” (57). While later theorists like Hardt and Negri might see the production of meaning as an economic form of immaterial labor, Bizzell’s perspective excludes economy in favor of ideology. The long-term goal of education for Bizzell, following Freire, is “the ability to see one’s world as the object of reflection and change” (126): again, a distant horizon for the value of writing, and change understood in the future rather than in the present.

Finally, perhaps the strongest and most influential Marxist critique of economic concerns in composition comes from James Berlin, who in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures describes “the changing economic conditions for which we are preparing our students” (43) but strongly critiques the notion that composition teachers are merely providing businesses with well-trained workers (52). This is a critique carried over from earlier essays by Berlin: in “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories,” he asserts that “many teachers (and I suspect most) look upon their vocations as the imparting of a largely mechanical skill, important only because is serves students in getting them through school and advancing them in their professions” (235), privileging instead a pedagogy “that will enable [students] to become effective persons as they become effective writers” (246). This circumstance is largely due to the fact that “we have just been through a period in which the end of education was conspicuously declared to be primarily the making of money,” to which Berlin offers the “counterproposal” that “education exists to provide intelligent, articulate, and responsible citizens who understand their obligation and their right to insist that economic, social, and political power be exerted in the best interests of the community” (55). Furthermore, according to Berlin, “the division of the workforce into a small group of the comfortably secure, on the one hand, and a large group of the poorly compensated and expendable, on the other hand, must be challenged in the name of social justice” (56). While this stands as a Marxist critique of economic relations, it is one based in assumptions about the ways in which higher education leads to a career, and so once more projects the value of writing in serving social change as existing beyond the bounds of the classroom.

From my notes on the ugly, ugly draft of my dissertation’s Chapter 4, some further thoughts on composition’s relationship to mainstream neoclassical economics: with the focus of neoclassical economics on commodified market transactions, it’s understandable why the classroom work of students in higher education is seldom seen itself as a scene of genuine economic activity. The only market transactions readily apparent to neoclassical economics are the student’s exchange of cash for tuition, in payment for the service of instruction, or the institution’s exchange of cash for faculty salary, in payment again for the service of instruction. In such a context, the labor of faculty is the nexus of exchange, rather than the labor of student, and if the student’s labor in the classroom is to be exchanged for any gain, that gain is always constructed by neoclassical economics as existing necessarily in the future, in the exchange of a degree (and its attendant qualifications, one assumes) for the value-added salary of a post-college occupation.

Such constructions are the most common instances of neoclassical economic thought in the discourse of composition, although they are often fragmentary or observed only in passing, as in Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor’s essay “Teaching Argument: A Theory of Types,” where they describe a course “devoted entirely to written argument, out of our conviction that written argument brings together other writing skills and prepares students for the kinds of writing tasks demanded in college courses and careers” (186). The work of students is here constructed as carrying long-time value in preparing them for work in the market-based information economy. Upon careful analysis, such an ideology is also implicit–although rather less visible–in the work of David Bartholomae, whose famous essay “Inventing the University” suggests that the student must invent the university in order to be able to adapt her writing to the university, so that she might later make the subsequent step of adapting herself to the larger capitalist order. In Bartholomae’s words, “The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do” (589), and even if the student adopts the critical stance Bartholomae later suggests, to do so is to acculturate oneself to a way of thinking and speaking in the service of future gain. The value of such intellectual labor is deferred rather than immediate. Consider how Bartholomae, in his conversation with Peter Elbow, expresses a desire for “students to be able to negotiate the ways they are figured in relationship to the official forms of knowledge valued in the academy” (503): those “official forms of knowledge” are a component of the authorizing discourse of market capitalism, and the value of the student’s language inheres in its deferred nature as a currency for exchange.

Hepzibah Roskelly, in “The Risky Business of Group Work,” offers a similar example of the construction of the value of student writing as deferred for future exchange, but also offers additional complicating examples of neoclassical economic ideology. In her initial characterization of the problematic nature of certain instances of group work in which one person performs most of the labor while others stand by and let that student pick up their slack (141), the problem is understood to be the unequal distribution of labor in the group and the therefore unfair distribution of the rewards of that labor: in other words, an unequal and inefficient mode of compensation for labor, or what neoclassical economics might characterize as a “market failure.” Although Roskelly describes a “clear link [...] between social interaction and learning” (141), the risks and flaws of its dysfunction is posted in deferred or future terms. Furthermore, the neoclassical privileging of risk-taking and the ideology of economic winners and losers is present in the concluding analogy Roskelly draws to the Tom Cruise movie Risky Business, with the movie’s climactic confrontation between Cruise’s character and Rutherford, the Princeton admissions officer played by Richard Masur: the admissions officer is highly impressed by Cruise’s suburban-pimp capitalist drive and rewards him with admission, and Roskelly sees this as a teaching moment, the deferred gratifaction of capitalist behavior while engaging in “Risky Business” (146). As I argued earlier this week, the neoclassical valuation of student work in first-year composition is always a distant rather than a present horizon.

Until recently, the discourse of socioeconomic class has been the chief means by which composition has addressed economic concerns in examining students’ day-to-day work in the writing classroom. While I’m approaching those concerns from a Marxian point of view, neoclassical economics remains the dominant paradigm in American culture today. Classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo focused their attentions on large-scale problems like economic growth, unemployment, and accumulation; neoclassical economics, evolving out of that thought, shifted its attention to the tastes and preferences of individuals within the economy, and how those individuals make decisions based on marginal cost and marginal utility. With their diagrams, curves, graphs, and equations, neoclassical economists seem to be doing everything they can to discursively represent economics as a scientific discipline (much is made in introductory economics textbooks of the distinction between “descriptive” and “normative”), despite the fact that it borrows its metaphors from geometry and its principles of application and its structure of explanation from physics. In fact, several scholars have noted the curious tendency of economics to represent itself as a sort of social physics with a historical perspective, despite reservations about constructing neoclassical economics as scientific, such as those expressed by conservative economist Friedrich August von Hayek at his Nobel Banquet Speech in 1974. Neoclassical economists occupy a broad range of political perspectives, from Hayek and Milton Friedman to John Maynard Keynes and Amartya Sen; all, however, share a belief in the utility-maximising individual who (in an ideal situation) is free to make choices about how to maximise that utility. This focus on the individual, and on free choice, allows neoclassical economics to rhetorically align itself with democracy. Neoclassical economists also tend to privilege efficiency, self-interest, rationality, and scarcity as their key concepts, while critics of neoclassical economics argue that it is overly positivistic, that it unrealistically assumes perfect knowledge and rationality, and that its idealized notions of competition excessively rely on conceptions of sameness and homogeneity while real-world competition is fundamentally based in difference, and that it bears a myopic focus on market transactions as the only economic transactions worth investigating.

Deborah Brandt is likely the most prominent compositionist dealing explicitly with economic concerns from a neoclassical perspective. Brandt begins “Writing for a Living” (Written Communication April 2005) with the statement that “Writing is at the heart of the knowledge economy” (166) and goes on to propose that “Writers put knowledge in tangible, and thereby transactional, form” (167). The very act of writing itself, it would seem, can be understood as an act of commodification. This understanding of writing as something to be transacted is not new, of course: James Britton used the term “transactional” to characterize instrumental, getting-things-done writing in 1970’s Language and Learning. What is new is the way that Brandt connects this understanding of writing to an economy that involves “knowledge-making and knowledge-selling” wherein writing is “a chief vehicle for economic trade and profit making” (167). In fact, Brandt argues, writing can be understood “as a manufacturing process in knowledge work” (176), and “Workplace writers can be likened to complex pieces of machinery that turn raw materials (both concrete and abstract) into functional, transactional, and valuable form, often with great expenditures of emotional, psychological, and technical effort” (176). This focus on “Workplace writers” is important, because Brandt’s interest in “Writing for a Living” is explicitly on an intercorporate environment in which “knowledge must be protected and even obscured to maintain competitive edge” (189) and “literacy as a human skill is recruited as an instrument of production in the knowledge economy” (179). This does not necessarily mean that Brandt sees all writing as commodified: in fact, she characterizes written knowledge as a “leaky property” (191) that circulates in arenas other than that of the marketplace.

However, what’s absent in her account in “Writing for a Living,” at least explicitly, is any connection between the classroom and the workplace: we might infer some conclusions about literacy instruction from Brandt’s account of the economic functions of writing, but the focus is very much on workers. Elsewhere, though, Brandt does explicitly connect economic pressures to literacy instruction. In “Losing Literacy” (Research in the Teaching of English February 2005), Brandt proposes that “A lot of teaching and learning–especially around communication–is for the purposes of stimulating consumer desire” (308), and points out that literacy instruction is often centered around concerns of profitability. Writing about educators in the “learning economy” (307), Brandt argues that “Literacy and knowledge, once the domain of the humanistic tradition, are being redefined within a production imperative” (307-308). She expresses strong reservations about such a circumstance, but offers no indication that she percieves any viable alternative to the demands and the workings of market capitalism. In fact, these two essays are both profoundly immersed in the logic of neoclassical economics, and the implicit conclusion for literacy educators would seem to be that whether we like it or not, our classrooms serve the market economy, and that students and workers internalize literate practices that privilege assumptions of efficiency, self-interest, rationality, and scarcity. Furthermore, the value for students in internalizing such practices is in how well those practices will help them to succeed in the marketplace: in other words, the value of work in the composition classroom has a distant horizon; it is understood as serving the student after the course is over, in other classes and ultimately in the workplace. Writing essays for their own sake, or for their use value in the near term, is not considered.

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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As a student or a teacher, are you emotional in public?

And if so, what did you make of the fierce review offered by James D. Williams in the November 2005 College English? I was looking at it again for its angle on the personal, but on a second read, it struck me as absolutely blistering in its privileging of rationality above all else, and it made me — someone who scores so far over at the “T” end of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that it’s not even funny — uncomfortable in that regard. Williams was talking about standards of evidence for academic texts, and while I agree that careful analysis quantitative data for such purposes is essential, I’d also propose that alternative forms of evidence are equally as important. In fact, I wonder whether the bruising critique Williams offers, in its supreme privileging of hyper-rationality and alleged objectivity, fails to allow for alternative possibilities.

Laura Micciche, in an essay I find somewhat problematic for its generalizations (”When Class Equals Crass,” in Blundering for a Change, Tassoni and Thelin, eds., Boynton/Cook 2000), suggests that working-class students are encouraged to “exercise ‘appropriate’ emotions” (25) because “emotions such as anger, rage, and sorrow are generally considered unacceptable in the classroom” (31). But the perspective Micciche offers is important for its view on the work of affect, although I worry that it’s too easy to perpetuate a binary that equates emotion with the working class and logic with the middle class, and I think that’s a class-bigoted simplification — not that Micciche is performing it, but I worry that the distinctions she sets up make it an easy place to which to go.

There’s an simple question: Are working-class students more emotional?

It’s a bad question, and the wrong question. Lynn Worsham argues (nod to the recent UMass guest speaker) that people separated by the reason/emotion binary are taught that emotion should be subordinate to reason and so that people categorized as “emotional” should take subordinate positions in society as well. Indeed, Micciche cites Spelman’s observation that “while members of subordinate groups are expected to be emotional, indeed to have their emotions run their lives, their anger will not be tolerated” (Spelman 264, qtd. in Micciche 33).

I’ve quoted before Hardt and Negri’s assertion that in today’s emerging economy, there are three varieties of immaterial labor: first, “an industrial production that has been informationalized,” second, “analytical and symbolic tasks,” and third, the emotional work involved in “the production and manipulation of affect” (293).

Political economy is personal, and the economy is affectual. This holds true for the classroom as much as for any other space.