(1 QUEERING COMPOSITION'S ECONOMIC IMAGINARY)

(2 PARTS)

 

(3 1. WRITING THE PUBLIC DOMAIN)

 

This presentation

 

(4 PUBLIC DOMAIN)

 

is in the public domain. Because I'm giving it using funding from the government, it is not protected under copyright.

 

(5 BLACK)

 

I cannot own it, and for that reason, anybody can take this and do whatever they like with it: redistribute it in its entirety, sell it, remix it -- anything. I hope, though, that just because it's in the public domain doesn't mean it's

 

(6 VALUE)

 

without value, and that term value is one I want to examine carefully, because the nature of economic value is changing.

 

(7 BLACK)

 

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observe that “Economic production. . . is increasingly biopolitical, aimed not only at the production of goods, but ultimately at the production of information, communication, cooperation—in short, the production of social relationships and social order.” Writing is what Hardt & Negri call "immaterial labor", and it's a valued and valuable part of economic production, whether it's your writing, students writing, or my writing that as I speak spills out into the commons unprotected by copyright, its value appropriated at the point of ownership by the American taxpayer.

 

However, the appropriation of value of immaterial work at one point in the economic cycle of work, ownership, and use does not evacuate that work of value at other points in the economic cycle. In fact, with writing, different forms of value are appropriated by different parties at different points in the economic cycle, as this presentation explores.

 

(8 2. QUEERING THE CAPITALIST IMAGINARY)

 

I started to try to construct a vocabulary for that economic cycle in my presentation last year, in demonstrating various examples of economic activity that did not fit the capitalist model,

 

(9 BLACK)

and remarked that many people were giving away free materials via Apple's iTunes and other online services. During the Q&A, a gentleman in the audience strongly disagreed, declaring that “That stuff on iTunes is all corporate.” But it’s not: there are independent acts selling their music without major labels, people giving away free podcasts, universities giving away audio and video course materials. What's interesting, though, is that gentleman's desire to see what political economist J. K. Gibson-Graham

 

(10 MONOLITHIC CAPITALIST ECONOMY)

 

characterizes as the monolithic, market-based capitalist economy. This is a common idea: that capitalism is pervasive, all-penetrating, all consuming, and anything that is not associated with market-based exchange is somehow othered, standing in the shadow of all-penetrating capitalism as its cultural shade, its flexible, feminized, non-corporate sphere of that which is not economic.

 

(11 MONOLITHIC CAPITALIST ECONOMY CONQUERS ALL)

 

This is not uncommon. Min-Zhan Lu describes economic activity's relation to writing as existing in “a world ordered by global capital.” Similarly, Ira Shor has worried that “market logic will more aggressively configure all corners of life,” and asserts that our community college system was set up not by individual human actors, but by “a headlong rushing economy [that] created and peopled an educational frontier” (4). And this economy drives all other concerns before it: to use Shor’s description, “a wildly growing and uncontrollable machine-economy rushed across the land transforming everything it touched” (Critical Pedagogy 2).

 

(12 BLACK)

 

We see another representative example in the language of Henry Giroux, who has written about the effects of economic activity -- always portrayed in exclusively capitalist terms -- on teaching and learning. So I'd like to ask you all as writing teachers to listen to Giroux's use of passive or agentless constructions in describing the changes he sees being wrought upon society by irresistible economic forces: “democratic values give way to commercial values, intellectual ambitions are often reduced to an instrument of the entrepreneurial self, and social visions are dismissed as hopelessly out of date. Public space is portrayed exclusively as an investment opportunity” (“Corporate War” 1.1, emphasis added). Giroux almost always uses such passive constructions in describing economic workings, arguing that “as the power of the state and civil society are reduced in their ability to impose or make corporate power accountable, politics as an expression of democratic struggle is deflated” (“Corporate War” 1.4, emphasis added), and pointing out that “students are now referred to as ‘customers’ and ‘consumers,’ while faculty are now defined less through their scholarship than through their ability to secure funds and grants” (“Corporate War” 1.6, emphasis added). Furthermore, “faculty are now urged to focus in on corporate largesse,” and they “are now valued as multinational operatives and [are] increasingly reduced to contract employees” (“Corporate War” 1.6, emphasis added). Giroux marshals this body of passive-voice evidence to support his overarching concern “that corporations have been given too much power” (“Corporate War” 5.1, emphasis added). Giroux’s passive constructions set the economic sphere of market capitalism as beyond human intervention and ascribe to the economy’s all-penetrating juggernaut

 

(13 AGENTLESS AGENCY)

 

an oddly agentless agency.

 

The reaction Giroux and others recommend in responding to this monolithic, phallic market-based economy irresistibly penetrating all it encounters

 

(14 BLACK)

 

is to stand as a flexible, feminized cultural other; to promote that which is not capitalism and that which is not economic. I want here to queer that binary and show how such a conception of economy is inadequate. If we understand economic activity is more than market capitalism, we can understand our own and our students' immaterial written labor as aspects of economy.

 

In the world of digital music that opened up with the advent of Napster and iTunes, there are many forms of nonmarket and alternative market transactions in addition to paying 99 cents for a song: there are what the RIAA calls theft transactions, gift transactions, and many others.

 

(15 GRID)

 

So, too, are there many forms of nonmarket and alternative market forms of economic activity in the composition classroom.

 

(16 3. TRACING THE ECONOMIC CYCLE)

 

Exchange-based value is not the only form of value immaterial labor carries. In today's economy,

 

(17 OTHER FORMS OF VALUE)

 

other forms of value exist beyond exchange

 

(18 PLEASURE ATTENTION REPUTATION EUDAIMONIA)

 

in pleasure (what Yochai Benkler calls intrinsic hedonic rewards), in attention (as Richard Lanham points out), in reputation (as Cory Doctorow's work addresses), and in what we might call eudaimonia: the value of working toward a better society. Writing can possess all these forms of value, and those forms of value can be appropriated by various parties at various points throughout writing's economic cycle.

 

(19 CYCLE)

 

I've revised how I see that cycle functioning. It's a three-part cycle: work, ownership, and use, leading back into work. Work comprises both production and distribution, of which reproduction is an aspect. Through these steps, work evolves into something that is owned, when it exists in some sort of fixed form, and ownership can be individual, institutional, community, or state, and it can change over time, as with copyright's artificially limited monopoly. When it exists as owned, in fixed form, it can be used: consumed, interpreted, exchanged -- or re-cycled into new works.

 

(20 APPROPRIATION OF VALUE)

 

And the appropriation of value happens at each of these three stages.

 

(21 CYCLE PLUS APPROPRIATION)

 

When we write, the first appropriation of value is in the process of production, and value is appropriated by the producer. In ownership, value comes from the product -- from the form of the text and its fixity. And in use, value comes from the meaning of the text, and in some way is measured by its interestingness, by the way it makes the user -- the appropriator of value at the use stage -- want to do something with it.

 

(22 BLACK)

 

At some of these stages, writing's value for the writer or author is rivalrous: it cannot be shared. At other stages, writing's value for the writer or author is non-rivalrous, and can easily be shared.

 

Writing is a hybrid form of immaterial labor that at different stages of the economic cycle acts in different ways: it's at once commodity and non-commodity, valuable to the writer in its process of production, valuable to the author-function after the fact of production, at the point of distribution or use. And at the point of its use, it cannot do other than point to all the underlying and preceding assets that have made it possible.

 

(23 CYCLE)

 

The value of the labor of writing both contributes to and is measured by the value of the labor of the writing that uses it and builds upon it. That's why this is a cycle, and that's why we ought to foreground the problem of value in our classrooms, in our attention to the work, ownership, and use of writing.

 

(24 4. FILESHARING THE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM)

 

So what could we make that cycle look like in the classroom? How could we engage our students and ourselves in promoting the public appropriation of the value of writerly work by many different people at different stages in the economic process of writing? I'll offer two imaginings as possible examples, but they're only very modest extensions of the work that online journals and archives are already doing.

 

(24 BLACK)

 

I was finishing my dissertation in 2006, and John Logie was finishing his book manuscript for Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion. At about the same time, we came up with some remarkably similar ideas about online textual repositories. Let me read Professor Logie's first: "Imagine," he asks, "that the process of locating an academic article or research study was as simple as navigating Napster 1.0 used to be.

 

(25 EDSTER)

 

Participants in this research-based peer-to-peer network—let’s call it 'Edster'--would commit to storing and making available at least ten articles they considered especially helpful. On Edster, you would type in a few key search terms in order to determine whether the article you needed existed in electronic form on the computers of all of the students and colleagues… throughout your discipline. Imagine receiving… that article in under a minute without navigating through a series of databases, without even firing up the library’s proprietary search engine.” (145-146) So Logie suggests something like Napster for scholarly articles.

 

(26 BLACK)

 

In my dissertation, I went a bit further, and imagined an online digital repository of Creative-Commons-licensed student and faculty texts where those who were so inclined could serve as a form of massively multiplayer online academic peer review, while at the same time rating, redistributing, and remixing one another’s written texts. Participants would include hyptertext links either to the assignment that prompted the posting of the text or to the work or works that prompted the textual remix and, in the manner of CCC Online, to the works citing or cited by the text. It would be relatively easy—given enough users—to track trends of what essay types and topics receive the most productive feedback and what forms and instances of textual work students value beyond their exchangeability for a grade.

 

(27 CLICKSTREAM)

 

A year later, I revised that imagining into what I called the clickstream, an online system by which texts would be sorted and cross-indexed into various categories and tagged with keywords by authors and users. Users could add comments in a similar variety of formats and rate and rank the projects, and the database could create maps—clickstreams—of the the associational trains of links between projects and track the traffic on those clickstreams. In a hybrid of the song remix and the debates that range across academic journals, users could create their own projects building on or responding to other projects, quoting and paraphrasing and parodying and mashing-up, and tag the associated clickstreams, so that could can map over time the emerging parameters of a discussion or argument in the informational topography of the database.

 

(28 BLACK)

 

I'd like to conclude by offering these hypothetical repositories as ways of re-focusing our attention on the economic cycle of work, ownership, use, and again to work in which writing circulates, and in which value is appropriated in different ways by different parties at different points in the cycle.

 

(29 QUEERING COMPOSITION'S ECONOMIC IMAGINARY)

 

So naming the complex web of economic activities in which we and our students' writing is involved can help us in queering composition's economic imaginary, and thereby offer us points for economic intervention and individual and collective economic agency in the writing classroom.

 

(30 EMAIL, VITIA)