A Google search for her name returns four and a half million hits. According to gossip site Defamer, she's "the closest thing we'll ever see to a being made of pure, uncut fame." She has a book, a recording contract, a reality show, her own lines of clothing, perfume, and jewelry, several film roles, a nightclub, "and, of course, herself -- last week she admitted charging up to $200,000 for a 20-minute appearance at parties. 'If it's in Japan, I get more,' she said" (Guardian UK). More than any other person today, Paris Hilton has made her public identity into a saleable commodity: a brand.
At the satirical masked weblog Wealth Bondage, Dominatrix CEO Candidia Cruikshanks rages that The Happy Tutor is trying to steal her "brand equity" -- said equity, of course, embodied in the written performance of all that attitude, in the online personae of her cohorts at Wealth Bondage ("America's cheerleader" Chastity Powers, "faithful consort" Dick Minim, forensic hermeneuticist and "adjunct in charge of hidden meaning" Dr. Amrit Chadwallah, et cetera) and in oh my those boots. We can take from Candidia's fury the same lessons we take from Paris Hilton: the creation and performance of a public persona has economic value, although Candidia's five-inch spike-heel patent leather thigh boots may be worth somewhat less than Paris Hilton's metallic faux-leather round-toe sling-backs or Peyton Manning's Reebok cleats. Furthermore, even in the cases of Manning's and Hilton's brands, this value is largely immaterial, since foot protection -- in comparison to image -- is a secondary concern. Paris Hilton's glamour and blankness of affect embody her brand just as much as Candidia's contemptuous attitude and Peyton Manning's squeaky-clean all-American-ness.
In fact, there is a nascent cottage industry in management literature dedicated to this phenomenon: "personal branding experts" like David McNally, Karl Speak, and Peter Montoya urge entrepreneurs, managers, and anyone with ambitions for success in business to "be your own brand." Unique to our contemporary situation, however, is the combination of the effects of economic production and consumption on the fashioning of individual identity, and vice versa: rhetorical self-production can be understood today as an act of product differentiation or branding; conversely, consumption of products or services can be understood today as a technology of rhetorical self-production. In her essay "The Age of Egocasting," Christine Rosen describes the "personalization of technology" by which "the individual's control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute," and how such technologies "enable us to make a fetish of our own preferences" (1). Our preferences -- as publicly enacted in blogrolls, in "100 Things About Me" lists, in the way we express tastes and likes and dislikes and praise and blame in weblog posts, in the way we hurry to post our own answers to online quizzes that tell us who we are, in our iTunes playlists, in the very weblogs on which we choose to comment -- are, in their performance and in our self-conscious sense and monitoring of that performance, ourselves. This, Rosen says, is egocasting: "the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one's taste" (2). And when we understand that blogrolls are lists of "Links [that] have a direct value on the Web and can be seen as a pseudo-monetary unit" (Jill Walker, "Links and Power"), we understand as well that the public marking of one's choices of informational consumption can be interpreted as the commodification of identity.
Thomas de Zengotita carries Rosen's analysis a step further, arguing that the individuation of economic consumption and its concomitant individuation of advertising turn us into highly self-conscious, media-flattered consumers. There's a cable channel for everyone, and Amazon, Audioscrobbler, and TiVo all know what you like and show you more of the same. As a result, "The flattered self is a mediated self, and the alchemy of mediation, the osmotic process through which reality and representation fuse, gets carried into our psyches by the irresistible flattery that goes with being instantly addressed" (de Zengotita 7), and the expectation of individuated personal attention has become a mark of our contemporary self-production and performative representation of our subjective experience. Think for a moment: do you remember that summer when "Don't Believe the Hype" was on every radio wherever you went? Or "When Doves Cry"? Or "Paradise City"? The experience of that summer has become mediated; difficult or impossible to disentangle from the experience of that song. And so it goes these days, more and more, with fewer and fewer experiences wholly separate from any media connection -- and, in fact, de Zengotita argues that we have begun to see our own experiences as a form of media. We are all self-aware method actors in our own lives, de Zengotita contends, performing those lives through representation and association. The public blogroll -- and its extension in individuated online collections of citations such as del.icio.us and CiteULike -- is a form of mask, a way to tell other people what type of person you are. What type of individual you are. As we understand from Foucault, writing is a technology of self-production (153).
In the currency of the writing classroom, where students exchange papers for grades, the tacit command to "Be yourself" associated with the personal essays assigned by so-called expressivist pedagogues is an injunction to create -- via the technology of writing -- a unique self that one can put into circulation; an identity constructed, commodified, and consumable. Julie Lindquist expresses the concern that asking for authentic "emotional responses for the purposes of academic rewards becomes, for students, a matter of producing the 'money shot' on demand", and offers the example of the canny writing student who spins a wholly fictional "tragic account of his friend's car accident and death" (197) to please his teacher. The graded exchange value of the student's essay is the reason for Lindquist's monetary metaphor, but Paris Hilton might remind us to not ignore the somewhat pornographic nature of publicly disclosing conventionally private acts -- faked or not.
Furthermore, the booming popularity of personal weblogs, amateur pornography, and the memoir genre (Hilton, at 24, has written one) serves as indicator of the increasing individuation of production and consumption. Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin confirm this increase, suggesting we've moved past simple "mass" consumption and production, and pointing out what that move has to do with the way individuals work in a networked economy of consumption. "In an advanced industrial society," they write, "consumption is a necessity, not a luxury. It is what people must do to survive. It is the way that individuals take care of themselves and their families, much as hunting and gathering or growing crops were for people of earlier societies. [. . .] Through the consumption of experience -- travel, shelter, college -- people both achieve and express individual self-determination. No one can escape the centrality of consumption" (7).
Educators worry that the immaterial acts of consumption and production associated with weblogs are becoming increasingly commercialized. The examples of such commercialization are too many and too familiar to list here, so I hope a few might suffice: top sites like BoingBoing, Slashdot, MetaFilter, Instapundit, and Eschaton all rely on advertisements for income, while bloggers like Jason Kottke solicit donations in return for links, and Andrew Sullivan relies on both advertisements and solicited donations. What happens, then, when writing teachers domesticate such technologies by bringing them into the classroom? Foucault's perspective, cited earlier, merits further exploration: he names four "technologies" "that human beings use to understand themselves" (146), and we might understand school-related blogging as the intersection of all four of those technologies: "(1) technologies of production [. . .]; (2) technologies of sign systems [. . .]; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals [. . .] to transform themselves" (146). Writing teachers ought to understand student blogging as a technology of the self at the code level, as a technology of signs in the classroom, as a technology of power when a student focuses a weblog entry or series of entries around a subject other than herself, and as a technology of discursive production.
From Foucault's perspective, then, the writing teacher's worry is that commercial aspects of the Web and the bottomless pockets of advertisers will serve as technologies of domination of the individual student. There exists a long-standing tradition of worries about the effects of commerce on students. According to PBS, some of the major problems with the increasing commercialization of schools are that "taxpayer-funded" schools "shouldn't promote a particular company or product" and that schools can also "provide a captive audience for advertisers, and critics question the ethics and advisability of advertising to young people" in such situations. Furthermore, "the commercialization of schools endangers [. . .] community control of the school environment, and the autonomy of the school policies." David Noble worries that "the commoditization of university instruction [. . .] raises for students major questions about costs, coercion, privacy, equity, and the quality of education." And Wesley Shumar is concerned that learning and research in higher education have "come to be valued in terms of their ability to be translated into cash or merchandise and not in any other ways, such as aesthetic or recreational pleasure. Eventually, the idea that there are other kinds of value is lost" (5). The concerns of critics of the intersection of economics and education can be summarized as follows:
While composition teachers tell students to "Write for yourself" when they assign the personal essay and "Write for the world" when they assign the research essay, writing for the world is often the only assignment that is understood to have some future productive economic value. In contemporary mainstream economics, "being yourself" is a consumptive practice, and economic production (unless one is, like Paris Hilton, a member of the celebrity class) requires an abnegation of self.
Digital reproducibility profoundly alters the relationships between production, consumption, the individual, and the economy. As Zuboff and Maxmin note, "the individuation of consumption [. . .] means that people no longer want to bend to the antiquated rule of business" but rather "want to be the subjects of a new commerce in which they are recognized as the origins of a new form of economic value [. . .] realized in individual space" (11). While I'm not enough of a new-economy fool as to dismiss Foucault's work, I do think that context is important -- and Foucault was writing in the context of an economy of mass production and consumption, when it was difficult to imagine any other situation. As a discipline, composition is in similar straits today: our big names, our super-scholars, are baby boomers. They grew up with three superpowers, three car manufacturers, and three TV networks. When Zuboff and Maxmin contend that "Rather than being diluted, the value of information can increase as it is distributed, allowing more people to do more with more, as it enables collaboration and coordination across space and time" via digital technologies (293), it's genuinely startling to such scholars, turning the conventional economic wisdom, with its assumptions about scarcity and value, on its head.
Former Harvard president Derek Bok has observed that many academics construct higher education as a space somehow outside of or immune to economic interests. This impulse is misguided when we understand the economy as involving "making, holding, using, sharing, exchanging, and accumulating valued objects and services" (Gudeman 1), but perhaps not so misguided when we understand the widespread commonsensical notion that economics=money. Indeed, economist Colin Williams suggests in "A Critical Evaluation of the Commodification Thesis" that "The view that predominates is that the overwhelming trajectory of economic development is towards a commodified economy. Although the extent, pace and unevenness of this process is open to debate [. . .], the process of commodification itself is not" (527). Williams's contention about the supposedly inevitable trajectory towards commodification sounds like the transcendent and agentless power J. K. Gibson-Graham suggests contemporary views ascribe to the economy, as when they point out in "The Diverse Economy: Constructing a Language Politics" that there has been a "shift from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society" and that this shift has relied upon "a hegemonic move through which representations of economy have slipped from their locations in discourse and landed 'on the ground,' in the 'real,' not just separate from, but outside of society" (1).
But bloggers and writing teachers know, not just in theory but in practice, that value is contextual and anything but monolithic. To borrow the technical language of Colin Williams, "there exist large alternative economic spaces of self-provisioning, non-monetised exchange and monetised exchange where the profit motive is absent" (526). The often non-monetised labor of academics and bloggers, as valuable and consumable work, should indicate to us the limits of conventional neoclassical economic theory. And "The fact that unpaid work now constitutes around half of the total time that people spend working and is growing relative to paid work in most advanced economies, means that some serious questions need to be asked about the validity of the commodification thesis" (Williams 532). Economists like Duncan Ironmonger have performed time-use studies that demonstrate that non-market transactions comprise more than half of annual gross domestic product. Why, then, are we so worried that commercialization will drive out other forms of value?
Does Peyton Manning's $42 million dollar salary make a neighborhood pick-up game of football worthless, irrelevant, not worth doing? More to the point: does Peyton Manning's performance of a game of football -- and the value of his shoes -- diminish the economic value of other games of football?
According to Zuboff and Maxmin, "The standard enterprise logic has difficulty embracing the management of intangibles because its assumptions about property rights were institutionalized when assets were mainly physical and financial. These 'hard' assets lend themselves to highly specifiable contracts and forms of measurement. In contrast, the intangibles [of ideas] challenge once-settled notions of property rights. They are not only 'produced' by individual 'employees,' but they arise from the 'employee's' own personal resources of intelligence, feeling, empathy, commitment, creativity, and so on. In other words, they are fabricated from an 'employee's' self" (367). Value isn't instrumental here; it doesn't come from the skills learned by the individual in order to assimilate into the job-chasing hierarchy: rather, it follows from the individual's person and persona. Today, we worry that the acid of money is all-corrosive because we cannot exist without consuming -- but to discursively construct the market economy as dominant is to grant it that power. There are non-market spaces in the economy, as well. Karl Polanyi's dictum is a useful reminder: "the market, whatever forms it takes, is itself a social product" (Williams 534).
Conventional neoclassical economics suggests that the increasing individuation offered by the remote control, the iPod, and the TiVo -- by the explosion in the choice of media one can consume -- is a result of the circumstance that attention is a scarce resource. When "Search engines like Google interpret links to a web page as objective, peer-endorsed and machine-readable signs of value" and "Links have a direct value on the Web and can be seen as a pseudo-monetary unit," the fragmentation and individuation offered by egocasting are actually both cause and symptom of the clusterings of a relational infinitude of social classes; of the step beyond an economy of mass production and consumption into an economy of individuated production and consumption.
In its very immateriality, Rip, Mix, Burn has become a material act of identity formation and class alignment, and at Wealth Bondage -- perhaps as nowhere else -- we see personae qua personae ventured, offered, exchanged, and rejected in market, feudal, slave, and gift transactions, in transactions that are deeply concrete and personal. The masked performances of The Happy Tutor and his interlocutors might stand as useful examples to writing teachers of the ways in which the online written performance of identity can carry material value beyond that of the commodity.