USE VALUE AND EXCHANGE VALUE
Definitions of use value and exchange value.
John Trimbur quotes Marx to explain the difference between use value
and exchange value: "'Wheat, e.g., possesses the same use value,
whether cultivated by slaves, serfs, or free laborers. It would not
lose its use value if it fell from the sky like snow' (881). What transforms
use value into a commodity [. . .] is its realization as exchange value
(881). As Marx puts it, 'the commodity only becomes a commodity . .
. in so far as it owner does not relate to it as use value (881) but
instead as a means of extracting exchange value from the labor process" (207).
Yanis Varoufakis explains further: "[T]he useful fruits of human
labor are called 'products'"; however, "For a product also
to be a commodity, it must not only be useful; it must also be exchanged
(for money or for another commodity) on some market" (Varoufakis
155).
Definition of commodification.
"The value of the work is identified not with the social relations
of its production (including its consumption) but with the form of
the product," and "That is commodification" (Horner
219): the transformation of student labor into a commodified essay
occurs only when the writing-work performed to produce the essay is
seen as an essential property of that essay.
Grades as incentive constitute the non-free-ness of student
writing, but the commodification of writing into grades solidifies
use value into exchange value.
The commodification
of use value into exchange value creates problems
for student writing.
According to Horner, "student writing is evaluated as a commodity
while being produced and distributed in ways that guarantee its lack
of exchange value" (50). Horner goes on to quote Peter Vandenberg: "Student
writing [. . .] except in the rarest of circumstances follows an arc
from the student, across the teacher's desk, and into the trash. [.
. .] Student writing is value poor because it does not travel; it cannot
circulate outside the narrow boundaries of its production, and therefore
'works' in the least meaningful way possible. It is 'practice' in the
least significant sense of that term, never more than a shadowy ancestor
of something yet to come" (Horner 51).
Remedies for those problems.
With the possibilities for circulation offered by digital reproducibility,
broader readerly consumption and remixing in the commons gives renewed
use value to writerly production. As student weblogs have demonstrated,
students
find a use
value in
writing that has an
audience beyond the teacher, and that value can rehabilitate the way
students value writing beyond the mere exchange value offered by the
teacher's grade. Circulation is a step towards the de-commodification
of student writing.
The exchange value of a grade is small, and fails to engage
other modes of valuation.
Grading is a blunt instrument, and seldom tells us much about how
skilled a writer a student is or about how much effort a student put
into an individual piece of writing. As Peter Elbow points out, a grade
is the single least interesting thing you can say about a piece of
writing. If I tell you that Jane Doe's paper is a C+ paper, how much
do you know about what she did in her early drafts, what she did in
her later drafts, how carefully she proofread her paper for correctness
concerns, the quality of her argument, the organization and structure
of her essay, the consistency, clarity, and originality of her style,
and how much use she made of her peer responder's comments? You know
nothing: all you know is the commmodified exchange value of her scarce
and solely-owned paper. I'll point out here that I don't want to make
a tired and facile lament about grading: rather, I'm trying to show
that in the writing classroom, there is room for a diverse array of
modes of valuation for student writing, just as there is room for a
diverse array of student motivations for writing, and the open-source
movement can show us how, in the classroom, we can give our students
the same credit (to use an expressly economic metaphor) that we give
ourselves here in these halls and conference rooms.
Making writing scarce and solely owned causes conflict in the
writing classroom between use value and exchange value, and creates
problematic contradictions for our pedagogy.
According to Benkler, "'Indirect appropriation' is appropriation
of the value of one's effort by means other than the reliance on the
excludability of the product of his [sic] effort," and "the
more a sector of information production can be sustained through indirect
appropriation, the less it needs intellectual property" (405).
Direct appropriation, on the other hand, relies upon excludability.
If we understand circulation as indirect appropriation, then our reliance
on peer response in our classrooms, and our insistence that students
learn the uses of quotation and acknowledgement, mean that our pedagogy
must be sustained through indirect appropriation, but we rely on direct
appropriation as the motivation for student production of texts. This
is precisely the circumstance that leads to the contradiction between
the use value of writing-as-activity and the exchange value of writing-as-product.
There are strong parallels between types of value and types
of transaction.
Benkler acknowledges the critique of commons-based peer production
that "no one will invest in a project if they cannot appropriate
its benefits" (378). However, this critique failes to take into
account that diverse communities have diverse motivations, especially
when it comes to producing knowledge: here at CCCC, we give presentations
for the social-psychological rewards, for the intrinsic hedonic rewards,
and for the monetary rewards that another line on a CV may bring.
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Introduction:
turnitin dot com
1. Writing as Process and
Writing as Product
2. Neoclassical Economics
and Marxian Economics
3. Market Transactions and Gift
Transactions
4. Use Value and Exchange Value
Conclusion: sharingwriting dot
net
Definitions of use value and exchange value.
Definition of commodification.
Grades as incentive constitute the non-free-ness of student
writing, but the commodification of writing into grades solidifies
use value into exchange value. The commodification
of use value into exchange value creates problems
for student writing.
Remedies for those problems.
The exchange value of a grade is small, and fails to engage other
modes of valuation.
Making writing scarce and solely owned causes conflict
in the writing classroom between use value and exchange value, and
creates problematic contradictions for our pedagogy.
There are strong parallels between types of value and types
of transaction. |