Production and Appropriation
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.)
How Not to Teach with Portfolios
Steve Krause nails it yet again: "Shari Wilson's" attempt at a critique of portfolio pedagogy in first-year writing courses offers little more than an indictment of her own intellectual and pedagogical laziness. It's a genre essay, in fact, of a species that writing teachers know quite well; the reactionary kick against process-based pedagogies we've been venturing and evaluating for a while now because such pedagogies take us out of our safe zones and don't match up with the way we've always done things. "Wilson" implies a predetermined syllabus, a predetermined evaluation scheme and weighting, and most curiously a predetermined practice of keeping students in suspense and not reading and evaluating their written work and offering suggestions on how to improve outside of "rubrics" and "due dates." One wishes "Wilson" might acquaint herself with some of the basics of process pedagogy and how to fundamentally engage student writing beyond "rubrics" and "due dates," and wishes that "Wilson" might as well figure out how to compose a syllabus that states exactly and precisely her expectations of students. As she admits, though, precision of language in a syllabus is something at which she arrives unfortunately late. Such late arrival seems, I'd suggest, to be not so much a shortcoming of portfolio pedagogy as a shortcoming in other areas. So, too, with the indictment of "loopholes": this seems to be a teacher who has scant idea how to assign and evaluate writing, and blames her failures on a system she's failed to adequately implement.
The later portion of the essay bears this out, with anecdotal support offered by the picture of peers drinking in bars after norming sessions, and by the use of the word "suffered" that Steve picks up on: what are the standards of evidence here? How do they correspond to the standards of evidence expected from students by the teacher?
Are "Wilson's" complaints evidence of the failure of the exhaustive and compelling rationales offered for portfolio pedagogies by Pat Belanoff, Kathi Yancey, and others in composition's canonical pedagogical literature? Hardly. And, in fact, "Wilson's" complaints offer zero evidence of any awareness of such literature. Lazy and uncritical teaching and failure to base one's pedagogy in established scholarship does not indicate that a discipline's long-standing and well-founded attention to various aspects of pedagogy is lazy and uncritical. It stands, rather, as evidence of nothing more than its own lazy and uncritical nature, and blames the student for the inadequacies and shortcomings of the teacher.
Most of us, "Shari," try not to do that.
Ice Station Zeugma
With reports in from Ice Station Echo, Ice Station Delta, Ice Station Sierra, Ice Station Alpha, Ice Station Hotel, Ice Station Bravo, and Ice Station Juliet, I figure I'd best add mine. Here at Ice Station Zebra Zeugma, the snow started late Tuesday night, and I was Staff Duty Officer the next day, which meant I had to be in early. Highland Falls did a wretched job of plowing, so I put on the Matterhorns and went in on foot at about 6:40 Wednesday morning. The snow kept going all day, alternating with some sleet and freezing rain, and I made it home around 4:30 yesterday afternoon with work to do.
Ninety feet of driveway by a swath eight feet wide, plus forty feet by three feet of sidewalk, front and back and porch. Roughly an area of 840 feet. Multiply by maybe six inches of accumulation, not all that much, but it was ugly because it was big dry flaky powder followed by a layer of ice and sleet followed by more powder and then more ice. It's aggravating wedding-cake snow; each shovelful at somewhere between 3.5 and 4 square feet weighing around 7 pounds-ish, but often more like 9 with the effort of breaking the ice crust. Call it 8 pounds average, with 2 shovelfuls per 6 inches of depth, sometimes 3 because of the crust. And then there's the stuff the village of Highland Falls plowed up onto my driveway and front walk, roughly 60 square feet of wet and heavy snow at 12 pounds and 4 square feet for every shovelful, but requiring 4 shovelfuls for every 4 square feet. Practically a berm. Overall, 60 square feet of heavy snow plus 780 square feet of light snow, at varying shovelable volumes. All told, a conservatively estimated total of something like 3720 pounds of snow moved via shovel in a bit less than two hours last night.
I'm anticipating some serious Motrin-munching today.
Outsider’s Hubris
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.
What I Do
When friends and family ask me what I do, I want to point them at this movie. The whole thing, yes, but especially from about 2:47 on. And O yes that last bit.
(Via Lanette via, of course and as ever, Jill Walker, who started so many of us.)