Filed under: Discourse Communities
Eberly argues for the re-imagining of the classroom as protopublic places – places of plural publics and public spheres – rather than the older concepts of readers, audiences, and communities. Challenging students to understand the classroom as protopublic spaces “encourages students to see themselves as actors in different and overlapping publics [and therefore] help them realize the particular and situated nature of rhetoric and the need for effective writing to respond to particular needs of particular publics at particular times” (167). The historical constructions of notions of self in relationship to these concepts of readers, audiences, and communities (18th century, Dewey, etc.) requires that we make our classrooms explicitly “publics-in-process” that help to make rhetoric, rhetors, etc. obvious (169). Habermas’ concept of the public sphere is useful in that “Habermas’s notion of intraorganizational public spheres has great potential for moving conceptions of writing across the curriculum away from indoctrinating students into discourse communities and toward having them practice writing for different kinds of publics with different kinds of institutional supports and constraints. Most promising is the idea that students writing in the disciplines have to write not only for discipline-specific publics that have formed in response to different problems but also for wider publics that will be unaware of what their discipline and its conventions are” (173).
Filed under: Discourse Communities
Dewey briefly discusses his belief that we become more fully human as individuals through the communities in which we live and participate. These communities are constituted and at times restricted by tradition and custom which often time prevent critical reflection and therefore change. Education, however, helps us to 1)recognize the common good and 2)create that common good through the reconstitution of community. In essence, Dewey argues that communities are formed and potentially reformed through education which constructs and transmits community identity to citizens.
Filed under: Discourse Communities
Covino describes two forces acting upon the American imagining of ourselves as a community, exploring the magic of Disney with the witchery of Mary Daly, a radical feminist. Drawing upon historic tropes surrounding magic, witchcraft, and sorcery, Covino concludes, in Benedict Anderson-like fashion, that all communities are drawn from our imagination, fashioned from the extremes of our memories and knowledge. What Covino warns against is the Baudrillardian fear that our image of ourselves as a community will come to be a simulacra – an imitation of the reality we imagine rather than our communal identity being the generating power for our imagination. The binary that is Disney and Mary Daly illustrates such inversion.
Filed under: Discourse Communities | Tags: discourse
Beginning with the premise that most contemporary rhetorics of discourse community assume political equality and obviate against difference, Clark seeks to redefine the concept. Maintaining that such a collectivity should remain democratic, he cites the work of ethicists Nel Noddings and Edith Wyschogrod to guide the participation of discourse that “directs people to value their differences because that is what enables their cooperation as equals.” Indeed it is the “rhetoric enacted in this redefined discourse of community [that] locates writing and reading, and its teaching, within the project of constituting and maintaining a collectivity of equals” (62). Clark goes on to interrogate the notion that community and democracy are about consensus.
Filed under: Discourse Communities | Tags: discourse
Brummett’s essay concludes this anthology, arguing that there is a clear shift in how political rhetoric is defined and understood. Brummett argues that four changes have influenced political rhetoric, making political rhetoric “more imaginary, commodified, local, and dialectic” (295). This shift is tied to “late capitalism” and its maintenance – and emerges in every article of the anthology, serving the foundation of the rhetorical analysis of various public sites that comprise the collection. Brummett surveys the entire anthology and comments on the varied ways in which these four shifts are obvious in each chapter. What is most important about this concluding chapter, however, is the ways in which Brummett categorizes discourse early in the chapter, explaining the ways in which political rhetoric is discourse that “creates, maintains, challenges, and overthrows power” and, in fact, discourse “creates community in all its complexity… creates identity… creates shared definitions of reality” (294-5). This allusion to discourse is limited to roughly a page, yet Brummett’s use of discourse as seemingly merely Foucaldian and merely Marxist is interesting as Brummett gives discourse constitutive, yet simultaneously marginalized powers.
Filed under: Discourse Communities, Literacy
Brandt calls the community of educators to arms as the dawn of “knowledge capitalism” threatens to alter the quality of human life. Brandt argues that educators ought to insist that literacy – not just functional literacy that allows for operations in the workplace but “democratized literacy” – is a human right that is threatened by the transformative powers of knowledge capitalism (310). Language educators are most called to stand witness, Brandt reasons. This piece is interesting, in terms of discourse communities, in the ways that it connects the community of language educators – the readers of RTE – with Nationhood in ways very divergent from Graff’s indicting histories that trace the dawn of mass literacy campaigns to nations and their nationalistic endeavors.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1996, economics, feminist geography, gibson-graham
Quick and Dirty Summary –
Gibson-Graham offers a critique of traditional opposition to Capitalism, arguing that anti-capitalist sects such as Marxists (including neoMarxists and even postMarxists) counterproductively reify Capitalism in their critiques by establishing and maintaining Capitalism as the economic center of the modern world. Gibson-Graham argues that the various vilifications of Capitalism from the left simply serve to construct Capitalism as unified, singular, and totalizing (Chapter 1 and 11); these critiques leave only Capitalism as a possibility, constructing it as inevitable and all-consuming. These critiques construct, over time, Capitalism as unchangeable, eternal, and “an object of transformation that cannot be transformed” (253). In fact, these critiques do the unifying and manufacture the feeling of singular totality that creates and sustains the mythos that Capitalism is the system of the Western past, present, and globalized future.
Gibson-Graham argues for an alternative way to conceptualize Capitalism as capitalisms; we ought to understand the systems that operate even within an overgeneralized understanding of capitalism. Gibson-Graham works to debunk the idea that Capitalism is “unable to coexist” by reimagining the idea of capitalisms as “not something large and embracing but as something partial” that needs redefinition and reconceptualization so that we can move from a discourse of Capitalism to capitalisms that are variable, flexible, adaptive, and local (260-2). This new paradigm will position economies as fragmented, partial, localized, diversified (and potentially bring about more equity) (263). A new understanding of capitalisms with their varied though connected economies will allow us to “envision local and proximate socialisms” that will allow for local, daily participation in constituting and reconstituting systems by those whose labor and lives sustain them (264).
The Big Ideas/Terms –
1) economic determinism, economic essentialism, economism – all are related to the ideas that things boil down to economics – which are generally draw from or in relationship to Capitalist traditions (lots in Chapter 2)
2) Althusser’s big ideas lead to conceptualization of things as ultimately unfixed, incomplete, open, decentered, acentric, destabilizing binaries… G-G see Althusser’s ultimate project as “contributing to a tradition… that is intent upon undermining the certainties of western thought” (27)
3) Althusser’s idea of overdetermination – “can be seen as a site of a longing or desire to resuscitate the suppressed, to make room for the absent, to see what is invisible, to account for what is unaccounted for, to experience what is forbidden” (28)
4) regulationists – those who presume capitalist economy and expect a homogeneous social order to emerge from capitalism (32)
5) Capitalocentric – borrows from French theory’s idea of phallologocentrism – the idea that it all comes down to being in the center or being away from it and therefore becoming defined by lack (35)… Capitalocentrism is the foundation of the sense of Capitalism as unified, singular, and totalizing – so it must be debunked!! Capitalocentrism leads to the construction of Capitalism as both subject and agent of transformation (38) and gives Capitalism a “disproportionate effectivity” (39).
6) Development theory – the idea that “development” is ultimately about economics, supporting the idea that a developed space is defined by economic monistism (40)… G-G responds to this idea with a call for “a discourse of economic difference” that pushes on capitalocentrism by questioning monistism (or sameness). This tradition comes from Althusser, after all, according to G-G… (40)
7) Class – G-G talk about the ways in which class is argued by some to be disappearing – replaced by identity issues of gender, race, etc. G-G find a discourse that suggests that class – particularly the working-class – is declining and they are disempowered is alarming. So they focus on the concept of class. They recognize that class is often defined via three shared attributes (49) – a)power to control labor process, b)property ownership, c)exploitation in terms of how surplus labor is appropriated. They suggest an alternative conceptualization – “we define class simply as the social process of producing and appropriating surplus labor (more commonly known as exploitation) and the associated process of surplus labor distribution… Our political and theoretical interest is in creating alternative (and potentially emancipatory) economic futures in which class diversity can flourish” (52). Exploitation is a social process that is class (53). Class is overdetermined (55). “Our question is, how can theorizing class as a process of production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor add dimensions to theories of society and to projects of social and economic innovation?” (70)
8) “chora” – “the space of Being of present Capitalism and the Becoming of future capitalisms” (90). The term comes from Plato who used it to “denote the space of movement between being and becoming” (83). The chora, positioned within the discourse of women’s rape in urban areas that make the female body either a lack or a container via phallologocentrism and therefore Capitalocentrism, is our ticket out of “this Capitalist place.” If we can decenter Identity – decenter the positionality of women within the capitalist discourse – then we can get out of the Capitalist space and find spaces of capitalisms. (G-G also spend time talking about their concern with the saturation of spatial metaphors across disciplines… they wonder if the metaphors aren’t becoming abstractions that trivialize real material concerns, being the Marxists that they are…)
9) economy as organism (100-104) – the idea that the economy is a living organism whose growth dynamic is in jeopardy – and this “organicist conception” of the economy leads to poor policy decisions (107) and convinces the public to agree to simple interpretations. This idea comes from the foundational idea that society is an organism (108-9).
10) Fordism – comes from Henry Ford’s own description of the assembly-line system of industrial capitalism spawned by the automobile industry in the early part of the 20th century… For feminist geographers like G-G, Fordism moves beyond the basic Fordist principle that we pay workers a high wage for their very specific skill to have them go out into the economy and spend! Geography looks at Fordism in terms of spatial patterns of economic activity – spatial division of labor rather than skilled/unskilled/technology-based (meaning assembly-line) division of labor.
11) PostFordism – the post-industrial (or deindustrialized- 95) economic era of the later half of the 20th century which includes diversified economies, “feminized” work forces, information economies, “white collar jobs,” etc. The feshization of “PostFordism” and therefore Fordism creates an “imaginary” within economic circles that precludes noncapitalist economic development (149). The idealization of postFordism leads people to see it as the only road to economic development (164). If we decenter this discourse we might be able to create alternative economies – with alternative, diversified ideas of class, too.
12) Economic evolution – derives from Gould’s work – capitalism is a ladder of evolution rather than a branch… “By denying the existence of other branches and pathways the image of development as a ladder of evolution promotes the monolithic capitalism it purports to represent” (115). If we got rid of the ladder as framework we “might glimpse a region of infinite plurality and ceaseless change, in which economic process scatter and proliferate, unhampered by a ladder of development or a telos of organized growth” (116). We need to end ideas of hierarchy and domination to realize capitalisms. If we can debunk the ladder – and its built-in hierarchy that locates postFordism at the top of the ladder – then we can create an alternative economy. G-G go on to argue that we can debunk the evolution ladder by “queering” economic identity and by this it seems that they mean “breaking apart of the monolithic significations of capitalism (market/commodity/capital) and a liberation of different economic beings and practices. A space can be made for thinking globalization as many, as other to itself, as inscribing different development paths and economic identities” (146).
13) Distribution – G-G argue that one way we need to think differently about how class transformation might happen. They think it will happen via distribution – which is obvious in eco-movement surrounding sustainability, etc. (180). G-G argue that we need to revise the discourse in ways that illustrate the power of the state to redistribute wealth. G-G argue that “to reinvigorate politics around distributional issues it may be necessary to denaturalize the economic discourse that situates distributions of social wealth in opposition to economic survival” (185). “… how might the abandonment of a centered economic totality and of an essentialist conception of economic dynamics and subjectivity allow for a less constrained role for distributional struggles?” (189)
Notable Quotes –
“If capitalism/man can be understood as multiple and specific; if it is not a unity but a heterogeneity, not a sameness but a difference; if it is always becoming what it is not; if it incorporates difference within its decentered being; then noncapitalism/woman is released from its singular and subordinate status” (44)
“In this type of urban theory the spatiality of women’s bodies is constituted in relation to two different but perhaps connected Forms or Identities, that of the Phallus and that of Capital… She is indeed the symbol of her “absolute space,” a homogeneous inert void, a container, something that can only be spoken of in terms of the object(s) that exist(s) within it… within the broader hegemonic discourse of Capitalism, woman is constituted as an economic actor allocated to the subordinate functions of the capitalist system” (78-9).
“Any attempt to destabilize woman’s position and spatiality within urban discourse must dispense with the Identity of Capitalism as the ultimate container and constituter of women’s social and economic life/space” (88).
“In all of these conceptions, the economy is both the master of Man and the site of his mastery, whether that mastery be gained through knowledge or through action. This paradox reflects Man’s dual existence: as mind and as embodied Reason, he governs and controls; but as mere and mortal body, he looks to the economy, the perfect face of Reasons, and submits to it as to his god. This back and forth is the signature of the binary and the hierarchical regime of gender. Man cannot escape it, for it is his creator. Instead he plays it out in the discourse and practice of economic intervention” (104). Hence the chapter title/ 1990s mantra - it’s the Economy, Stupid!
“Thus the affective discourse of economy is always to some extent a discourse of mastery: the terrain of the economy is laid out by economic theory, with its entryways and pathways clearly marked and its systems interconnected. Spreading the economy before him as his dominion, economic theory constructs Man as a sovereign/ruler. And the familiar terrain of the body is his domain” (104-5).
“Thus you may quite easily arrive at the bizarre conclusion that general economic well-being will be enhanced by wage cuts; and by associating this vision with an invisible and deific figure, you may sell this program to an entire nation of wage earners and economic believers” (108).
“In similar fashion, the current penchant for representing the history of 20th century capitalism development in terms of a series of progressive steps from pre-Fordism to Fordism to post-Fordism places economic organisms on a ladder of sequential adaptation” (113).
“Alternative representations of society as a decentered, incoherent, and complex totality could offer multiple points of intervention in class (and other) processes at any point in time” (172).
“When Marx attempts to banish the specter [drawing on Derrida here], in that same moment he sets himself up for a haunting – by all that must be erased, denied, cast out, mocked as chimerical or belittled as inconsequential, in order to delimit a certain objectivity. Indeed the attempt to banish the specter [Capitalism, in G-G’s case] creates the possibility and the likelihood of a haunting. In the very moment of exorcism, the specter is named and invoked, the ghost is called to inhabit the space of its desired absence. The more one attempts to rend it invisible, the more spectacular its invisibility becomes” (240). So – what are the ghosts that haunt and therefore maintain Capitalism? 1)post-communist eastern Europe appears “homogeneously capitalist” but clearly still embodies non-capitalist practices that fail to disappear and in fact reappear, 2)the dichotomous interaction of the “market” and non-capitalist practices in a globalized economy system, 3)non-commodities (including non-commodified labor) within a commodified system, 4) diversity within Capitalism haunts - heterogeneity haunts, 5) discursivity haunts Capitalism – the discourses of organistic economies, of political/economic intervention, etc.
On the Depiction of Capitalism as Unified:
“Through its architectural or organismic depiction as an edifice or body, Capitalism becomes not an uncentered aggregate of practices but a structural and systemic unity, potentially co-extensive with the national or global economy as a whole. As a large, durable, and self-sustaining formation, it is relatively impervious to ordinary political and cultural interventions. It can be resisted and reformed but it cannot be replaced, except through some Herculean and coordinated struggle” (255-6).
“Thus one of the effects of the unity of Capitalism is to present the left with the task of systemic transformation” (256)
On the Depiction of Capitalism as Singularity:
“Capitalism, by contrast [to Socialism which always seems to be caused or created by something externally], tends to appear by itself. Thus, in the US, if feudal or ancient classes exist, they exist as residual forms; if slavery exists, it exists as a marginal form; if socialism or communism exists, it exists as a prefigurative form. None of these forms truly and fully coexists with Capitalism… Capitalism’s singularity operates to discourage projects to create alternative economic institutions and class relations, since these will necessarily be marginal in the context of Capitalism’s exclusivity” (257-8).
On the Depiction of Capitalism as Totality:
“Capitalism is presented as the embrace, the container, something larger and full… Capitalism not only casts a wider net than other things, it also constitutes us more fully, in a process that is more like a saturation than like a process of overdetermination. Our lives are dripping with Capitalism. We cannot get outside Capitalism; it has no outside…. We laboriously pry each piece loose – theorizing the legal ‘system,’ for example, as a fragmented and diverse collection of practices and institutions that is constituted by a whole host of things in addition to capitalisms – but Capitalism nevertheless exerts its massive gravitational pull” (258).
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bourdieu, Capital, Education, Violence
(An attempt at a) one sentence summary of Part 1 -
Bourdieu sets out, through the presentation and analysis of empirical data, to describe and thereby theorize about academic classifications (taxonomies, evaluations of students, descriptions of students, descriptions of teachers), exploring the academic and social consequences of such taxonomies that become most evident through the lives and conceptualization of “teachers” who live in the “duality” of intellectual aspirations which, because of their positionality within the structures of the academy, are forever dashed as they are perpetually cast aside as “working” class, non-intellectual folks.
Chronological Summary -
B establishes a hierarchy of disciplines – and therefore of the students that study them – in the French educational system (10). French and philosophy are at the top – and more content areas like geography and math are at the bottom. There is more cultural capital in the abstract, meta-disciplines – in the intelligentsia subjects than in those subjects that indicate preparation for work.
Thus, Part 1 sets out to derive “a set of principles or hypothesis likely to become increasingly general with each subsequent application” (10). B opens this section with a general questions about how the “Categories of perception and forms of expression” used in various disciplines “suppress or repress the social dimension of both recorded and expected performance” leading people to believe that the performances of students are independent of such perceptions of norms, social connotations, historical language use, etc. People demand empirical proof to support such an inquiry, B says, so he will work through empirical evidence to define the categories he sees at work within the French educational system – and point toward implications.
The difference between disciplines of work and disciplines of study come from how the disciplines are perceived. Some disciplines have abilities to easily measure success – some disciplines are vague and abstract (11). B turns to a massive chart to understand the disciplines as “characterized by a set of systematic traits” (14) obvious in the students who engage in them. French and philosophy students are clearly the highest class of students – this is intellectual activity rather than “work.” These two are “talent subjects” that are the best investment in cultural capital (14). These students “demonstrate in every way that they have a margin of freedom and security that is broad enough to enable them to maintain a relationship of educated dilettantism and eclectic familiarity with culture” (15). They are most willing to “adopt a cultured stance in these ‘independent’ subjects (such as film and jazz)” (15).
These students (French and philosophy as the highest tier) are more likely to be “left” leaning – as they adopt the politics of those with cultural capital. They learn to idealize and embody that which the elites tell them = capital (17).
Thus, “analyzing the systemic differences that oppose students in ‘talent’ disciplines to students in ‘work’ subjects thus reveals very clearly the system of oppositions between antagonistic and complementary properties or qualities that structure judgments…. Thus one can draw up a table of the categories deeply inscribed as they are in the minds of teachers and students” (17).
“Disciplines choose their students as much as students choose their disciplines, imposing upon them categories of perception of subjects and careers as well as of their own skill” illustrating the supporting ideology of predestination at work within French education (19).
B then points out the ways in which academic differences reveal social differences. For example, some students exhibit signs of “precocity” – meaning that they are seen as academic protégés. This “early” academic maturing, however, is often simply a result of cultural capital – access to education/cultural literacy early in life based upon class, etc. (20). “Precocity is but one of many academic retranslations of cultural privilege” (20). We often recognize these students who are talented and have “ease” – but this is really about acquisition, not talent (21). We mistake a particularly privileged mode of acquisition (based upon access, family, etc.) as “talent” or “natural ease” and therefore reify the capitalist system (21). Our traditional academic taxonomies “establish and obscure the relationship between students’ social origins and their grades” (22). The longer students are in the educational system – the more it teaches them their “place” within it – as upper and lower class educational citizens (23).
Academic mediocritas [defined on 51 as “the cult of the virtues of moderation and poise in things intellectual that implies the rejection of all forms of excess, even in matters of invention and originality”]– those teachers who come from the lower classes and internalize the values of the educational system – taking on “good academic form” that “assumes both knowledge and a detached attitude toward it” and reveals them as the cultural imposters they are (B doesn’t use the word imposter, but I think it is a useful conceptualization) (24-5). Thus teachers embody the “conciliation of opposites” that is education – they are both judgment, taste, restraint, etc.(26).
Teachers pursue the “cult of the master” (27) and thereby use the structures of education to construct their (and their students) realities (29). [Discussion of objective structures of the institution vs. mental structures]
B turns again to empirical data to help him explore the “cognitive structures that organize profession judgment,” studying, for start, the ways in which adjectives used to evaluate student work might be related to the teacher’s cultural knowledge of the student, the teacher’s own socio-cognitive operations, etc. (31-2).
Teachers rely upon screens and relays that help them to taxonomize students in way that seem to become invisible, even to them (36). The academic taxonomy simply mimics, invisibly, the social taxonomies used to determine class and cultural capital (36-7).
Thus, academic taxonomies help to construct and maintain social taxonomies, rewarding those with characteristics of the dominant class and penalizing those without them. But these taxonomies only work when they remain hidden (37).
However, it is not simply these taxonomies that create and maintain the system. The great “principle of action” motivating these taxonomies lies in agents and their “habitus” which is really made up of the relationships between the correspondences between objective structures and subjective structures – between the organized field and the taxonomies implemented through academic classification (38-9). “This taxonomy is in fact a neutralized form of the dominant taxonomy that, being produced by and for the functioning of a relatively autonomous field, takes the taxonomies of ordinary language to a second degree of neutralization. Thus the academic language that is the principal vehicle for these principles of vision and division is in part responsible for the functioning of mechanism that can only operate if agents decide to act according to their logic, which presupposes that they offer them their objectives in a misrecongizable form” (39).
Teachers learn to classify because THEY were classified – and so the system continuously recreates itself (39). Therefore the taxonomies come to seem almost self-evident (39).
“… it is necessary to connect language to the social conditions of its production and use and to search beyond words, among the mechanisms that produce both words and the people who emit and receive them, for the basis of the power that a certain way of using words allows one to mobilize” (41).
Next B studies obituaries (of teachers) – and sees academic taxonomies playing out throughout the lives of “students” (42). These obituaries “define the space of possible ethics associated with the position of teacher, a space whose truth would be fully revealed only through comparison with other spaces, associated with other positions in the field of power” (44).
“As classified products themselves, teachers never cease to classify each other and themselves according to academic principles of classification” (44-5).
“Thus, in this final test, departed comrades find themselves classified as they were classified throughout their lives, that is, through subtly hierarchized academic qualities that still bear a verifiable, yet invisible relationship to social origin at this final point in the cursus” (45-6).
Teachers, in fact, have more in common with public servants than intellectuals – for they are doomed to remain outside of the top tiers of cultural capital – but appeased with constructions of virtue and service (48-9).
People like to simplify the academy to an “immense cognitive machine” which is sometimes appears to be (52). However, this metaphor is dangerous because it removes agents, history, etc. from the mix. We must understand that while all agents create practices that “acts of reality construction that engage complex cognitive structures” these activities “bear no relation to a self-conscious intellectual operation” (53). The “choices” are dictated by the (super)structure of the “machine.”
Filed under: Uncategorized
Chapter 8 - “Revisionist Thinking” (254-271).
Lanham outlines the ways in which binary relationships have historically (and persistently) been constructed between substance/style, reality/rhetoric, literacy/orality and argues that a commitment to revising such thinking [hence the revisionist thinking] by creating collaborative relationships is the original - and pressing - call of rhetoric, the first economy of attention. While the current digital world is driven by attention to improvement - and therefore revision as it asks how as well as what, looking at as well as through, it often “pushes style into substance” based upon binary foundations (255). The new economy of attention requires a “new oscillation between at and through vision” as our view becomes “bi-stable” and our ideas about communication more “inclusive” (258). The shift in the economy is also a shift in the “consumer” of such an economy which allows for not only a “correct view of the economy [but also] … a correct… view of rhetoric” (260). Thus, this revisionist thinking is “all about relating style and substance, trying to align them more perfectly” to reflect a world that aligns two kinds of economies - through the useful tools of rhetoric (262-3).
Filed under: Uncategorized
Chapter 6 - “Barbie and the Teacher of Righteousness: Two Lessons in the Economics of Attention” (191-232).
Lanham creates a play which argues, through two particular case studies (involving scholarly battles of intellectual property between Dead Sea Scroll Scholars and the struggle to own property in the form of cultural conversations through the embodiment of Barbie as an idea - and character in the play - herself), that the shift from a stuff economy to an attention economy means a new focus upon ownership of cultural conversations about objects rather than objects themselves. The resulting tensions in scholarship and culture itself become obvious in the dialogue of characters - 1.”Buffin Pundit, JD” who serves as reigning academic and PBS host, 2.”Barbie,” literally a life-size doll who delivers the exigency and explanations of Lanham’s arguments as she embodies the tensions in her dual existence as both initially a cultural object and now, in the new economy, as a cultural conversation (part of both the economy of stuff and the economy of attention), 3.”Teacher of Righteousness,” the Dead Scroll Scholar in question, 4.”The Author,” Lanham’s voice in the conversation, and 5.”A Chorus of Footnotes” who exist ‘below the line’ in the virtual reality scene and eventually revolt in response to their marginal status (and who also, according to Lanham, most clearly represent the limitations of the stuff economy of traditional print culture in lieu of the new possibilities offered by the attention economy of hypertext culture).
These characters engage in a kind of virtual “TV talk show” and work on the intersections of the Dead Sea Scroll scholarship controversies, copyright law, and the shifting nature of economics. Barbie instigates the discussion, on behalf of the Author, asking the group about the consequences of a shift from a materialist economy - and its “late-capitalist consumerist” systems - to an economy ruled by a scarcity of attention (201). Barbie argues that the change means that now the value is in the “conversation about objects more than in the objects themselves… It is a fundamental change, really, from the one-sided written communication of paper to the much older oral interchange, but now, mostly, to our surprise, in writing instead of speech” (202). Applying this idea to the Dead Sea Scroll scholarship, Teacher of Righteousness argues that this shift means that we began to want to own “not just [the Dead Sea Scrolls as] petrified shreds of immortality but the whole cultural conversation that descended from it” (202-3). This desire to own cultural conversations is obvious in both the “stuff” of the conversation about the Dead Sea Scrolls and the delivery/style/medium of the argument - Barbie herself who embodies the new economy that values attention as the scarce commodity. Barbie, as a cultural conversation, is owned and controlled.
To interact with or create ideas/music as derived from Barbie, one has to get “permission to dance with Barbie” from Mattel because she isn’t just a cultural object, iconic figure, or materialist commodity but a cultural conversation itself. Likewise, the Dead Sea Scroll scholars established a similar ownership of a conversation that wasn’t just based upon objects, canonical text, or other materialist commodities (like the worth of the text as an antiquity) but ownership of a cultural conversation - and for their own personal fame and ethos rather than with the “dignity” often attributed to the mania of scholarship that, while disinterested in commodities, is driven by a generous spirit that leads to “reproductive,” generative play stemming from “the love of knowledge for its own sake” (220). It is such thinking - suggesting that conversations be owned for purposes of hierarchical dominance rather than the possibilities of development - that leads to “all the hysterical declarations that without protection for intellectual property there would be no creativity” (321).
Such conversations work to justify copyright laws which fail to recognize the ways in which most “play” (or generative activities) happen in the periphery rather than the center. In an economy of attention, necessity is no longer the mother of invention. Now pressure to invent comes from both necessity and play - which Barbie embodies. Copyright should be renovated to become a “Doctrine of Fair Play” rather than a doctrine of fair use (224). This begs the question- who is responsible for such invention? Where does Barbie lie? In a plane of play (as fictional concept) or the plane of use (as physical doll)? Barbie concludes that “if stuff and attention have changed places, then I’m realer than my plastic. Well, I’ve always thought so” (229).
The ultimate lingering question becomes - “What is the fundamental ‘atom’ of protectability?” to which the Pundit answers with a contemplation of Warhol’s idea of all having 15 minutes of fame, concluding that such an egalitarian premise doesn’t work because “the atoms of the one economics [the stuff one] are not the same as the atoms of the other [the attention one] and there fore “the centripetal gaze - the gaze you live by, Barbie - won’t permit… democratization” (230).
Quotable Quotes -
“Barbie: So what is scarce? Not information but the human attention needed to make sense of it. We are really living in an economics of attention, not an economics of information. And a good deal follows from that” (201).
“Barbie: I care about it because I am the cultural conversation. Or at least an allegory thereof. That’s what Author finally began to understand when he looked beneath my flash and filigree… I’ve been created by the cultural conversation. That’s what has allowed me to outgrow my Mattel chaperons, to come to life, to be sitting here like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, doing battle with my detractors. Qimron v. Shanks matters a lot to me because it means owning me” (209).
“Barbie: … The Big Collision! The Main Point of our Conversation! In an economics of attention, digital technology wants the conversation to be free, but the logic of added value wants the conversation to be owned. You see this collision everywhere” (214).
“Pundit: …copyright law is really about the free trade, or economics, of the mind and its moral consequences for the cultural conversation. And, of course, information - and thus, Barbie, by your extension, human attention - is the most globalized element in the global economy” (215).
“Spokesnote: This cultural conversation you folks keep talking about. That’s us. That’s what we reincarnate. … [later that same page]… That movement from then to now - it is called intellectual progress - is in fact, what we footnotes incarnate by making our readers oscillate from above the line to below and back. That oscillation embodies the subject of Qimron c. Shanks -credit where credit is due” (216).
Author, quoting Steiner who says about a scholar - “when in the grip of his pursuit, [is] monomanically disinterested in the possible usefulness of his findings, in the good fortune or honor that they may bring him, in whether or not any but one or two other men or women on the earth care for, can even being to understand or evaluate, what he is after. This disinterestedness is the dignity of his mania” (219) - without this dignity of disinterested we have only the effects of the “spotlight.” Barbie comments that “That hunger for the center, that centripetal gaze, is what the economics of attention is all about. I’ve lived int hat spotlighted centered all my life. My unkind critics say it is me…” (218)
“Teacher: You are saying that generosity of spirit redeems the whole scholarly endeavor and that this redemption is just what the cartel [Dead Sea Scroll] members lacked?” (220)
