the loco local glocal

Recently, I was teaching a little introduction to the concept of globalization in my first-year-writing seminar, and one of the students said he was still a bit fuzzy on the concept of “glocal.” To explain this word, I started telling them about an essay I had just read by a student in one of my other classes about a small village in Africa whose economy is based on tourists who want to learn about a traditional African culture. In other words, the economy of this small village far away from any major city is intensely global, but the cultural tradition it supports is intensely local. Similarly, I could have my students read one of my previous blog posts here about the Masai market I visited in Kenya. This dynamic dialectic between local culture and global economy is what I wanted my students to pay attention to, because mainstream journalism usually represents culture inaccurately in static, essentialist terms.

What I realized when I left the classroom is that I had located the “glocal” in the third world. This was, perhaps, a mistake of mine, since my students may leave the classroom thinking that glocality is something that happens elsewhere. But we can also see the glocal down the road in any American town. If you walk into your average Wal-Mart, you will see men and women buying up clothing, guns, and other commodities that are all part of an intensely felt local American identity. The most extreme examples, I suppose, are cowboy boots, country music, hunting equipment (often worn indoors when they aren’t even hunting), and Harley-Davidson motorcycle stuff (not the actual motorcycles, but T-shirts, vests, and badges with Harley logos that all present the feeling of “American.”) Ironically, everything sold in Wal-Mart is made in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, El Salvador, and other countries, not in the U.S.A. Wal-Mart is one of the largest and most ruthless multinational corporations in the world, but it is precisely the low prices it offers that enable people to buy so many expressions of “local” country culture.

The thing to notice here is this. The more that the Wal-Mart economy globalizes and moves factories and capital all around the world, the more working-class Americans react to the uncertainties of global economics by grasping onto what they feel is a distinctly “American” culture. I mean, seriously, who needs cowboy boots? This American culture and the commodification of American patriotism is illusory, of course, and is often made-up. There’s nothing especially traditional about the kind of country music that gets played on the radio in the mid-West, because it sounds more like 80s pop and 60s rock than authentic 40s country, but I often hear Minnesotans blasting pop music about the hills of Arkansas. Ironically, Wal-Mart’s headquarters is in Arkansas, so maybe that’s oddly appropriate, though I doubt most of the people sporting conferate flags and blasting “country” pop in their pickup trucks in central Minnesota are aware of that. What they are doing is affirming a somewhat racist attachment to their “roots,” even though they are (paradoxically) expressing their roots through a globally produced commodity culture. In a sense, their self-expression is an unconscious attempt to resist the negative effects of global capitalism (job losses, low wages, etc.), but is clearly an attempt that will fail to achieve much of anything except a vacuous pride and an insidious racism. So, in conclusion, the glocal is local – it’s right here, all the time — and it is sometimes a bit crazy (or loco, as the many Mexican-Americans who live and work down the street from the Wal-Mart in my town might say in Spanish.)

On the flip side, we can raise a reverse critique of the fake cosmopolitanism of the liberal elite, who love their Japanese sushi, their Indian yoga, their Australian wines, and their boutique coffees from Ethiopia, Brazil, and Sumatra (pretending they can taste the difference between the various coffee beans even though the roasting process affects the flavor more than its location.) This too is a cultural expression, an effort to fabricate an identity out of the many globally produced commodities. In contrast to the invention of an intensely local “country” identity, this is the invention of an intensely global “cosmopolitan” identity. The university tends to endorse this cosmpolitan identity because it believes students will be better prepared to succeed in a dynamic, global economy. However, this identity is just as fabricated (almost pre-fabricated) as the “county” one.

In my view, the real question is how to truly confront the global economy, resist its evils, build on its goods, and work towards a more just and equitable society. It seems to me that the glocal nature of postmodern cultural identities is often more a symptom of our capitalist economy’s paradoxes (like a runny nose is a symptom of the common cold virus) than it is a viable culture that might enable people to ethically engage with the world in which they live.

Orwell’s Dystopia in Composition Pedagogy

For almost eight years, I have taught college writing courses such as “freshman comp” and “first year seminar” the way I was trained to do at my two graduate institutions — the neo-Aristotelian way first advanced by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca and later developed by people like Marie Secor, Andrea Lunsford, Jack Selzer, and Cheryl Glenn. Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the faculty of finding the available means of persuasion,” and today Aristotelians emphasize attention to the “rhetorical situation” of any argument. Among other things, this approach includes strategies for addressing particular audiences and contexts. It also includes focusing one’s rhetorical goal — whether one’s goal is to define terms, ascertain causes, predict effects, prioritise values, advocate an action or policy, or determine jurisdiction and responsibilities.  The main idea here is that students would be better prepared both for college writing and for “real world” writing if they were circumspect about the purpose and context for each and every act of writing, speaking, and behaving. In other words, what might be appropriate for a newspaper editorial might not be appropriate for a political speech, and what might be appropriate for one class might not be for another. For example, the style, tone, and organization of this blog is not the style, tone, and organization I’d usually want my students to emulate in the analytic papers they write for my class. In sum, rather than teaching a formalist one-sized-fits-all or a touchy-feely-express-yourself kind of course (two other models of writing pedagogy), Aristotelian pedagogy gives students practical skills that are useful for a range of situations, both academic and non-academic.

For a while, I was happy with this approach, but last year I grew frustrated with it, because it seemed to me to assume that writing must always be intentional and must always aim to persuade. This suggests a goal-oriented, self-interested ”instrumental rationality” rather than a critical, dialectical, humanistic, or ethical concern for others and for the world. Also, I have always felt a tension between the various goals of composition pedagogy; academic writing has its own set of standards and rules for governing truth claims that differ from Aristotle’s sense of persuasive speech; similarly, although critical thinking can certainly serve the art of persuasion, critical thinking has other roles to play as well; in addition, a lot of the creative writing we most admire did not have clear rhetorical goals but instead helps us think. Now that I’m at a liberal arts college, I decided this year to do something different — something a little more liberal artsy — and so the question that I’m struggling to answer is what and how to teach writing differently.

Instead of focusing students’ attention on specific rhetorical goals and strategies for persuasive writing, I wanted to emphasize the ethics of writing and develop a more critical approach so that the students would diagnose the socio-economic and political forces that shape our world and our position as writers in that world. In other words, instead of adapting themselves to the rhetorical situation and becoming well-adjusted writers, I want students to critically assess the situation and consider the ethics of “mal-adjustment” as Martin Luther King, Jr. encouraged his audience to do in his speech, “The American Dream.” In that speech, King asks, why should we adjust ourselves to an un-just society? 

Through literature, I hoped my class could come to a deeper understanding of the “rhetorical situation” than the one usually posited by the Aristotelians. (To be fair, Aristotelians often do wonderfully critical analyses of culture, but by the time it gets simplified for the writing classroom, most of this sophistication is lost.) So, I’ve divided the course into topics such as ”the politics of writing,” and “representation” and “writing about violence,” and we will read literature such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, Josefina Lopez’s Real Women Have Curves, and Sitawa Namwalie’s Cut Off My Tongue, for example.

We just finished Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and I have to admit that I’m a bit disappointed with it. I liked it a lot when I was a teenager, but I hadn’t read it since then, so I wasn’t sure how well it would work. I chose it for a couple of reaons. One thing I like about this novel is how it draws attention to how ordinary life might be political. Even sex can be political in certain situations, Orwell points out, and one of my students brilliantly observed in class that not too long ago in America sexual relations between different races was prohibited. And so I think the novel is useful for a class discussion on how there are many ways writing can be political — as Orwell also says in his essay “Why I Write”  — and not just the obvious ways such as political speeches and newspaper editorials. Another thing I like is how it draws attention to the importance of memory and writing’s relationship to memory. In the novel, the Ministry of Truth is able to manipulate memory by controlling the written record. This – along with Orwell’s invention of newspeak — was useful in class for highlighting the importance of academic citation and how academic citation was developed precisely to prevent the kind of manipulative, dishonest activity we see in Orwell’s novel.

But here’s the problem with the novel. Orwell creates a dystopia (the opposite of utopia) so extreme and far-out that most of my students could not see much connection between what Orwell is describing and what is going on in the world today even though the edition of the novel we read was published in 2003 with a new forward by Thomas Pynchon that implies there is such a connection. Pynchon himself suggests a critique of how president George W. Bush and the mainstream media manipulated public opinion and falsified evidence to justify war against a made-up enemy, just like what happens in Nineteenh Eighty-Four. And now, in 2009, how is it possible that after six years of war with Iraq, very few Americans know anything about the history of our supposed enemy and how its relation to us has changed over the years. Perhaps we suffer from the same kind of historical amnesia that Orwell’s characters suffer from in his novel. Also in his forward to Orwell’s novel, Pynchon observes the extent to which the internet (with its cookies that track what we do and suggest more things for us to buy) has has become a much more subtle form of social control than the “telescreens” that Orwell imagined. But it’s not my students’ fault for not making that connection. I think it’s Orwell’s.

Orwell creates such a fantastic situation that the most natural reaction to his novel is “Wow, I’m glad I don’t live in that society. That would suck.” And of course the political aspect of that natural reaction is the sense that ”America has freedoms and totalitarian socialism doesn’t.” It’s hard to reconcile the fact that the most vivid attack on socialism was written by a man who was himself a socialist, but Orwell’s book could in some ways be read as a rhetorical failure. Instead of presenting a cautionary tale for his fellow socialists or giving his readers some concepts for critically evaluating their own society as I believe he intended, he instead created a boogey-man that Americans define themselves against. In other words, his portrait of the society of Oceania is so totally other that when Americans read Orwell’s novel, they say to themelves, “I’m not that.” My point here is not that Americans should realize that they in fact are that, because they aren’t. Nobody is. Orwell’s Oceania is a rhetorical “topos” (or dystopia), not a real place.  It’s a symbolic figure, not a coherent picture of reality. Rather, my point is that, in a way, this novel almost gives Americans an excuse not to really try to understand what Chinese or Iraqi or Iranian culture is like, because they imagine life in those countries to be just as Orwell described daily life in his dystopian Oceania. And because this far-away, freakish other so fully captures our imagination, we seem to have an excuse for not really understanding ourselves or the historical truth of our relationship to real others.

I’m trying to think of another novel that might focus on the more subtle forms of thought control and historical amnesia that exist in the real world. Perhaps a novel that also recognizes that sometimes human beings often prefer to be ignorant rather than knowledgeable. (Albert Camus’s The Fall or Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, I suppose.) For instance, consider the recent debates about health care, which have become almost too painful to pay attention to. How is it possible that so many people in America could believe that President Obama was prescribing “death panels”? So much of the health care debate has focused on ridiculous mis-information that little energy is left for honest discussion about real solutions.

Moreover, it might be useful for us to try to understand why Americans have become so hysterical these days. I suppose it’s not surprising that with an unemployment rate over 9% (and it’s actually 20% for people who didn’t graduate from high school) people would get a little paranoid and search for freakish, non-existant things (such as death panels) to define themselves against. It feels good and self-affirming to be outraged at something, even if that something isn’t real. While Orwell shows us this outrage in the daily “two minutes hate” scheduled by Big Brother, Orwell’s idea about how the human ego can be manipulated in Oceania doesn’t seem to account for the willful ignorance we all have in our everyday lives. Nor does he account for how other social factors such as unemployment, poverty, and job stress might affect our ability to understand what’s happening around us.

This leaves me with two questions. How do we take stock of the forms of writing and representation (mainstream media, Google, FaceBook, etc.) in our world today? And how do we respond ethically to this state of affairs (including the high unemployment rate today) in our own writing?

Back to School… with Stanley Fish?

It’s that time of the year. Students have just arrived back on campus or finished their first week of classes; professors have attended faculty meetings and finished making their syllabi… and… out from their swampy lairs in the mainstream media, pundits have surfaced to perform that August ritual of “informing” the public about how foolish and misguided academics are. So, since the question of “how to do research” and “how to teach” are naturally on my mind at this particular moment, I thought I’d respond — angrily respond — to two recent articles, one about the “diminishing returns” of scholarly research by Mark Bauerlein [here] in The Chronicle of Higher Education and the other about the paucity of quality writing instruction by Stanley Fish [here] in the NY Times.

Bauerlein starts with a few facts about the state of academia which he believes (rightly, I think) indicate that the current generation of professors is expected by their institutions to publish much more than the older generation had to. Ironically, at the same time, such books and articles are less likely to actually get bought or read. He argues that publication today seems to be less about usefully explaining a literary text and more about uselessly performing some kind of academic identity.  For instance, consider that 2,406 things have been published since 1986 just about the play Hamlet alone — a statistic that causes Bauerlien to exclaim, “Whoa! Slow down! Hamlet can’t give you anything more.” His recommendations are that (1) departments should reduce the amount of publications expected for tenure and promotion, and (2) universities should subsidize and encourage research in “unsaturated areas” rather than “saturated” ones (such as Shakespeare, for instance.)

Much of my response will agree with my fellow blogger Dr. J [here], but I won’t be quite as kind and considerate as Dr. J tends to be. In my view, she rightly responds to Bauerlein by pointing out how new approaches to old texts (such as feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches) actually do lead to rather insightful scholarship and explications of texts, and though she and I would agree with Bauerlein that a lot of that scholarship seems redundant or uninspiring, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for new and good work. For example, just this year I read an excellent article on Hamlet [here] entitled “Making ‘Young Hamlet’” that made me see the play not only in a new light, but also in a better light. This article by my friend Matthew Harkins, a relatively young scholar in the field, is just one of many examples of illuminating truth and productive insight. So, contrary to Bauerlein’s comment, Hamlet can give us more. And even more importantly, Dr. J points out that if one of our roles as an educator is to teach our students how to do original research, then we should be actively modeling that kind of critical inquiry for them instead of just throwing up our hands in despair exclaiming, “vanity of vanities, all is vanity… there is nothing new under the sun.”  

I would go a bit further than Dr. J and say that there is something fundamentally ignorant about Bauerlein’s rather pathetic lamentation. First, what Bauerlein doesn’t acknowledge is that the pressure to publish comes not from departments but from deans and university presidents, and those deans and presidents in turn are under pressure to compete with other universities for rankings in the famous (or infamous) U.S. News and World Reports survey of colleges and universities. So, the problem is obviously bigger than Bauerlein is willing to recognize, and it has more to do with the competitive nature of higher education than with any error in judgment by academics. Therefore, his recommendations are a bit obtuse. And moreover, I think he should have recognized all of this, not because this fact is somewhat obvious, but because the Modern Language Association (to which he belongs) has been discussing this very issue for the past two decades (a fact that Bauerlein neglects to mention, since he wants to pretend that his diatribe is more original than it is.)

Second, most departments have already been subsidizing research in new fields since the 1970s — fields of African American literature, multiethnic literature, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, postcolonial theory, new media, technology, etc. In other words, to his suggestion that we should be subsidizing new areas of research, the most appropriate response is perhaps, ”duh.”

Third, one of the reasons that young scholars feel compelled to publish on “saturated” subjects such as Shakespeare and the American Renaissance is because we are still expected to teach classes on those subjects. How to address the gap between the undergraduate curriculum and academic scholarship is an important and difficult question, but it is also a fairly old question, and I don’t think it is cause for alarm. As teachers, we’ve all been straddling that gap our whole professional careers. Often, we simply assume that the high-level scholarly work will trickle down to our teaching, but sometimes scholarship actually forces a useful paradigm shift in curriculum and instruction.

Lastly, Bauerlein bemoans that most scholarly monographs do not sell very many copies, but he seems to be ignorant of why academic university presses were created in the first place. They were never meant to compete in the marketplace. They never sold very many copies. In fact, the fact that some recent publications on scholarly presses have become international bestsellers is pretty amazing, because academic presses were always intended to publish the work of scholars primarily for academic libraries. The real crisis is not what Bauerlein thinks it is. The problem is not that these books aren’t selling; they were never meant to. The real problem is that university administrations are cutting back on their subsidies of their own presses, which forces these presses to either compete or go under. This is the real travesty.

Ultimately, Bauerlein’s lament is pretty standard fair for those who love to participate in one of America’s most popular pastimes — bashing academics – and so I agree with Dr. J that it’s important for our students and for the future of critical inquiry that we take such petty posturing with many grains of salt.

So much for the scholarship question. What about teaching?

In his op-ed column for the NY Times, Stanley Fish responds to a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which is a somewhat bogus organization created by Lynne Cheney (Dick Cheney’s wife) and whose goal is primarily to promote conservatism in college curriculum and classrooms. Fish ultimately disagrees with most of ACTA’s arguments, but he does agree with them on two important points: (1) that the college courses should focus on their academic subjects, not on liberal political agendas, and (2) that colleges really should require a course that focuses entirely on writing skills. That’s pretty much all Fish has to say, though he takes a really long time to say it because he feels obligated to dismantle ACTA’s argument.

Although I do regularly teach one of Stanley Fish’s essays in my intro-to-theory course because my students and I appreciate his clear writing style, I have to admit that in general, a lot of Stanley Fish’s work (both his scholarly work and his journalistic work) pisses me off. Even the essay that I teach pisses me off, and the reason for my pissy-ness is that Fish claims to be a theorist, but he writes more like a lawyer trying to win a case in court. Theorists are dedicated to raising questions and revealing ambiguity, indeterminacy, and complexity; the goal of theory is to open up lines of inquiry, not to cynically oversimplify the question or snidely close off inquiry as Fish tends to do.

For instance, his rather unscholarly and questionable opening statistic (which is unverifiable since it is based on a personal observation) is the sole piece of evidence that gives his argument any rhetorical force. His point there is to demonstrate that English faculty do not genuinely value writing instruction and instead teach courses on whatever subject they happen to be interested in or on whatever liberal, politically correct feel-good agenda they prefer. Those who have been reading Fish’s work for the past decade are by now somewhat tired of this oft-repeated diatribe about “professional correctness” because Fish’s claim (as usual) sets up a straw-man which is all too easy for him to argue against, and doesn’t acknowledge a number of competing facts. One of those competing facts is that most faculty wrestle with this issue all the time, and it’s a much more complicated issue than Fish acknowledges. In order to get students excited about writing and also in order to model for them what sustained, scholarly inquiry looks like, teachers often give their writing courses themes or topics. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about writing; it means that the effective teaching of writing is difficult and complicated. It’s not as easy to separate writing instruction from thematic content, political debate, and/or ethical dilemmas as he suggests. And in fact, most people who do research on the teaching of writing believe that writing instruction works better when its purpose is felt by the students — in other words, writing instruction with theme, politics, and/or ethics is more pedagogically effective than writing instruction without those things. And everyone knows that one learns to write not just by writing, but also by reading (and the stuff we read tends to be about something.) Fish is such a giant on the academic scene that I doubt he has ever had to teach a basic writing class, so I don’t blame him for being unaware of the real thought that goes into planning one… though it doesn’t seem like he bothered to ask his junior colleagues, and I do blame him for that.

Another of those competing facts, of which Fish should be aware, is that there has been a significant rise in composition pedagogy over the past two decades, so that on the scholarly side, a lot of new and innovative research has been done, and on the administrative side, even elite universities such as Princeton are valuing basic writing classes more now than they were before. And I say that Fish “should be” aware of it, because everyone else in his field is aware of it. (Of course, readers of the NY Times generally aren’t aware of it, which is why Fish is doing his readers a disservice by deliberately misrepresenting the situation.)

All that said, I do want to give Fish some credit for his careful efforts to consider ACTA’s points. He acknowledges where he thinks they are right, refutes their errors, and exposes their hypocrisy. However, what I am curious about is why he even bothers. Does anyone take ACTA seriously? It doesn’t really represent university trustees and alumni as their name implies; their organization is spearheaded entirely by private, partisan money, not by any inclusive, democratic survey of actual trustees and alumni. In truth, they don’t “represent” anyone except for Lynne Cheney’s own radical agenda. And so, I wonder why Fish even bothers to deal with them, especially considering that several real representative organizations — e.g., the American Association of University Professors, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, not to mention the individual boards of colleges and universities and the aforementioned MLA – all do deal with all the questions Fish raises and/or do regularly assesses the performance of colleges and universities. Why doesn’t he discuss them and what they do? Why doesn’t he talk about how the real world works and instead wastes so much ink pandering to the radical agenda of a bogus organization? Well, to be fair to Fish, perhaps he does because ACTA is backed by some pretty deep pockets and because, unfortunately, a lot of the ethically limp members of our House of Representatives and our various state assemblies do pay attention to ACTA.

So in sum, what are we academics and teachers to do as we head back to school? It is a bit frustrating that such public attacks on our integrity should come from our fellow academics because their status lends their arguments some authenticity and, in my view, leads the public astray. (Like when the mainstream media finds conservative black people to slander the NAACP and lament the rise of hip hop.) Is it surprising that the one literary theorist (out of hundreds) whom the New York Times selected to publish a weekly column just happens to be the one who has spent the second half of his career making fun of his colleagues? And it’s even more frustrating when such dishonest slanders of literature departments should appear repeatedly in the main newspaper of higher education itself — a newspaper whose every issue delights in printing intellectually wimpy diatribes against the use of theory in literature departments.  Though I welcome honest critique of our practices (and such honest critiques actually do fill the pages of both scholarly and popular periodicals), the dishonesty of Bauerlein and Fish, alongside the bizarrely anti-intellectual tone of The Chronicle of Higher Ed,  feels to me more like a deliberate betrayal. Should we fight back or ignore them? Clearly, I have chosen to fight back, though I fear that at the end of the day doing so might do more harm than good.

Theory and Neologisms: the “Prosumer” or the Journalist

The other day, some veteran journalists came to my campus to participate in a panel discussion about the future of the news media. As everyone knows, newspapers these days are struggling to maintain themselves, and one of the panelists cited the statistic that approximately 12,000 journalists had lost their jobs in recent years (out of a total of 50,000 or so… sorry about the inexactness of the numbers, but I didn’t take notes, so I’m writing from memory.) What, unfortunately, none of the panelists adequately addressed was probably what was most on the minds of those in the audience — jobs. If newspapers are firing not hiring, then what kind of career in journalism can an English major look forward to? One of the panelists briefly suggested that graduating seniors should look to gain life experiences after college (teaching English abroad, for instance) that could lead to a writerly life, but sadly none of his options included a paid position in traditional newsmedia. His comment was meant to be consoling, but it was actually the opposite — quite scary to all those students in the room who were hoping to earn some money after college and could ill afford to spend it on more life experiences. Also sadly, all of the special projects to revive quality journalism that these panelists were discussing were exactly that – special. And by special, I mean receiving some special public grant or some special support from a university committed to promoting quality journalism for the sake of its undergraduates . . . um . . . so that they can be trained for jobs that don’t exist.  (Don’t get me wrong; I was very impressed by all of the panelists and wish the kind of work they do was supported even more than it is, but still, I am concerned about my students earning a living after they graduate.)

The day before this panel discussion, my blog-comrade Topspun over at SevenRed recently posted a lengthy discussion of the word “prosumer” [here], a neologism that combines producer and consumer. Now, to be honest, I’d really never read anything about this neologism before, so I have to admit my ignorance, but it seems that we can relate the term to some of the economic and professional transformations of journalism.  According to Topspun’s post as well as to wikipedia (sorry, I’m being lazy today), the neologism “prosumer” was first coined in 1980 by Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave, a book which I’ve never heard of until now. The idea of the prosumer, basically, is that the traditional division between the act of production and the act of consumption does not hold today. Not only does the internet and other communications technologies enable production to be more responsive to the desires of consumers, but even a lot of innovative work (i.e., intellectual labor) is done by the consumers themselves rather than by men in suits sitting in office buildings or industrial park complexes. One example of the prosumer is bloggers — consumers of internet knowledge who also produce internet knowledge. Similarly, YouTubers. In a sense, bloggers and YouTubers are like unpaid journalists (through sometimes bloggers actually are paid journalists).

So, what’s my point? Admittedly, I’m struggling to get to it — and my struggle is reminding me of how my “intro-to-theory” students probably feel when they have to blog for my class about concepts that are as new and foreign to them as “prosumer” is to me. And as I am writing now, I expect that probably some of my students will have smarter things to say than I do about prosumption or whatever, but to finally get to the point of this blog, I think my main question is this: do we understand the word “prosumer” to indicate something that actually exists or do we understand it as a conceputalization of a problematic relation?

And here’s why I ask that. It seems to me that there are those who gleefully see the “prosumer” as the economic hope of the future and the spitting image of the postmodern, entrepreneurial, do-it-yourself, get-rich-quick individual. For an example, see this rather obnoxious book Pro-Sumer Power! that I just found on-line. (I didn’t finish reading its introduction, because it kind of made me nauseous.) For these people, the idea that the consumer can also be a producer is both liberatory and powerful, because production is no longer controlled by the capitalist owner of the factory, newspaper, etc.

But this seems to me to be an insidiouis ruse for two reasons. First, unlike laborers and employees, prosumers don’t get paid. Now, it’s possible that they might end up making millions of dollars if their blog or YouTube production hits the big time (such as the blogger Diablo Cody who later was hired to write the screenplay for the hit film Juno.) But of course, most don’t (and Diablo Cody was actually making money by stripping until she was “discovered” by the mainstream media), and so I’m sceptical of people who see prosumption as somehow “liberatory” or “powerful” or “resistant” to capitalism. If anything, it seems to fit perfectly with the interests of capitalists who ultimately want to increase productivity and decrease wages. And with prosumption, they get their labor for free.

This is insidious in the same way that the culture of Starbucks and Barnes &Noble are insidious according to Naomi Klein in No Logo. What is curious about that culture is that these companies enlist college graduates to work there because college graduates like coffee-house culture and books. In a sense, everyone in the place (whether one works there or not) is participating in the production of the socially meaningful experience of being there. And that is why Starbucks and Barnes & Nobel can pay its workers so little… because the workers are supposedly supposed to enjoy it. (And this reminds me of Slavoj Zizek’s jokes when he appeared on NiteBeat about the postmodern injunction to enjoy what one in reality has to to do anyway…. And it also reminds me of the condition of teachers who get paid so little and get so little respect because supposedly their jobs are so emotionally meaningful to them that the work is its own reward.) Likewise, to return to my original observation about the panel of esteemed journalists, today’s college graduates are supposed to do prosumptive labor not for a salary but for their own enjoyment and to gain life experiences.

However, to return to my question about how we understand the word “prosumer,” my main point is that we should think of it as a conceptual tool for thinking about a problematic relation instead of thinking about it as a thing. In other words, not only should we be skeptical of those who think prosumption is liberatory, powerful, and resistant, but we should be skeptical of those who think prosumers exist. Certainly bloggers and YouTubers exist, but what does it mean to call them prosumers? What such pundits of prosumption are doing is taking a neologism and reifying it. Reification is when a concept is removed from its context and placed in another context in order to assert some kind of independent, a priori existence. Or, as Karl Marx says in his notes on alienated labor in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 , the field of economics proceeds from identifiable facts (private property in the case of Marx’s chapter, prosumption in the case of this blog post), but does not explain those facts or how they came to be. In other words, it mistakes the effect (e.g., private property, prosumption) for the cause (e.g., a complex history of changing — and changeable — social relations.)

Instead of reifying concepts to assert their existance, I think the point of neologisms such as “prosumer” should be to conceptualize a problematic relation. (And the same is true for such neologisms as ”postnational” and “glocal” which I blogged about last December [here].) In the case of prosumption, the problematic relation is among capital, labor, technology, and social value. For the prosumer pundits, technology is what drives the new form of economic being, but of course they have taken prosumption out of the context of capital and labor and placed it in the context of technology.

And of course, getting back to Marx’s point, we all know that technology is as much an effect of changing relations of capital and labor as it is a cause. And this is why Marx goes on to say that the economist “conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker and production.” Marx is asserting the estrangement (or alienation) of labor here, because the worker is in effect producing the very conditions that oppress him. The more productive the workers are, the more the capitalist can reinvest the fruits of their labor to expand, intensify, and control the economic relations of production. To apply Marx’s idea to the idea of prosumption, by doing labor for nothing, we are ultimately enabling the economic system to continue giving us nothing… and in the case of journalism, to continue cutting salaried jobs.

To explain what I mean about the difference between reification and problematization, consider this analogy. In formal poetics, the synecdoche is a figure of speech in which the part stands in for the whole. In good poetry, the synecdoche always alerts (or should always alert) the reader not only to what it stands-in-for or represents, but also to its failure to represent. In other words, in standing in for the “whole,” the part always excludes some information and always marginalizes other parts of the whole. Therefore, good poetry (in contrast to bad propaganda) will reveal the failure of its own figures of speech, because a synecdoche simultaneously indicates an identity and a non-identity.

I think we should think about all theoretical neologisms the same way we think about synecdoche — not as nouns indicating new phenonema, but as concepts alerting us to changing social relations and as concepts that always suggest an absence of identity at the same time that they indicate a new presence that can be identified.  So, in my opinion, neologisms such as “prosumer” should be taken to suggest not only new identities but also non-identities (or even the “lack” of a fully present identity.) The non-identity in this mix, of course, is how hungry and cold we might be if prosumption became the dominant form of labor in our society (instead of wage labor.) In other words, getting back to the comment made by the panelist about the future of jobs in journalism, the non-identity here is that most college graduates who decide to become prosumer-journalists will probably be living with their parents after they graduate. (And by my own reasoning, probably I shouldn’t waste so much time blogging like I’m doing now, because even though I use it as both a teaching tool and as an experimental space to test out scholarly work I might do in the future, it isn’t what butters my bread either.)

What I think is genuinely liberatory and resistant is not prosumption, but the social production of alternatives. In other words, working for nothing is not exploitative if one is participating in the social creation of the conditions that sustain life. I would admit that there is some potential in prosumption for alterity, but it seems to me that the prosumption pundits risk subsuming the alterity of prosumption to the interests of capital when they forget the basis for resistance and alterity in the first place.

English majors, careers, graduate schools… ideology?

I thought I’d do something different in this blog today, something pragmatically useful for my students. As one might imagine, students often come into my office distraught about their career prospects (especially in in today’s economic climate, the dreary winter recession of ‘09), wondering what to do with a degree in English, and secretly hoping that graduate school might be a nifty way to avoid that scary, uncertain future — a future as loaded with all the hope and fear as those starry-eyed proponents of the American dream can make it. So, what I’m going to do in this blog post is give some practical advice about how to think about careers after college and even how to search for a good graduate program.

But, as this is a theory blog (and since my theory class has just begun its unit on ideology), of course I will also add a few remarks about that as well. After all, isn’t all the hope and fear about the future a product of the ideology of the American dream, an ideology that claims you can be anything you want to be? (And please notice here how – just as in the contradictory readings of Slumdog Millionaire found in the media, which I blogged on last week – ideology always produces a contradiction, as hope and fear are contradictory emotions.)

So, to be as useful as possible, I’ve divided this blog into several topics, which you can skip to as you wish: career options, why it’s surprisingly good to defer making that fateful decision, choosing a graduate school, and finally how to prepare early.

Career Options
Many students come to the English major because they love reading and/or writing. And of course, this presents a problem, since we aren’t always able to earn a living doing what we love. For instance, somebody may love sleeping, drinking beer, and having sex, but careers in such activities are highly unlikely, not to mention morally suspicious. Nevertheless, we have been taught since we were children that we should love not just our leisure but also our job (and I do love mine, so sometimes it works out.)

The real problem here, though, is not whether it’s possible to love one’s work. This is a false dilemma. Rather, the real problem is that most students don’t even know what their options are. Their imagination of what’s possible is obviously limited, but what limits it? They know what teachers are because they’ve been students, and they know what writers are because they’ve read books, and they know what lawyers and doctors are because television stations feature them on their dramas and sit-coms so often. Of course, television shows feature such careers not because they are the best careers but because they conveniently lend themselves to dramatic action — i.e., the ambiguity of crime, the risk of death, etc. In short, our knowledge of what’s possible is limited by our power to access various kinds of information, and this serves to underline how ideology works in strange and even unintended ways. Not only our idea of reality but also the form in which we learn about it (the form being the television drama or sit-com or even school) often serves to actually obscure and hide reality.

In addition to the two problems of access to knowledge and the form such knowledge is presented to us, such limitations are unfortunately perpetuated by the very people entrusted to advise students: teachers, who tend to advise students from their own experience. After all, what kinds of jobs do teachers of literature know about? You guessed it! Teaching and writing. What else is there?

Of course, despite the myth that English majors are good for nothing but teaching and serving hamburgers with-or-without fries, there are many other fulfilling careers out there for people who can communicate and think critically. Communicating and thinking seem like obvious skills, but as many employers know full well, few people on the planet actually have them. For instance, both governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) need such people. Working for an NGO can be a fun and rewarding job, and one place to start looking for work is Idealist.org. But also government jobs. For instance, the State Department needs people to work in embassies all over the globe, and the main skills one needs to work for the State Department is a criminal-free past and the ability to not be a jerk. (Again, not being a jerk would hardly seem to be a skill at all, but employers will tell you otherwise. And English majors seem to be  especially skillful here, perhaps because of the effect of literature on their subjectivity . . . . Sadly, I have to admit, literature has not endowed me with the skill of jerk-less-ness, and that is just one of the reasons why I could never work for the State Department.)

And although jobs in technology or medicine may seem more lucrative, a UNESCO study once estimated that America’s second largest export is not gadgets or pharmaceuticals, but… can you guess? The entertainment industry! (By the way, if you’re wondering what the largest export is, it’s money; yes, that’s right, we export pieces of paper with our presidents’ faces printed on them. It’s called the finance sector, and China and Saudi Arabia have quite a bit of these pieces of paper in their vaults.) The entertainment industry includes movies, television shows, video games, pornography (yes, sad to say, but that’s a big slice of America’s economy), sports, music, magazines, books, etc. And of course, English majors are perfect for all of these jobs, as writers, editors, managers, administrators, producers, etc. To give you an example, a friend of mine was a painter, and one day a random guy was looking at her paintings and offered her a very lucrative job. It turns out he designed video games, and he wanted her to design the background for a new NASCAR video game . . . . Cha ching! Money.

And of course, any university’s career center will have dozens of other possibilities, and there is even a book called Jobs for English Majors. So, taking a gander at books such as that (though I advise always gandering with some skepticism) and taking advantage of the staff who work in career center are a must — the sooner you do so, the better — but keep in mind that the career center and myself are often behind the trend. For instance, in the mid-1990s, back when the internet was just becoming mainstream (and when I was just graduating from college with my seemingly useless English degree), probably the best thing an English major could have done was to learn HTML and start designing web pages. At that time, the web was new, and HTML was easy to learn, and who better to design a website than somebody who understands the creative process of representation? Many of my English major friends did just that, and are now millionaires, but no career service center would have thought in 1995 to suggest as much. What’s the moral of the story? It’s this: pay attention to what’s going on in the world. And how does one do that? Ummm…. newspapers and magazines, duh.

It’s Good to Defer
One of the myths that causes so much anxiety is the notion that one must decide one’s career. Some feel that choosing a career is not only about finding a way to pay rent and buy food but also an expression of their core being. This feeling is also an example of how ideology works on you (or, as Althusser and Foucault suggest, works on subjects), and seems to me to come from the Protestant work ethic that defines your relation to God in terms of your labor. But the fact is, people change careers often, and the real fact of it is, you never really know whether you are that person until you try it.

What troubles me is that many seem to believe that the best way to defer choosing a career is by going to graduate school. This is, however, probably the worst way to defer, because you never get to test out real career paths. I suspect the notion that more education will make you a better person and better job candidate is also ideological — derived from the liberal belief that everyone can, and should, go to college, because that’s how one achieves the American dream. But more school is not always the answer. So, my advice is to defer choosing not by avoiding the world of work, but to defer choosing by experimenting with real jobs. Thinking about going to law school? Instead, why not work as a legal assistant for a law firm or get a job at an NGO such as the AFL-CIO, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, or Greenpeace that engage with legal matters. There are thousands of these NGOs, of all shapes, sizes, and colors. The upshot here is this: only when you really know what you want to do should you actually start applying to graduate school.

Choosing a Graduate School
So, what if you want to go to graduate school to become… a real, bonafied author… or a professor? Although this is the path I chose, I often find myself counseling students to be cautious about choosing it for themselves. People seem to believe that getting a Ph.D. is a sure way to a successful life, but here again is a myth perpetuated by television and movies. I personally know a few Ph.D.’s in literature who barely make enough money to eat because there just weren’t any jobs for them out there. And since American ideology seems not to value educators as much as it used to, government spending for higher education continues to decline (when measured against inflation and cost), which forces universities to cut back on their hiring of professors, as Michael Bérubé has discussed in his book The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies.

In addition, many people don’t realize what the professional aspects of being a professor really are and the amount of scrutiny that both graduate students and professors are subject to, as Greg Semenza has written about in his recent book, Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. Again, I think this is in part due to TV stereotypes, but I also think such stereotypes are in some cases politically motivated. When Fox television represents professors as silly fools or bizarre geniuses, then Fox “news” can more easily ignore or dismiss the expert opinions that professors have to give on such controversial topics as Iraqi culture, the environment, and the death penalty.

But, if a career as a writer or as a professor is what one really desires, then the question becomes which school?  There are many resources out there – whole books on the subject — and certainly magazines such as the U.S. News and World Reports is famous for ranking colleges and graduate programs. But even more useful than a ranking is information about what kind of program the school has, and the Modern Language Association (MLA) actually has a guide to doctoral programs, which explains what the program really has to offer in terms of financial assistance and courses. (The MLA is also a place one can get a job, by the way.)

Another blogger has done a very comprehensive study on MFA programs in creative writing, which I wholeheartedly recommend you check out. But like many guides to graduate school, he left out some important information. First, rankings are based largely upon reputation, and though reputation is important, it doesn’t tell you what kind of training you will receive there. Some of the highest ranked schools are ranked highly only because they have famous professors . . . . And guess what? Sometimes famous professors are way too busy being famous to actually teach or advise their graduate students. So, although rank always matters, and we can’t pretend it doesn’t, sometimes high-ranking programs are not very good at training graduate students and preparing them for the job market. 

In addition, sometimes location matters. Universities in big cities will give you the advantage of access to many cultural resources such as theaters, libraries, and other schools . . . not to mention airports so you can more easily go places (like home). But rural universities will give you the advantage of greater sense of community and access to your faculty, who have nothing better to do than spend time with you. It’s a toss up as to which is better, urban or rural, but really, you should go to a place where you feel you can flourish. Because if you don’t flourish where you are, then the whole graduate adventure will not take you where you want to go. In other words, while rankings are somewhat important, they aren’t the be-all-end-all.

For instance, rankings won’t tell you about the personality of a graduate program. Some MFA programs are theory-phobic, and others (such as St. Mary’s College of California) is more theory-friendly. (In St. Mary’s case, though, it is mainly a particular kind of theory–modernism – which it mentions on its website.) And some creative writing or Ph.D. departments in English have close relations to other disciplines such as gender studies, Latino/a studies, or world literature. These affiliated disciplines may not seem important initially, but all Ph.D. programs require that one person on your dissertation committee be from outside the English department. And in addition to all of that, it is also the case that most of the interesting work being done right now is interdisciplinary.

But all things considered, the most useful advice I can give is this: apply to programs that have faculty whom you know about. Of course, you’re probably wondering how the heck you could know them, but it’s easier than you think. All colleges and universities regularly invite professors and authors from other colleges. For instance, my school just had three poets visit and read their work last week, and all three of them teach at other colleges. So, when there are such literary and academic events on your campus, I suggest that you go to them. And if you like the people and like what they do, then find out where they teach… and maybe read some more of their work.

This same principle can also be applied in another way. Even if you’ve never seen or met an author, you will often read recently published books or articles in your classes and when you do research papers. If you read something that you really like, then find out where that author teaches. Quite possibly, it might be a good place to apply, and in your “application essay,” you will actually be able to tell of a real, personal connection between you and the graduate program to which you are applying. The upshot of all this is that choosing a graduate school is not something that you all 0f a suddent start to do. Your entire undergraduate experience and education, in essence, has prepared the way for that choice.

The problem is that (again, for ideological reasons), students fail to notice the context of that choice. As Karl Marx points out in his famous chapter on the commodity fetish, the value of a commodity is not simply natural. It is social and historical. So, when you are looking for a graduate school, don’t buy into the ideology of the marketplace and think you can choose a graduate school the same way that you might choose a pair of pants at Macy’s. Instead, prepare early.

Preparing Early
And this leads me to my final point: preparing early. As I mentioned, you never really know who you are or what you want to be until you start doing it. You may think you know what you are, but as Foucault points out, your subjectivity is socially constructed. And even if you don’t agree with Foucault and believe in a God-given soul that is wonderfully unique and unaffected by the world around you — an ideology that is very convenient for capitalist countries, since it allows them to ignore the socio-economic conditions in which people live — you might still agree that the eternal soul is not exactly the easiest thing to actually understand.

So, in addition to getting good grades (since, these days, few graduate schools will pay much attention to your application if you have below a 3.5 GPA), you should also do extra-curricular activities such as the school newspaper or literary society or even a basketball team. All of these things not only will help you figure out what you want to do with your life but also give you something to put on your résumé — something that will demonstrate to future employers that you are a real person. Or, alternatively, you might do volunteer work such as caring for children or tutoring immigrants in English. For summers, try to find internships in various fields so you can see what they are like and gain experience. Your career center will have all sorts of information about such opportunities. Of course, the problem is that many of these internships (such as internships at publishers or magazines) are often unpaid, and some of you may need to make money by serving burgers with-or-without fries. But if that’s the case, then find an internship that’s only ten hours a week, so you can work full time as well.

Conclusion
In this blog post, in addition to offering some concrete information about what one could do and where one can look, I’ve also tried to give you the intellectual tools for critically thinking through the ideological baggage that might get in your way. Obviously, I don’t have all the answers, and you’ll need to figure things out for yousefl.

But I suppose, all things considered, I do have a thesis, and it is this: experiment, experiment, experiment. In other words, you do not have to make one single be-all-end-all choice. You do not have to figure out who you truly are (as if this were even possible.) Rather, you learn, develop, and improve yourself through a series of experiments — trial and error. When does this experimenting start? You’re doing it already. Do it more.

Good luck!