Seven Red

So I saw a good talk today by one of my colleagues (MC), who discussed the teaching of intellectual property and its relationship to writing. This has been, of course, the major (and perhaps dominant) topic in the field of writing studies since the mid-1990′s, as I never tire of noting. MC has designed a graduate course on writing and intellectual property, and is currently working on an edited collection on the same. All good. In any case, his talk today was about the framework he’s trying to establish for an undergraduate course on writing and intellectual property in a “digital age,” so he basically laid out four primary topics that such a course should address. For my money, the suspect category was something like “development of a personal ethic for information production.” As I understood it, he had his graduate students articulate what kinds of licenses they’d prefer for their digital work, which could range from standard copyright, to the various levels of Creative Commons licenses, to pure public domain release. Through this discussion, students would have to better understand the ethical decisions they make when they use others’ works or release their own, etc. It should be said that this development of an ethical relationship, and understanding the emerging ethics of digital production, has been the primary answer that the field of writing studies has offered up in the face of the expanding copyright regime, together with various disputations on fair use doctrine and similar activist related issues. MC, for example, cited the now oft-quoted DeVoss and Porter article (“Why Napster Matters to Writing”), which is all about rethinking the ethics of digital production through the rhetorical canon of delivery, asking students, ultimately, to consider why they are writing/producing/remixing, etc. It’s this seemingly telescoped turn to an ethics that I’d like to discuss a bit here, and I’ll do that by pausing on one of the keywords of MC’s talk, the category of the prosumer.

Prosumer, of course, is a conflation of the producer and the consumer, the point being that production is itself now available to consumers in a way it wasn’t for, say, the automobile. The term is a classic of the shift toward postindustrial social organization and neoliberal economics, coined in its modern version by Alvin Toffler sometime during the late 1970′s or early 1980′s. It has since become doxa in internet lore, and even normally careful analysts like Mark Poster can’t quite help themselves in attachment to the concept (see, for example, Poster’s discussion on capitalism’s “linguistic turn” in What’s the Matter with the Internet). In a very quotidian way, the prosumer is a manifest feature of digital production: once goods can be digitally encoded, or once digitally encoded material really starts to function as value, all the typical prosumer activities that were certainly present in largely analogue production become the key point of conflict, since the means to control scarcity evaporate, or at least become more difficult. MC provided the example of a family using a song as background music for a video of kids dancing (recently pulled from YouTube after a cease and desist letter was issued), but we all know the stories about the ease and quality and conflicts of digital production by now. Say, blogging. I’m more interested in the way the prosumer, as a category designating a particular kind of work, gets hooked back into this dominant discourse of ethics.

Because it appears to me that a very particular conceptual shift happens alongside the collapse of industrial production into this mixed production/consumption dyad, and it got played out today precisely in MC’s pedagogical program to have students develop a personal ethics of digital production. Consider, for example, a program designed to teach the industrial worker how to develop a “personal ethic” of production. I have no doubt that many such programs existed (indeed, they might be said to be the very driving force behind the development of public education!), but it would take a fairly recalcitrant liberalism to insist that line workers chose, on some kind of individual basis, a personal ethic of production. Rather, the worker developed a relationship toward production through the act of laboring within a very particular set of forces. We don’t have to presume a reductionist theory of class consciousness to suggest that something about the worker’s relationship toward industrial work – and, indeed, a collective relationship given the mode of production – emerged out of the material processes of work itself and the sets of forces on the shopfloor and in the economy at large.

When I brought this up in relation to the prosumer, MC first suggested that the prosumer wasn’t really an economic category. Needless to say, I found this shocking answer unsatisfying.  You also wouldn’t need some wacky reductionist Marxism to say that if you take the category of producer/production, a fundamentally economic category, and marry it (which is to say, eliminate the mediation) with the category of consumer/consumption, another fundamentally economic category, you might end up with, well, an economic category. That the discussion with the other questioners centered around deriving a “benefit” from one’s digital production would also make MC’s answer problematic. That is, wrong. But I quickly gleaned what the problem was: MC then suggested that – contra the industrial worker – the “production” of the prosumer doesn’t necessarily take place within what he called an “institution” (presumably the factory, though he mentioned the office and “for pay” work of technical writers). In other words, he seemed to remove the label of the “economic” precisely from those acts of production that would seem to be located in traditional spaces of leisure/reproduction, which is to say, consumption. If the prosumer wasn’t an economic category, it was because not all prosumption (as production) takes place “at work,” where work is a traditional space of production. That seemed to be the gist of it. I am feigning some surprise here. MC’s conceptual moves happen to be the standard response in most discussions of the prosumer; they are, however, precisely the move you cannot make if you buy into or take seriously the category of the prosumer. If you marry the category of producer and consumer, you cannot then turn around and say that those things produced by the prosumer are not work because they don’t happen in a traditional site of labor. You can’t turn to traditional sites of consumption, reproduction, and leisure (the video of the kids dancing) as an escape from labor and the economic!  Once you have the prosumer, you have labor spread across the whole social body. The prosumer, in this sense, is a fundamental element of Post-Fordism, because the category denotes that work is no longer isolated in sites of enclosure, nor ordered according to the top-down imperatives of scientific management.

However incoherent these conceptual moves might be, they do perform a kind of magic trick once they invest the category of the prosumer. It’s easy enough to say that they strip particular activities from the category of labor. I can’t tell you how often I get the blank stare from both liberals and labor activists when I suggest that remixing a YouTube video or submitting a T-shirt design to Threadless might be – gasp – labor. The liberals generally perform the same song and dance that MC did to escape the economic, while the labor activists hem-haw about the dignity of factory work or the poverty of hotel maids and adjunct faculty or some such. The only group that maybe gets it are the hard-core digital capitalists, who say of course it’s labor, but it’s not exploited labor, since the winner of the T-shirt contest gets paid (this is Jeff Howe’s ideological defense in Crowdsourcing), while the YouTube video producer gets enjoyment (production is a leisure activity!), reputation, and perhaps a job out of it!  Well, fantastic then. That both the YouTube video and the countless losing submissions and ratings on Threadless build value for these sites is ostensibly beside the point for Howe and others. So it’s easy enough to say that such activities are labor, however much such an analysis draws the blank stare. But the real operation is not the negative slicing of labor out of the prosumer category, but rather the way consumption and entrepreneurialism take over the category. Consider the category itself: it is made up of production, on the one hand, and consumption, on the other. Easy enough. But production is, of course, itself split in traditional analysis into capital and labor, while consumption plunges one back into the private realm of either biological necessity (reproduction) or choice (leisure). The whole conceptual trick of the prosumer category involves retaining the positions of capital and consumption, while eliminating the position of labor. And what this might reveal is that the subjectivity of the capitalist producer and the subjectivity of the consumer can serve similar purposes in that they appear to develop independently (appear, zu sein scheinen, in the classical sense, is key here). The subjectivity of labor, on the other hand, remains problematic because it always develops in confrontation with modes, forces, and the organization of production. The consumer and the entrepreneur get to choose, apparently, and thus the prosumer becomes the key topos of choice. They may even get the choice to collectively organize, like the Digg “rioters” did when the site – produced entirely by its “contributors,” incidentally – briefly succumbed to a cease and desist order on HD-DVD encryption codes. The prosumer, in this sense, gets everything it wants. What it doesn’t get is a determinative and material relation to a mode of production, which is considered passé , in any case.(This is where even extremely smart commentators like Mackenzie Wark fall short, in my view).

What, then, is the pedagogical upshot of this conceptual sleight of hand? It is, of course, the flailing over “fair use,” on the one hand, and the concomitant “teaching” of personal ethical codes on the other. And really, what else is a producer (sans material relation to work)/consumer to do but choose a perhaps profitable and pleasurable “ethical code” as regards his or her own productive and consumptive activities? Needless to say, all this is presented (and I’m not talking about only MC, but the majority of the field) as some kind of “resistance” to the exploitative expansion of copyright on the part of the content industries. A better example of out of the frying pan and into the fire of neoliberal logic would be hard to construct. The whole discourse of developing a digital ethic of production, in any case, seems contaminated by precisely such a logic. Put another way, these various ethical lessons, which include every version of so-called “context” except serious engagement with the material conditions and forces of production (passé, remember?), strike me as formal training in a particular mode of capitalist thought, whatever their results might be in terms of content. I’d be pleased if research moved off the copyright and fair use issues and began really investigating these prosumer forms as actual sites of labor. That means serious ethnography, to be sure, but it also means reconceptualizing the space and subjectvity of work.

This post is then a kind of preamble, quick and dirty and mostly forced by MC’s talk, to the post I promised about contribution. I’ll have to hold off on that one for now, but I want to tease it a bit here. Christian Marazzi, as one of my Weekly Mantras once noted, argues that the new economy was both a technological and financial transformation, and I think it’s important that we hold those two spheres very closely in any analysis of where we now stand, in writing studies and otherwise. Writing studies is, of course, very big on “technology,” and damn near embarrassing on finance; all the more reason to insist on the latter. So if I could suggest an analogy here, I’d go back to Marazzi. He claims that one of the major financial shifts (which came online along with the prosumer, and at roughly the same time) was the transformation of household savings, in the form of pension funds, into investment capital, a phenomenon Marazzi calls financialization. Of course, one of the primary vehicles of financialization was the infamous 401(K), a defined-contribution plan that differed from the traditional union-preferred defined-benefit plan. No longer merely compensation for work, the 401(K) – and it’s hard to believe  now that it only came into existence in 1981 – transforms its bearer into both a consumer of securities and entrepreneur, a shareholder rather than a worker, “prepared to fire himself if Wall Street should demand it” (Marazzi 22). It’s a bit of hyperbole, for sure, but I’m not convinced we can so easily disentangle – as a subjective matter – the sense of contributing to ones 401(k) and the fascination with the category of contribution in the digital domain. The revolution in technologies and financialization, to put it another way, involved a revolutiuon in consciousness, the effect of which was to disrupt or short-circuit the determinative relationship between material production and subjectivization. Aren’t these the stakes of installing a so-called personal ethics of production in our lovely remixers? And maybe that’s where I’ll pick up next time.

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