Writing After Print Capitalism

Author(s): John Trimbur

Source: JAC , 2012, Vol. 32, No. 3/4, Economies of Writing (2012), pp. 723-731
Published by: JAC

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41709850

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 Response Essays

Writing After Print Capitalism

JohnTrimbur

The 20 1 2 Watson Conference raises interesting, complicated questions

about what the term "economies of writing" might mean in U.S. college
composition. I think immediately, for example, of the economic history of
writing and publishing, Elizabeth Eisenstein' s The Printing Press as an
Agent of Change, the effects of movable type, the attribution of texts to
authors, the emergence of copyright law, the rise of mass literacy,
compulsory schooling, and a literary marketplace. This is the familiar
world of print capitalism - Benedict Anderson's memorable term in
Imagined Communities , his study ofthe formation of national conscious-
ness among North and South American creóles based on their recognition
of others like themselves across geographical and semiotic space through
print-language. Then my mind jumps ahead to the role writing plays right
now, as a productive force in the global economy adding sign value to
commodities through branding and advertising, managing just-in-time
production and distribution, localizing new technologies and business
practices across languages, creating new forms of information-wealth in
the knowledge economy. At the 2010 Watson Conference, in "When
People Write for Pay," Deborah Brandt identified these two sides of
literacy, past and present, as a "transformation" from "mass reading
literacy" to "mass writing literacy," in effect setting the groundwork to
link the 20 1 0 conference ' s emphasis on "working English" to "economies

jac 32.3-4 (2012)

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724 jac

of writing" at the 20
relations between div
rhetoric and composi
Brandt's work has a
workplaces, the condit
and what writing for
any meaningful sens
namely, an attention to
of work, the processes
and the appropriation
another facet of prin
class formation. Part o
that it extends the li
capitalism and mass r
the era of digital capit
entanglements Richa
national market, the
managerial classes at
order of post- 1 989 n
downward mobility an
caught in the maelstr
Among the 20 1 2 Wat
in Theresa Lillis' s "Ec
tion: The Case of Eng
terrain shifts from
corporatized), with a
tion plays as the adju
academics in Hungar
us to see is how trans
the margins of Europe
institutions" of the
indexes and the rankin
term economies of w
capital and its circula
systems of credit and
global markets: the me

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 Response Essays 725

on a world scale as the means of producing wealth

profits.
I single out Lillis's paper because it locates what she calls "economies
of signs" in a world system that is based on the unequal distribution of
linguistic and other semiotic resources of representation. To my mind, this
is a necessary starting point to imagine how the notion "economies of
writing" might work in writing studies, this time to reframe such familiar
notions of writing as literate events and practices in New Literacy
Studies; multimodal designs in Gunther Kress's social semiotics and the
New London Group's pedagogy of multiliteracies; and genre sets, genre
systems, and activity fields in the work of Amy Devitt, Charles Bazerman,
David R. Russell, and others in rhetoric-inflected U.S. writing studies. T o
think in terms of a world system, where core and periphery are linked in
unequal relations, complicates our previous understandings ofhow writing
is produced, how it articulates interests and identities, and how it takes on
worldly consequence.
For one thing, to see the relation of texts to each other in a world
system is a matter not just of recognizing differences in features, contexts,
and uses across forms of writing - these have been amply documented in
writing studies, in the various types of work just mentioned - but of
emphasizing how stratification of forms of writing and unequal distri-
bution of rhetorical agency join core and periphery together in relations
of inequality. Differences in forms of writing amount to differences in
what Jan Blommaert calls "semiotic mobility," the capacity to have
effective voice or, to put it more sharply, the differential ability to plug into
the transnational hierarchies of linguistic and semiotic systems, the
available means of communication and influence (Blommaert 3).
Second, locating forms of writing in a stratified world system provides
a much needed counterpoint to globalization theories in writing studies and
elsewhere that represent the circulation of writing as virtually frictionless,
where digital signals transmit texts, knowledge, and information electroni-
cally across global networks. The task of a world system perspective in
this instance is to bring writing out of the ether, making its circulation and
its economies visible, not as an unimpeded flow across smooth cyber
surfaces but as what James Ferguson calls "point-to-point connectivity"
that links premium places across the globe to a metropolitan core and by-

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 726 jac

passes the switched-o

economy of writing to
system guarantee th
remain locked togeth
grievance.
The time comes to ask why we are talking at all about economies of
writing and why at the present moment. What impetus or set of
circumstances has led us to these terms, with all their affiliations and
connotations? Why does the very idea of economies of writing seem so
eminently sensible today, a nearly inevitable frame of reference? One
could say, with some truth, that posing the question of writing in terms of
economics amounts to intellectual fallout from the wider marketization of

consciousness that can be traced back to the Reagan-Thatcher years,

when the market was personified as thinking on its own and capable of
acting on its own behalf. Since the 1 980s, the market has acquired a kind
of rhetorical stature, a bullying sense of exigency made plain in Margaret
Thatcher's "there is no alternative."
The market has infiltrated the discourse of public life, insinuating itself
into our sense of what is real and important. NPR and the respectable
press at the New York Times and the Washington Post, for example, are
endlessly reporting on how the market "feels" about things and how it
"responds" to events - say, to a recent turn in the European debt crisis, or
the latest unemployment figures or housing starts in the U.S., or strikes
against austerity in Greece or Italy or the U.K. We are supposed to care
about what the market "likes" or "fears," what it wants us to do, and how
to take care of it. Habermas' tripartite division of modernity seemingly has
collapsed, as the market takes over the state and civil society, colonizing
governmentality and life worlds alike. The youthful idealism of political
activism has been repurposed as social entrepreneurship, and viral
marketing has replaced protest in a revamped NGO sphere. The market
becomes, in effect, the only truly telling measure of concern for the future
and the only way to make decisions. If anything, the market dissolves the
very idea of a polity into itself, in the privatization of consciousness that
resides at the heart of neoliberalism, turning citizens from rhetorical
agents into economic atoms - investors, entrepreneurs, consumers,
taxpayers.

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 Response Essays 727

What underwrites this relentless marketization

quite simply the persistence of capitalism, in a la
form, into the twenty-first century - the tragic legac
failure to replace it. Any proper economics of writ
how capitalism has weathered a series of crises
through what David Harvey calls "accumulation b
fake bankruptcies, privatizations, corporate raiding
tural adjustments by which capitalism has survived
riskobjectifyinghistory and accordingasenseofinev
"there is no alternative" unless we understand what
and how the rise of neoliberalism was based on the Left's thwarted
struggles against capitalism. This is the piece of history that is too
frequently omitted from characterizations of neoliberalism, making today' s
free marketeering appear to be self-propagating, the logical expression
and explanation of its own success. The fact is that the high tide of
globalization and the crises it has brought with it, and will continue to bring,
are premised not on the merits or the performance of the system (the 2008
crash should dispel any residual illusions about that) but on the relation of
forces between capital and labor and the fortunes of the Left. The
Reagan-Thatcher version of victorious neoliberalism is based, after all, on
smashing the strikes of the air controllers union in the U. S . and the miners
union in the U.K., class struggle to drive down wages, undermine the labor
movement, and bring the post-war settlement between government,
business, and the unions to a screeching halt.
Theconditionsofpossibilityforneoliberalismtosinkroots in the final
decades of the twentieth century can be backdated, at their most iconic,
to the failure of the French student-workers alliance to overthrow

Gaullism, as the Utopian energies and revolutionary imagination of 1 968

fizzled out and a psychic Thermidor followed in the eighties and nineties,
demobilizing and disorienting the Left, emboldening mischief and
meanspiritedness on the Right, and resulting finally in the triangulations of
Blair and Clinton's new centrism and its more genial approach to
dismantling the social state in the name of freedom, consumer choice, and
personal responsibility. Even more tellingly, the fall of the Stalinized
workers' states in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union appeared to verify
the betrayals of Marxism and the moral superiority of the market while

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728 jac

transferring massive
hands, robbing the peo
wealth in post- 1989 an
last great battle fough
1960s - the revolutio
Many Vietnams" and
fighter - took place in
Angola, at Cuito Cu
supported Angolan
apartheid South Afri
in the biggest battle
By the time the new
was already discredit
assassination, civil wa
the Middle East, clear
Arabia, Iran, Indonesi
mass labor movement
international network
of the people. In the
Fanon' s writings have
heroic anti-colonial st
misgiving on the part
national consciousnes
debt slavery of the po
structural destitution
The picture of the L
do not mean to imply
sporadic outbursts of
ington, D.C., Genoa,
spontaneous eruption
discontent and the pow
The point I want to ma
sheer longevity and t
weigh heavily on our
alternatives, but whi
emerged in clear relie

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 Response Essays 729

eras that have been periodized variously as fordis

manufacturing and knowledge economies, mass rea
writing literacy, trying to understand the transition,
it, "from the perspective of people living through
We know we are living in some important r
capitalism, but the very notion of digital capit
designation) as its logical heir has done more perh
we view the past than to clarify the present or fut
seem initially to be significant differences between p
of writing frequently dissolve on closer inspection. Th
Benedict Anderson ' s creole nationalists, for example,
space as anything digital capitalism can call up, a so
and simultaneity produced by print-language. Lik
multimodal becomes available, it can be identified
communication as much as new media. Consider
analysis of how early nineteenth-century survey
reports on poverty and public health combined
narrative commentary in what we might today c
designs, with different rhetorical authority and claim
numbers, as factual, and to words, as interpretive
examples, including the telegraph as a remediation of
tion explosion. To my mind, the fuss about digital rh
composition 2.0 amounts in a certain sense to the
are supposedly leaving behind in order to make the pr
from this perspective, the impulse to periodize eco
and present is itself an attempt to resolve the blu
situation we find ourselves in, to get some traction on
in-betweenness by coming to terms with the sent
the persistence of late capitalism and the human desir
prison of suspended animation.
Economies of writing go back invariably to the hou
we dwell, in both etymological and literal terms, as th
activity. One of the lessons of the 2012 Watson con
how we imagine our footing in this world, where
places settled and occupied by the political econom
Persistent forms of nationalism and the instrumental

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 730 jac

appear quite strikingly

Cherokee syllabary (
scholarly publicatio
nationalism, Marxism
Chicago's Puerto Rica
riculum and testing r
though you say the
summoned as the "im
present. The key rec
estate of composition
values are determined
and teach to measure t
cutoffs that make it a
of being at home and n
periphery - in U.S. c
outpost in the global En
in the days of late ca
Emerso
Boston, M

Works Cited

"2012 Conference Theme." Thomas R. Watson Conference Website. 17 Jan. 2012.

<http://louisville.edu/conference/watson/2012-conference-theme.html>

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991.

Blommaert, Jan. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 2010.

Brandt, Deborah. "WhenPeople Write for Pay.'V^C29. 1-2 (2009): 165-97.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1979.

Ferguson, James. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order.

Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006.

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 Response Essays 73 1

Harvey, David. A Brief History ofNeoliberalism. New Yor

Mbembe, Achille. "Fanon's Nightmare, Our Reality." Ma

201 1. <http://mg.co.za/article/201 l-12-23-fanons-nigh

Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems

Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago

WWW

The Nature and Value of Work

in Rhetoric and Composition

Carrie Byars Kilfoil

In several of the essays included in this special issue, discussion focuses

on the ways in which rhetoric and composition rests on the shaky ground
of shifting economic systems, and particularly, how its labor (writing
teaching, learning, and scholarship) is being (re)conceived and, subse-
quently, (re)"priced" in an emerging, fast capitalist knowledge economy.
In these discussions, two primary views of composition - its work, and the
value ofthat work - circulated: one in which composition is conceived of
in terms of "cheap," mechanical labor transmitting rote, discrete, and a-
contextual skills, and the other, in which composition is seen as intellectu-
ally "rich," complex, and situated, a domain of serious theoretical inquiry
and research. The first view is prevalent among and typically associated
with disciplinary outsiders (university administrators, policymakers) who
crucially affect the ways in which the field goes about its business through
the allocation of funding and other resources; the second is prevalent
among and typically associated with disciplinary insiders (faculty, gradu-
ate students) who are eager to earn recognition in the academic commu-
nity of scholars and to secure better working conditions and increased

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