Academic Kindness

A small blog, but I approve.

Anonymous Blogging and Academic Freedom

The AAUP has updated its report on Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications. Below are some salient excerpts:

Academic freedom, free inquiry, and freedom of expression within the academic community may be limited to no greater extent in electronic format than they are in print, save for the most unusual situation where the very nature of the medium itself might warrant unusual restrictions—and even then only to the extent that such differences demand exceptions or variations. Such obvious differences between old and new media as the vastly greater speed of digital communication, and the far wider audiences that electronic messages may reach, would not, for example, warrant any relaxation of the rigorous precepts of academic freedom. 

The basic precept in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure that 'teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results' applies with no less force to the use of electronic media for the conduct of research and the dissemination of findings and results than it applies to the use of more traditional media. 

a classroom is not simply a physical space, but any location, real or virtual, in which instruction occurs, and that in classrooms of all types the protections of academic freedom and of the faculty's rights to intellectual property in lectures, syllabi, exams, and similar materials are as applicable as they have been in the physical classroom. 

The AAUP has upheld the right of faculty members to speak freely about internal university affairs as a fundamental principle of academic freedom that applies as much to electronic communications as it does to written and oral communications. This includes the right of faculty members to communicate with one another about their conditions of employment and to organize on their own behalf. 

faculty members cannot be held responsible for always indicating that they are speaking as individuals and not in the name of their institution, especially if doing so will place an undue burden on the faculty member's ability to express views in electronic media.  

social media can be used to make extramural utterances, which are protected under principles of academic freedom. Obviously, the literal distinction between “extramural” and “intramural” speech—speech outside or inside the university’s walls—has little meaning in the world of cyberspace. But the fundamental meaning of extramural speech, as a shorthand for speech in the public sphere and not in one’s area of academic expertise, fully applies in the realm of electronic communications, including social media. 

So why am I still blogging anonymously? Suggestions?

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Reorganizing Again

I'm back.

My university is once again engaged in its periodic and inscrutable reorganization of my academic life. So once again I find myself in need of a creative outlet. So, blogging it is.

Wiki Wonderlands

Via:

The Georgia Institute of Technology has stripped, at least for now, more than 10 years of class work from its collaborative-learning Web sites, known as Swikis. 

Following a student’s complaint to the university that his name was listed on the Web site of a public course, Georgia Tech officials decided on Monday to remove all Swikis other than ones from the current semester, said Mark Guzdial, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing, who is a co-creator of the Swikis. 

He reported the development on his Computing Education blog this week. (The tech journalist Audrey Watters picked it up on her blog.) 

In his post, Mr. Guzdial recounts how he and two Ph.D. students created the Swiki, or CoWeb, in 2000, so that students would have a place to “construct public entities on the Web.” The Swikis served intentionally undefined purposes, such as providing a forum for cross-semester discussions and a home for public galleries of student work. “All of that ended yesterday,” he wrote, because of Georgia Tech’s concerns about Ferpa, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

This seems a case of an administration over reacting to the barest hint of a legal challenge. My best guess is that the only part of this that might be covered by FERPA is identifying student posts by full name on a university course site. Identifying posts by a user handle, initials, etc., would be fine.

If the blogs themselves were public and hosted on blogger or tumblr rather than on a password protected university server, there never would have been a temptation to identify posts with students' full, legal names. In addition, students would maintain full control over what information remained online after the end of the course, not the university. I don't think there is anything in FERPA that prevents students from identifying themselves, their work, or the courses they took online. FERPA simply prevents the institution from publishing this information.

Deleting all the student authored wikis at Georgia Tech seems a very rash act.

The Beginning Is Near

photo by Steve Kube

This is one of my favorite photos from my local Occupy Movement.

I'm repurposing the photo, though, to mark my own re-occupation of my blog. I've had a long enough respite from blogging and plan to plunge back in to my former habit of occasional posts on my research, academic labor, politics, and snark. There's much to discuss.

Blogging's Barbarisms

In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin writes:

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. (Illuminations, 256)

I'm interested in the ways blogging also exhibits this barbarism. Discuss.

Lumpen Cats

I've decided to stop blogging about Marx, academic labor and the state of higher education. It's all just too stressful. Instead, until further notice, I will be blogging exclusively about cats.

Despair Wear

I like this shirt. I may need it.


I even like the name of the company selling it. DespairWear. Clothes Make the Man. These Clothes Make the Man Sad. :-(

Wordle

Lumpen Haiku

The Doctor Isn't
finds a blog haiku machine
curious and strange

Haiku2 for lumpenprofessoriat
predations there are certainly problems with work in academia
@ aboutmylife.netadvogato.orgblogger.comblogs.gnome.orgblogspot.comdeadjournal.comgreatestjournal.cominsanejournal.comlivejournal.commyspace.comspaces.msn.com
Created by Grahame

Searching for Spring Break...

Lumpenprofessoriat, your number one spot on the World Wide Web for spring break photos! Somebody please explain this google image search result to me:

"spring break crowd"

How does this dry and obscure academic blog come up number one on the search page and ahead of such sites as: coolestspringbreak.com, springbreakgirl.net and even springbreakhoes.info? wtf??

Be a Footnote!

Limited, Inc. needs our help. Secure your place as a footnote in intellectual history, by giving generously to help Roger pay his bills. Just follow the convenient PayPal link at the bottom of the page on Limited, Inc. and be a footnote now!

Parents Strongly Cautioned

By way of Professor Zero. Note to self: must strive to use saltier language in the future. "Dead," "hell," and "bastard" were the worst this gizmo could find in my blog.

Fire Blogging

July wasn't a very productive month for blogging for the LumpenProf. My attention hasn't been online -- which isn't really a terrible thing. But I've started to miss my online exchanges, so it's time to start back again. August will be a much better month to blog, I think, if for no other reason than that I'll need the distraction from all the other reading and writing I ought to be doing to get ready for the school year.

This afternoon I'm burning a pile of lumber scraps in the front yard. Somehow, blogging on the front porch swing while drinking a beer and listening to the amazingly loud pops and cracks of some of the venerable, but sadly useless and rotting, American Chestnut boards on the bonfire seems like the thing to do.

I haven't really posted since I got tagged by the Combat Philosopher for the 8 things meme. Like the CP, I'm also somewhat ambivalent about these memes, since they seem to be the blog equivalent of chain letters. But since they are mostly harmless and innocuous chain letters, I'll play along. With one proviso. I hereby proclaim that I will accept any and all resulting bad karma for any of the folks I tag who do not wish to play. So, without further ado, here are eight lumpenfacts about the LumpenProf:

1. I'm currently learning to play clawhammer banjo. It's strangely relaxing. Plus, I have a beautiful old Luscomb banjo from the 1890's that's nice to hold and plunk on.
2. Another musical factoid, in college I once played guitar with a blues band that played in the bar where the bloody final shootout would be filmed for Robert Rodriguez' Desperado. As I recall, we set up right about where Antonio Banderas leaves the pile of dead bodies.
3. I once shook hands with the father of the voice of Alvin the Chipmunk.
4. I went to grad school with Mr. Limited, Inc. who is still the smartest man I know.
5. I habitually read Catch-22. I don't know why.
6. Sometimes, when I'm feeling happy, I brew beer. It's pretty good beer too.
7. Wherever I am, but especially when I'm traveling, strangers stop me on the street to ask me directions. I used to think this happened to everyone. But evidently not. I must look either exceptionally knowledgeable, or exceptionally harmless. Or both.
8. I can handle a snake whip.

Now I will pass on this dubious honor to the following eight bloggers: Limited, Inc., What in the hell, Wildly Parenthetical, Professor Zero, Genderquake, notes of a neophyte, I think and it is so, and Academic Cog. You are all cordially invited to post eight things about yourselves on your blogs and then tag eight more poor unsuspecting bloggers out there.

Some Unlikely Searches

Here are some unusual searches that have brought folks to this site:

"pictures of woodland animal sculls"
animation "the animals" polish
mortarboard animation
does deadwood contain nudity (probably this deadwood rather than this deadwood)
tenure process nightmare (ok, so this one is accurate)
salvador dali tattoos (oddly enough, this one is also accurate)
"fuck your war"
deleuze summer camp

Finally, there was this one:

picachu nude

Desiring Blog Production

This post is in response to a comment below from jreeve as well as to a recent post from Decoys on the continuing discussion of the labor theory of blogging begun on I cite.

jreeve writes:

When I read my kids Sesame Street books, they are also getting an advertisement for Big Bird. This inclusion or citation is a big part of the value of those products: the value of a Big Bird doll as greater than that of a stuffed yellow bird is created not by some inherent goodness of the product but rather by the fact I have developed Big Bird as a significant character for my children.

This seems right to me. It's very hard to avoid participating in the corporate marketing aimed at ourselves and our kids. One of the very first words of my youngest was "Picachu" – which was disturbing for her marxist dad on any number of levels. Asking why kids desire Big Bird or Picachu, though, isn't so far removed from asking Wilhelm Reich's question of why people desire fascism? The question isn't one of value, though, but of use-value. Why do we want the particular things we want? Why do these things come to have a use-value for us? Marx writes:

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.

Marx writes very little about how use-value becomes attached to one thing rather than another. The question of why we desire the things we do isn't one that Marx addresses directly since for Marx's discussion of value, the particular use-value involved "makes no difference." This is one reason for so much later interest in various Freudian supplements to Marx as a way to approach this question of desire. From here, it's only a short step to discussions of Deleuze and Guattari's desiring-production or Zizek's Lacanian riffs. The advertising and branding that capital engages in today is focused on shaping and producing consumer desires for what capital is selling.

Decoyist writes:

Should the value of blogging be measured in economic terms? As L.P. shows, it can be, but as L.P.’s links also show, it can be seen in other terms. Blogging is economically highly unprofitable without returns from other quarters; given this, one might look to Hegelian recognition, were this to offer much profitability itself in the small circles it operates in; alternatively, the blogger might seek to resist the global order in statements that represent their subjectivity in performativity.

What is it that gets a blogger out of bed in the morning? All of the above and none of the above! It is a question of priorities, caprice. It is difficult for one motivation alone to overshadow all other others without extraordinary discharge of energy, a wastefulness lurking where economy (of whatever kind) imposes – no expenditure without loss. The blogger, in considering economic imperatives, embraces the uneconomical.

This also seems right to me, except that what the blogger embraces might better be understood as a variety of different use-values for blogging, including even, its uselessness. What a blogger gets out of his or her blog isn't the same thing as what capital gets out of that blog. This is another way to describe the difference between use-value (the thing workers desire) and value (the thing capital desires). Use-value is always very malleable and the production of new and different use-values is always possible within capital. Capital is extremely tolerant of these innovations in use-value. In fact, capital almost never cares what we use something for as long as we still buy it, and the more different use-values the better since each use-value brings along with it the possibility of a new commodity to sell.

Capital makes no such concessions when it comes to value. While you and I may be able to imagine finding value in many different things – beauty, love, wit, recognition, or cool – capital can only ever value a single thing: labor. The more labor something takes to produce, the more value it has. Capital is not subtle or flexible on this point and capital's hunger for value can't be sated by offering up some substitute source of value. Capital lives on a steady and monotonous diet of dead labor alone. And while you and I may find many different and wondrous use-values for a commodity, capital sees every commodity through its monochromatic lens of labor-time only. Thus, from capital's perspective the value of blogging lays not in the variety of uses the consumers and producers find for their blogs. For capital, blogs can only have value in that the labor put into them helps to produce and reproduce a commodity, in this case, the commodity of labor-power itself. Even the dreams discussed by Decoyist have a place in this production of labor-power. One can't escape working for capital even in sleep, and in so far as our dreams are part of the production and reproduction of ourselves as labor-power for capital they also have value for capital.

jreeve continues:

To push this onto blogging, can't the same be true about the mechanism behind discussing some film or book? Isn't a blog about the films 300 an ad for the film?Is it possible to think of the labor of blogging as creating that kind of value, or are these narratives foreign to Marxism as it stands now?

This also fits with capital's more recent focus on marketing and advertising as ways of shaping and producing consumer desires. Blogs function as consumer produced advertisements for movies and books and certainly capital benefits. This would be yet another facet of the link between blogs and the production of labor-power as desiring-consumers.

Now Blogging at 2.16 GHz

I just got a new computer! I had asked for a modest software upgrade for my old one, but during the end of the fiscal year budget spending bonanza, I ended up with a brand new iMac. It's way cool, but the screen is so big I have the urge to eat popcorn while I check my email. From now on, I will be blogging at 2.16 GHz, although, I will try to type s l o w l y for those of you with less fearsome machines.


And just for grins... according to the labor theory of blogging I've been pursuing, the new computer would constitute an increase in constant capital aimed at making me a more productive blogger, thus further decreasing the socially necessary labor-time needed for blogging and so decreasing, ever so slightly, the value of labor-power for capital resulting in an increase in the rate of surplus-value.

The Use-Value of Blogging

I've argued in two previous posts that most blogs are not commodities themselves, but that they are part of the process for producing the commodity labor-power.

Perhaps an example will help.

Consider a parent telling a bedtime story to their child. The bedtime story itself isn't a commodity. No matter how much enjoyment they find in it, no matter how instructive, no matter how much the kid smiles, or how much time and creativity the parent invests in crafting it, the story is not a commodity. It is not produced for exchange and is not a source of surplus-value for capital. However, in so far as the bedtime story is part of the means of subsistence for the child – like breakfast, t-shirts, school, and cable-tv – then the bedtime story too can be understood as part of the useful labor that goes into producing this next generation of labor-power.

Blogs are like bedtime stories. Blogs are most often not commodities produced for exchange, but they are still part of the useful labor that goes into producing and reproducing the commodity of labor-power. And currently, the vast majority of blogging labor pays just as poorly as telling bedtime stories.

This is one story about the relationship between blogging and capital that can be told, but there are certainly others – stories about immaterial labor, attention economies, or Baudrillard and sign-value. And there may be digital commodities other than blogging that require some new and different kinds of stories be told as well.

However, I'm wary of any story that encourages intellectuals see what they do as something other than, or more important than, labor. As a group, we are too susceptible to the flattery. If nothing else, the story told here has the virtue of connecting blogging and intellectual labor with the much less glamorous economy of unpaid housework and childcare.

Productive vs. Unproductive Blogging

This is a continuation of yesterday's post. More on this topic can also be found here, here and here on I cite as well as here on Foucault Is Dead.

Yesterday, in The Labor Theory of Blogging, I argued that most blogs are not themselves commodities because the vast majority of blogs are not produced for exchange. They are not sold on the market. (Let's ignore the possibility for now that I may be working for free for Google and producing this blog as a commodity for them to sell.) However, even given that most blogs aren't themselves commodities, I think it would be a mistake to conclude that commodity production is not still taking place here in the blogosphere as we work together on the collaborative production and distribution of rants, raves, snark, and other useful information.

In the second half of Jodi Dean's post on Productive Labor, she writes:

The early Marx was concerned with alienated labor. Blogging may be unalienated labor. Even when we are sick of it, we chose to blog. We chose to link, to post, to read, to comment. Blogging's value, then, may escape or elude, at least in part, the commodity form. Capitalists don't want us to know this, so they provide us with indicators that point to possibilities of monetarization: page hits, visits, counts, neighborhoods, stats, referrers, totals. Somehow these numbers give us a sense of value. But this is misleading because, again, a different kind of value is produced.

What sort of value? Is it a value of self-knowledge or self-display or even just a momentary sense of self? Is it a value of connection, of hope, or possibility, of the positing others who read and react? How might we best conceive the value of blogging?

I think the claim that "Blogging may be unalienated labor" is perhaps overly optimistic. Alienated labor for Marx describes the process by which capital separates the worker from both the products and process of his or her own labor, from other workers, and even from human life itself. This discussion of alienation is closely tied to Marx's analysis of the commodity form and most importantly to the imposition of that commodity form on ourselves. We are produced as the commodity labor-power and we must then sell ourselves as workers for capital's use. Labor-power is habitually produced and reproduced in order to be alienated and sold for a wage. This brings us back to the question of blogging and commodity production.

The commodity that blogs help to produce and reproduce is that singularly useful and important commodity, labor-power. But to see why this is, we need to look at one of the more unsavory passages in Marx on productive versus unproductive consumption.

In the first section of Chapter 7 in Capital, Volume I, Marx writes:

Labour uses up its material factors, its subject and its instruments, consumes them, and is therefore a process of consumption. Such productive consumption is distinguished from individual consumption by this, that the latter uses up products, as means of subsistence for the living individual; the former, as means whereby alone, labour, the labour-power of the living individual, is enabled to act. The product, therefore, of individual consumption, is the consumer himself; the result of productive consumption, is a product distinct from the consumer.

The distinction Marx introduces here between the productive consumption of capitalist commodity production versus the unproductive consumption of workers and their means of subsistence has been the source of a number of frustrating debates within Marxism. The trouble is that Marx needs to be able to talk about labor-power as itself a commodity that is bought and sold and that has its own distinct process of production – namely, the consumption of the "means of subsistence for the living individual." He seems to undercut this possibility in the passage above.

Be that as it may, if blogging is to be described as a form of productive consumption of labor, then blogging ought to result in the production of a commodity "distinct from the consumer." If blogs themselves were a commodity produced for exchange, then this might be the case. But as we've seen, blogs tend not to fit in this category. There are a few commercially successful blogs out there that are the result of this sort of productive consumption of labor-power that results in the production and sale of a commodity. For the vast majority of us, though, blogging may be more like the unproductive "individual consumption" described by Marx that results in the "consumer himself." That is, we are what blogs help to produce.

On this view, blogging is like all those other so-called unproductive activities we do such as cooking, cleaning, child care, sleeping, reading, dancing, yard work, bowling, therapy, and sex that help to produce and reproduce us as the living, breathing, thinking commodity of labor-power that we are. Blogs that bitch and moan and rant provide a release that allows us as workers to go to work another day. Blogs can also inform, entertain, enlighten, confound, confuse, anger, soothe, and bore. Blogs about cats and hobbies do this. Academic blogs do this too (with perhaps a heavier dose of 'bore' thrown in). They all help produce people who are then ready and willing to alienate the rest of their lives as wage labor. This is why I think the claim for blogging as unalienated labor is too strong. It's not easy to escape the mode of production. And if blogging has become part of our social, cultural and intellectual means of subsistence, then blogging is also part of that individual consumption that produces us as alienated labor.

This is, of course, the negative moment of capitalist production where everything produced by capital functions only for capital. Fortunately, resistance and struggle also always happens. This is where the "value of connection, of hope, or possibility" that Dean writes about can gain a foothold. Here's one formulation of the relationship between blogging and capital I can endorse: blogs are also a site where class struggle occurs. People are very creative at resisting the alienating destinies planned for them by capital. Blogs may be another place where this resistance can grow and spread. And this is not just true of anti-war blogs and academic blogs. Cat blogging too is a part of that struggle over finding new ways to carve out some unalienated space of one's own and craft new strategies against commodification.

I don't think the blogosphere has any special resistance to being colonized and commodified by capital just like so many other areas of our life have been. It's important not to overestimate the radical potential of blogging. But there is also no reason to think that blogging is any more susceptible to capital either. And revolutions always surprise.

The Labor Theory of Blogging

Jodi Dean at I cite has written a wonderful post on blogging and Productive Labor.

... if we think about blogging, about cat blogging and snark and fandom and mommies and hobbiests, we can't help but be struck by the enormous amount of creative, productive labor expended. Think about the hours and hours of labor time. Creating, making..what? Contributions. Contributions to the flow of ideas, opinions, and impressions.

Marx reminds us that the more labor the worker expends, the less the value of his product. I always think of this in terms of the amount of labor in any individual item that comes off a factory assembly line. But, it's also applicable, in a way, to blog posts. The more collective creative labor power goes in to each one, the less the value of each.

Yet, maybe this is the wrong way to put the question. Perhaps what is at stake is a different account of value. Capitalists are working to commodify and monetize blogging--more than it is already for those of us who pay for hosting, high speed internet access, and the hardware. Some get ad revenue. Some try to get subscribers. Some treat blogging as advertising, a way to generate interest in and increase the consumption of a commodity or service. Some are associating blogging with a kind of self-production and marketing. How exactly this can be monetized, other than by selling books about how to blog or how to market oneself by blogging, is still a mystery--kind of like a treasure or the gold the fantasy around which a rush builds. But, maybe all this is mistaken precisely because the value at work is different.

Blogging requires the expenditure of definite quantities of labor-time. Bloggers themselves are well aware of this fact, and of the many hours they sink into blogging rather than other pursuits. Taken as a whole, the blogosphere represents an enormous investment of labor-time, almost all of it unpaid labor with no monetary wage attached. In fact, most bloggers must pay for the privilege of laboring in the blogosphere by purchasing their own computers and internet access, and running the gauntlet of online advertisements. But what is produced by all this labor? Dean speculates that "Contributions" are produced. "Contributions to the flow of ideas, opinions, and impressions." Capital, though, only concerns itself with the production of commodities. What, then, is the connection between the production of these online contributions and the production of commodities?

As others have pointed out in the comments to Dean's post, for Marx, the value of a commodity is in direct proportion to the amount of socially necessary labor-time it takes to produce the commodity. The more labor-time it takes to produce a commodity, the greater its value. However, it's also true that the dynamic of capitalist production always aims at cheapening commodities – at making workers more productive and decreasing the amount of labor-time needed to produce commodities and so decreasing the value of commodities.

Cooperation is one of the important methods described by Marx that capital uses to increase the productivity of labor-power. Cooperation, like the massive cooperative endeavor that is the blogosphere, makes us all more efficient producers of ideas, rants, speculations, conspiracy theories, cat blogs, fan blogs, and snark and so decreases the amount of labor involved in producing our "contributions to the flow of ideas, opinions, and impressions." For better or worse, this cooperation makes us more productive bloviators and bloggers. I am more productive because I have I cite and Limited, Inc. and thousands of other bloggers to draw upon and collaborate with in my blogging. I write faster. I write better. I am read more widely. And because of this increased productivity due to the cooperative nature of blogging, my work has less value. Not less use-value I hope! We all aspire for our writing to be beautiful, useful, entertaining, and enlightening both for ourselves and for others. But it has less value in the marxian sense that it now takes me less time to produce more, and perhaps better, writing and to distribute that writing to a larger audience than ever before. (Perhaps dozens will read this post!) Yet for all this increased productivity, what commodity is being produced?

For Marx, there are two factors every commodity must have. First, it must have a use-value. That is, it has to be useful to someone, somewhere for something. There are probably some blogs that fail this test, but they tend to be abandoned and lonely places. There are certainly some individual blog posts that fail this test – I myself have authored more than one of these. However, blogs themselves are without doubt useful things. Millions of us read them and write them every day. If they weren't useful to us, even if only as therapy or as targets for derision, then we wouldn't spend our time blogging.

Second, every commodity must have a value. That is, it must be the product of human labor. Every blog, even the bad ones, qualify on this count. Even automated spam blogs have this sort of value since somewhere there are people writing the code to create these abominations.

Finally, there is one last feature that every commodity must have according to Marx. To be a commodity, it must be produced for exchange. Simply put, most blogs aren't commodities because they aren't sold. Very few blogs are produced for exchange – whether directly for subscribers, or mediated through advertising revenue, or even indirectly as publicity and advertising for some other product, service, reputation, or brand name. Millions of blogs are not produced for exchange at all. They are produced for own consumption by the author, and are given away freely to others – despite what various copyright laws may pretend.

Blogs themselves, then, are typically not commodities. They have use-value, and value, but since they are not produced for exchange they are not commodities and so not a direct source of surplus-value for capital. The fact that blogging doesn't turn a profit won't come as a huge surprise to most bloggers.

However, there's more to this story. There is a commodity being produced here, it's just not the blogs themselves. What is still needed is a discussion of the always vexed distinction between the productive and unproductive in Marx. I will return to this tomorrow and to the second half of Dean's post.

------------

Other posts in this series:

• Productive vs. Unproductive Blogging
• The Use-Value of Blogging
• Desiring Blog Production