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Metabolizing Capital: Writing, Information, and the Biophysical World

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Metabolizing Capital: Writing, Information, and the Biophysical World University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses August 2015 Metabolizing Capital: Writing, Information, and the Biophysical World Christian J. Pulver University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Pulver, Christian J., "Metabolizing Capital: Writing, Information, and the Biophysical World" (2015). Doctoral Dissertations. 393. https://doi.org/10.7275/6962381.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/393 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. METABOLIZING CAPITAL: WRITING, INFORMATION, AND THE BIOPHYSICAL WORLD A Dissertation Presented by CHRISTIAN J. PULVER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2015 English Rhetoric and Composition © Copyright by Christian J. Pulver 2015 All Rights Reserved METABOLIZING CAPITAL: WRITING, INFORMATION, AND THE BIOPHYSICAL WORLD A Dissertation Presented By CHRISTIAN J. PULVER Approved as to style and content by: ______________________________________________ Donna LeCourt, Chair ______________________________________________ Charles Moran, Member ______________________________________________ David Lenson, Member ____________________________________ Jenny Spencer, Department Head Department of English DEDICATION To my parents, all five of you. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deepest gratitude goes out to my fearless advisor Donna LeCourt whose exquisite mind guided me out of the thicket I had created. I could not have made it without your guidance and support. Many thanks to my committee—to Charles Moran and your unexpected questions; our talks over lunch that always inspired me, and your earnest dedication to the field and students. And to David Lenson and our occasional walks over lunch, to your light heart and ability to make difficult stuff interesting. Namaste to all of you. Special thanks and gratitude to Holly Boyle, for your patience, and more patience. And your good jokes and toughness. Te amo. To Dad and Jai for knowing me better than I know myself. To all my brothers and sisters who I rarely see--there wasn’t a day during this process you weren’t in my heart. More endless thanks to Eleanor Kutz, Denise Paster, David Toomey, Janine Solberg, Wanda Bak, Martha Stassen, Noreen Lemieux (and everyone at OAPA), Susan Mellin, Hearts of Space, Ata Moharerri, Nicholas Ratner, Kave Pouresmail, Mark and Carrie Koyama, Leslie Bradshaw, Phillip Palmer, Matthew Weingast, James Poros, SooBee Murray, Adam Cogbill, Emma Howes, John Gallagher, Chris Dibiase, and Anna Rita Napoleone. v ABSTRACT METABOLIZING CAPITAL: WRITING, INFORMATION, AND THE BIOPHYSICAL WORLD MAY 2015 CHRISTIAN J. PULVER, B.A., STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK ALBANY M.A. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Donna LeCourt While the discipline of rhetoric and composition has looked at a variety of topics related to the materiality of writing, the majority of materialist approaches limit their scope to local, situated writing practices. However, with the spread of digital media and the establishment of a global, networked infrastructure for communication and inscription, the abundant textuality that has emerged in the early 21st century demands that we develop more rigorous materialist approaches to the study and teaching of writing. This growing textual environment has been called, in popular and academic discourse, Web 2.0—a more “social Web” than its early form in the late 1990s, one that encourages more interaction and collaboration between users. The ethos of sharing that defines Web 2.0 has been celebrated by writing scholars as a qualitatively new public sphere where we are writing and participating more than ever. Yet, vi underlying our exuberance of Web 2.0 is the problematic assumption that more writing is an intrinsic good. As more writing is produced, the logic goes, the richer the opportunities for human agency. In a world of infinite resources, such a productivist ethos makes sense; but in a world of finite resources, one whose health is intertwined with our global network of writing technologies, unrestrained textual production has become a threat to other human and nonhuman systems. In this dissertation, I analyze current materialist approaches to writing to theorize how the usefulness of Web 2.0 technologies--and the writing labor they harness—have become necessary agents in the production of capitalist, consumer culture. Drawing on ecological models of writing and supplementing them with Marxian concepts of value, metabolism, and capital circulation, I explore the historical and dialectical relations that have given rise to a new phase of digital culture, one called Web 3.0, where the celebrated use value of Web 2.0 writing is eclipsed by the ascendant exchange value of Big Data--the massive substratum of consumer data that is produced as a by-product of our writing. Because the economic value of user data depends on two critical resources--the labor of our writing and the finite natural resources of the planet—our celebration of the productivity of Web 2.0 is in direct antagonism with other natural systems, including the organic system of the writing body. I conclude with a sequence of writing activities designed to help students foster critical, ecological literacies that will prepare them to grapple with the social and ecological problems emerging in Web 3.0. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ v ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................ vi LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................... x CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: WRITING, ECOLOGY, AND MATERIALITY................... 1 Tracing Material Talk .......................................................................................................... 9 Ecology In Composition .................................................................................................. 12 Second Wave Ecologies of Writing ................................................................................ 14 Dialectics, Metabolism, Composition ............................................................................ 19 MEOW: Materialist Ecology of Writing as a Theoretical Framework ...................... 28 2. STRATUM I/STRATUM II: WRITING AND TEXTUALITY AS AGENTS OF CAPITAL CIRCULATION ............................................................................................... 33 Part 1: Historical Background and Definitions ............................................................. 38 Medial Affordances, Informationalization, and Capital Circulation ...................... 38 Marx’s Concept of The Money Form and the Creation of Value .......................... 41 Writing and Money as Co-Agents of Capital Circulation ........................................ 46 Part 2: Redistributing Agency: From Human Agents to Ensembles of Agency ...... 56 Inscription ...................................................................................................................... 57 Self-Augmentation ........................................................................................................ 61 Physical Causality and The Abstracted Humanist Agent ......................................... 64 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 67 3. STRATUM III –THE CONTEXTS OF INFORMATIONAL CAPITALISM .... 69 Part 1: Web 2.0 Writing Theory ...................................................................................... 73 The Data Mine and Big Data—Inscribing the Labor of Our Writing ................... 84 Part 2: Web 3.0 as Infrastructure for Inscription ......................................................... 92 Networks of Persuasion ............................................................................................... 95 The Great Acceleration ..............................................................................................111 viii Conclusion .......................................................................................................................116 4. STRATUM IV: LITERACY AND THE BIOPHYSICAL WORLD ...................118 Part 1: Web 3.0 and the Challenge of Sustainability: Setting the Context ...............120 Strong Sustainability ....................................................................................................120 Electronic Waste and the 4th Stratum .......................................................................121 Part 2: Literacy, the Somatic Mind, and the 4th Strata...............................................128 Three Kinds of Digital Literacy.................................................................................132 Writing Instruction in Web 3.0..................................................................................133
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