How the Value of A Product Is Appropriated and To What Uses and Ends It Is Put
A student’s becoming aware of how a text is used (and framed) does not change the actual working practices or the relationship of the institution to the communities being studied.10 for this reason; we also need to imagine how a focus on use-value might interrupt our current practices in connecting with community and neighborhood organizations. Here the work of G. A. Cohen becomes important. Whereas Spivak ultimately accepts Marx’s conception of “surplus labor” as a conceptual tool to explain exploitation (“Subaltern”), for Cohen, exploitation occurs through how the “value of a product is appropriated” and to what uses and ends it is put.” He believes that, by creating the object, the worker earns the right to determine how the product is used: “[T]he crucial question for exploitation concerns the justice of the distribution of the means of production”. Merrell Boot
Earlier, I argued that nontraditional texts were being introduced into classrooms to make the canon more “representative.” Cohen’s argument demonstrates the inadequacy of such a move, because the inclusion of marginal voices within traditional networks of production curricula, required courses, textbooks, and publishers simply reproduces the current networks of sponsorship and power. (Certainly, this is one of the lessons of the Glassville project; the neighborhood was represented, but without representation.) What is needed is a new model of aesthetic and cultural production that not only provides alternative cultural products for use inside and outside our classrooms, but also alternative systems of production for our students and community partners. For all of these reasons, I have come to believe that cultural and educational institutions should understand part of their work as “socializing” the means of cultural and aesthetic production.12 Or, as Guillory argues, aesthetic and cultural production must be reintroduced as a right of every citizen and become an aspect of everyday ordinary life: “The point is not to make judgment disappear but to reform the conditions of its practice. If there is no way out of the game of culture, then, even when cultural capital is the only kind of capital, there may be another kind of game, with less dire consequences for the losers, an aesthetic game. Socializing the means of production and consumption would be the condition of an aestheticism unbound, not its overcoming. But of course, this is only a thought experiment”. Guillory’s “aestheticism unbound” is an argument for the right of communities to create their own aesthetic self-definitions; it is an instantiation of Cohen’s view that exploitation can be overcome only by expanding access to the means of production.Merrell Shoe
Rather than see its work strictly in terms of canon (re)formation, English studies should imagine itself as a field that is engaged in fostering new local public writing spaces. It should demonstrate to its students how the binary concepts of in/out and canonical/noncanonical are the result of negotiated literacy acts and practices. Ultimately, English studies could push against a literal view of language, one in which language is seen as a reflection of a community’s reality, to a view of language as the means by which different language communities bring themselves together for greater explanatory (and political) power, replacing the literal text with a catachretical text. I would even go so far as to argue that, for students undertaking such collaborative work as part of their general education, it would demonstrate the true use-value of the writing process.
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