Authentic Labor

My previous post mentioned a recent WPA-L thread on “time in grad school.” There was an interesting spin-off of that thread that ended up revolving around “authentic labor.” It began when a Ph.D. student named M. Deanya Lattimore wrote: “After many years of hiring and firing people, I would never discount someone for a position based merely on the time it took her to receive certification for it. Instead, I would look for some explanatory reasons in her cover letter or supporting documents. Here's some of what you may find:”--and she lists several kinds of narrative that job applicants may provide as explanations for the time spent obtaining qualifications for the job they’re applying for, such as “narratives of retooling,” “narratives of poverty,” “narratives of family illness,” “factors of age and of being sole supporter,” and so on. She added: “I certainly hope that, when I finally finish in spring semester, there will be at least one or two departments to which I apply who will consider hiring someone who overcame the odds against her because she was dedicated, hard-working, and tenacious enough to learn how to balance all of these factors with a 4/4 adjunct teaching load.”

Read the whole post.

Then Onur Azeri, an ABD working outside academia in Corrales, New Mexico, who said he had “happily left academia” but was still plugging away at his dissertation, just to give himself the satisfaction of finishing it, reacted strongly against Deanya’s use of the term “narrative”: “Hell, this isn't a narrative or a story, this is real, true blooded life that we live everyday, day in and day out, as we do many other different things beyond just writing a dissertation.” He then contrasted academic or intellectual work with “authentic labor” done outside the academy: “This thread has constantly brought up conversations I had with Steve Witte back in the day--he always reminded me that people work really hard for a living (and I'm not talking about a 3-3 load, or grading papers, or lecturing, or sitting on committees--I'm talking authentic labor) and that I should never discount a hard day's work toiling at some constructive task...this was coming from someone who pretty much did everything while he worked on his PhD beyond teaching and scholarship to get through it and to support his family.”

Read the whole post.

I jumped in here to correct Onur’s reading of Deanya’s use of the term “narrative,” saying that “Deanya's reference to ‘narratives’ that you reacted negatively to was about how to RETELL the story of your life in job applications in order to improve your chances of getting the job you're applying for. It wasn't an attempt to reduce lives to theoretical constructs.” I added: “Ask any of the people you have worked with whether they ever tell stories. Ask them whether they ever take something that happened at work and retell it to friends or family after work. Ask them whether they consider it an important part of maintaining any relationship--family, work, friendship—to narrate life experiences as story. Ask them whether they would be willing to retell their most unpleasant work experiences in positive terms in order to obtain a better job. I would highly doubt that any of them would be as negative about this sort of narrative as you.”

Read the whole post.

Bill Thelin came back to Onur’s point about “authentic labor,” defending Onur by critiquing academia: “But what about our other duties and our teaching of upper-level and graduate courses? Much of it is self-perpetuating. We're not really producing anything. Our labor is, essentially, trying to preserve white culture, maintain an aesthetic sensibility, assure middle- and upper-class privilege, and secure future positions for people who look and talk like us. While this is "authentic" work, I guess, it sure is not work that does much for the good of the community or the environment or the oppressed or even the individual soul. Perhaps I've grown a tad cynical after being a beacon of light, joy, and good will over the years , but we need some serious self-examination. We need perspective about what work is, and what this artificial environment we have created is. Somehow, this discussion of time spent in grad school is bringing some of these tensions to the surface.”

Read the whole post.

I responded to Bill: “What I'm hearing behind the class war of ‘authentic’ (physical) labor vs. ‘inauthentic’ (intellectual) labor is not only lower-class farmers and laborers vs. middle-class tutors and monks but masculinity vs. femininity. Real men work with their bodies; women and children hardly work at all, because they don't get sweaty. Real work makes things (manufacturing and farming jobs); fake work buys, uses, and at most embellishes what has been made. (Even when I write a book, I don't actually MAKE the book; I fill a file with ones and zeroes and send it to the publisher, who hires someone else to make the book.) Real work gets done in public, in fields and factories; fake work gets done in private spaces, in homes, scriptoria, offices, and classrooms. Men who do fake work are fake men, in fact honorary women, subservient to power: teachers, nurses, secretaries. Real men have hard bodies, bodies that are increasingly fetishized in visual culture (the "feminist" wolf-whistling at construction workers laboring naked to the waist, sweaty and muscular); fake men are flabby and inconsequential. (And who really cares how smart we are? After all, we don't MAKE anything.)”

I added: “And I forget now who it was that said authenticity is in the eye of the beholder [it was Chet Pryor, but that’s not exactly what he said: read his post here], but that kind of relativism seems to me a secondary DECONSTRUCTION of power and normativity. The ideology that constructs our work as less authentic than the work of riveters, and even than the work of captains of industry, who after all ORGANIZE the making of things, is still solidly in place. It's in our interests to challenge that ideology, to deconstruct it; but just invoking a relativistic rhetoric doesn't make the relativism socio-politically or emotionally true or efficacious.”

Read the whole post.

Bill responded to me: “First, the type of work that we stereotypically ascribe to women produces tangible results. Cooking produces meals. Knitting produces garments. Childrearing produces adults. I think this type of work is authentic labor.” And: “Second, your point seems to shift to the degradation you perceive of men who use their intellect rather than their hands for work. The concept of masculinity is complicated and certainly has produced some ills in our society, but I'm not sure a man's occupation has much to do with it. While it might be an issue here and there, what a white-collar worker or academic does outside of work really establishes the sense of masculinity you're talking about.” And last, again, writing teachers and writing program administrators don’t produce anything. If, Bill says, he were a mechanic, he would be fixing cars so that they ran properly. "I would not be satisfied--my boss would be horrified--if I talked about the few whose cars I fixed properly while the many whose car were not impacted by my work slipped away." That, he implies, is what we do in writing programs: we take in students for a whole semester and send most of them away “unfixed.”

Read the whole post.

My response to Bill began by trying to differentiate between “defining authentic labor,” which I took him to be attempting, and “talking about the social construction of certain types of labor as more authentic than others,” my project. I wrote:

Traditionally "we" (patriarchy) haven't valued women's work. It's JUST women's work, because, of course, it's done by women, who are JUST women. Work is something done by men outside the home. Thus a woman of my mother's generation might have said "I've never worked" or "I'm going back to work after the kids are in school." She didn't think of the work she did in the home as "work." Three or four decades of third-wave feminism have taught us, men and women alike, to value the work women (and men) do in the home, so now we'd want to say "work outside the home" for the work that was earlier called simply "work." When you write "I think this type of work is authentic labor," in a sense you're just reflecting that new feminist conception of women's work inside the home--but there's more going on there as well. "I think" has an edge to it, a sense of setting yourself in opposition to something--and that something is, of course, the older patriarchal view that devalued women's work in the home and didn't call it work at all, let alone "authentic" work. Instead of saying "the type of work that we stereotypically ascribe to women is OBVIOUSLY authentic labor," you made your assertion a form of personal counterhegemonic insistence. And I suggest that's because the older patriarchal ideology is still at work within us. You felt it, and felt you had to resist it.

And it was that older patriarchal ideology that I was trying to unpack in my post--the ways in which it continues to saturate our thinking even despite those three or four decades of third-wave feminism, which has affected all of us, men and women alike, intellectuals and "authentic laborers" alike.

ONE HAS (to use the depersonalized phrase that Heidegger called das Man) certain normative assumptions about authentic labor: workers work (with their bodies); the leisure class sits around on yachts sipping martinis. Men work; women do things at home. As I said, we don't BELIEVE those things intellectually any more, but they continue to resonate powerfully at a deep socioemotional level, and to shape our thinking from that level.

As for the "tangible results" that you list, look at them again: (1) Cooking produces meals, (2) Knitting produces garments, (3) Childrearing produces adults. Notice the difference between the "tangibility" of (1) and (2) and the "tangibility" of (3)? If the adults produced by childrearing are TANGIBLE products of traditional women's work, then aren't the writers produced by FYW classes equally tangible? And if not all adults produced by childrearing are really "mature" adults--some kids never grow up, some become incestuous fathers or serial killers--isn't there a neat parallel there with writers produced by FYW classes that aren't really "mature" writers?

For that matter:

"I would not be satisfied--my boss would be horrified--if I talked about the few whose cars I fixed properly while the many whose car were not impacted by my work slipped away."

Would you be equally horrified if it were somehow proven to you that parents fuck up more kids than they are able to raise to be balanced, healthy, happy, productive citizens?

Or: would you be equally horrified if you were a doctor and weren't able to cure every patient that walked (or was wheeled) in through your door? If some of your patients died?

The obvious point to make here is that human beings are not mechanical systems like brakes, which makes it problematic (to say the least) to make the true measure of our success in teaching whether we are able to FIX our students as well as mechanics fix brakes. Parenting fails at least as often as teaching does, because both operations are performed on whole human beings. Doctoring probably has a better success rate, because Western medicine does tend to treat the human organism as a mechanical system. So by your lights, I guess a more behavioristic FYW classroom would be more conducive to success?

I added a P.S.: “FYW produces tangible results in the more mundane sense as well, the sense in which cooking produces meals, or at least in which a factory foreman produces widgets. I require that my students write a paper, and they write a paper. They follow my specifications, and I assess the products of their labor for quality. Their papers are no longer physically tangible--I grade and write comments onscreen, and send the "papers" back to my students electronically--but they are digitally stored on various computers and servers, and could be given physical form at any time. My marked-up and graded papers could be stored and analyzed for program-assessment purposes as well. My grades are stored digitally in Blackboard, from which I transfer them to the online grading forms that are made available to me in the middle and at the end of the semester. Those grades are tallied up and averaged and so on, and they help students get jobs or admission to graduate or professional schools. If that's the main kind of productivity you value, we've got it. Certainly it's the kind of productivity administrators and accrediting agencies and assessment companies value most highly. But five decades of process and now post-process writing theory have tended to call that the least important of what we do. The fact that the "whole student" we're trying to transform in FYW classes is a considerably hazier entity than a grammatical error seems to bother you, as it does the administrators and the rest. If we had administrators and accrediting agencies and assessment companies for parents, the haziness of childrearing would bother the hell out of them as well. But to my mind, the complexity and difficulty of what we do are part of what makes it interesting and important work.”

Read the whole post.

To my post, Mary Goldschmidt added:

I think both Doug's and Bill's posts regarding the gendered nature of work need to be fleshed out (and, of course, have been by many scholars in other contexts) to address race and class, at least. Let's not forget that many women worked in factories and were thought to be perfectly capable of sweating, even while their middle and upper class “sisters’ were thought too delicate to do physical labor, open doors, or--and this is key--do intellectual work beyond ‘finishing’ school. Too much exertion of the brain caused problems with the uterus. REAL women were these women, not the working class women who served as their maids or worked in factories or who still did agricultural work. REAL women were certainly not enslaved women from Africa who ‘worked’ (unpaid) in the Americas. As you can see, what we're getting at here is identity politics.

Class, race, gender, and sexuality all exist in interconnected hierarchies which determine one's power within society. Often, that power can be measured by income, which to a great degree also determines one's power. For example, upper-middle class women in the 19th and early 20th centuries were encouraged to do lots of (unpaid) volunteer work. In other words, the proper sphere for these women had everything to do with maintaining the class and gender identity of their husbands (or fathers), even as it *also* worked to keep women from financial independence, influence, etc.

All of this is to say that which kinds of work are seen as "authentic" (and which ones end up supporting one's "authenticity" as a real MAN, for example) keep changing based on what brings the most income and power, and who needs to be excluded from this group, beyond a small number of tokens.

In thinking back to where this thread began, I'd have to say that these assumptions do indeed inform hiring committees, even as other value systems and hierarchies more specific to high education do as well.

Read the whole post.