What does this mean, that we are the gold farmers? It means that in the age of postfordist capitalism it is impossible to differentiate cleanly between play and work. It is impossible to differentiate cleanly between nonproductive leisure activity existing within the sphere of play and productive activity existing within the sphere of the workplace. This should be understood in both a general and a specific sense. [...P]ostfordism is a mode of production that makes life itself the site of valorization: that is to say, it turns seemingly normal human behavior into monetizable labor. [...] I dispute the ideological mystification that says: we are the free while the Chinese children are in chains, our computers are a life-line and their computers are a curse. (120-1)

—Alexander R. Galloway, "Does the Whatever Speak?," in Race after the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York: Routledge, 2012)

Apparently the semester is over

I've started many a blog post in the last few weeks, only to discard it, dissatisfied. I'm in a bit of a strange lull lately, despite having the usual gigantic heap of work on my hands. I submitted an essay relatively recently, but not the essay, and I'm on the fence about how deeply to revise the essay right now (versus after I hand it to some readers). Common sense tells me to cobble together something remotely worthy of a response and send it out for feedback, because I've been staring at the thing for too long. Reading the essay tells me to scrap the whole thing, go vegan for three weeks, maybe seek enlightenment, and then try again.

I'm hoping for some middle ground, since abandoning cheese just isn't going to happen.

I've meant to do some critical reflecting on the course I most recently taught, Didactic Modernism. I've actually written pages on the subject (scrapped). Partly those pages veered into reminiscences about books I've read, courses I've taken, things I wish I knew.

How you never really know what your students are thinking. How you, as a student, often only find out what you're thinking after the lapse of years. As a teacher, likewise.

How strange course evaluations are. How Alan Jacobs argues that course evaluations should be given at least a semester after the course has ended. How a student said that my expectations for the final exam made me "as pompous as Ezra Pound." How I chose to read this as evidence of the student's having learned that Ezra Pound expects you to know a lot, which is true. Also that Ezra Pound could be pretty pompous. Also true.

How another student said that Berkeley should give me tenure. How this saddened me for a variety of reasons.

In short, I seem to be too near to it still to do anything but ramble.

The essence of it is that it seems difficult to separate one's teaching methods from one's memories of being a student, even when you remember that you were by definition an atypical student. And I can't kick the belief that what makes a course a great learning experience is incredibly arbitrary and contingent. It is the lot of an English major to sit through many sub-par discussions. The trade off is that you've read Moby-Dick, and carefully. You forget the one, and remember the other, and return to it for the rest of your life.

How do you create the conditions for that? Well, you assign Moby-Dick, for one thing. But of course there's more to it. But what is that more, and for whom?

I was the kind of student who responded well to being set tasks. Given something hard to do, I rose to the occasion. I was a nerd; that's how I ended up in grad school! This is clearly not the case for all students. I've heard many students say that as soon as something is an assignment, they don't want to do it; it sucks out all their creativity and they stop trying. Also that if something isn't required, they won't do it.

This may be the first semester I've given an extra credit option. The option, in this case, was to do something slightly more onerous than a standard course blog post, in order to make up for missed blog posts of past weeks. Here was an interesting scenario. You couldn't lose credit, but you could gain it. There was no penalty for trying. (There is, some might point out, never any penalty for trying, insofar as getting no credit is always worse than getting a low grade. This seems to be beside the point when it comes to the psychology of grades.) Several students decided to do extra credit. Some really really needed it; some only sort of needed it. One asked if she could do it when she did not need it. There were easier and more difficult ways to do this extra credit, and some chose more difficult ways.

How can you rig a course so that it all seems like extra credit? Would it even be wise?

I once memorized "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" "for" a course, while studying for the final. The course was a pretext; I memorized it for the poem.

You never know when your students are doing that, or doing something like it for a different class--not that you necessarily want to know.

The pedagogical uses of grading continue to puzzle me. Clearly it functions differently for different people. In some ways it's a form of gamification, which some people find motivating and others find stressful and demoralizing. Grades certainly confuse the issue of learning.

These are, of course, questions I've been pondering precisely because my students this semester were so very excellent. It so clearly wasn't all about carrots and sticks for most of them. So then--what? Did I already do my bit by assigning Gertrude Stein? Will my students remember Tender Buttons forever?

On these matters my course evaluations are silent.

Gamification (or the Romance of Accumulation)

I haven't yet had a chance to discuss Mark Sample's recent, very compelling post about "gamification," the tendency to turn everything into a game (for points) whether or not it's appropriate. Mark writes:

I oppose the general trend toward “gamifying” real world activities—mapping game-like trappings such as badges, points, and achievements onto otherwise routine or necessary activities.

A better term for such “gamification” is, as Margaret Robertson argues, pointsification. And I oppose it. I oppose pointsification and the gamification of life. Instead of “gamifying” activities in our daily life, we need to meanify them—imbue them with meaning. The things that we do to live, breathe, eat, laugh, love, and die, we need to see as worth doing in order to live, breathe, eat, laugh, love, and die. A leaderboard is not the path toward discovering this worthwhileness.

I mostly share Mark's sense that gamification is a scourge. But I'm also extremely curious as to why it's compelling. The mere accumulation of points, which is predictable and sequential, should be incredibly boring. Incredibly boring. And yet somehow it isn't; somehow it's at once soothing (five points...six points...) and anxiety-inducing (Will I make it to seven points?...Cliffhanger!).

As someone who studies experimental literature, I'm not deeply committed to either meaning or narrative as self-evident goods, and I am actually one of those weirdos who enjoys reading Stein, but the narrative power of mere counting remains a puzzle to me--an interesting one.

I'm pasting my comment on Mark's post below, not because I've said anything brilliant but because if anybody has any leads, I'd like to hear about them.

It strikes me [...] that the proverbial elephant in the room is the pervasive gamification of learning, through grades, credits, and the like, which leads to the perverse practice known as "grade-grubbing." (Not to mention the mistaken impression in some quarters that the letters "B. A." have, or should have, the powers of the One Ring.)

I mostly hate grades, and not just because I hate grading.

But I do think there's something to be said for having to discipline oneself into a practice--to do something before one understands why one is doing it. (Learning to code almost always starts out like this, or at least it has for me--just follow these instructions, use this syntax, make this thingy that says "hello world." A week later, you understand why you were doing what you did, and you understand it because you did it.)

With thinking persons, usually the extrinsic motivation of the grade flips over into an intrinsic interest in what it is that one is doing--it has to, because it's just too boring to merely do things to rack up points. When that flip doesn't happen, we get grade-grubbing--people who think the points are (as it were) the point.

Perhaps that flip happens when you start to understand enough of what you're doing that it starts to become more interesting than racking up points. Racking up points, which is a sort of degree-zero narrative, is more interesting than a series of arbitrary, meaningless, and repetitive tasks, which is how some people see school. (And it's worth noting that, to the beginner, most complex things seem arbitrary and meaningless--until they don't.) So gamification is a relief from such tasks. As you say, the desire to gamify life processes seems to signal an inability to imbue them with more complex or interesting narrative (or, say, poetic!) significance. But it seems as though there are moments when gamification can be, and is, used strategically as a bridge into significance.

There's a very striking section of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative in which Equiano is going about trading various goods (limes, glassware, turkey). It's all about the numbers, and what I once called a "romance of accumulation" (in a seminar paper lo these many years ago) takes over the "interesting" narrative. Equiano's racking up points. But he has to give some bulk and narrative to the tedious process of accruing enough money to buy his freedom, so the romance of accumulation must serve. A similar racking up of points appears in Thoreau's Walden, when he is literally bean-counting.

Which is to say that "gamification" is an old and strange narrative strategy. I don't quite know what to do with these C18/19 examples, but I've long wondered about them, and the role of the romance of accumulation in American literature and culture more broadly.