A view from the second floor of the Academic and Administration Building at Salt Lake Community College, where our institute’s classes are being held.
I remember making papier mache for the first time in elementary school and marveling at how ingredients like delicate paper could be turned into something as sturdy as a mask. The mask I created – a purple and yellow parrot’s face – took a significant amount of time, effort, and patience. Though the mask was neither functional nor beautiful, it was a moment of exposure to the labor of making something from scratch and understanding the materials that went into that process.
In today’s institute discussion, we talked a lot about the labor of book-making and the people, the hands, that go into making the texts that we tend to forget have people and laborers behind them. It is perhaps easiest to imagine this labor in the days of historical hand-made paper (i.e. before the 19th century when mass industrialization happened) where pulp was made in large vats, spread out in thin sheets, dried, and then pressed. This was a factory that involved the hands, noses, eyes, and ears of lots and lots of people, many of whom would never get to read whatever was eventually written on those very pages. But it is also possible to imagine this labor in the days of mass industrialization, where the hands no longer dried sheets of papers from the ceiling, but instead, turned the cogs of machines to ensure that papers moved through their systematic mechanical motions.
Still, today, even with increasing automation across our industries, we have people managing, monitoring, and maintaining the infrastructures that make our reading experiences. Indeed, the role of people becomes perhaps all the more acute as we think about the factories in China manufacturing most of our major electronics and the inevitable health implications of their exposure to the numerous chemicals necessary to make the plastics, the silicone, the wires, and the circuits that power our global demand for laptops, smartphones, and tablets. We also must consider the bodies affected by the locations of server farms, fiber optic networks, and cellular phone lines, the ways in which human lives may be negatively impacted by the as-yet-unknown consequences of exposure to the byproducts of maintaining a digital infrastructure. (There may be some known byproducts of this exposure that I’m not aware of, and as I write this post quickly to record my reflections, I appreciate any resources or references that you may have to offer that can point me in the appropriate direction to understand these concerns more clearly!).
I think it is important not to forget the roles that bodies play in producing the information infrastructures we consume, just as it is important to recognize where our food grows or what our buildings are made of. But at a certain point, I wonder what we do with this information. The issue of labor practices and of the ways that bodies get abused, poisoned, or destroyed to maintain market demands is SO big, and it, of course, goes beyond the production of books and digital devices. (I’m thinking particularly of the recent controversies over under-paid factory workers for “fast fashion” clothing companies like Forever 21 or H&M or for “delivery box” food services like Blue Apron). So, what is there to do with this information and how does awareness of the labor behind information infrastructure do to our conception of reading in a digital age?
I don’t really know the answer to this question, but I have wondered to what extent awareness-raising of labor practices is enough. Do we need to reenacts parts of these labor practices in our classrooms? Do we need to show videos of how things are made? Do we need to ask students to go on field trips and visit factories, to uncover the labor-making spaces all around us yet also rendered invisible to those in white-collar industries? Do we try and change policy? What do we do? The invisible labor of manufacturing also has especially political resonance right now in our contemporary moment, where unethical crackdowns on immigration policies are already leading to severe shortages in essential manual labor, especially impacting industries like agriculture.
Throughout this institute, we’ve been implicating ourselves in some of the labor of creating books too by engaging in the making of different art forms. Today, we stitched pages together for chapbooks and folded pieces of paper for zines and I was, yet again, exposed to the limitations of my own handiwork. I had the great privilege to scoot my chair away and say, “You know what? I don’t really need to perform this labor anymore because I’m not really doing any critical work around this and my priority is to return to my intellectual labor.” So, I found a comfy chair in the corner of a building, plugged my laptop into an outlet, and began writing this blog post, trying to make sense of and synthesize all the content that has been happily pumped into my brain for the last week.
At first, I felt a little guilty pulling away from the making work. Again. I wondered if I stubbornly absconded myself into ignorance, if I was willfully ignoring and resisting the work of making because I knew I wasn’t good at it and I knew that those forms were not really going to advance the projects I wanted to do. It was yet another moment during this institute where I watched everyone around me happily chatting and sewing away while I leaned back in my chair dumbfounded, taking in the scene of my confusion, frustration, and failure. I lacked the functional literacy to sew sheets of paper together, an evident gap in my spatial-visual education, that others wrote off as “easy” while I struggled. I yet again tried to project myself outwards to every student I ever supported who just couldn’t quite grasp the concepts that I taught, who just couldn’t quite follow along with me. As an instructor, my impulse was to cajole and encourage, but putting myself in the shoes of the frustrated student here, my impulse was to run away. So I ran away.
I realized, as I did on the second day when I abandoned my coptic stitch, that I had yet again already gained something from the experience: the awareness that being able to operate at the level of intellectual labor was a position that put me in tremendous responsibility of trying to advocate for the ethical consumption of material goods. I’m not going to be the person who ethically makes those goods, but I can be the person that supports it, that consumes as critically as possible and attempts not to be implicated in systems of reinforcing unethical labor practice. I can be the person that sees labor when it’s happening – and acknowledges what that labor looks like – and try to use the skills I do have. After all, I wield rhetorical savvy (sometimes) and I’m good at, like, reading text and writing text or whatever. I’ve got a skill somewhere but it sure as hell is not crafting a thing.
I’m still struggling with the mindset that I’m not allowing myself to grow by quitting activities, like the crafting, that are hard for me. But I also feel the pressure of time ticking away at me, the protected time I have here to devote myself to articulating an argument about developing literacies in the twenty-first century that I think/hope will really impact how people understand the role of reading and writing in a moment of technological transition. My abilities to grow and learn are only so capacious and, as the pragmatist that I tend to be (often to a fault), I’m inclined to pour myself into the project that I think has the most practical potential to extend my abilities to do good in the world. I think I know what I have to offer and I need to keep myself focused in that direction, I think.
So, obviously, I’ve thought through some of my intellectual conundrums, but I’m also wondering through a pedagogical conundrum: is it OK to willfully abandon a weakness in light of continuing to bolster a strength? At what point should I return to those areas of learning at which I’m weak and, to what extent might engagement with these weaknesses eventually build to strength?
To return then to the issue of labor and the work of making labor visible: what ethical responsibility do I have, as an educator, to make the act of learning itself, as a labor, visible? Another institute attendee who has been reading these blog posts asked me the other day what my process was for writing these posts, and I sort of shrugged away the question. “I just write them and publish them on the same day,” I said. And that’s true. But these posts are also extensions of the tremendous learning I’m doing in the other hours of the day, the hours where I’m listening intently to lectures, typing notes as much as possible, linking outside sources to those notes, going back to those notes, highlighting them, and then mapping them on to the key words and ideas that I keep a running list of in a paper notebook. So, these blog posts emerge from the material apparatus of note-taking that I keep and the workflow that I’ve established for myself to understand what it is that I’m learning. All of this happens before I write.
So, I wasn’t falsifying my experience of writing these posts (I do write them and publish them on the same day, but mostly just to maintain the exercise of writing and sharing something every damn day). But I was glossing over the labor that happens prior to the moment that I sit down and add a post. This form of labor is fundamentally different than the labor of, you know, manufacturing, but the concept of talking about our labor of all kinds, of seeing that things emerge from time and space, not thin air or magic, is perhaps the clincher here.