Burning Out: Writing and the Self in the Era of Terminal Productivity

James Daniel, University of Washington

(Published February 24, 2020)

“We know how productivity really functions. We know which choices matter most and bring success within closer reach. We know how to set goals that make the audacious achievable; how to reframe situations so that instead of seeing problems, we notice hidden opportunities; how to open our minds to new creative connections; and how to learn faster by slowing down the data that is speeding past us” (7).

                                    ---Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity 

In 2013, a 31-year-old journalist in Tokyo named Miwa Sado died after working 159 hours and 37 minutes of overtime in the month preceding her death (Inoue and Specia). As was widely reported, the cause was karōshi, death by overwork, a condition credited with 189 fatalities in Japan in 2015 (Rosenberg). While the problem is alarmingly common in the country, thought to be due to Japan’s long working hours and poor labor mobility (Fifield), the culture of productivity is fast becoming a global concern. Such disparate cases as Uber’s employment of “automated and algorithmic management” (Rosenblat and Stark 3759) to keep drivers on the road for longer and American poultry workers forced to wear diapers because they are denied bathroom breaks (Chuck) evidence the alarming ubiquity of overwork. As the Economic Policy Institute recently reported, in the United States, workforce productivity has increased nearly 250% since 1948 while pay has remained virtually stagnant since the early 1970s (“The Productivity-Pay Gap”). 

The effects of such increased productivity are particularly apparent across the scene of writing. As Deborah Brandt contends, writing has become progressively commodified and subject to market forces. “Increasingly,” she argues, “writing itself is the product that is bought and sold as it embodies information, invention, service, social relations, news—that is, the products of the new economy” (The Rise of Writing 16). Brandt likewise notes how writing is particularly subject to exploitation: “Writing is a time-intensive form of labor that tends to follow people home” (17). Evidence of these trends can be found throughout the professional world of writing, from content farms employing writers to produce large volumes of low-grade content optimized for search engines (Low) to the increasingly precarious world of freelance journalism (Brown).

As fellow scholars well know, a culture of “deep writing” likewise pervades academia (Brandt, The Rise of Writing 160), where professional success requires that tenure-track scholars and those aspiring to such positions publish without remit. Observing the crisis of academia’s acceleration, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney contend that the university “swallow[s] everything in its sped-up path” and mandates that those on a tenure line do “more research, more teaching, and more administration” (27). Similarly, scholars in writing studies have long observed that analogous productivity expectations exist for contingent faculty who invariably “subsidize” (Olson) the research of tenured and tenure-track faculty through large teaching loads (Kahn et al.; Welch and Scott). In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jonathan Malesic describes how his mounting stresses as an overworked adjunct led to the collapse of his working life: “In my final semester, I could get through class fueled by adrenaline, but after returning to my office, I crashed—hard. Then I went home and lay motionless for hours.”

Thankfully, writing studies is increasingly responsive to issues of contingent faculty labor (Kahn et al.; McClure et al.; Welch and Scott) and writing about work in the composition classroom (Bay, Lu, Scott, Seitz, Shor; Welch). However, despite this interest and scholars’ attention to the topics of work and production (Horner “Introduction”; Trimbur “Composition,” “Writing”), compositionists have only nominally investigated the excessive productivity that defines the contemporary professional world (Brandt “When People Write for Pay”; Danberg; Gunner; Jensen; Lu; Rouzie; Scott), the consequences overwork (Bizzaro; Bishop; Deacon), or the question of what can be done to address these conditions. This article accordingly looks to address these issues and to contribute to the field’s mounting body of scholarship on the political economy of composition and writing’s relationship to work. As I suggest, composition scholars must not only investigate the economic shifts shaping students’ aspirations and anxieties (Lu 90), as well as the greater financial ecology of writing instruction (Scott), but must also develop a pedagogical solution to the professional world’s increasingly untenable demands. 

This issue notably indexes the long-simmering antagonism between writing instruction’s professionalizing function and its critical role. Kate Ronald effectively illuminates this tension with her question, “[A]m I helping students get jobs and promotions, or am I helping them become critical thinkers who can change and improve those professions?” (24). For Ronald, teachers must ultimately strive to do both by preparing students for a broad array of professional and academic writing tasks while also conferring them with critical thinking strategies. Jennifer Bay similarly advocates for closer relations between composition and professional writing: “The global and technological landscape of our world necessitates that students share both a critical understanding of advanced capitalism as well as an understanding of advanced writing technologies” (31). As I read them, these are generally helpful compromises that speak to students’ needs and anticipate the potential resistance of students who receive critical perspectives rather than practical skills (Peckham 142). However, in offering a compromise between professionalization and critique, these approaches often subordinate resistance to professional necessity. It might indeed be asked how writing can be truly “consequential, immediate, responsive, and sometimes even dangerous” given composition’s professional and institutional context (Scott 187). For Scott, the answer lies in teaching students to interrogate the discourses of work, directly engaging the political economy of composition pedagogy in our teaching, and “present[ing] hopeful alternatives” to the economic status quo (190). I’m persuaded by this answer; however, I believe that this work must also be supplemented by writing instruction relevant to the specific conditions of the contemporary working world that threaten students’ autonomy and well-being. 

As I contend, the scene of work, the professionalized world of higher education, and a substantial segment of the self-help genre[1] have so lionized productivity as to frame it the most desirable attribute of the contemporary worker-subject. Accordingly, the university is now frequently understood to be little more than a job training program and the place for cultivating more competitive employees (Catropa). Jobs themselves, particularly those in the service and global supply chain sectors, are more arduous and depersonalized than ever before as monitoring, analysis, and efficiency have become ascendant[2]. In response to these shifts, I argue that writing instructors should introduce students to self-expression as a politically and socially liberatory act and as a counteragent to the dominant professional rhetoric of obedience and efficiency. In addition to providing students with a necessary critical introduction to work’s emergent neo-Taylorism, teachers of writing would greatly support their students by introducing self-expression’s capacity to undergird refusal, resistance, and assertions of individual value against the market logics that preside over the lives of workers. 

This proposal builds on the scholarship of those who encourage assigning personal writing on the subject of work (Lu; Scott; Seitz; Shor), particularly David Seitz’s promotion of work memoirs as a means to “elicit writers’ multiple orientations toward cultural values of work through reflection on situated moments of their continually evolving work identity and persuasive influences on work issues in their lives” (214). While I value the critical and ethnographic potential of this form of student writing, I contend that personal writing offers an additional and valuable benefit of disarticulating writers’ senses self from the increasingly dominant rhetorical culture of work. Some might contend that such an approach goes well beyond the purview of composition insofar as it considers professional conditions that aren’t writing, strictly speaking. However, I maintain that this work concerns discursive acts intimately related to students’ professional lives, namely the extrication of the self from professional narratives and the critical intellectual enterprises of resistance, critique, collective solidarity, and refusal. Far from being irrelevant to the writing classroom, these are precisely the kinds of public, discursive, and rhetorical situations that composition is most adept at preparing students to encounter.

As I develop in this article, one of the most immediate and significant threats of the contemporary culture of work is the erosion of autonomy. Literary critic Anna Katharina Schaffner contends that while concerns over the problem of exhaustion are timeworn, twenty-first-century conditions effectively represent a shift from prior paradigms: “boundaries between public and private selves, between work and leisure, and profession and calling, are becoming ever more blurred” (13). Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming likewise argue that the culture of work has expanded into the territory of the self to the extent that “we can no longer draw the line between what is fake and genuine about ourselves” (35). Accordingly, I regard the pedagogy of self-expression and self-discovery, most clearly identified in the expressivist tradition (Banks, Goldblatt), as supporting students in operating as intentional, autonomous agents and capable of resisting, changing, or even refusing work[3].

In what follows, I contextualize how contemporary theoretical approaches to work and overwork have conceived of the culture of the working world in terms of a loss of self. I then demonstrate how the field of composition has glossed the ways in which productivity lays claim to workers’ selfhood. I subsequently juxtapose these approaches with the expressivist tradition, a body of work that, as I suggest, offers a valuable means of teaching the reassertion of selfhood in the context of work. Finally, I turn to a discussion of how self-articulation might be introduced in the first-year composition classroom. I specifically discuss Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, a memoir of the author’s employment at an Amazon fulfillment center in Germany, detailing how the text offers an introduction to the culture of productivity and models resistant personal writing and discourse applicable to it. I additionally elaborate how Geissler’s text could be used to introduce the political value of self-expression and to support student writing in the service of this end. 

Burnout Theory

Before elaborating how the self might be liberated from the rhetorics of the contemporary working world, it is first important to clarify what precisely is meant by work and how it relates to the field of composition. As I conceptualize it, labor, as opposed to work, is fundamentally associated with production. Bruce Horner observes that labor has been historically understood as “the production of commodities” but notes that evolving notions of immaterial labor have allowed language and writing to function as commodities in the context of the knowledge economy (Rewriting Composition 95-97). Work, alternatively, may be distinguished as the formalization of labor practices, often localized in sites or organizations, “which have . . . been ongoing throughout human history” (97). However, due to the contemporary conditions of precarity, work often does not entail a formal profession or career but rather “temporary agency work, short-term contracts, on-call work, independent contracting… involuntary part-time work… and so on” (Moody 24). In other words, work names the conditions and locations of labor, though not necessarily stable or consistent ones. As the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” suggests, work is a place we come home from and a burden that keeps us from going dancing, even if it is discontinuous or part-time. 

According to Max Weber, the ideology of ceaseless productivity has increasingly informed the lives of modern workers. Work, for Weber, is no longer “the means to an end of satisfying the material needs of life” (12). Instead, he argues that the current “capitalist economic order is a monstrous cosmos” that “forces on the individual, to the extent that he is caught up in the relationship of the ‘market,’ the norms of its economic activity” (13). These norms, in Weber’s view, mandate “ceaseless, constant, symptomatic labor” (116). Importantly, he suggests that despite the spirit of capitalism’s unrelenting accelerations, workers are often complicit in this process. In the United States, “[w]here capitalism is at its most unbridled” (Weber 121), accruing wealth has effectively become “a sporting contest” (121). Regarding the previously discussed distinction between labor and work, in Weber’s view, to oppose work is not necessarily to oppose labor as such but rather to critique participation in the institutionalized and market-bound forms of work that structure contemporary life.

As contemporary critics of late capitalism note, work has kept pace with the accelerations of neoliberalism such that it is no longer entirely possible to distinguish between life and work. For critic Jonathan Crary, the culture of “24/7," the de facto ethic of the contemporary age, is now encroaching upon workers’ biological lives (9). On Crary’s account, sleep represents a site of non-productivity, “one of the of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism” (10). Philosopher Byung-Chul Han similarly argues that the neoliberal culture of work has profoundly transformed subjects’ lives. Late capitalism, he contends, propagates a myth of ceaseless productivity—“more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living” (51). As Han asserts, the modern subject is unable to do anything but work, “too alive to die, and too dead to live” (51). Theorizing a solution to these conditions, feminist critic Kathi Weeks contends that workers must continually develop creative methods of denying work access to the self: “[life] must be continually invented in the struggle to mark distinctions between fields of experience that nonetheless remain intertwined” (232). 

While they have devoted modest attention to productivity, writing studies scholars have been generally uninterested in the problems of overwork. Of those compositionists who have explicitly taken up the topic, several have expressed varying degrees of support for writerly productivity through direct theorization of efficient writing processes or through defense of writing as a productive act. Other writing scholars cognizant of neoliberal shifts have likewise refrained from developing pedagogical solutions to the increasingly unreasonable demands of the contemporary working world. Writing for CCC in 1985, Robert Boice investigated “blocked writers” (472), noting, “Failure to teach good habits of productivity . . . condemn[s] many students to a future of difficulty in completing written tasks” (479). Several scholars and professionals offered similar pronouncements in a 1987 special issue of Technical Communication. Paul D. Doebler praised the electronic revolution for enhancing the productivity of print publications and applauded technologically wrought productivity gains in the publishing world (256). In the same special issue, Robert Krull and Jeanne M. Hurford posed personal computing as a solution to “physical and psychological constraints” that limit writing production (243). 

Such early enthusiasm notwithstanding, composition has largely avoided treating writing as a quantifiable product and the writer as a producer, particularly as the discipline transitioned away from current-traditional rhetoric (Elbow; Emig; Murray). Until quite recently, much of the discipline’s treatment of writing production since the 1990s has framed writers’ output in abstract terms. Bruce Horner, for example, has claimed the value of writing lies with the labor of the writer rather than with the product of writing. In the introduction of the “Economies of Writing” special issue of JAC, he contends that political economies of writing underscore “the role of labor in producing value, and allow us to recognize that the official status and value of given texts and activities of writing are not and never their full or final value… but in and through specific means of engaging with them” (459).

Despite the field’s reticence to support productivity as such, a modest contingent of composition scholars have defended more material senses of production and productivity as goods associated with the work of writing. In 2009 article, Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss coined the term “rhetorical velocity,” an approach to the question of how writers might keep pace with the “rapidity at which information is crafted, delivered, distributed, recomposed, redelivered, redistributed.” In an essay similarly concerned with the need to keep pace with the contemporary demands of digital production, Jennifer Bay asks, “Why, then, aren’t Composition Studies and professional writing constituting themselves as part of this constant production?” (36; emphasis added). Unlike critics who theorize abstract or labor-based models of writing, these scholars understand writing to be tangible and entangled with various material and embodied processes. While most of these analyses do not defend productivity as such, they nevertheless conceive of writing as an inherently productive enterprise insofar as they esteem the writer’s capacity to materially produce text in response to the exigencies of work[4]. Other compositionists have approached productivity critically, though these discussions have generally glossed the structural aspects of overwork and refrained from offering pedagogical solutions. Albert Rouzie’s “Beyond the Dialectic of Work and Play: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric for Composition Studies,” for example, considers the late capitalist problem of work’s incursion into personal life. Rouzie supports reintroducing play into the space of work as a bulwark against professional demands: “Play in the context of work can help to recapture aspects of creative activity that have been denied to labor” (633). While productivity doesn’t directly enter his critique, Rouzie’s defense of play offers a counterstatement to the broader culture of overwork that attends to neoliberal working culture’s threat to the individual.

Overall, writing scholars’ attention to these issues indicates modest disciplinary concern with the unreasonable demands being placed upon contemporary workers. However, among those openly critical of neoliberal conditions, few acknowledge that the accelerations of work are the result of economic shifts or, indeed, that composition has any capacity to address this problem. Latent support of writers’ productivity has quietly reemerged over the past decade and reflects the not unreasonable desire to help students keep pace with twenty-first-century accelerations (Bay, Ridolfo and DeVoss). Generally, such attempts to cope with neoliberal conditions, whether critical (Rouzie) or more openly laudatory of productivity (Ridolfo and DeVoss), avoid explicitly intervening in the broader issues of overwork and burnout that increasingly attend the professional world. 

In contrast to research in composition concerned with productivity, expressivism’s long-standing interest in the discrete writer-subject offers an effective, albeit unorthodox, means of teaching writing that serves the interests of the individual rather than those of the working world. In “Don’t Call it Expressivism: Legacies of a ‘Tacit Tradition,’” Eli Goldblatt endeavors to recover expressivism’s emphasis on affect and personal expression in the interest of defending writers’ intimate relations with writing. Resisting disciplinary presumptions of personal expression as “embarrassing and unworthy of academic attention” (439), Goldblatt argues that many scholars, in fact, “hold a preference for personal writing and narrative” (440) and for teaching that celebrates this kind of writing by students. For Goldblatt, “professional and theoretical” orientations in composition courses often neglect what initially motivates most writers, namely “the desire to speak out of your most intimate experiences and to connect with communities in need” (442). Goldblatt accordingly contends that expressivist tendencies are not entirely gone from composition and traces four expressivist ethics that he sees as embedded within the work of composition and worthy of more explicit foregrounding. The first of these particularly lends itself to teaching composition against a culture of overwork as it addresses the importance of the individual finding his or her place in the world as an autonomous being: “The individual, embedded in culture and history, must find a way of being in the world through expression that cannot be adequately prescribed by textbooks, standardized curricula, or social norms” (443).

Adam Banks’s Digital Griots, a text Goldblatt reads as expressivist insofar as it places “emphasis on the urgency of writing out of individual as well as collective voices” (453), offers a clearer sense of how overwork might be combatted. Banks conceptualizes the work of composition as the cultivation of the self and the strengthening of the individual’s knowledge, skills, and communicative capacities. The text develops a model of the digital griot, or storyteller, who exemplifies a form of agentive, culturally-situated rhetorical performance: “an approach to African American rhetoric that is fluid and forward looking yet firmly rooted in African American traditions” (3). Banks celebrates the idiosyncratic voices of the digital griot while noting that the figure ceaselessly mediates between personal choice and the dictates of tradition. As a DJ, he argues, you are “expected to have your own style, your own flow, your own technique(s), even as you’re expected to know the conversation, know the tradition, shape and reshape them” (4). Banks implies that the griot’s primary communal investment resists economic exploitation. In acting as a “historiographer” (27), a technical master, an entertainer, and “interpreter” (28), the digital griot, in Banks’s understanding, is rooted in an engagement between individuals, communities, and traditions beyond what Crary calls “the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism” (10). Read together, Goldblatt and Banks pose expressivist writing as a potential means of resisting the overreach of work insofar as they frame the writer as a self-possessed subject capable of experiencing the world as an individual and making intentional choices beyond the remit of work. 

In the following section, I apply expressivism’s valuation of the discrete subject and its promotion of personal writing to the context of work, arguing that reflective writing can serve to support students’ agency and autonomy in neoliberal contexts.

Temping

Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, a timely memoir of the author’s employment at an Amazon fulfillment center, is valuable both as a critical introduction to the increasingly dominant culture of job insecurity and as a text with which to support students’ personal writing on totalizing rhetorics of the working world. Throughout the memoir, Geissler demonstrates how the casualized workplace both degrades workers’ autonomy and vitiates their capacity for resistance. Though she ultimately regards her tenure at Amazon as a failure to resist, she nevertheless conveys her experience as to be of value to others struggling to protect their selfhood in the context of the new economy. As I argue, Geissler’s critiques and her account of her personal failure problematize the plight of the contemporary worker and communicate both the potentials of and hindrances to defending the self in the context of work. I suggest that using this text to introduce students to the complex and destabilizing rhetorics of contemporary work and, subsequently, as a model for students’ own personal writing that actualizes the goals of expressivism promises a productive means of communicating the resilient and potentially liberatory value of cultivating “your own style, your own flow, your own technique(s)” against the logics of work (Banks 4).

A central arc of Geissler’s memoir concerns the author’s surrender to the dissociative rhetorics of the workplace that strive to deny the dignity and individuality of workers. Despite enjoying a literary career outside of her seasonal work and knowing that her time at Amazon is limited, Geissler nevertheless find herself defeated by the experience. Throughout the text, she highlights how the outwardly welcoming demeanor of the institution papers over a culture of indignity and disposability. At an unpaid training session at the beginning of her tenure, a trainer explains that “We’re all on a first-name-basis from the bottom to the top, that’s how it works here.” This ersatz collegiality, however, is paired with an entrepreneurial, bootstrap rhetoric: “‘We at Amazon think every day is a first day. Remember that. This is a good opportunity to make a note of that and get in on the ground floor and move up’” (35). Already at this early stage, Geissler experiences a sense of personal failure in being unable to assert herself. “You’d like to contradict him,” she writes, but she doesn’t “because you’re me and that means that you’re shy; you can’t get your mouth open” (39). 

Throughout the text, Geissler continually finds herself similarly defeated and decentered by her work. As she reflects, “You’ve completely forgotten that you have a profession and are only here to alleviate momentary poverty. Something inside you is essentially unsettled and will never calm down again” (29). Not only does working for Amazon drive Geissler to lose sight of her outside life, but she continually finds her mind inhabited by the logics of work. In relating a conversation with a friend who expresses the wish to never work again, she notes, “You won’t talk the way you normally talk, by then. You’ll end up talking to yourself in employee language” (27). When she leaves the position, having finally succumbed to burnout, she is unable to feel relief at the prospect of release. Instead, Geissler hears the call of work:

And then a choir proclaims:

What are you doing?

You can’t just stop!

You coward!

You lazy thing!

Work takes skill!

Work takes some learning!

Now you know what it’s really like!

And you just cut and run. (203)

In these and other instances, despite her efforts to compartmentalize her experience, logics of efficiency and productivity invariably inform Geissler’s relationship to her own personhood and trouble her attempts to separate herself from her job. She likewise finds that her work obviates the possibility of resistance. When an employee explains that she doesn’t have a choice but to accept the position at Amazon, Geissler thinks, “you could have contradicted her and said: Yes, you do have a choice. But you stood there tired and shocked next to her, like you’re standing there tired now; the reflexes you’d need are numbed, so you nodded and now you nod and you think: That’s one way to see it” (167).

Despite her purported failure to assert herself or resist the dissociative and disempowering forces of the contingent working world, Geissler’s memoir nevertheless affirms the value of denying work ultimate access to the self. Reflecting on how others might approach laboring under similar conditions, she notes, “you ought to have more guts than me and not try to perform your work as well as possible; you should be trying to perform your work badly. Or, as Elfriede Jelinek writes: ‘Anyone alive disrupts.’ You ought to prove to your employer that you’re alive” (169). Such a statement, quoting the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and playwright, exhorts readers to oppose the extensive professional rhetorics that mandate workers disappear into their labor. Geissler further speculates that one could engage in small acts of resistance like hiding products, noting, “Of course they’d catch you, because everything gets found out in this company, but up to that point you’d have lived a little more in your workplace and you’d have ordered your obedience to retreat” (170). In her construction, the act of resistance is not ultimately about offering a substantive challenge to one’s employer but rather about mitigating the employer’s attempts to diminish the worker’s capacity for resistance. In this sense, the preservation of autonomy is a generative act that looks forward to the future agency and capacities of the worker. As Geissler’s contends, the worker who has proved to their employer that they are alive also has the potential to act (169).

As I contend, teaching this text in the context of a first-year writing course organized around the subject of work, or in a critically-oriented professional writing course, would be one of many possible methods of introducing students to the consequence of contemporary rhetorics of work. Specifically, this text offers to present students with the disastrous effects of 21^st century occupational rhetorics and the value of cultivating an agentive self that Goldblatt and Banks both advocate. While the text could be pedagogically utilized in a variety of ways, I believe its most effective use to be in support of personal writing following Seitz’s work autobiographies (214), Shor’s promotion of autobiographical writing about work (22), and Scott’s assignment of work histories in which students “write descriptions of jobs they currently hold or have held, and examine perceptions of work” (165). One version of such an assignment, similar to personal work on writing that I’ve previously assigned, could ask students to write work autobiographies modeled on Geissler’s text, focusing specifically on how employer(s) treated them, how productivity expectations were communicated, and how their treatment as workers affected them. Students could reflect directly on how the rhetorics of obedience and success communicated to them by their employers differs or aligns with Geissler’s description and the extent to which they believe these rhetorics similarly influenced their thinking and behavior. Crucially, such an assignment, following Goldblatt’s prescription that individuals “must find a way of being in the world through expression that cannot be adequately prescribed by textbooks, standardized curricula, or social norms” (443), should also ask students to reflect on their identities outside of work as a means to meditate the influence of the rhetorics of work and to position themselves to face them more critically and agentively. Such writing should ideally be accompanied by extensive discussions on the relationship between work and the self and the role of productivity in this relationship. In these discussions, instructors should be prepared for resistance to the notion of work’s threat to selfhood or indifference to the risks of work in the context of the new economy and should expect to interrogate these perspectives with students at length. 

In assigning similar projects, though notably before the translation of Geissler’s text, I’ve asked students to reflect on their work histories and their affective experience of employment. While many students have described feeling gratified and enriched by work, many others related distressing narratives of indignity and frustration. These experiences, notably, have often diverged along the lines of class and race. Many of my more privileged students have detailed positive experiences working in government, law, and entertainment, and have frequently reported that these early-career working experiences are supportive of their long-term goals. Common among many less privileged students, however, is a deep sense of devaluation and exploitation. In a recent course, one student wrote on the complex humiliations of working in fast food as a working-class Asian-American woman. Another student movingly described the shame experienced by work-study students who are effectively outed to their peers as low-income and in-debt. Some years ago, a student of mine wrote about suffering a heart attack while working at a fast food restaurant. These and other student papers exposed the physical and psychological effects of work, though they often lacked a direct critique of working culture. When asked how she viewed an employer and a position that risked her health, the student who had suffered a heart attack remarked that she was determined to take better care of herself in the future. Like Scott in his discussion of a student named Sophia (176-7), I recall wishing for more critical perspectives and a further rejection of capitalist narratives of self-reliance and success. In my experience, students across the spectrum of privilege have internalized society’s mandates for higher productivity, entrepreneurialism, and ceaseless hustle, whether in prestigious positions or in multiple part-time jobs. Absent from these accounts is any sense that the culture of productivity is the product of a capitalist society striving to derive maximal profit from an increasingly contingent and unorganized workforce. Accordingly, I believe that Seasonal Associate offers students a framework to analyze similar indignities in their own lives as general conditions of neoliberal work that can be both critiqued and resisted. 

Notably, for students who have limited work experience or for those whose experience of the neoliberal economy is not as injurious or illustrative as Geissler’s, a more straightforward utilization of the text could ask students to analyze the rhetorics of work on display in Seasonal Associate. Such an analysis of Geissler’s experience could offer students a proleptic introduction to the construction of work in the neoliberal economy and suggest modes of resistance and critique. As I have demonstrated, Geissler dramatizes how the discourse of personal entrepreneurship and productivity pervades the world of contemporary low-wage work and coerces employees into obedience. Students uninitiated to these discourses could be asked to specifically analyze how Geissler’s employer constructs work and exacts obedience from employees through training, discourse, and policy. Students could also be asked to analyze resonances between Geissler’s description of workplace rhetoric to contemporary examples of employee training materials. Students analyzing explicitly anti-union training videos used by Amazon (“Amazon's Union-Busting Training Video”) and Walmart (“Walmart Employee Training Video Anti Union 2000s”) or more mundane examples of customer service behavior (“The Home Depot Training video”) could likewise better understand how employers strive to persuade employees to adopt specific beliefs and engage in actions in conflict with the employee’s self-interest. By placing such materials in conversation with Geissler, students could come to identify patterns of neoliberal workplace rhetoric and be far better positioned to encounter them.

Regarding my promotion of Season Associate and defense of expressivism, I believe that students benefit enormously from understanding themselves as fundamentally separate from the pervasive culture of neoliberal work. While the strategies I’ve described can ultimately do little to mitigate productivity demands that are directly harmful to workers, by studying neoliberal workplace rhetorics students can better understand that contemporary working conditions are the consequences of a global working culture that can be critiqued, negotiated, resisted, or refused. With Geissler, students may be better positioned to negotiate their work or to seek better working conditions for themselves and others. While I don’t envision this work as supporting direct acts of defiance or refusal in the classroom—this could not but be counterproductive—students engaged in this work would certainly be better positioned to contextualize their roles in both higher education and professional life and better protect themselves in diverse neoliberal contexts.

It must be acknowledged here that the ability to cultivate self-expression against the rhetorics of work is contingent upon a host of extrinsic factors. With respect to social class, those of limited economic means, like Geissler, can rarely afford to confront their employers and are likely to find themselves in similarly exploitative contexts if they leave one position for another (Wright 26-7). William H. Thelin and Genesea M. Carter notably contend that working-class students lack the relative autonomy of the middle class (6). Of course, autonomy and agency are also unevenly distributed along the lines of race, sexuality gender, ability, nationality, and numerous additional factors. While workers from marginalized or precarious groups have contributed substantially to the tradition of American labor organizing and workplace resistance[5], workers from these groups are also more thwarted in their activism. As Joe William Trotter, Jr. observes, African American workers have historically been met with “mob violence, racial job ceilings, and color lines” (xviii) to thwart their attempts to enter and equalize the workplace. Simply put, those who already lack autonomy and agency face greater obstacles and risks when it comes to challenging their working conditions. However, I nevertheless suggest that the value of self-expression and the concomitant disarticulation of the self from the sphere of work is a valuable aspiration for those of all positionalities within the working world, save, perhaps, for those at its pinnacle. While such distancing may prompt some to take more risk-laden action in advocating for their rights as workers, self-expression nevertheless supports the efforts of those who are unable to take such risks. In particular, self-expression promotes Kathi Weeks’s “postwork speculative horizon,” a generative means of thinking beyond work in ways that offer to support agency, autonomy, and acts following from their cultivation (233).

An additional question arises from the political economy of composition. As an enterprise embedded in the financial mechanisms of late capitalism, austerity, and the declining support for public universities, composition is deeply informed by the logics of profit and productivity (Brownstein). Departments and writing programs tirelessly chase student credit hours, compete to produce majors, and manufacture their institutional brand (Gunner), a process that, as Robert Samuels argues, “often pushes composition programs to reproduce the structures that place writing, teachers, form, and practice in a debased position” (A3). Likewise, as Ann Larson notes, composition, as a field that largely subsists on part-time labor, “is inseparable from low-wage work” (166). Given these conditions, Samuels is right to ask how writing studies can be critical of neoliberalism when it is itself so deeply informed by neoliberal conditions. It is also likely that students who notice the degree to which “the managerial subjectivity dominates in composition studies” (Bousquet 494) will not only be confused but may be persuaded by the neoliberal rhetorics of the university that promote industriousness, excellence, and tireless productivity. Such challenges are considerable and cannot simply be dismissed if teachers decide to engage in pedagogical practices like those I’ve outlined here. However, despite the challenges, I maintain that this kind of work is worth attempting. On a national scale, scholars should, as Samuels argues, “promote full-time faculty with job security, fair wages, a career path, and professional development funding” (A9). As Scott contends, we must also use our classrooms to engage with students about the political economy of higher education and the contemporary workplace (162-167). Building upon this work, the pedagogical orientation that I advocate can better contextualize the efficiency rhetorics informing both the university and the world of work. Students taught the value of self-expression in the mediated contexts of the modern workplace, even if such education is conducted within the neoliberal context of higher education, may better understand the stakes, risks, and potential of striving to “prove to your employer that you’re alive” (Geissler 169).

A final challenge to what I propose concerns the controversial nature of preparing students to see the world of work as often antagonistic to their own interests. Insofar as academic institutions frequently frame the goods of writing education as in the service of professional success, instructors may find themselves at odds with colleagues and administrators. Writing teachers, it must also be acknowledged, additionally hold complex relationships to both institutions and students that might trouble this work. While we wish to provide students with the knowledge and skills that will most secure their success and well-being, we also work at the behest of our institutions. To return to the arguments of Ronald, Bay, Scott, and Samuels, pedagogies more concerned with promoting criticism and resistance rather than skills may be profoundly misaligned with the orientation of the university. Moreover, pedagogy that questions or challenges the rhetorics of professionalization dominant in higher education may be dangerous to teachers of composition insofar as most of us are contingent employees striving to remain in the good graces of our employers. These are serious concerns that should be carefully considered when engaging in any form of risk-laden pedagogy. Nevertheless, my purpose in this article has been to suggest that the professional conditions of overwork, including our own, have not only become increasingly intolerable but pose mounting risk to workers. I believe that if instructors hold the requisite security to be direct about the threats posed by contemporary working culture—acknowledging that many of us do not—then we have an obligation to resist the professionalizing orientation of many of our programs, departments, and institutions to better prepare students for what lies ahead.

Conclusion

As I have argued throughout this article, while burnout may be a pervasive feature of work in the new economy, workers should not simply learn to bear it through coping strategies. Instead, as teachers of writing, we must strive to prepare students to contextualize and resist the rhetorics of work even as doing so entails our own potentially hazardous resistance to the logics that inform composition programs and universities. Because these rhetorics represent an enormous threat to the autonomy and well-being of contemporary workers, the struggle for disarticulating the self from the scene of work should be a central concern in an era where overwork is becoming our defining condition. 

More research is needed, of course, to understand how the culture of productivity acquires individual investment. Composition scholars need to better understand how productivity operates in various areas of social, professional, and university life. With increased corporate presence on college campuses and the number of professional partnerships on the rise[6], students are being inured to a culture of maximal productivity throughout their college experience. The ubiquity of campus hackathons, round-the-clock work sessions where undergraduates emulate the 24/7 work model tech industry, is one such example (Leckart). Regarding these kinds of events, the field has yet to substantively investigate how pre-professional initiatives and corporate partnerships are inuring students to the demands of fast capitalism. 

As compositionists prepare students to encounter the challenges of the new economy, we should continue to consider what our role ought to be in supporting those we teach. In particular, we ought to embrace the potential of radical pedagogical strategies that do not gloss the antagonisms between occupational success and individual flourishing. As the working world asks progressively more of workers, it is no longer acceptable to merely prepare students to succeed professionally, even when such preparation includes critical training (Bay; Ronald), when graduates will be increasingly overworked and undervalued. Regarding these conditions, encouraging students to articulate a sense of self apart from the sphere of work is quickly becoming one of our most important pedagogical tasks.