Taking stock of the diminishing material conditions faced by contemporary writers broadly conceived, this article (re)frames writing as a site and a practice of exploited labor. Arguing that writing scholars have often avoided interrogating writing’s links to labor, particularly with respect to declining working conditions and the appropriation of value from workers, I draw attention to the pervasive crisis of writing’s devaluation under late capitalism. To evidence this assessment, I apply political economist Harry Braverman’s conception of the “progressive alienation of the process of production”—the notion that labor is increasingly eroded through capitalism’s advancement—to the scene of contemporary gig writing, specifically Amazon’s microtask platform Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurk, I maintain, offers a paradigmatic illustration of contemporary writers’ material exploitation, both for its efforts to de-skill writers and for its conscription of writers to advance their own exploitation by employing them to train generative AI.

Recently, a private space race has emerged, helmed by some of the world’s wealthiest figures. These space entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk most prominently, have framed the new space race as preparation for the permanent emancipation of humans from Earth. Brad Tabas terms this project the “post-planetary.” In this essay, I analyze postplanetary rhetoric through Todd McGowan’s theorization of fantasy, arguing that the discourse gains assent through operationalizing fantasies of abundance and relegating Earth to a lost cause. In charting the structure of this discourse, I seek to promote further disciplinary attention to fantasy for its capacity to illuminate how contemporary discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation perpetuate capitalism’s hegemony by cultivating consumers’ desires for plenty. I also seek to showcase how a rhetorical approach to fantasy both attends to capitalism’s abortive repression of its contradictions and reveals how the repressed Real of capitalist violence haunts the entrepreneurial scene.

While scholars of writing have increasingly turned toward economic issues, the role of debt has remained largely absent from composition scholarship. This article takes stock of the material and ideological magnitude of student debt in the age of neoliberalism and proposes bringing the subject into the writing classroom.

Drawing from recent work in the areas of economics and sociology, this article applies theories of precarity and the precariat, terms that denote the marginalized status of contingent workers, to the composition classroom. Reviewing the economic and social conditions precipitating workforce casualization, the article argues that theories of precarity support the efforts of scholars in composition studies thinking beyond the concept of social class and toward models of solidarity. Building upon the work of these scholars, the article advocates attention to the shared precarity of students and proposes methods of enhancing solidarity at the university.

AbstractAs scholars have recently suggested, rhetoric has long been remiss when it comes to nondiscursive concerns beyond its traditional purview. While many have sought to broaden rhetoric's scope, no one has yet undertaken a nondiscursive rhetorical investigation of social change in an effort to reconcile the tension between a critique of agency and the perception of human responsibility. This article undertakes such a critique through Alain Badiou's concept of the event, a concept that, I contend, offers the discipline a means of rethinking the opposition between relativism and flat ontology. Analyzing the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi through the frame of the event, I regard Bouazizi's act as an ontic occurrence exerting influence over protestors across the Arab world while demanding collective recognition to emerge as an event.