First of all, I love the example of the ATM in the introduction – it effectively complicates the myth of “machines replacing manpower.”

The idea that strikes me as the most interesting is Watkins’s shift from positioning people as “literacy users” to “literacy subjects.” The former assumes that there is the individual who is shopping for literacy products out there; on the contrary, the latter highlights how the individual is subjectivized as an literary subject in a web of socio-economic conditions. As such, while the term “literacy users” implies that individuals rage against external conditions (which present themselves as obstacles), “literacy subjects” implies that we are also enabled by power relations. In short, it focuses less on how we act and more on what enacts or what enables us to act. Watkins’s critique of the fantasy of autonomy and autonomous choice would benefit from a conversation with Judith Butler’s and Elizabeth Povinelli’s critique of the autological subject.

One of the assumptions Watkins works with is a more refined conception of “human capital,” whose resources “are never solely the result of individual effort, nor can they be initiated solely by individual choice” (7). This is Watkins’s way of challenging some scholars’ faith in individual autonomy. This adds to Bawarshi’s point last week about transferable skills: many skills are transferable but not all of them are validated and thus not all skills are legible as transferrable resources. In other words, the value of literacy is only realizable when it is expressed and then recognized as such. Thus, “There is no reason to assume automatically that the value ultimately realized from the literacy labor necessary to this production is returned to the literacy subjects” (Watkins 52). Literacy is not permanent, or is not recognized as such at least. But is individual autonomy in the context of literacy a necessary fantasy?

This leads to Watkins’s formulation of “just-time-human-capital,” which explains why long-term investment in education is hard to justify. According to Watkins, “In a just-in-time system, human capital is individual power of action on the occasion, rather than the individual acquisition of a reserve that can be mobilized for an occasion” (61). Cumulative literacy is only valuable if it manifests in the power to act. The result of upholding the just-in-time, which “undermines the temporal grounds for merit,” is democratizing and yet problematic because it has the potential to render human capital disposable and obsolete (62). This speaks to Deborah Brandt’s observation of how literacies can be rendered invisible in The Rise of Writing.

I was really excited to see Watkins use examples from labor practices in English departments (or more broadly speaking, in academia) to demonstrate his points about human capital and just-time-human capital. What would be his advice to graduate students who are anxious about the academic job market? I’m also interested in discussing Watkins’s take on the split between the “professional” and the “literate” (as in adjectival literacy) – do we buy it?