Dewey, Latour, and the Economy of Things

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There has been much discussion recently about the agency of non-human objects. Perhaps it is beneficial to think in terms of the agency of Latourian “missing masses” not so much in terms of the agency things initiate upon us (thereby perpetuating a tried anthropocentrism) but in the relationships things have together outside human experience. Think of it as the Bechdel Test for non-human things. In Experience and Nature, Dewey makes it clear that we should not be so naive as to think that when we turn our back, things cease to form relationships with other things. Tools not only have relationships outside of our own, but Dewey even goes so far as to say that these relationships are primary:

A tool is a particular thing, but it is more than a particular thing, since it is a thing in which a connection, a sequential bond of nature is embodied. It possesses an objective relation as its own defining property. Its perception as well as its actual use takes the mind to other things. The spear suggests the feast not directly but through the medium of other external things, such as the game and the hunt, to which the sight of the weapon transports imagination. Man’s bias towards himself easily leads him to think of a tool solely in relation to himself, to his hand and eyes, but its primary relationship is towards other external things, as the hammer to the nail, and the plow to the soil. Only through this objective bond does it sustain relation to man himself and his activities. A tool denotes a perception and acknowledgement of sequential bonds in nature. (123)

This passage disrupts the tendency for readers of Dewey to see him as overly anthropocentric and it is actually in this passage that we can see Dewey responding to Morris Cohen’s criticism about that same topic leveled at him in Problems of Men (195-6). Dewey wants us to recognize that humans are but one bond in this long sequential series of transactions marked by continuity. Things/objects are literally “acting out” on their potentialities in the process of inquiry, and this oftentimes gets hidden behind the fact that it is happening during the act of experience. But just because a human is using a hammer and that hammer is known through experience does not mean that the hammer and the nail do not have a separate relationship when the human turns around or when they operate outside the realm of human experience.

Dewey, always a perennial champion of experience, should not be interpreted through such a delimiting lens by assuming that his philosophy focuses on the primacy of human experience.

Rethinking Groupthink

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Lest we forget about the value of cognitive science to our field, and to writing practice in general, I suggest Jonah Lehrer’s most recent article from The New Yorker, “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth.” Not because it forwards anything new about what writing teachers were taught about brainstorming or group activities, but because it challenges us to rethink a practice we use in a rather rote fashion.

Lehrer’s seeks to archive away Alex Osborn’s 1948 book “Your Creative Power,” which was the first real mainstream attempt to vouch for brainstorming as many conceive of it today: an uninhibited thought exercise in which a group of individuals attempt to solve a problem by “storming” it with an array of stream of consciousness free associations.  Lehrer wants Osborn’s book to be stored in the library basement not because it did not make contributions to the way people generate ideas, but because its once-ubiquitous assertions have now been challenged and, in several cases, proved erroneous mainly by studies by fancy-pants universities in the American Northeast concluding that the best ideas generated in group settings are not merely the result of free associations uttered in a “safe space” but rather in group settings where ideas are constantly met with healthy doses of criticism and skepticism and my favourite people of all: dissenters.

Yawn. Any writing instructor has known that for years, in writing classrooms all over North America, Peter Elbow’s “Doubting/Believing Game” encourages practice of just these things (although with more of a focus on the individual): Free associations! Realistic assertions. Crazy potentially revolutionary argument! This is so illogical. The only real difference is that, while Elbow broke up the process into larger stages –  back and forth, back and forth, doubting and believing, doubting and believing — Lehrer calls for an integration of these processes in a full-on group setting in the final line of his piece: “It is the human friction that makes the sparks.” While Elbow wants individual writers to enter into opposite frames of mind while crafting their composition, Lehrer wants to put believers and doubters into the same space at the same time. But even then he would be hesitant to prescribe such a single mode of brainstorming:

The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions.

After reading this I began to think about my own way of “teaching” brainstorming, and the acceptable/common ways of doing so in the field of rhetoric and composition. I do teach clustering, clouding, and listing; I do make assumptions that students know how to do these things; I do put students in groups and tell them to come up with ideas, not really trying to properly distribute the dissenters into groups, or thinking about how one student’s ideology might productive clash, in Lehrer’s words “make sparks,” when confronted by the ideology of another student. I want to challenge myself to no longer view brainstorming as “giving time” to students to think through some ideas, and instead to view brainstorming as an activity that expands students’ perceptions and potential ideas about a given topic by exposing them, explicitly, to criticism and dissent that will disrupt their way of thinking and, through having to resolve this disruption, have them come to reach a new way of thinking, a new take on a given topic.

It’s less about viewing a student as doubting and believing, and more about viewing students as a group of doubters and believers.

Writing Students as Flattened, Non-Enriched Soil

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To say that metaphors are a dominant trope in reflections on teaching practice is a rather sizable understatement.

In his 1989 article, “Bridging the Gaps: Understanding Our Students’ Metaphors for Composing,” Lad Tobin relays an excerpt from an interview of a student who viewed the writing process through a slightly different metaphorical lens than did Tobin:

You see, that’s the whole problem. Writing is a lasagna to me. There are layers and you have to put them together carefully and then you are done. But you keep saying that I have to narrow my focus. You are trying to turn my lasagna into a meat loaf and I don’t like meat loaf. (455, emphasis added)

Tobin’s anecdote, while humorous, illuminates an important point: many of the conflicts we have with our students on a pedagogical level can not only be addressed through explicit discussions of metaphor but are direct causes of dissonance between the metaphors we have and the metaphors our students have. And while English educators as a whole have addressed metaphor thoroughly (see Bowden; Cooper; Faigley; Fleckenstein; Mead and Morris; Reynolds; Smith; Tobin) in many ways pertaining to teaching roles and methods, one way that is lacking is in what Tobin refers to as “bridging the gaps”: assessing, analyzing, and teaching students how to be critical users of metaphor to see how theirs match up with ours.

The consistent, explicit integration of metaphor into my own teaching practices stems from a frustrating trend in the literature of composition pedagogy to be teacher-centric in its discussions of metaphor. Most thoughtful, reflective instructors are quickly able to respond to the question, “What metaphor guides your teaching?” but are perhaps, in my estimation, less likely to have a quick response to the question, “What metaphors do your students subscribe to when writing?”, or even, “How do students challenge or respond to the resulting metaphors of your choosing?” Tobin’s comic relief above relays the reality that the metaphors students have for writing, and education broadly, differ at times fundamentally from the ones we use to teach.

We are accustomed to thinking about our own metaphors for our teaching selves; however, each metaphor we conceive of ourselves as embodying necessarily places students in their own position (if I am a cultivator then my students necessarily take the form of flattened, non-enriched soil, and so on). Metaphor is a powerful tool, as we have collectively acknowledged. As such, we should be more explicit in the ways we get students to hone this tool.

Redefining Student Apathy, Saving the Milquetoasts

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To say that writing teachers are familiar with student apathy would be an unforgivable understatement. Over the years, each “movement” in composition studies has had its own response to this issue: Emig and Britton asked students to engage in the expressive and poetic; Bizzell and Cooper extended the discursive acts of student writing beyond the classroom; Berlin celebrated but also lamented when students realized they were very much part of the oppressive institutions they were critiquing. In this vein, I ask: How can current writing teachers respond to supposed student apathy towards civic engagement without relying on using technological artifacts as mere “entertainment”?

In his recent TED talk titled based on his co-edited book Local Motion, Toronto-based Dave Meslin redefines political apathy not as some sort of internal syndrome, but as a complex web of technocultural barriers that actively reinforce disengagement. Barriers, Meslin suggests, that manifest through societal narratives of involuntary “heroes”; uninformative political coverage in the media; and impossible City Hall documents. If we view Meslin’s call as a challenge and not an excuse, then I contend that writing teachers can benefit from Meslin’s redefining of apathy.

I’ve been thinking about how (non-learning management system) course websites can serve an integral role in shaping a social environment aimed at overcoming barriers to engagement. In many ways, course websites can serve as the hub of a student’s understanding of a given subject: students collect resources, view content, and even contribute to this one given site.  As such, how we craft course websites could potentially re-shape student habits and associations. John Dewey, in The Public and Its Problems, shows the importance of developing habits in citizenship.

“Faculties of effectual observation, reflection and desire are habits acquired under the influence of the culture and institutions of society, not ready-made inherent powers.”

Apathy, or the lack thereof, is not an individually-based phenomenon; rather, political motivations stem from the shaping of particular kinds of environments. Course websites shape technocultural environments that value certain habits over others. These aesthetic, political, and educational spaces require a careful thinking through of design, purpose, and particularly features, all of which have ramifications in the group habits we are developing  in students. Our students are not milquetoasts, drained of all political purpose. Our students are motivated individuals whose experiences revolve around the encountering of a series of actively discouraging barriers for political engagement. I wonder if our construction of course websites, if done with Meslin’s redefinition of apathy in mind, could act as agents against these active barriers discouraging political engagement.

Christian sophistry, etc.

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A summary of Plato’s (unfortunate) place in the 21st-century university, from the Gorgias:

“I don’t know, Socrates — in a way you seem to me to be right, but the thing that happens to most people has happened to me: I’m not really persuaded by you” (513c).

Callicles, telling like it is…as usual.

As I’m studying for my comps and immersing myself by Plato’s dialogues (mainly the Phaedrus and the Gorgias), I find myself stubbornly trying to stay in love with Plato: a love that is forged along the lines of foundationalism and common good. I find myself identifying a significant amount of overlap with my own philosophical and religious beliefs and Plato’s insistence that language is the conduit for spiritual and moral conviction of souls (which exist by the way –  look it up). There is a “rightness” about Plato that feels at home with my fundamental Christian beliefs, a comfort I find in seeing other people say “true,” “right,” and “just” without seeming to bat an eyelash.

But like so many Christian speakers, the manner in which their message is portrayed frustrates audiences to the point of, well, frustration. Plato’s outsider status in the “sophist” community is because he cared less about the way he was coming across than he did about the accuracy of the message. While this may seem like a truism in rhetorical studies, it’s important to note that this is a key reason why many Christians have a soft spot for Plato and secretly rally against honey-tongued pastry chefs.

Arhetorical Research Processes and the Limitations of IRB

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Well I must say that anyone who questions the procedures and limitations of the Institutional Research Board (IRB) practices is good with me. Heidi McKee and James E. Porter’s The Ethics of Digital Writing Research: A Rhetorical Approach (in CCCC, June 2008) does just that and reveals the one dimensional approach that IRB takes on the research of “living beings.” And while they do admit that the charts IRB gives are not meant to be holistic but rather guidelines, I think McKee and Porter are spot on in saying that the information and documents provided for support to potential researchers does not sufficiently act as a heuristic and as such falls short in addressing the inclusion of online “living beings.”

Pointing out the arhetorical nature of IRB and other institutional research protocols should come as no surprise. Before I applied to get IRB for a research study on educational assessment, I was told by many in the English department that it was designed for scientific or at least social scientific research settings. The IRB application form and the supplemented information did not account for the wide range of research practices that actually take place on the university campus. They force those who wish to conduct discourse analysis or engage in simple educational assessment to fill out page after page of non-sequitur information that is entirely irrelevant to the project. While I might seem like I am coming across as a bitter humanities grad student eternally shaking my fist at the domination of scientific practices in a post-secondary setting, I encourage you not to view me like this. I am thankful for the IRB process that keeps us safe from harm while in bed at night but I do think that IRB, like McKee and Porter, should be injected with a healthy dose of rhetorical awareness, at least an  acknowledgment that the research work being done in variegated university settings are distinctly different in their epistemological approaches, that the assumptions I make about knowledge are different than people conducting psychological studies, that my “lab” is different than their “labs.”

But alas here is the problem: the very act of expanding the borders of IRB research protocols would to some extent imply an acknowledgement that research is a rhetorical process, and that research practices are not always so cut and dry and instead are constantly being challenged by integrations of computer technology and shifting notions of what is “being” (last time I checked there is not an ontology section of the IRB application system). And in many ways the idea that research is rhetorical is McKee’s primary concern, a concern that I, who just recently lashed out against all neatly-packaged theory-based ethnographies, would love for all people to acknowledge. McKee’s work is vitally important because it forces researchers (in rhet/comp anyway) to address the rhetorical nature of their research in transparent ways. It asks them to acknowledge that the research they are/have been conducting is a situated event with factors that cannot be replicated and with participants who are highly aware of the events taking place and with researchers who really need this research project to “work” because if it doesn’t then it will not be published and the wonderful thought of publication was the catalyst behind the very act of research in the first place, right?

As we continue to traverse the meandering, complex nature of Internet-based research, we will continue to redefine what ethical research practices are (see McKee’s other article in Computers and Composition). We need to push forcefully against the arhetorical limitations places upon us by organizations such as IRB, not in such a way that is disrespectful or that shows disdain, but in a way that encourages conversation and takes critically into account the range of practices and definitions that are now changed the face of electronic research.