Most writing in schools and colleges is a perversion of practical style: the student pretends that he is writing a memorandum. He pretends that he knows more than the reader, that the reader needs this information, and that his job is to impart that information in a way that is easy for the reader to parse. The pretense is supposed to be practice for the real thing. Actually, the reader (the teacher) probably knows much more about the subject than the writer; the reader (the teacher) has no need whatever for the information; and the job of the writer is to cover himself from attack by his superior (the teacher). The actual scene interferes so much with the fantasy scene that the result is almost inevitably compromised, if not fraudulent. (Francis-Nöel Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth, p. 77-8)

Scholars write for their peers. They present their ideas to a readership of people who are roughly as knowledgeable about their subject as they are. They write for readers who are qualified, not just to learn from their discoveries, but to point out their mistakes. Shakespeare scholars write about his plays and sonnets for people who are familiar with them. They imagine a reader who knows the text as well they do and has easy access to it. Sociologists write about society on the presumption that their readers, too, have thought a great deal about, say, the causes of crime or poverty. They assume that their readers also have data to inform these thoughts. Writing instructors, finally, when writing in their journals, are addressing other writing instructors, with a rich understanding of the problems of writing and many years of experience trying to solve them. Their readers already know what student writing looks like.

But who are those students writing for? Sometimes we will give students a kind of “simulation”; we ask them to write a text with an imaginary audience of magazine readers, policy makers, or business leaders. We place them in the role of journalist, or expert, or consultant. Sometimes we will ask them to imagine writing an article in one of the major academic journals of their discipline. But we are, indeed, asking them to imagine these readers–they are not yet journalists, experts, consultants, or scholars–and they are, by no means, our students’ peers. Is there a way of getting the students to really simulate the experience of writing for a peer readership, of getting them to engage directly with the problem of writing down what they know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people? I believe that there is, and it’s quite straightforward. I think we should, in most cases, for the majority of their assignments, ask students to imagine their fellow students as their readers. They should explain what they have learned to each other.

This community can be defined quite precisely. Their readers will, first and foremost, have participated in the course. They will have read the required reading and attended the lectures and workshops. The teacher, who has also read the readings and attended the classes, and has even read all the students’ work during the term, is in a good position to judge whether any given student is effectively addressing the others. The imagined or “ideal” reader is, of course, a good student — one of the most intelligent and serious among them — but even this reader must be addressed with an awareness of the difficulty of the texts discussed and the disagreements about them that came up in class. The students are pitching their claims to each other. They are trying to get each other to believe, understand or agree with them about what the learning experience means, what the course has taught them.

Knowing how to write, said Virginia Woolf, is knowing who you’re writing for. We can say that it means knowing what difficulty your reader faces when you make your claims. If the reader finds them hard to believe you must provide evidence. If the reader finds them hard to understand you must explain your meaning. If the reader finds them hard to agree with you must engage with the known objections. Your writing helps the reader overcome the difficulty of the claim you are making. But when students imagine not each other but their teacher as their reader, they can’t feel the difficulty very easily. Indeed, they probably imagine a reader who already knows what they are trying to say, or, anxiously, that what they are trying to say is wrong. They let the reader contribute too much to the reading. In an important sense, they are making their own task too easy by expecting the reader already to understand the ideas they are presenting.

I don’t know how often university students are asked to imagine each other as their readers. I don’t know how widespread the practice of evaluating them on their ability to address the difficulties of their (most intelligent, most serious) peers is. In my view, it should be the standard approach to university-level writing. It would incentivize the students, not merely to read the course material, but to attend class and engage their fellow students in conversation, both inside and outside of class. They would be tasked with learning, not just about Elizabethan tragedy or inner city poverty or the elements of style, but also with what is on a “like mind” working on the same problem at the same level. This awareness is fundamentally “academic” and we spare our students the experience — the very instructive trouble — at their peril. In fact, the ability to address yourself effectively to your peers is not just a useful skill for you to have as a person, it is useful to all of us as a culture that you possess it. It takes a village to know anything of value; we build the community of scholars in the university classroom.

Further reading: “Some Thoughts on Peer Grading” and “Peer Grading and Peer Review”

I think Jonathon Kneeland’s “rejection of academia” is worth taking seriously. After all, he is not an academic but is, as he points out, one of its benefactors. His taxes support the work of academics; he wants to hold them accountable just as he would his politicians and police officers. “He has never been to university,” his author bio tells us, “and has no formal training in writing.” He appears to have acquired his writing skills by reading extensively and, I’m going to assume, writing a great deal. He writes well and appears to have informed himself about the issues he’s writing about. It would be completely wrong to dismiss him as simply “unqualified”.

Also, his concerns are entirely reasonable. Indeed, he isn’t making arguments that we haven’t heard from academics themselves. Like many scholars, Kneeland is dismayed by the sort of thing that is considered a contribution to scholarly discourse these days. He offers a specific example, an article by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman in Body and Society . It’s a perfectly respectable journal that has been operating since 1995 and is published by SAGE, a perfectly respectable academic publisher. The lead author is an associate professor, presumably tenured, at a public university. Kneeland isn’t tilting at windmills here or slaughtering straw men. He’s taking aim at something that can be held to a certain standard.

I was struck by a particular phrase in the abstract because I think it goes a long way towards explaining the clash of expectations that motivate Kneeland’s rejection of academia:

…scholars have examined vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation.

Though Kneeland himself doesn’t emphasize it, his underlying objection might well be to this idea of working “beyond” representation. After all, suppose our elected “representatives” boldly announced their intention to work “beyond” their mandates.  In that light, laypeople like Kneeland can be forgiven for being taken aback by the idea of a methodology that does not commit itself to a logic of representation. Of course, we might remind him that politicians do in fact often state their personal convictions and, sometimes, cast their vote according to their conscience rather than the majority opinion among the people they represent. Politicians sometimes openly oppose themselves to the will of their constituents, hoping to persuade them of the rightness of their views before the next election. So the analogy does offer us something like a space “beyond representation”, a legitimate space for experimental work.

But I think two questions can be reasonably asked: How many resources should be devoted to such experimentation? And how should the existing representational space constrain the pursuit of such experiments? If everyone in a given a discipline (like pedagogy) is always working beyond the confines of representation–beyond the presumption that there are facts in the world and some of them are known–then how can we ever know anything at all? Who can we call on to tell us what the facts are? Worse still, we sometimes get the impression that academics want us to believe that there simply are no relevant facts of the matter, that there is no truth at all, because “representation” simply doesn’t work. Again, I would encourage people who find themselves saying such things to imagine an elected official eschewing “representative democracy” as a illusion.

We want there to be an institution in society whose main purpose is to represent the knowable facts. We sometimes call that institution the University.

On the other hand, we can certainly come up with good reasons to allow exploratory and experimental research to exist as well, no matter how odd it sounds. As long as we are offered assurances that the majority of the research funding in pedagogy is going to produce stable, orderly, (indeed, “logical”) representations of pedagogical practice, there is no harm, and indeed some benefit to letting some researchers explore “vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation“. I think  it must come with an obligation to engage with those who are puzzled by it. Or, at the very least, there should be an expectation that the editors who decide to publish such work are able to defend these decisions, in part by pointing to the world of represented facts that are not at risk, at least immediately, of being overturned by one or another experiment. Meeting that obligation, I believe, is what it will take to regain Kneeland’s trust. Like I say, I think we should try. I think scholars do well to express themselves in ways that make sense to obviously intelligent but unabashedly “uneducated” laypeople like him.

I often compare writing to drawing. My own amateur sense of the difficulty of drawing objects (hands, trees, boats) is that you have to represent a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional space. I got this idea many years ago when I tried modelling heads in plasticine based on photographs. I found it surprisingly easy, and I assumed it had something to do with the extra dimension the plasticine gave me to represent the information in a two-dimensional picture. In the same way, it’s easier to reproduce a photograph in a drawing than it is to work with a live model. It’s the disparity between the amount of dimensions that the object has and the amount that the representational space has that determines the degree of difficulty. That’s the idea I got, anyway.

On this view, we can think of writing as a one-dimensional representational space. One word follows another in single file. Especially in prose, where there is no “line” (as in poetry) to work with. It’s just a series of words that form a sentence and series of sentences that form a paragraph–a series of paragraphs that form an essay. It’s one-dimensional and even uni-directional (you can’t read a sentence backwards). Prose is linear. It is a very impoverished representational situation. It lacks dimensional resources.

If we think about what our writing is “about” the situation gets even worse. Writing rarely confines itself to three-dimensional objects. Normally, what we write about will include a fourth dimension, namely, time. We are writing about facts that change over time, events that transpire in history. Moreover, we are normally trying to represent not just how they actually are, but what they could have been or what they might one day become. That is, we are representing the possibilities that are implicit in our object of study. Indeed, I would argue that an object of knowledge is “objective” precisely in so far as it determines the possible ways in which it can be combined with other objects. (Readers of the early Wittgenstein will perhaps recognize this point.) That is, our objects are located in logical space.

Lastly, we have to consider that, as scholars, we are as often representing “ideas” as we are representing “things”. When we are representing our knowledge, we are representing a rich set of competences, both individual and social, that imply both perceptual and communicative abilities. We are claiming to be able to see certain things and to talk about them with others. We are claiming to have collected and analysed data. We claim to understand the methodologies that we and our peers use to construct our facts. We claim even to uphold certain ethical standards and open ourselves to particular forms of critique.  (Here readers of Foucault will perhaps feel on familiar ground.) That is, the objects of our knowledge are located also in discursive space.

I don’t know how many dimensions all this implies. But it’s certainly more than the single dimension that the space of writing (the “page”) provides. (A piece of drawing paper has two dimensions to work with and the eye can scan it in all directions; but the written page of prose, like I say, has only a single line along which the reader’s attention passes in one direction.) I think this is the basis of the felt difficulty of writing. Indeed, it may indicate the real difficulty.

The root meaning of “prose” is “straightforward or direct speech.” Today, however, it normally refers to a kind of writing. While it is often contrasted with poetry, the original meaning of prose, as a “plain” kind of writing “without ornament”, and in that sense distinct from poetry, doesn’t quite apply any longer. Much of the prose we can read, and often in academic journals, is highly ornate or “poetic”. There is even such a thing as “prose poetry”. The sixteeenth-century conception of prose as “plain” writing appears to have inspired, in the seventeenth century, the pejorative sense of prose as “dull”, so that, in the nineteenth century, the French word prosateur meant simply a “dull writer”. It is also from French that we get the derivative “prosaic”, meaning “ordinary”.

“Prosaic writing,” said Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “limits itself to using, through accepted signs, the meanings already accepted in a given culture.” Against this, he sets “a poetry of human relations—the call of each individual freedom to all the others.” In fact, he distinguishes both “great prose” and poetry from ordinary prose writing, which writers resort to, he argues, when they are “no longer capable of … founding a new universality and of taking the risk of communicating.” While, this way of constructing the difference between prose and poetry appeals to me, there is a danger in interpreting it as an argument against prosaic writing. After all, given the choice between “limiting” yourself to “already accepted” meanings, on the one hand, and calling out to “each individual freedom”, on the other, it seems obvious what your ambition should be.

It is possible to read Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things as an argument for the contingency of this prosaic world. “Don Quixote is the negative of the Renaissance world,” he tells us; “writing has ceased to be the prose of the world.” (The title of Merleau-Pounty’s book was The Prose of the World.) And it is of course true that Merleau-Ponty’s “new universalities” do emerge, that the conditions of (prosaically) meaningful communication do change. Poetic language was the means by which such changes occurred.

Sometimes I get the sense that scholars think of themselves as poets–perhaps self-consciously minor poets, or even failed poets, but poets nonetheless. Many academics struggle with the language in the manner of Don Quixote, who “wanders off on his own,” as Foucault put it. We “no longer read nature and books alike as part of a single text,” in terms of their similitude, he tells us. We don’t acknowledge, I would add, the simple utility of producing a description of the facts, or articulating them in prose. We have become highly skeptical of this basic function of writing, and our students, too, have adopted this attitude. They learn to read even ostensibly factual prose as though it were the accounts of adventures of madmen, “without content, without resemblance to fill their emptiness … no longer the marks of things … sleeping … covered in dust.”

It often seems to me that we have, like Foucault, come to see the representation of facts in prose as tantamount to a belief in magic. All writing has become fiction. We appreciate each other’s writing in the manner of literature rather than simply and straightforwardly “taking issue” with what is said on the assumption that the words we are using are meaningful in the ordinary prosaic way and may therefore be compared to, i.e., “read against”, the world of facts that make our utterances true or false.

It’s time to defend the virtues of prose, the value of ordinary usage, the power of writing that does not imply institutional change or the dissolution of what Foucault called the “alliance” of “resemblances and signs”. Ironically (which is to say, appropriately), this little rant in favor of the representational function of language will be considered by many to be the ravings of a madman who has read, with a certain romance, too many books and his brain has dried up. Perhaps I am tilting at windmills? I would argue that academic prose should not be ashamed of its inability to “found a new universality”. Academic writing is very much an attempt to use the language within the limits of accepted usage. There is a whole world of prose: the universe of which it is always already possible to speak. It is in ordinary, academic prose that we make and support knowledge claims. Somebody has got to do it.

(This post is a reworked version of two posts from my retired blog.)