Teaching the Action Horizon
by Kurt
Spellmeyer and Richard
E. Miller
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"Among the
many assumptions that have shaped teaching in the humanities, we
believe that two have had a particular impact. These we would like
to call archivalism
and specialization."
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We believe that teachers of The New Humanities
Reader may need to undertake a significant rethinking of what
it means to run a course in Expository Writing. When new teachers
draw on memories of their prior schooling for help in how to teach
this material, they may find that few examples come to mind. Beginners
may not get much guidance, either, from current academic writing on
pedagogy or from the monuments of popular or literary culture-not
"Dead Poet's Society," or Culture and Anarchy, or
even The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
We all know what "teaching" means in general; what it means
in particular is another thing. Some of us buy into the idea that
teaching is an "experience," and that teaching well means
chucking out the questions in the book and deeply interacting with
the students. Others look at teaching in the opposite way: for them,
the teacher represents an august institution, to be embodied as convincingly
as possible. Still others think of teaching as a means to social change,
starting with a change in the attitudes of their students. Then there
are the teachers who see themselves as purveyors of the basics: the
paragraph and the restrictive clause are their alpha and omega. Teaching
lends itself to so many views precisely because much more is at stake
than the subject of instruction. The course may be English 101, or
Modern British History, or Theories of the Mind, but how we teach
(as opposed to what we teach) largely depends on our assumptions about
social life in general, assumptions that often pass unnoticed and
unconsidered, even in a period that prides itself on its reflexivity.
Among the many assumptions that have shaped teaching in the humanities,
we believe that two have had a particular impact. These we would like
to call archivalism and specialization.
"Archivalism" refers to the idea that the world is made
up of discrete "cultures" or "civilizations" and
that each of them possesses a core of founding knowledge on which
everything that has enduring value must build. For those persuaded
by archivalism, the past can take on a quasi-sacred character: figures
from antiquity may loom large, while contemporary people look like
pygmies by comparison. If archivalism is an ideology that tells us
what should count as genuine knowledge, "specialization"
is a way of organizing work that enables us to reproduce and extend
the knowledge we happen to value. Specialization is certainly possible
in the absence of an archive: long ago the sciences gave up on the
idea that physicists or microbiologists should study their fields
historically, starting with the earliest discoveries and working their
way up to present. Alternately, we can treat any archive as a body
of general knowledge that every person ought to know. Until quite
recently, all literate Westerners were expected to study the Latin
classics; among the Chinese, every scholar had to range across the
whole Confucian canon.
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Archivalism defined
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In subtle but far-reaching ways, archivalism shapes
the ways we teach. Many people automatically believe, for example,
that we cannot think clearly about politics today without having first
read Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Augustine's City of God,
Machiavelli's The Prince, and so on. Needless to say, these works
have enormous value: not only do they bring to light the sources of
beliefs we probably take for granted now, but they also restore to
us useful paradigms our more recent predecessors have thrown away.
Nevertheless, it is still quite possible to understand contemporary
politics without a knowledge of these works. Plato, after all, had
never read Plato, and many people who have never heard of ancient
Syracuse--the site of his proposed Republic--can readily grasp the
dangers of a "tyranny of virtue," a tyranny created by those
who believe that their fellow citizens must be protected from themselves.
In effect, archivalism tells us that before we can know one thing,
we must first know something more basic. And "knowing,"
for the archivalist, is a painstaking activity that involves holding
fast to every scrap of information. It's simply not enough to get
the main idea when we read: we need to trace out in fine detail how
each step in the author's thinking leads to the next. From the standpoint
of archivalism, we cannot be said to understand a text until we can
restate it in our own words--until we can prove, in other words, a
"mastery" or "command" that signifies the fusion
of our consciousness with one small portion of the archive.
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Specialization defined
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The other influence on humanities teaching is specialization. Just
as many advantages can accrue from the effort to hold tightly to
the past, so specialization is a proven strategy which has produced
in the short space of a hundred years an unparalleled increase in
knowledge. But specialization, no less than archivalism, also rests
on assumptions we might do well to weigh more carefully than we
have. It presupposes, for example, that the making of knowledge
is a task properly reserved for specialists, and that the point
of education is to disseminate such knowledge "downward"
to the untutored masses.
In an age of specialization, people tend to make sharp distinctions
between expert knowledge and mere popular opinion, and between research
and teaching. Especially at the introductory levels, teaching is
assumed to serve two purposes.
- The first of these is to identify and recruit future specialists,
those who show sufficient promise to justify a long and relatively
costly program leading to the Ph.D.
- The second purpose, which might qualify as public relations,
is to promote among non-specialists a great enough degree of respect
and sympathy to ensure the survival of the discipline itself.
Different branches of learning offer different rationales for their
reliance on specialization. Among scientists, the rationale is generally
logistical: they might refer to the complexity of scientific questions,
the time-consuming character of the research process, and the ever-rising
price of indispensable equipment. By contrast, specialists in the
humanities have often donned the robes of secular priests, or else
they have claimed for their writings the same avant-garde character
once reserved for cutting-edge works of art.
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"In creating The
New Humanities Reader, we have come to the conclusion that the
archive no longer exists: there are, in fact, a great many archives
and none can claim preeminence."
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In creating The New Humanities Reader, we have
come to the conclusion that the archive no longer exists: there are,
in fact, a great many archives and none can claim preeminence. By
the same token, there can scarcely be an "advanced guard"
anymore when the rest of us have ceased to stand together in one place--"advanced"
relative to what? And at any rate, the status of all archives past
and present is probably a moot question, since "knowledge"
itself no longer means what it meant in pre-modern times. Today, the
preservation of time-honored lore matters far less than the making
of new knowledge. Even the humanities have moved quite far in this
direction by attempting to represent the work they do as "research"
rather than "scholarship."
At the same time the two us had reached these conclusions about the
archive's fate, we also observed that specialization has progressed
so far and so fast that expertise itself is now an arena of competition
and not a monopolistic enterprise as it was throughout the previous
century. Just as there is no longer such a thing as the archive anymore,
so there is really no such thing as the expert on, say, the treatment
of cancer, or that state of world health, or the condition of the
environment. Although many people view these developments as a disaster
for the humanities, we see them as profoundly hopeful changes. The
proliferation of sources of authority means that instead of waning
away, as many observers have predicted, the public sphere might become
more robust than ever before. No single government agency, for example,
can dictate policy on the environment, and even the world's foremost
scientists disagree about crucial circumstances regarding events like
global warming. Given the far-reaching and long lasting consequences
of many decisions we are now obligated to make, even the most powerful
players need to secure at least the appearance of a democratic consensus.
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The Action Horizon
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We believe that the appropriate response to such a crucial historical
moment is a pedagogy that imagines ordinary citizens like our students
as the shapers of policy rather than as mere critics, passive observers,
or discerning consumers. To be a shaper of policy means that one possesses
the capacity to act upon the world in ways that do justice to its
real complexity. Precisely because the motive for policy is always
a problem that requires action, a pedagogy of critical consciousness
is unlikely to prove adequate, reflecting as it does the perspective
of the insurgent recipients of directives from above, often understood
to be the victims of an all-encompassing false consciousness. And
precisely because real-world action always involves an element of
risk or uncertainty, a pedagogy stressing argument alone will also
miss the mark. Real-world problems begin as anomalies and contradictions
rather than as established positions. Choosing sides, or choosing
weapons, in a prior, well-defined debate is not the same as finding
the domains of meaning-the contexts of understanding and explanation--that
are best calculated to make action possible, ethical, and effective.
We hardly need to add that there is never such a thing as infallibility.
Very different plans for action may prove equally persuasive at first,
and later, in execution, equally successful--or ruinous. The test
of a program for action does not lie in its invulnerability to critique
(since all programs can be shown to have flaws) but in its ability
to give coherence to the evidence.
"Teaching the action horizon" does not mean that everything
our students read and write should take the form of a proposal: "We
should pay service workers a living wage," "The environment
must be saved." We mean instead that students entering college
today should read materials directly concerned with the most important
problems of our times, and that the discussion of these materials
must move beyond the formalist concern with rhetorical or aesthetic
techniques--that is, with how a text is put together. But we also
feel the need to distance ourselves from the poststructuralist obsession
with perspective as the true subject of inquiry. We admit that information
can never be presented in a value-neutral way, but we believe that
the question of truth has to be retrieved: the point of reading about
genetic engineering is not, finally, to have a better grasp of the
politics of representation behind the discourses on genetics. Far
more pressing and consequential is the need to decide whether genetic
technology is going to unravel the fabric of life across planet, or
whether it may end forever many forms of suffering. To "teach
the action horizon" is to treat interpretation and evaluation
as means to an end, not as ends in themselves.
There are those who would say that issues such as genetic technology
are not the proper concern of a writing course. Our proper concern,
or so this line of thinking goes, is with methods of communication
rather than with any particular subject matter. These colleagues want
to teach their students how to use words, sentences, paragraphs, and
strategies of argument, but without addressing issues so complex that
the writing is likely to suffer. We believe, however, that this way
of thinking is a little like teaching prospective artists how to "use
colors" without asking them to actually paint, say, a vase of
yellow roses or a group of people seated on the grass of a Paris park
some shady summer afternoon. The whole point of painting is to make
visual images; the point of writing is not writing for its own sake--Why
would anyone want to do that?--but to write about something. And that
"something" is always a specific problem or contradiction
in the actual world. For this very reason--because the occasions for
writing are content- and context-specific--the all-purpose formulas
and rubrics which have so often been the stock-in-trade of the writing
teacher promise to impart an easy mastery that strikes us as basically
dishonest. Everyone knows that an essay should have a main idea, a
body of supporting argument, and finally, some kind of conclusion.
Everyone knows that prose should be coherent, persuasive, and well-organized.
But no one on this earth knows with perfect certainty how to write
an essay that makes a point about, say, war and evolution, and that
draws extensively on Mary Kaldor and Franz de Waal in the process.
Only a perspective altogether divorced from the horizon of real-world
action, and especially from action in the public sphere, can sustain
the exclusion of "content" from the scene of writing. That
this exclusion has such a long pedigree does not make it any less
world-evading.
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Making
Connections: Providing the Tools for Dealing with Complexity
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We believe that a pedagogy which asks students to imagine
themselves as genuine actors in the public sphere should begin with
the process of creating connections--connections of a special kind.
Action in the public sphere, as opposed to practices of an instrumental
nature, might usefully be understood as a response to problems which
are never simply given as fact but which appear only at the point
of intersection between different domains of meaning. Consider this
example: for genetic engineers, the practices of manipulating genes
pose problems mainly of a technical kind, problems in a single domain
of meaning. By contrast, the innovations of genetic engineering become
problems for the public sphere only after we connect them to some
other, discrete domain of meaning, such as the economic problems of
farm communities in the West, or the ecological crisis overtaking
rainforests in the tropics. We always need to bear in mind, however,
that because the public sphere exists only at the interface of separate
domains, the problems we find there are themselves perpetually a matter
of debate. The nature of such problems, and even their existence,
can never be "proven" to everyone's satisfaction.
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"We believe that a
pedagogy which asks students to imagine themselves as genuine actors
in the public sphere should begin with the process of creating connections."
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Another way to explain this process of making connections
is to say that teaching people to be actors in the public sphere begins
with teaching them to locate the sphere itself. The public sphere
is not a place, nor is it any particular medium or discourse. Instead,
the public sphere is a virtual location, one that has to be created
over and over again. At first glance, a book chapter by the primatologist
Frans de Waal may seem to many of our students completely unrelated
to Mary Kaldor's discussion of changes in contemporary warfare. When
we tell students to find connections and to explore the ones they
consider most important, their efforts are bound to be hit-or-miss.
Some connections will turn out to be unsustainable, some will end
in triviality, and some may open up broad new areas of meaning and
new possibilities for action in the world. But because of our own
socialization, we may not fully appreciate that simply to look for
these connections is already to imagine ourselves differently, as
the makers of knowledge rather than a passive (or resentful) receivers.
The truth is that there is no right way to connect the texts assembled
in our anthology, and no one can predict where the connections may
lead. Many students--and many teachers--will find this open-endedness
unnerving. But we believe that this encounter with uncertainty, unimportant
as it might seem as first, is an encounter with the freedom of the
citizen, in sharp contrast to the cocoon of security which envelops
both the consumer and the therapeutic subject.
The Freirean tradition of pedagogy stresses problem-posing as a method,
but in the public sphere, as connection follows connection, problems
will pose themselves. Connection, in other words, produces questioning.
If we place Kaldor alongside de Waal, we can hardly prevent ourselves
from wondering if the evolution of warfare in our time has in some
way been shaped by biological evolution. Other questions may present
themselves as well: Does the world situation today call into doubt
de Waal's speculations about altruism? If biological evolution is
at variance with our political and social needs, does it actually
always have the last word or can we change the course of own development
as a species? Approaches to instruction more traditional than ours
often envision the writer as a person with an established point or
argument who needs to present it persuasively. But the truth is that
arriving at a position is a long and complex process that must be
taught and learned, a process of deliberation which we might view
as hallmark of any healthy public culture. Deliberation without awareness
of others is autistic, but persuasiveness without the struggle to
learn from contradiction is bound to be destructive on many levels.
Pragmatically, this means that we need to give students the opportunity
to explore the connections between different texts without demanding
that they move toward closure prematurely. A first-year student exploring
the connections between de Waal and Kaldor can hardly be expected
in the first month of the semester to come up with a coherent argument
that synthesizes both texts in an accurate way. Our experience is
that this complex task must be segmented into simpler assignments
culminating, after six or seven weeks, in the sort of synthetic essay
The New Humanities Reader has been designed to elicit. What we have
in mind is a sequence of assignments. The first might lead to a paper
of three or four pages in which students begin to explore the connections
within a single text. After discussing Kaldor in class, we might ask
students to write about the obstacles posed by traditional forms of
nationalism in a climate that requires international cooperation.
Then, in a second assignment, students might begin to explore connections
between Kaldor's analysis of change in the conduct of war and de Waal's
thoughts about the evolution of emotions. Only in the third and final
paper in the sequence would we expect to see something like a true
thesis or argument, supported by extended discussion of two or three
texts.
We believe, in other words, that instead of shielding beginners from
complexity, a writing course should give them the tools to deal with
it. The tools we have in mind, however, are not the venerable "modes"--narration,
description, cause and effect, and so on. The truth is that all human
adults have the capacity to perform these elementary cognitive tasks
without any special instruction, precisely because the requisite abilities
are "hardwired" into our brains. Neither do we think that
Aristotle's topoi, the Burkean pentad, or Girouvian "border crossings"
add anything to skills and capacities people already have. Implicit
in these approaches, different as they are from one another, is the
shared assumption that a conceptual order or logic of inquiry must
be imposed from above or outside on brute, inert, chaotic fact. Some
may believe that this superior order is eternal, and some may conceive
of it as a contingent social construction, but in either case the
"content" to be formed is conceived of as formless in and
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Deliberative Writing and the Emergence of Coherence
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We are convinced, however, that coherence has to be
discovered rather than imposed. As writers try to answer questions
that present themselves when they explore the connections between
different texts, they may feel for some time that they really are
condemned to endless incoherence. But if they persist in the effort
to find answers, an implicit order will begin to emerge. Such an order
is "implicit" because it does not exist in advance of the
process of questioning, yet it is also more than an artifact of the
writer's own ingenuity. An implicit order will begin to show itself
only after the meaningful evidence reaches something like a critical
mass. Needless to say, no one begins this process as a blank slate,
free from all preconceptions. Instead, an implicit order typically
emerges from an ongoing "dialogue" between the outcomes
the writer expects at first and the possibilities made available by
the information at hand. Far from starting to write with a clear thesis
in mind, most people need to sustain this dialogue long enough, through
many revisions large and small, for something new to emerge.
Deliberative writing is experimental. It requires a willingness to
allow ideas to unfold wherever they might lead. Although it has become
conventional, even cliched, to speak of writing as "exploration"
or "invention," conventional pedagogy often remains strangely
silent about the particulars. We believe that teachers should make
"saying something new" an explicit goal of a writing course.
Naturally we want the writing our students do to be clear, coherent,
and mechanically correct, but we are also convinced that the most
eloquent turn of a banal phrase, or the best-crafted arrangement of
trite ideas, has far less value in our society than the capacity to
produce genuine knowledge-to produce, that is, new ideas, or to give
old ideas a fresh significance. To imagine, however, that the capacity
to say something new lies out of reach for all but a few Ph.D.s is
to flatter ourselves in a way that does real violence to the truth.
For a long time, much of the knowledge produced by the academy has
been highly predictable and ritualized. In order to break with this
legacy, the sciences have had to transform themselves, creating new
disciplines almost overnight while abandoning long established fields
that no longer hold much promise. To the humanities, by contrast,
change has come far more slowly, despite putative "revolutions"
in methodology that have left standing the walls separating the disciplines.
Those walls should come down. We would say that the humanities for
the last hundred years have tried to emulate the sciences by following
the path of rigid compartmentalization, a path the sciences themselves
may now have abandoned in favor of continuous fusion and splitting.
And increasingly, within the humanities as well, the neatness of our
compartments has come under suspicion. Many of us have begun to ask
whether the humanities ought to play a different social role than
the sciences, remote and obscure as they often seem. Few nonscientists
expect to understand the fine points of particle physics or microbiology,
but the humanities may do their work best when they give understanding
pride of place. The humanities, one might say, are inescapably committed
to the perpetual renewal of understanding. To put it more simply,
our proper concern may very well lie with those varieties of knowledge
that contribute to the sharing of ideas, outlooks, sensibilities,
and, yes, modes of action. If this is the role of the humanities,
then contempt for the beginner or the non-specialist seems to especially
inappropriate and self-defeating.
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"In our view, good
writing doesn't need to make an ironclad case. The idea, instead,
is to present the best fruits of deliberation in ways that a reader
might find not flawless and not even necessarily appealing, but
merely reasonable."
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One aspect of writing is having something new to say;
another is saying it in ways that renew the cultural and linguistic
worlds we share, and that we must continue to share in order for our
society to exist at all. The very idea of an action horizon implies
a common horizon of understanding within which people can cooperate.
Some theorists, however, notably Jurgen Habermas, have in our view
overemphasized the need for consensus as a prelude to cooperative
action. The truth is that in order to act cooperatively, people don't
need to agree about anything except their shared need to act. In all
human endeavors, the participants can always be expected to bring
with them a wide range of expectations and aspirations. Rather than
imagine "persuasion" as the writer's final goal--getting
everyone to agree--we would suggest the alternative of simply "being
understood." In our view, good writing doesn't need to make an
ironclad case. The idea, instead, is to present the best fruits of
deliberation in ways that a reader might find not flawless and not
even necessarily appealing, but merely reasonable. A reasonable case
is one that makes clear the stages in its development, that offers
supporting evidence, and that presupposes a respect on the reader's
part for the writer's efforts.
We consider reasonableness the most appropriate standard for claims
in the public sphere. The reader, like the citizen, should always
have the opportunity to say, "That's just not for me." But
in an atmosphere characterized by mutual respect and the freedom to
explore ideas without fear of ridicule or recrimination, the process
of deliberation can become enlivening for everyone involved. In this
spirit, our paradigm for discourse in the public sphere is not conversion
but conversation. The participants in a conversation might not end
by agreeing with one another, but they may come away with new insights
to be used in the conduct of their lives afterward. If this sharing
of ideas is not the function of the humanities, then perhaps their
time has passed. But if the humanities become "arts of living,"
their future-and the future of English 101--seems to us quite bright.
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| "The humanities
have for too long overlooked the creative abilities and aspirations
that everybody has in abundance. We are convinced that everyone benefits
in the long run from freeing the creative energies of ordinary people." |
By linking composition to the tradition of the fine arts, we may
appear to have taken sides with the so-called expressivists in a
prolonged controversy that has dragged on, in our view, far too
long. We do not conceive of English 101 as the best place to foreground
the existential struggle for a personal voice, although we recognize
the importance of that struggle. At the same time, we believe that
writers need to have a personal stake in the issues they happen
to be writing about. Implicit in our anthology is the idea that
we become the persons we are primarily through our actions-our choices
and deeds-in the real world, and not through our ability to represent
ourselves, on paper or in some other venue, through the manipulation
of tropes. Since the Great Depression, bib overalls may have "traveled"
from the sharecropper's field and the factory line to the pages
of Vogue and GQ, but migrant farmhands and textile workers for the
most part have not made the same upward journey. In our flacking
of "identity politics," there has been too much concern
with identity and not enough with the second term.
By invoking the arts, in other words, we do not mean that the crafting
of selves should be any more important in a writing course than
the crafting of "beautiful" prose or "striking"
conceits. Rather, what we see as most valuable in the tradition
of the arts is its emphasis on creativity and agency. We believe,
moreover, that by representing the arts as an ethereal realm occupied
a few special people, the humanities have for too long overlooked--and
sometimes actively suppressed--the creative abilities and aspirations
that everybody has in abundance. While it may be true that most
students in English 101 will not turn out to be the Thomas Carlyles
or Northrop Fryes of their generation, the same holds true for most
of their teachers. We are convinced, nevertheless, that everyone
benefits in the long run from freeing the creative energies of ordinary
people. In the short term, of course, our students may not thank
us for making this freedom our goal. But in the weeks and months
to come, please remember that we were all once beginners, and that
if we continue to think and learn, we will remain beginners for
the rest of our lives. Good luck.
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