What does it mean to have achieved a learning objective?

[Introductory notice: this is one of the papers I wrote during my sociology master, which I suspect shines through in patches (e.g. the the first paragraph, and the frequent use of Calhoun et al 2012). Nevertheless, I reckon these words might be more useful in a published state, rather than merely collecting entropy on a hard drive somewhere. Enjoy.]

The learning objectives state that the student shall display an “in-depth knowledge of classic sociological theories, concepts, and topics”. This might seem a straightforward enough proposition at a glance – there is a verb and a noun, and the relationship between the two is possible to parse grammatically. Upon closer inspection, particularly through the lens of the theories put forth by the thinkers categorized under the rubric of ‘classic social theorists’, matters become ever so slightly more complex. As we shall see, “knowledge” is situated in the social context at a more general level, rather than in any particular individual. This makes the notion of an individual “displaying” knowledge somewhat disingenuous, since it masks the necessarily social dimension of being in the know. An individual is not possible outside of the social, just as the social is not possible without individuals. They are mutually constitutive, meaning that – as Sinatra did sing – you can’t have one without the other.

Kant (2012|1949), for instance, wrote of the difference between private and public reason. “Private” here refers to a situation wherein a particular person acts in a particular circumstance, such as when employed to perform some clerical or administrative function. In such a situation, there is no room for argument or reasoned disobedience – the taxes have to be collected, the legitimately given orders obeyed, the functions of state performed as written. Private reason is particular, situated. Public reason, on the other hand, addresses a more generalized audience (“the entire reading public” [p 51]), using all available arguments and evidence to make the best, most reasoned case possible. Public reason is not concerned with the specifics of how the arguments laid forth inconvenience or embarrass the powers that be – it merely seeks the truth for its own sake, based on the available and through logic sustainable lines of argument put forth in previous applications of public reason. Later on, Matthew Arnold (1864) would phrase public reason in terms of using “the best possible knowledge” (with the added probabilistic observation that the likelihood that we already possess this knowledge is low, and that we thus should be on perpetual lookout for it).

From this one distinction alone, the issue of displaying knowledge becomes a question of just what kind of reason is sought after. Are students asked to display an apt performance of private reason, thus showing that they are fit for this or that employment or some other particular niche contingency relevant to the university at hand? Or are the students asked to perform a more generally applicable form of reason, regardless of whether it is relevant to the private situation of anyone involved?

To be sure, learning objective number six states that students shall act in a critical and independent manner, which at a glance would suggest a preference for public reason. It is, however, possible to be critical and independent in the application of private reason as well – many a philosopher (Hegel, Heidegger, take your pick) have found themselves justifying what the state apparatus would have done anyway, albeit with less scripture to fall back on. Add to this the ever mounting pressure to self-regulate in all domains of life, rather than to merely conform to previously given decrees, and we are back to asking whether private or public reason is the order of the day.

From here, it might be fruitful to jump over to Benjamin (2012|1969) and the tendency of modern fascism to incorporate public reason into its private functioning. Or, in his terms, the tendency of fascism to reproduce any work of art in such quantities as to render its qualities irrelevant. No matter how egalitarian or progressive a work might have been upon creation, once it has been incorporated within the fascist aesthetic the work is subsumed to whatever teleology professed by the state. Not necessarily due to flawed efforts on the part of the artist, but due to how the mass production of art distorts and affects artworks: the endless repetition of a unified aesthetic reduces any particular element of it to merely a component, a replaceable part of an ideological machine. Whatever the conditions of an artwork’s production, its reproduction into a new context renders it moot. Context trumps content.

The challenge presented by Benjamin is to create works which nevertheless resist this reduction. While he does not go as far as Adorno & Horkheimer (2012|2002), who claim that the entirety of what is produced by the culture industry (which is to say, anything an ordinary person can reasonably expect to encounter by means of purchase) is a rigged game, Benjamin does acknowledge the difficulty of being genuine whilst also being widely distributed. A painting – existing in singular – invites viewers to partake of its particular aura and peculiar circumstance. A poster – existing in multitudes – invites a very different mode of engagement. The former has the potential to move viewers, while the latter is more prone to mobilize them. The aim is to foster appreciation of the few paintings that remain their own contexts, whilst not falling for the lure of producing too many posters whilst trying to make a living.

This is, I reckon, a more contemporary version of Kant’s distinction between private and public reason. There is no small irony in the fact that the mass-produced, ubiquitous forms of art that are available to everyone, and thus present in everyone’s private homes, while the manifestations of public reasoning have become rare and hard to come by. More so as universities are under pressure to become relevant to the job market – to subsume their commitment to public reasoning to private interests, in all senses of the word.

In all this, it becomes difficult for a student to know how to proceed in order to fulfil the learning objectives. On the one hand, an overt commitment to public reason is unlikely to be rejected on explicit or ideological grounds – these are, after all, the values enshrined into academia by virtue of hundreds of years of tradition and continual practice. On the other hand, there is – as Merton (2012|1949) pointed out – a need to distinguish between manifest and latent functions of social practices. The stated goals of an organization might not be the entire story of what this organization is actually doing, sociologically speaking, and merely identifying the manifest function in ideological terms does not provide the full picture of what needs to be learnt in order for the objectives to be deemed fulfilled. Merely knowing the official story means knowing nothing at all, which – Socrates notwithstanding – is not a comfortable situation to find oneself in[1].

Again we are confronted with the vagaries involved with the individual display of knowledge. There are, as it were, two kinds of knowledge in circulation, both of which have to be present in equal measure for the display to be valid. There is the obvious, explicit knowledge of what different authors wrote and how their ideas interact with each other. And then there is the implicit familiarity with the tradition of the discipline, the injokes, the informal sentiments, the recurring themes, and other ephemeral yet foundational aspects of a body of knowledge. Displaying one form of knowledge without the other would not pass muster; the display would be found lacking in either substance or soul.

Here, it is illuminating to view the educational process as a gradual initiation into a community, rather than as a series of tests to be undergone and passed. To be sure, undergoing the tests is still an integral part of the project, but their latent function is to ever so gradually become more socialized into the discipline and its customs. Being a sociologist – or indeed belonging to any academic discipline – is more akin to possessing an attitude or a worldview than anything else, and can not be reduced to knowing the contents of a discrete set of foundational texts. As rigorous and systematic as the evaluation criteria might wish to appear, a core part of determining whether an education has succeeded comes down to whether a student gets it or not. Or, to return to Benjamin: the quality sought is made plain in the difference between appreciating a painting and plastering a poster.

These are not qualities that exist as independent measurable variables which can be isolated and controlled for using ever so systematic metrics and procedures. Rather, they are constitutive of and inherent to the very situation the education takes place in. What is evaluated is not whether the student knows this or that, but whether they manage to comport themselves in such a manner that the conversation keeps flowing without interruption.[2] To invoke Bakhtin (1986), it is more important to be aware of genre (defined as a series of social expectations on frequently recurring situations) than to know exactly which year a particular author published their seminal work. A student gets more mileage out of gesturing towards a shared exhaustion from reading a particularly painstaking introduction, than they derive from paraphrasing it with unerring accuracy.

A pragmatic student would apply Mead (2012|1934) to this dynamic. Mead differentiates between the “I” and the “me”. The “I” is the stream of impressions, thoughts and emotions that occur in any given moment. The “me”, in contrast, is a gestalt self-image which takes into account all aspects of one’s place in a local and global social context. The “I” uses whatever information is retained in/of the “me” to orient itself and plan its upcoming course of actions. Our imaginary pragmatic student would shift the goal of the educational process from the I to the me – rather than seeing it as an individualistic trait that can be summoned or performed at any given moment, it is rather a characteristic of the social situation they happen to find themselves in upon nearing the completion of their education. Rather than hitting the books, they would seek out social gatherings in which to gain insight into the social processes at work within their field, and possibly wherein they could get recognition as belonging to the very same community. To pun: the important thing is not whether I know this or that, bur whether they know me.

The learning objectives, however, remain on the level of individual assessment. The student, singular, shall display their acumen through individual effort. The goals are framed in such a way that the knowledge is situated within the student, as so many crates in a warehouse, rather than as a more general proficiency to draw upon the collective fount of shared resources, references and reflections. There is an inherent contradiction between the praxis of performing academics and the stated learning objectives. The former heavily emphasizes surveying the collective state of the field, of surveying the literature and probing the limits of established disciplinary achievement. The latter collapses all of that into a single unit of performance, and applies a single value to it. The student either knows or does not know – a binary solution to a complex social dynamic.

This contradiction might seem a subtle point, but it manifests very directly in everyday educational situations. The most overt example is when a student asks whether some concept or theorist is going to be on the exam. From the point of view of being introduced to the discipline’s traditions and tools, this is the least interesting (and most parochial) question that could possibly exist – an entire history of knowledge is reduced to a single social situation in the near future. From the point of view of the student, who sees that the only thing they need to do is to perform the learning objectives, this is a rational inquiry which could provide useful information upon which to structure their efforts. If a theorist appears on the exam, then being able to reiterate the general outline of their thoughts is a demonstrably good thing; if said theorist is not on the exam, then focusing on the theorists that do appear is a more rational option. It is a far cry from engaging in public reason, but it achieves the learning objectives. Why appreciate a painting when plastering a poster does the job just fine?

Here, the reader might object that a student asking whether something appears on an exam or not is an indication that they lack the proper insight into what the point of higher learning is. Which is fair as far as it goes, but it does highlight that this very point ultimately boils down to whether or not the student gets it, in the manner discussed above. Too direct and explicit focus on the process of passing the educational obstacles and jumping through all the hoops draws attention away from the very goal to be achieved. Learning objectives and learning outcomes diverge, despite their grammatical similarity.

This is, of course, not a new observation. Quintilian (1987|95) noted that every educational situation is a unique context with its own dynamics, wherein the values and virtues to be inculcated have to be reaffirmed anew, lest the pupils learn something else. The reasons for learning something are as important as learning the thing in itself. Quintilian uses memorization of literary passages as an example of this dynamic. The desired outcome is not that the pupils can regurgitate the selected passage on command, but to show them that being able to access a wide range of literary sources will help guide them in their efforts at living a good life, where everyday occurrences are connected to greater themes and thus possible to analyze as parts of a whole, rather than as individual incidents. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the goal of a Quintilian education is to ever so gently point towards the greater picture.

Dewey (2005), in slightly more contemporary terms, made the same observation when he noted that pupils only ever learn what they are interested in, and that education is only as effective as it is capable of capturing this interest. An explanatory lecture on the finer points of algebra might be effective in conveying information pertaining to math, but it might also be a fine opportunity to practice falling asleep whilst sitting in a room with various degrees of directed noise. The latter is motivated by a very clear and directly applicable use value, while the former requires a higher degree of contextual introduction to come to pass. Both outcomes are equally likely, and both learners are equally motivated.

A way to rectify the situation would be to punish those who are not interested. Or, rather, those who fail to learn. This would introduce a very clear motivation to be interested in the topic at hand, and very concrete reasons to perform the tasks laid out. It would also, with equal clarity, reframe the situation as being about avoiding punishment, rather than as ultimately striving to reach some sort of more refined worldview with access to the tools of reason and rationality. At best, it would be an inefficient didactic methodology. At worst, it would be an attempt to force individuals to freely participate in public reasoning, a proposition quite contrary to what Kant envisioned.

The overarching project in de Beauvoir’s Second Sex (2011) is to underscore all the ways in which women – historically and at present – have been formally and informally barred from participating in public reason. By describing in detail every aspect of women’s lives – youth, menstruation, marriage, sex, rape, pregnancy, housework, prostitution – she also describes what makes women other when compared to men, the implicit default. These aspects are peculiar, particular and personal.  More specifically, they create a different starting point from which to engage the world, a different social and epistemic staging ground from which to launch any attempt at participation, be it in politics or public reason. There are men, the universal subject who tackles universal issues with the tools of rationality and reason, and there are women, who tackles the particular, emotional and utterly local. Men are constructed as universal, women are constructed as other.

The efforts of McDonald (2004) are indicative of this state of affairs. Her ambition to gather and introduce female social theorists is not motivated by trying to justify women’s peculiar or different contributions over the centuries. Rather, it is an attempt to draw attention to how these contributions follow the same developmental lines as male theorists, using the same tools and more often than not the same lines of arguments. There are not two differing historical tracks, male and female, which never interacted with each other as time passed. Rather, theorists from both genders engaged in lively and fruitful debate where the results were a better understanding of the contemporary social and political situation. To quote: “[t]he problem, after all, is not that the women founders of the social sciences failed to publish but that the scholarly world failed to recognize their work” (p 242).

McDonald (2004) notes that the omission of female theorists from the canon of social thinkers has had the unfortunate consequence that many contemporary social theorists have felt as if they started from scratch, and based their approaches to the social sciences on this premise. Rather than being able to draw upon the rich tradition of female authors discussing women’s issues – in the broadest possible use of the term – these efforts have been hampered by a lack of theoretical underpinning and a sense of methodological commitment to qualitative approaches. Given that all social theorists presented in the canonical works are men, women had to carve out a niche for themselves, theoretically as well as institutionally.

Needless to say, this redoubling of otherness, as described by de Beauvoir, has not done the study of women’s issues (or women’s studies) any favors. It has framed the feminist approach as somehow optional, something to do above and beyond the real work, an excursion into private reason only allowed once the appropriate work has been performed with regards to public reason. To put it in the bluntest possible terms, it creates a dichotomy which is nigh impossible to overcome: there are public intellectuals, and there are women.

Neither has it done any favors to individual women, who – to gain access to positions in academia, and thus the right to participate in the conversation – have had to read through an extensive amount of theory which only marginally concern a large portion of their lived experience. Which is not to say that this theory is irrelevant or inapplicable, but it introduces something of a delay to getting started with the actual work. There is a lot of universal theory to power through before being allowed to proceed with the particulars, where every step of the way has to be retraced to theories which do not take the lived experience of women into account[3]. The barrier to entry into public reason consists of a non-trivial amount of hoops, some more onerous than others.

Given this state of affairs, we could use Simmel’s (2012|1971) theory of group dynamics to predict that feminist scholars in different fields will have an easier time of collaborating with each other than would non-feminists. According to Simmel, one group functions more or less like any other group, despite their overt differences. Thus, performing the work necessary to maintain some particular function in one group creates a kinship with those who perform the same work in other groups, by virtue of a shared range of experiences and skills. Applied to feminist scholars, who (regardless of field) have had to struggle for the inclusion of actually existing women into the historical canon, there is bound to be a rich potential for interdisciplinary cooperation to draw upon in future efforts.

To return to the question of learning objectives, this places objectives 1 and 2 in a precarious position. On the one hand, women have been excluded from the canonical writs of the history of sociology to such an extent that the official history has become almost exclusively male; any effort to accurately describe the historiography of the field must take this social fact into account. On the other hand, efforts to include female authors are under way at present, and part of these efforts is the inclusion of these very same authors in new rewritings of the same history. The question then becomes whether to report on the history of sociology as written, or to give an account which includes actually existing social thinkers who have not yet been labelled as sociological. Both courses of action follow from the learning objectives as they stand.

Of course, contextual evidence suggest that the second approach is to be preferred (such as the inclusion of McDonald 2004 in the syllabus), but this bounces us straight back to informal knowledge guiding the process of adhering to formally stated goals. What is asked for is not knowledge of the history of sociology in general, but a very specific subset of a very specific categorization of history of sociology with a local emphasis. History is indeed, as Cannadine (2011) noted, a situated activity in the present.

An attentive reader will have noted the parallels between the global and the local, the state of the field and the state of the syllabus. Sociological theory is not a static thing that can either be known or not known; rather, it is a dynamic and ever changing ethos formed as much by tradition as by propositional statements made by individual theorists. Thus, evaluating whether a student knows sociological theory or not becomes a somewhat extracurricular activity. To be sure, knowing one’s Weber and Durkheim is important, but it is equally important to know them for the right reasons[4]. As Quintilian pointed out, merely going through the motions is insufficient; a successful education will have had the student approach the subject matter in an appropriate manner, the manner being of greater import than the matter. The same applies to the teaching of sociological theory, mutatis mutandis.

This frame of reference is rather far removed from the contemporary tendency of envisioning education as a series of boxes to tick off, where the educational aims have been achieved in full once each and every aspect has been individually fulfilled. I reckon that Merton’s distinction between manifest and latent functions is very much at play in this tendency. We can not take the learning objectives at their words – that would be akin to analyzing rain dances only with regards to their efficacy at making it rain. There are far more interesting social processes at work, and it is very fortunate that we as sociologists are uniquely positioned to analyze these processes using the traditional tools of our trade. They only need to be applied appropriately.

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[1] The same goes for reading syllabi. As Wahlström (2015) points out, these documents are situated in a political, institutional, ideological and sometimes didactical context, where the specific content is determined by a number of competing forces vying for influence. And, I might add, merely reading the syllabi, words on a page, does not translate into knowing what transpires in classrooms or seminars.

[2] Bourdieu (1990) describes this process, and points out that students from middle and upper class backgrounds have an advantage over their fellow students from working class backgrounds. Where the former carry a habitus suitable for performing academics (albeit still with a need to be socialized into a particular discipline), the latter have to pull double duty of both reading the required literature and relearning their way of being in the social world. They have to learn to be middle class as well as mastering the subject matter, as it were.

[3] Being behind Rawl’s veil of ignorance takes on a substantially different quality should you happen to be pregnant.

[4] Weber wrote extensively on 19^th century economics, and Durkheim famously made reference to phrenology as a legitimate scientific method. Building an argument on these two historically accurate propositions is not likely to garner favor in the contemporary sociological community, however; it would be an inappropriate approach.

References

Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. (2002). The dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical fragments. In 

Calhoun et al (ed) (2012): Classical sociological theory. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Arnold, M. (1864). The function of criticism at the present time. The National Review, November 1864.

Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres & other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Beauvoir, de, S. (2011). The second sex. Ney York: Vintage Books.

Bourdieu, P. & Passeran, J-C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage.

Benjamin, W. (1969). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Calhoun et al (ed) (2012): Classical sociological theory. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Cannadine, D. (2011). Making history now and then: discoveries, controversies and explorations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dewey, J. (2005). Democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Cosimo Classics.

Kant, I. (1949). What is enlightenment? In Calhoun et al (ed) (2012): Classical sociological theory. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

McDonald, L. (2004). Women founders of the social sciences. Montréal, Québec: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Merton, R. (1949). Social theory and social structure. In Calhoun et al (ed) (2012): Classical sociological theory. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Quintilian. (1987). Quintilian on the teaching of speaking and writing: translations from books one, two, and ten of the Institutio oratoria. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Simmel, G. (1971). Georg Simmel: on individuality and social forms. In Calhoun et al (ed) (2012): Classical sociological theory. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Wahlström, N. (2015). Läroplansteori och didaktik. Malmö: Gleerups.

The transition from postmodernity to liquid modernity in the writings of Zygmunt Bauman

The attempt to summarize the trajectory of an authorship can take different forms. One such form is to begin at the beginning, with the very first books of the author in question, and then gradually move forward in chronological order until there are no more books. This has the advantage of being both complete and comprehensive – the theoretical seeds that lay dormant in the early works can be seen to blossom in the later ones, and the potential blooms that did not come to pass can be noted by virtue of their absence. There is a trajectory, which exists in the form of the works published, an irrefutable empirical fact just waiting to be revealed through methodological observation – the method being the orderly progression through time.

The orderly progression through time is a key theme in Bauman’s work. It is one of the key aspects of modernity (and the way in which he characterizes its self-image and self-justification). As he notes at length with regards to the physical countenance of the Leeds town hall (Bauman 2000, p. 130ff), the inscription “Forward” is not merely an idle slogan meant to convey a vague sense of anticipation for what is to come. It is a direct invocation of the project of modernity and its promise of eternal progress; the movement forward is both a temporal and developmental affair. The work performed today will lead to a better tomorrow, whose improved conditions can be harnessed to lay the groundwork for an even better day after tomorrow. The immediate roadmap for moving ahead is laid out in planning documents, visions of a better ordered society and ever increasing statistics measuring the quality of life; the slightly more distant and future trajectory is dotted with utopian promises that are impossible today, but which will inevitably be possible once the future materializes through the efforts of today.

The counterpoint to this orderly progression through time is the specter of chaos, ornately developed dead-end inventions, and societal visions which do not quite manage to survive the transition into social practice. While Bauman characterizes modernity as the (both perceived and actualized) steady drumbeat of accumulated improvements, he also contrasts it with the ever more present condition of postmodernity and/or liquid modernity, wherein plans are held onto until better alternatives arrive, and the scope of future visions have been reduced to a pragmatic and frantic ad hoc crisis management of the immediate present. The confident forward momentum along a predetermined plan towards a clearly envisioned goal, a hallmark of modernity, is a maladaptive strategy under the conditions of postmodernity and liquid modernity. Modernity turned everything pre-modern that was solid into liquid, and then kept going as new modern institutions began to solidify. The only constant feature is change, but where modernity envisioned itself the architect of this change, liquid modernity finds itself sculpted (and defined) by knowing neither how things are nor how they are going to be moving forward. The steady progression into a bright future turned into a constant state of ambiguous uncertainty, a condition quite opposite to what was promised.

This, of course, has repercussions for how to read Bauman and the trajectory of his work over the years. Not only would it be a mistake to see it as an orderly progression from beginning to end, unambiguously and inexorably moving towards a clear conclusion; such an undertaking would also not quite be in the spirit of his thought. Bauman dwells in and upon the ambiguous, uncertain conditions wherein one course of action is as valid as any other, and the only difference between them is the self-imposed sense of right and wrong we bring to the table. We will, like so many of the hypothetical individuals described throughout his work, have to find our own way through it. To quote from Liquid Evil (2016):

What one can – and needs to – do, when aiming at its fullest possible representation, is to discover the river’s sources and its most copious tributaries, trace the trajectory of the riverbed (or, if such needs arise, its multiple – coexisting or alternating – trajectories), and map them both (even if being aware that what can ultimately be achieved is more of the nature of a snapshot than of the conclusive, lasting image of the phenomenon in question). (pp. vii-viii)

To be sure, Bauman did not primarily intend these words to be instructional with regards to how to read his works, but – as has already been suggested – things do not always turn out the way they were intended.

One way of taking a snapshot of the trajectory, as it were, is to take a quick look at the book titles as they have been phrased over the years. In the 90s, we saw titles like Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992), Postmodern Ethics (1993), Life in Fragments (1995), Postmodernity and its Discontents (1997), Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998), In Search of Politics (1999), The Individualized Society (2001), and Society Under Siege (2002). A cursory glance indicates that there seems to be some kind of unifying direction or theme to these works, albeit the exact nature of this common trajectory will have to be explored through closer reading. In the 00s and 10s, we find a more explicitly unified set of titles, such as Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006), Liquid Times (2007), 44 Letters From the Liquid Modern World (2010), Culture in a Liquid Modern World (2011), Liquid Surveillance (2012), Liquid Evil (2016), and Nati Liquidi (2017). While the exact nature of this common trajectory also requires and deserves closer reading to uncover, it should be a fairly straightforward proposition to suggest that some sort of change took place between the one set of titles and the other. As Foucault famously noted, whenever there is a discontinuity, there is probably also something interesting afoot.

A more ambitious text would now say something along the lines of “and over the course of the next several chapters and hundreds of pages, we will discuss this in extensive detail”, but alas, we only have a few pages to go about this snapshot. The snapshot will take the form of a brief summary of a number of books from the first category – Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992), Postmodern Ethics (1993) and Postmodernity and its Discontents (1997) – followed by a brief look at some later works. The result will, naturally, not be a complete and comprehensive account of before and after, but it is in the nature of these things that no amount of effort is ever sufficient; there is always more to be done.

The postmodern period

Bauman of this period was very keen on exploring the relationship between individual and structure, or between micro and macro. Unlike Habermas or Bourdieu – or even Giddens, his contemporary – however, Bauman is not striving to give a stringent theoretical account which connects all the dots and crosses all the t’s, thus explaining how the two interrelate. Rather, his project is to show how the two do not connect, and how individual attempts to cross or bridge the gap may or may not succeed at performing the task. He is less interested in showing how to comprehensively describe the current state of things through elaborate theoretical models, than he is in showing that all attempts at this feat would necessarily result in the snapshot mentioned above; the river shifts and moves even as it is being mapped, making the resulting map slightly less obsolete than its predecessors. The inexorable passage of time is not methodologically irrelevant, as it were.

In Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992), Bauman explores the situatedness of individual lives within the larger context of cultures and institutions. No man is an island, and everyone is to some degree shaped by the situation they find themselves in. Not even the most fiercely independent and individualistic of persons can escape the necessity of using tool, frameworks and languages already put in place at the time of their birth by the forces of history. As Heidegger puts it, humans are thrown into the world and have to sort things out in medias res. History does not begin with the individual, and it does not end with the individual. Life is short, but art is very long indeed.

This state of things implies the question of the meaning of life. Barring a few select individuals, most actually existing humans have lived, worked and died without making a notable dent in the formation of history. The vast majority of human lived experience were never recorded, documented or in any other way remembered. Upon death, activity ceases and the process of forgetting begins. Biographical fates are not historical fates, and most biographies – should they have been written – would be rather unremarkable in the grand scheme of things. The question then becomes: given this inexorable march towards death and epistemic oblivion, what meaning does it all have?

For Bauman, the answer lies precisely in the longevity of art and human institutions. Being able to look back on past generations and centuries and see what has come before, provides a context for one’s lives and actions. On a small scale, this can mean looking at family traditions and the community created through their perpetuation; the larger family unit becomes immortal where the individual is not. The same tendency is borne out writ large with regards to intellectual or artistic traditions, where individual efforts are able to inscribe themselves into a shared history by continuing the work into the present. The great ones of the past (like Habermas and Bourdieu, and perhaps even Giddens) provide an existential anchor upon which to rely. When death inevitably comes, it will bookend a life lived in service of something greater than oneself.

The crux of the matter is – as is often the case for Bauman – that these life strategies do not always work, and that contemporary society is (more than anything else) characterized by a sense of discontinuity and disconnectedness from the past. The great family units of the past have disintegrated, the means by which to inscribe oneself into the tradition of the old masters tend to be ever so slightly unattainable, and the jobs with which one pays the rent is more often than not utterly orthogonal to any sense of meaning or purpose whatsoever. The strategies employed to ensure survival are not the same as those employed to give a meaningful account of one’s life, which only serves to accentuate the disconnect. This is a theme which will recur in later works.

In Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), the gap between personal biographies and historical tendencies is explored in the context of the Holocaust. For Bauman, the holocaust is not the result of a resurgence of barbarism in the civilized world, a momentary lapse of reason in an otherwise orderly progression towards a better future. Rather, it is a symptom of modernity, an outcome inherent as a possibility of the modern condition as such. The Holocaust was not the result of a large multitude of Germans unifying in their unrelenting hatred of the Jews; rather, it was the result of ordinary people going about their ordinary days in an ordinary manner. The salary office clerk, train maintenance worker and time table organizers did more or less what you would expect them to do today – ensured that salaries were paid on time, that the trains kept rolling, and that they did so in a manner which was both predictable and efficient. The fact that the salaries happened to go to the staff members of concentration camps and that the trains were bound for Auschwitz is, when it comes to understanding modern division of labor, an irrelevant but deeply morally disconcerting detail.

Much has been made of the figure of Adolf Eichmann, the administrator responsible for ensuring that trains arrived at the concentration camps in an orderly fashion. His work had a direct impact on the lives and deaths of those sent to these camps, and if he did his work well this meant more people would arrive there than if he did it poorly. Yet despite these effects of his work, he did not think particularly ill of the Jews. According to Arendt – who Bauman quotes and discuss at some length – Eichmann did not think anything particular about anything at all. He did not have to – his ethical and moral dispositions were orthogonal to his work of optimizing the train time tables. He famously said that all he wanted to do was to perform his duties; the results and consequences were quite literally above his pay grade.

Eichmann may be an extreme case, but his situation is not uncommon in a modern society. There is a fundamental decoupling of moral agency and the functions performed whilst at work. At the Nuremberg trials, it was concluded that merely following orders was not a sufficient defense against the charge of having committed war crimes. Nevertheless, “just doing one’s job” is still to this day an acceptable excuse when having to perform some ethically questionable task whilst on the clock. The moral and ethical responsibility is routinely delegated to whomever gave the order, who more often than not have received their own orders from even higher up the chain. When Bauman says that the Holocaust is an inherent possibility of modernity, rather than a one-off anomaly contained within a particular historical circumstance, he is referring to this mode of social organization. For Bauman, it is an ethical imperative to not settle for being another Eichmann, content in performing whatever task is set before him with efficient alacrity.

This has implications for what we saw above with regards to life strategies, but it does not provide a clear course of action moving forward. In Postmodern Ethics (1993), Bauman sets out to explore the ethical conditions we find ourselves in, not just post-Holocaust but post-modernity in general. When we can no longer inscribe ourselves into the tradition of relentless progress towards a better tomorrow – the Holocaust was indeed performed using better tools and at higher levels of organization than previous efforts of a similar nature, but it would be repugnant to call it progress – we have to try to find our own way best we can. Bauman characterizes modern ethics as a universal, one size fits all framework which is applicable to any and all situations, a final solution to the question of morals, whereas postmodern ethics have to make do with provisional, ad-hoc and quite possibly temporary solutions to immediate, contextual problems.

On the very first line of the book, Bauman makes it clear that this is a work about contemporary ethics rather than contemporary morals. The distinction between ethics and morals is crucial. Ethics is defined as the rigorous thinking that goes into determining whether something is right or wrong, praiseworthy or deplorable, good or bad; the system of values that determine which actions, past or future, are to be recommended or advised against. Morals, in contrast, are defined as what you do in an actual, immediate situation which requires your attention and participation. This distinction between ethics and morals makes the decision to limit the book to the realms of ethics quite understandable – the former can be assessed by reading and observing the zeitgeist, whilst the latter requires extensive empirical investigations to determine. The results of such investigations would also be subject to the passage of time; again, the river moves whilst being mapped out.

One way to visualize the distinctions – both between modern and postmodern, and between ethics and morals – is the trolley problem. In its modern form, it consists of a trolley moving along the tracks towards a group of ten people. By pulling a lever, our hypothetical ethical agent can divert the trolley onto another track, where it will only hit a single person. The ethical discussion then consists of various attempts at determining whether pulling or not pulling the lever is the correct choice, and the reasons for making such a judgment. Everything is very hypothetical and ethical. A postmodern rendition, however, would place you on a trolley, packed with people going about their day, nothing out of the ordinary. Suddenly, you discover that the person sitting across from you seems to be silently crying. You are now in a situation where you, personally, are called upon to act. What do you do? Do you ask what is wrong, do you pretend not to notice, give some other sort of emotional support,  or – and this is a very real possibility – do you become immobilized by indecision, unable to act one way or another until the other person gets up and exits at the next stop?

The modern trolley problem is characterized by access to perfect information. It is known that the trolley will hit those people, and it is known where the lever is and how it works. The postmodern trolley problem, to the contrary, is characterized by an overwhelming lack of information. We do not know who the other person is, what kind of situation they are in, whether our intervention would be helpful or detrimental, how to find out what is going on, or even which stop they are going to. All we know is that we are in a moral situation and have to act now, based on the limited amount of information available to us in the immediate moment, lest the moment slips by and we have missed the opportunity to make a difference. It is a very immediate situation, where inaction speaks as loud as action.

For Bauman, moral situations are not just exceptions to an otherwise ordered social reality. Every situation has an inherent potential to become a moral intervention (good or bad) into the lives of others, and the project of the book is to expand the realms of ethics from particular, well-defined situations to the messy muddle of everyday life. To simplify almost to the point of absurdity: where Modernity and the Holocaust is an appeal to not be an Eichmann at work, Postmodern Ethics expands it to the whole realm of human experience. What, given the postmodern lack of certainty, are we to do?

The question returns in Postmodernity and its Discontents (1997), where Bauman turns his attention to processes of inclusion and exclusion. Given the aforementioned lack of certainty, new categories are found or invented as focal points for social organization. The specifics differ from context to context, but the general tendency is to create ever subtler social distinctions where even minor variations become intensely significant and lead to tangible consequences. This turning of attention to what seems to be minor details has the double effect of providing certainty and a clear sense of direction as to what to do next. The thing to do, of course, being to redouble one’s efforts in ensuring that one continues to fulfil the criteria for inclusion, whilst also taking comfort in not belonging to the group of those excluded.

The ‘discontent’ of the postmodern condition is, of course, a term applicable to both those included and those excluded. The former have to work ever harder with ever more enthusiasm to maintain their status as still being allowed inside, while the latter face the consequences of exclusion. An employed person might find themselves working overtime as a result of the implied (sometimes not so implied) threat of losing their job, where an unemployed person find themselves the subject to any number of bureaucratic checks and controls to ensure they are not somehow cheating the system. Neither position is particularly comfortable, yet they are endured nevertheless; if nothing else, it is a survival strategy.

As the mechanisms for exclusion become more effective and intrusive, they also become more expensive. Given the contemporary tendency to decrease budgets whenever possible (in the name of using taxpayer money more efficiently), there is a systemic incentive to push people out of the system altogether. Not giving someone social security is cheaper than giving it to them, and so ever stricter rules are put in place regarding who counts as a legitimate recipient. These stricter rules are then used as leverage to keep those still included (albeit on a permanently temporary basis) on their toes; it is a self-reinforcing cycle where those who inevitably drop out are the examples used to scare new employees into new levels of work performance (a theme further explored in Bauman 1998).

Needless to say, there are inherent dangers to these processes. If the population of excluded individuals becomes too large, it has to be dealt with somehow. Any one particular individual makes little difference, but in sum total they can become perceived as an existential threat to the fabric of society. The fact that their status as excluded is a byproduct of how society is organized is beside the point – they are seen as a problem that has to be dealt with, and history has proven ample example of how such problems prompt final solutions (see also Bauman 1991). There is cause to be discontent indeed.

The liquid period

Having read thus far, readers would not be surprised at any of the themes brought up in Liquid Modernity (2000). Modernity in its liquid state has overwhelming similarities to modernity in its post-prefixed state, with the same discontents and perils. It would be possible to trace each and every theme back to a previously published work (an effort which would be educative as an excuse to read said works, but whose end result would not be an interesting read). What does differ is the metaphorics, whose implications are both more and less obvious than it would seem at first glance. The obvious implication is of course the letting go of the term “postmodern”, and the connotations it bears to heavy-duty theory and difficult-to-read books. A less obvious implication, related to the first, is a commitment to reaching and engaging with a wider audience. The metaphor of liquidity is easy to come to terms with and apply to lived experience – things used to be stable and solid, but now things change in ever new and inscrutable ways. What the metaphor loses in terms of being traceable to the postmodern lineage, it gains in terms of simply being able to hand someone the book and being confident in their ability to read it.

The significance of this shift can be gleaned from the evocatively titled What Use is Sociology (2014). Here, Bauman extensively discusses the continued relevance of the social imagination (as envisioned by C. Wright Mills), and the role sociology has in connecting personal issues with societal and structural problems. The move from postmodernity to liquid modernity is a measure taken to give ordinary people access to the tools of the trade. What use is sociology – pun very much intended – if it is locked away behind jargon? Moreover, what use is it if it reduces itself to a mere hunt for statistically significant correlations which, upon being presented to the public, only results in an indifferent shrug so profound as to move mountains? The purpose of sociology is to be relevant and of use, a purpose which should be reflected both in the chosen subject matter and the way it is conveyed. The metaphor of a world turned to liquid seems to cover both of these bases, warranting its extended use.

In Moral Blindness (2013), Bauman and his interlocutor Donskis return to the themes laid out in the last chapter. The blindness refers to the capacity of normal human beings – unremarkable in every way – to perform acts of unspeakable cruelty during the course of their normal lives, be it to ignore the physical presence of those in need (beggars come to mind, but also prisoners) to report someone to the secret police for minor infractions out of a sense of duty and loyalty to the system. Again, we see the theme of doing what you are supposed to, and of following orders. Here, the different ethical threads explored in the previous works are brought together with a clarity afforded by hindsight and familiarity with the new liquid metaphorics. The ethics are still, in essence, postmodern, in the sense that actual situations humans find themselves in are still defined by a radical lack of certainty and an ever growing sense that something has to be done. Our technical capacity to act on this impulse has grown since the publication of Postmodern Ethics (1993), without a corresponding growth of our ethical sensibilities. Indeed, innovations such as the internet and social media have given individuals the capacity to find more information about the issues and problems of the day, but it is not the kind of information that makes for radical ethical empathy. Rather, it allows for the ever finer pinpointing of the identity of the excluded Other, and the coordination of unsavory activities pointed their way. To use an example not found in Bauman, but relevant in our Swedish context: it allows for the mobilization of ordinary people in burning down housing units intended for refugees, arson in the name of nationalism. Only this time, no one gave the order; it just emerged as the moral thing to do.

In Liquid Evil (2016), the tendency of technology to dissociate morality and the potential to commit evil is discussed in more explicit terms. To quote:

One of the consequences of [liquid modernity] has been to render redundant mass participation in state-initiated, state-commanded and state-monitored evils. We no longer have massive conscription armies; murder has turned into a task for professional soldiers – and those soldiers have turned mostly into fully programmed attachments to smart technological contraptions. […] Smart missiles and drones have chased away battleships and fighter pilots. Ever more seldom do the killers face the killed – and so the demands of obedience come unto direct confrontation with moral scruples much less than they used to – if at all. (p. 33)

The turn to discussing these technological developments explicitly in terms of evil might seem hyperbolic, but as Bauman’s own work has shown, the atrocities committed by man against man far transcends the realms where any other term becomes insufficient. Rather than locating the evil at particular agents – the Germans in the case of the Holocaust, the soldiers in the cases alluded to in the quote above – Bauman locates it as a possibility inherent in each and every one of us, aided and abetted by the new technological means which allow us to do it ever more efficiently with ever less risk of facing the consequences, legally or even physically. This, and nowhere else, is where the orderly progression implied in the slogan “Forward” has taken us. In no uncertain terms.

A conclusion of sorts

As I hope has been clearly shown in the snapshot given above, Bauman is not in the business of giving us fixed and universally applicable answers. Rather, his project is to create a framework for ethical (and sociological) reflection, and to make it available to those in need of it. Which, as it turns out, is each and every one of us. If there is one hopeful message that shines throughout Bauman’s work, it is that with the capacity to do evil also comes the capacity to do good. There is still a human subjectivity capable of making ethical judgments, and thus there is still a humanity left to make ethical appeals to. It would be very easy to look upon the world as he describes it, and despair. Yet despair is not a very effective emotion; it does not spark feats of ethical prowess. Fortunately, the race is not over yet – there are still things to be done. There is still an alternative. There is still time. We can still choose to be ethical.

A second, more literal conclusion

In Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (2001), published relatively soon after Liquid Modernity (2000), Bauman expresses a growing unease with the term “postmodernity”. Not only because of its gradual falling out of popularity, but also because it implies that modernity came to an end in some undefined way. It is an accurate description to say that modernity took one form and then changed into another form, but Bauman wanted to convey that they were both of a kind. Postmodernity was, in a sense, the most modern we have ever become, the logical conclusion of the transformative process initiated by the modern project. These two tendencies conspired into finding a different metaphor for describing both the transformation of modernity and the changes to the transformations of modernity. Which is a more literal, but slightly less ethically interesting, answer to the question of why the shift in terminology from postmodernity to liquid modernity occurred. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

References

Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and Ambivalence. Oxford: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (1992). Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bauman, Z. (1995). Life in Fragments. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bauman, Z. (1997). Postmodernity and its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (1998). Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Bauman, Z. (1999). In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2001). The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. & Tester, K. (2001). Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2002). Society Under Siege. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2003). Liquid Love. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2005). Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2006). Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid Times. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2010). 44 Letters From the Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2011). Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. & Donskis, L. (2013). Moral Blindness. Cambridge. Polity.

Bauman, Z. & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid Surveillance. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. Hviid Jacobsen, M. & Tester, K. (2014). What Use is Sociology?. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. & Donskis, L. (2016). Liquid Evil. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. & Leoncini, T. (2017). Nati Liquidi. Sperling & Kupfer.

Shake, shake, shake

I've been thinking a lot about the topics broached in the last post, and how we learn the darnedest things without realizing it. Get into the habit, as it were. The darnedest of these habits is the one where you are expected to give a too full account of yourself - covering every aspect that may or may not be relevant to what's going on.

Academia in particular fosters this kind of habit, in a very explicit fashion. When writing anything larger than a paper, you have to describe your methodology down to the nuts and bolts, and then evaluate the merits of the chosen brands of bolts against other brands. It is all very down to the wire and very literal - no obfuscation or ambiguity is allowed. Everything has to be explained, and it has to be explained well.

Part of this comes down to the scientific method, and the importance placed on being able to replicate results of previous efforts. Like recipes, they becomes easier to follow when the steps are clearly laid out in a straightforward manner. But another, I suspect more important, part of it is that it's become a habit which is (pun very much intended) habitually applied even when scientific exactitude is not on the line. It keeps going even outside the specific domains wherein it is a virtue.

Thus, we often see young academics spring into action writing in public about past thinkers with alacrity. Five posts into the new blog, they are grappling with the significance of semicolons in Derrida or the travails of making sense of the few remaining pre-Socratic fragments in context. Which is all very interesting, to be sure, but it is also way too specific, too explicit - too much in the vein of giving an account of oneself and justifying one's claim to be an academic. As if failing to live up to the implicit academic ideal would disqualify one's efforts and forever cement a reputation of being a fraud, a know-nothing, an amateur. It's all or nothing, and "all" includes lengthy and explicit accounts of whatever one happens to be doing at the moment.

If this sounds very much like impostor syndrome, it's because that's what it is.

That academics in particular fall into this habit more often than others is no accident. It goes with the territory: introductory courses demand that you show you've read the literature, with intermediary courses demanding more of it, and theses being a culmination of expository discourse. At every step of the way, you have to prove yourself, justifying each and every sentence. Down to the semicolon.

It is a very difficult habit to shake indeed.

Shaking the habit

As I am ever faster approaching the end of my time as a master student, I naturally become more reflective of times past. Not only because these times are soon to be irrevocably over for my part, but also because others are bound to begin the same journey soon enough. It's an integral aspect of institutionalized education - there have been others before you, and there will be others after you. The show doth go on.

Part of this process is seeing young ones (they do get younger every year) enter into university life and encountering everything for the first time. And second time. And a lot of times until they, probably, hopefully, possibly get it. Or get a degree, whichever comes first. Their path is as personal as it is predictable - first comes the obstacle of getting into reading, then the obstacle of getting into writing, and somewhere along the way it all translates into getting into thinking. One step at a time, until either understanding or degree undergoes the formality of actually occurring.

I don't say this to imply that bachelors leave with a partial understanding of whatever field they've studied. Everyone has a partial understanding of everything - the world is to big for it to be otherwise. Rather, what I mean to imply is that there are habits that one gets into that one does not necessarily get out of. The most prominent of these habits is to write in the way that is demanded by the university system - particularly, in a way that shows you have actually read the literature on the syllabus. It is an easy habit to get into, seeing as it keeps graders off your back. However, it takes work to get out of this habit once the need for it has passed.

Like, say, after graduation.

The reasons for teaching such a style of writing are many, but most of them relate to a vaguely protestant notion of having Performed the Work. Thus, it is routinely demanded that students include page numbers whenever they refer to an author, rather than just make the reference in general. The only way to actually have a page number on hand, it is assumed, is if you have the opened and read book right there in front of you. This goes for every reference at all times, meaning that writing becomes an bibliographically exhausting (not to be confused with exhaustive) effort - every time an author is mentioned, there has to be a page number to go along with it. To show that you indeed read the book.

If you at this point are having flashbacks to your university days, I apologize.

Thing is. Unless you are doing heavy duty exegesis where every word has to be read and understood in context, there is no reason to write like this outside of the educational setting. It is sufficient to give an account of what the author wrote, get the year of publication right, and move along with whatever argument you are trying to make. Especially if you are trying to tie several authors' lines of thought together - the overall thrust of your discursive momentum is sufficient to give context to your writing, and the addition (or, as the case might be, subtraction) of page numbers will not substantially contribute anything.

The same tendency can be seen, albeit writ large, in comprehensive introductions which mention every author in the field before getting to the topic at hand. This is an excellent writing strategy if you need to convey that you have read about a number of theories and can place them in a proper context. It is a less than excellent strategy if you want to write a compelling introduction which gets right to the heart of things.

There are a number of these habits that gets drilled into you during your university years. Most of them are there to make you easier to evaluate (and subsequently grade), others are accidental. Some are even useful. The key to moving forward is to take a look at oneself and assess which habits still serve a purpose, which have to be unlearned, and which have to be kept in a state of being just remembered enough so that you can give useful advice to new students upon encountering them. The goal, of course, being to nudge these young fellows toward the habit of thinking, rather than settling for a habit of performing.

The show doth go on.

Getting ahead, one leg at a time

There are three different ways of going about riding a bike.

The most intuitive way is to give it your all and effort to maintain maximum speed, Tour de France style, where it is all muscle all the time. Full speed ahead, legs thumping and whooshing. Oontz oontz oontz oontz. Faster, harder, overtake that Scooter. This usually occurs when you are in a hurry to get somewhere, want the exercise, or simply have not thought too hard about how to go about biking.

Then there is the economical way, where you effort just enough to get the bike into enough sufficiently sustained momentum that you can move forward without additional input. Just keep on rolling, maybe lean forward a bit, until more power is required. Then repeat the process as many times as necessary, alternating between building momentum and effortlessly moving forward. Eventually, you'll get where you are going, minimum effort style.

And then there is the low-speed high effort method, where you effort just enough to get moving, but not enough to actually move at sustained speed, and thus have to continually apply leg power to move at a crawl. Friction and gravity keeps on slowing down the bike to such an extent that every pedal push becomes akin to the initial oomph to transition from standstill to motion. Previous efforts do not accumulate or help you sustain momentum, and every iota of speed has to be reestablished anew every step along the way.

At this point, you might be asking yourself - is this some sort of metaphor for life in general, where the different modes of biking represent different approaches to everyday activities and how to approach them? Or, possibly also, different states of mind that a person might slip into as they go about doing the thing called being alive?

To which I say: yes. Yes it is.

An analytical poke

Every now and again I come to think of the big disconnect between the act of performing rhetorical communication and rhetorical analysis. Rhetorical communication happens any time you strategically choose your words to get someone to do something (from passing the salt to approving a bank loan). Rhetorical analysis is the act of looking really closely at some sort of rhetorical communication and analyzing what's going on in it. The communication usually happens very fast, and the analysis very slowly. That's the disconnect.

The disconnect is, of course, inevitable. An analysis has to perform many tasks, and be explicit about most of them. It has to provide context, justify the significance of the communicative act under analysis, and describe it in sufficient detail to convey to readers what's going on. This takes quite a number of words, even if only performed with the minimum of surplus verbiage. Even after subsequent revisions with the explicit intent to reduce word count, there will by necessity be a substantial amount of words to it. It goes with the territory.

The communicative act, on the other hand, only has to do what it set out to do. Once done, it's over, and other things can commence. In trivial cases, it literally takes seconds - the salt is passed. In other cases, it can take a bit longer, but tends to be limited by the physical constraints of the human body. A speech can only be so long. All said and done, other things happen. Life goes on.

Thus, analyses tend to end up being much ado about seemingly nothing. On first glance, you might wonder how it is even possible to write thousands of words about something that takes seconds to perform. Then you dig into it and discover that there's a lot going on in that one moment, which indeed needed all those words to unpack. Worse, you begin to look at similar situations for similar implications - the analysis continues inside you. Further communicative acts require at least some thought before they become routine again.

The power of rhetorical analysis lies in this disconnect. A good analysis will disconnect you from a situation, and then force you to reconnect to it in a new way. You think you knew what's going on, but looking back on it you realize that, no, there's more to it. Your perspective has changed, and so you must pay attention to the differences made visible. You have permission to be perturbed.

In all this, life goes on. But you still have to reconnect.

Active listening by the numbers

I like hearing mathematicians talk about doing math things. Usually I do not follow along, but it's nice to listen to. The [name] algorithm passed through the [name] filter and then cleaned up through the [name] process. It all makes sense to someone, probably.

There are different ways to approach discourse you do not understand. One is to simply throw up your hands and declare you do not understand any of it. Sometimes, this is in fact the most useful approach - radical honesty and all that.

Another approach is to take what you do understand and try to parse it using available data. If we know that, in math, procedures are often named after those who formulate them, we can gather that each time a name is mentioned, some sort of procedure is brought into the context. The names themselves do not matter as much as the courses of action they connote; they are shorthand for what to do and how to go about it.

This does not make the specifics any clearer, to be sure. But when someone objects "but what about the [name] conjecture?", you are now clued in to the fact that there is something amiss with the proposed course of action, which needs to be addressed. The content of this objection is unknown, but the form of it is clear. Whatever comes next - be it an "oh, but the [name] postulate solves that" or a heartfelt "shit shit shit shit shit" - your act of active listening has provided you with some insight into what's going on.

The same goes for any context. There are always two conversations going on at any given time, where one might be more prominent than the other. There is the factual conversation where specifics are tossed around left and right, where knowing what's what helps tremendously. These facts are timeless, and can be grappled with later on, on their own terms. There is also a very time-sensitive conversation going on in the now, where everything is specific to the very moment it is happening. This is the realm of moods, postures, physical positioning within the room, hierarchy - everything that affects a situation without necessarily being explicitly mentioned by anyone involved.

Needless to say, the fact that it goes without saying does not mean it is unimportant.

There is an ideal out there that conversations ought to take place solely in terms of the first conversation. Putting ideas against each other and all that. It has the merit of being an ideal, but as an analytic approach to actual social situations, it leaves out too many relevant aspects to generate useful insight. The "shit shit shit" response above might be a response to the fact that the [name] conjecture makes the thing difficult to perform, but it might also be a response to the fact that the person in question was planning on going home early that day, and just had that very plan dashed to pieces right there and then. Merely thinking in terms of content leaves out the very real life implications of form.

Be sure to keep both ears open as you move through life. Arguments are very seldom about the things they are about, and there are cases where losing the argument in the first kind of conversation means winning in the second. You just have to know to listen for it.