Ethical Learning, Responsibility, and Assessment

A long time ago, when I first became enamored with the possibilities of digital communication and deconstruction, I remember constructing a piece on spectrality and student work. I was proud when the piece won a Parlor Press award at Purdue for Best Multimedia Project, and a bit disappointed when it was rejected for publication at Kairos (though I can't blame them, the thing is a mess). Essentially, the piece emphasized how rhetorical practice involves more than a knowledge of and ability to enact Aristotelian tactics--that interacting with real, responsible (que Levinas) human beings requires a pathetic sensitivity and strength, and that the only way to gain that strength is engage in situations that leave us "weak," out of control, beholden to a spectral other/future over which we can have no mastery or assurance.

I remembered this piece today reading over a Chronicle piece on Assessment and Ethical Learning. One cannot materialize ghosts, nor can one accurately measure an individual's response to the affective rush of alterity, the traumatizing experience of facing an Other that calls a self into question, the infinity that interrupts totality (etc), outside of the radical encounter itself. Recreating that situation is (virtually?) impossible. I'd link to think--in the best cases--that the blogging pedagogy I've been working on approaches the problem; but I certainly wouldn't claim it solves it, or that it in anyway ensures ethical responses. Rather, it makes possible this kind of encounter, and aims to cultivate a responsible (que Levinas again, in this case a response that weighs the other to the neighbor while recognizing the inevitability that violence will occur) response. As the article intimates, there is an issue of kairos to ethical learning largely irrelevant to critical and epistemological pedagogies:

"It is really hard to measure ethical learning because it's not declarative or semantic knowledge, but, like any expertise, it is knowing the right thing to do in the right way at the right time," says Darcia F. Narváez, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame. In her research, she has found that intuition plays such a big role in moral decisions that she argues it is a mistake to ignore its influence.

As the article further complicates, such attempts run into trouble once they begin to determine what/whose particular values are right. One reason I enjoy Levinas so much is that his work doesn't articulate a morality (hence, it does not belong to logos). Rather, it attempts to establish, via pathos, a mood from which we can hospitably approach those impossible, but necessary questions. Levinas' phenomenological account of subjectivity dis-posess us of any claim to a spontaneous, autonomous foundation, thus, I hope, generating an embodied dis-position from which we can ethically approach argumentation (remembering that we dispute with other people, rather than with mere ideas). Ethics, when I deploy the term, doesn't mean to signify a list of truths, or even an accepted collection of moral laws. Rather, it speaks to the cultivation of a spectral subjective attitude, a pre-condition to productive human encounters. Referring to yesterday's post on Tim Morton, it is the cultivation of a dis-position both open and weird. Irrational though it may be, argumentation is not a matter of simply deploying proper arguments or upholding the proper morality.

As I continue to work on my Nussbaum article, its articulation of post-pedagogy, and the emphasis of ethics over critique, I am caught up in contemporary will to assess. I am trying, hard, to avoid adopting an intellectual position anti-thetical to standardized assessments, especially after reading Academically Adrift such a move would feel reactionary and stupid. Thinking about the kinds of qualitative assignments in Academically Adrift, I am beginning to have new appreciation for the CLA test they endorse. I feel much more obligated to acknowledge and endorse such maneuvers; if we do not cultivate more sophisticated forms of assessment, then we could be burdened (in the post-Spellings Commission, hyper-attentive, economically-crisised-driven University) with something much worse. In my article I deal with recent "reforms," by the CollegeBoard, in Florida's primary and secondary schools--they are now driven by a scripted, day-to-day program accompanied by standardized tests leaving little room for kairos and invention on the part of teachers. To say that such rigid policing could not come to higher education is, I believe, a dangerous stance.

And, if you haven't read Academically Adrift yet, and you teach writing, then I cannot emphasize enough how important this book is. Sure, there are methodological issues with their study (I remember Pat Sullivan emphasizing how, when people want to reject a conclusion, they begin by attacking the methodology), but the picture they paint of learning on contemporary campuses warrants attention and response.

Deconstruction, Responsibility, and Greek-Europeans

Thanks Casey--I have a sneaking suspicion that when it comes to books, we have divergent tastes. When it comes to teaching, we share quite a lot. Like my last post, this started as a comment and grew into a long one.

The early/late Derrida question is quite the question--whether his entire opus is oriented toward ethics or whether this marks a significant turn in the later works. Personally, I think he was always concerned with ethics--but early in this career he was more interested in destruction (because that high tower had grown so high and presented itself as impervious to critique) and later in his career much more interested in construction (since he had pretty much succeeded with objective #1). Its also important to remember that the anthologized stuff in America primarily deals with literature and language, and tends to pass over elements of the early work invested in metaphysics. To simplify, Derrida's career can be read as a tension between Heidegger's poetics and Levinas's ethics--he starts closer to the former and ends closer to the latter.

In Learning to Live Finally, his last interview before his death, Derrida shares a very candid and lucid (wait, Derrida, lucid--yes!) depiction of deconstruction. Its pretty long, but here we go:

Deconstruction in general is an undertaking that many have considered, and rightly so, to be a gesture of suspicion with regard to all Eurocentrism. When more recently I have had occasion to say "we Europeans" is is something quite different and is always related to a particular set of circumstances: everything that can be deconstructed in the European tradition does not negate the possibility--and precisely because of what has happened in Europe, because of the Enlightenment, because of the shrinking of this little continent and the enormous guilt that pervades its culture (totalitarianism, Nazism, fascism, genocides, Shoah, colonization and decolonization, etc.)--that today, in the geopolitical situation in which we find ourselves, Europe, an other Europe but with the same memory might (this is in any case my wish) band together against both the politics of American hegemony (in the configuration of Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfield and so on) and an Arab-Islamic theocratism without Enlightenment and without political future (though let's not minimize contradictions, the processes underway, and the heterogeneities within these two groups, and let us join forces with those who resist from within these two blocs). Europe finds itself under the injunction to assume a new responsibility. (40-41)

Derrida locates this new responsibility in Kant's original "hesitant" Enlightenment--this is something one of my graduate students, Adam Breckenridge, pointed out in my Contemporary Rhetorics seminar--that Kant's original work was suspicious of meta-narratives much more than many postmodern theorists have been (and thus, postmodern theory, very much against some wills, transformed into its own monolith resistant to critique through its presumed attention to foundations... have I heard this line before? It is possible to be a bad anti-foundationalist--bad in this sense would not only indicate a sole commitment to destruciton, but also a lack of self-reflexivity).

Speaking toward a Kantian inspired geo-cosmopolitanism (one dedicated to the planet and not the nation as polis), Derrida writes:

What I call "deconstruction," even when it is directed toward something from Europe, is European; it is a product of Europe, a relation of Europe to itself as an experience of radical alterity. Since the time of the Enlightenment, Europe has undertaken a perpetual self-critique, and in this perfectible heritage there is a chance for a future. At least I would like to hope so, and that is what feeds my indignation when I hear people definitively condemning Europe as if it were but the scene of its crimes. (44-45)

There is a small strain of optimism here that recalls for me Kant's conclusion to "What is Enlightenment?": "If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism." Notice Kant doesn't say "reach Enlightenment." He's aiming low. Given humanity's track record, that's probably high enough.

Finally, I should address all this talk of Europe--I hear it ring with an echo of "Greece"; we are all still European (to what extent is debatable) just as we are still Greek, still Roman. Not all of us, for sure. And we are more than just Greek, just Roman. But these are the times (more than even places) from which our values were drawn, the heart of our cultural, political, and legal landscape. Those veins still pump. There resonances heard in the walls of our institutions.

But I am especially rooted in Europe (never mind that I was born in bred in Plymouth, MA--the self-proclaimed birthplace of America proud to have help kill the Red Coats). I have mentioned, from time to time, that the Holocaust remains the single event that motivated my entry into scholarship. Everything I have written lies in its shadow. It haunts me with questions: why, how, when? It is this last question in particular that haunts me--when might it return. We know that genocide has surfaced in other places in the 20th century. I find it impossible to think such hatred. It is the face of the other for me-I cannot totalize it, understand it, come to terms with it. I quake thinking about it. And so I do the only thing I know how to do. I read. I think. I write. I question. I teach. I wait. I listen.