Transdisciplinary Rhetoric| Prof. Rickert | Paper #2 | March 13, 2020
In describing availability bias, Daniel Kahneman explains that one feature of System 1 is its ability to “set expectations and be surprised when these expectations are violated” (134). This accurately describes my response to searching for transdisciplinarity in Jordynn Jack’s Raveling the Brain: Toward a Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. Despite the word “transdisciplinary” appearing in the title of the book, it is nowhere to be found in the book’s index and I have been unable to locate the term anywhere in the text. If I’m wrong (and I hope I am), please help me to see what I’m missing. Reading between the lines, the transdisciplinarity of Jack’s metaphor of “raveling” manifests in a few ways. Raveling Out which works from an assumption of linguistic and material inseparability or what Jack calls “rhetorical-material infrastructure” (11). Raveling Back questions particularity and seeks to employ “rhetorical genealogy to move back in time to see how current material-discursive practices are woven out of earlier ones” (13), and Raveling Together promotes a synthetic approach of “intertwining [disciplinary] perspectives” in order to “open up new lines of inquiry or ways of theorizing human cognition” (15). While the interdisciplinary threads of inquiry here are clear, I’m interested in learning more about the transdisciplinary telos alluded to in the title of this book and this seminar. Toward this end, I ask and amplify some questions that might be heard as critical—this is not my intention—by querying what transdisciplinary rhetoric is, we must also ask how it is done. When it affords us with advantages, we must be cognizant of the consequences.
CCCC 2019 included a panel titled “Naming What We Don’t Know, Composition Studies’ Performance of Expertise,” moderated by Paul Kei Matsuda. In it, three linguists described how their disciplinary work on the specialized term “translingual” originated in linguistics, but has become “adopted” and used widely in rhetoric and composition studies. The problem, they contend, is that we don’t understand the term and that we’ve warped it to mean whatever we want . We’ve circulated it with such virality that one presenter, a professor of linguistics who specializes in translingualism, had a journal article rejected in a composition journal because she “failed to use the term ‘correctly.’” Given the generosity of these linguists to enter a rhetoric and composition epistemic court and share this experience on our terms, I think it behooves us to take Matsuda’s advice seriously: “compositionists need to be better at carefully defining the terms they use, especially when the term is borrowed from another field.” Consider, as a converse example, what rhetoricians might think when a psychologist publishes for his discipline on “consumers’ use of persuasion knowledge” through rhetoric by starting with the methodological step of “assembling a long and heterogeneous list of classical rhetorical figures and classifying them into psychologically meaningful types and subtypes” (McGuire, 111). The move here is clear: scholarship presenting itself as transdisciplinary works to advance a disciplinary agenda by appropriating knowledge in other disciplines through a process of “operationalization” (the term Jack learned from her neuroscientist colleague, pg.179) or what Edward Said artfully describes as “Orientalism” or the ways in which non-Western cultural capital is appropriated, generalized, and re-fabricated to fit Western needs (1978).
Jack is aware of this tendency in rhetoric, noting “We have also tended to be promiscuous in our theoretical engagements, drawing from an ever-widening engagement with philosophy, feminist studies, critical theory, disability studies, critical race studies, new materialism, field methods, and so on,” nonetheless, rhetoricians still engage with “layered” responses and the recognition that “often, no single, universalizing answer can be given” (69). While I appreciate the contextualized open-endedness of this approach, students of rhetoric and transdisciplinarity should be careful to posit this pluralism as true openness and not advance ambiguous enthymemes that suggest rhetorical conclusions without taking full responsibility for them.
Greek myth (Ovid) tells of Arachne at the loom becoming too skillful and self-confident that she exposes the blunders of the gods in the text(tile) she weaves and gets punished for her hubris. The goddess Minerva beats Arachne who hangs herself and becomes transformed into a spider. Jack weaves her book around the central metaphor of raveling—the construction of fabric.
Where I’m from, my friends, the Diné people (Navajo) have a rich tradition of weaving beautiful rugs. This practice is enmeshed with tradition and passing cultural knowledge from one generation to the next and includes a specific practice of leaving an intentional “imperfection” in the rug design. There is a rich narrative guiding this practice, but that story is not mine to tell. Rather, I see this practice as bearing the mark of a true expert—the humility to recognize that we are not perfect and cannot ever expect to flawlessly weave our plans and ways around the world. This way of weaving embodies the mindfulness of phronesis that Arachne lacked. How can we, as transdisciplinary scholars or students of transdisciplinary scholarship, exhibit the same kind of intellectual humility?
If rhetoric is, as Jack posits a techne (183), we are ethically obliged to practice it in a way that resists operationalization. Technical writing has been actively engaging with its propensity for misuse for decades (Katz, 1992), and recently has turned toward social justice as its defining characteristic (Jones, Moore, & Walton, 2016). Rhetorically speaking, phronesis (φρόνησῐς), or practical wisdom might be one virtue for transdisciplinary rhetoricians, particularly if we understand phronesis as “mindfulness” or the contextualized awareness of oneself with others (McEvilly, 2002). How do we ensure that transdisciplinarity does not become a convenient namesake for the rhetorical appropriation of the labor and specialized terminology developed by other disciplines? Further, how can we practice transdisciplinarity responsibly to ensure that it does not become instrumentalized and work impose disciplinary norms and vocabularies of rhetoric upon other disciplines?