Transdisciplinary Rhetoric | Prof. Rickert | Paper #1| February 14, 2020
At the center of an argument about post-truth crafted by Johan Farkas and Jannic Schou is a question about the assumed linkage between truth and democracy, specifically that “disciplinary actions [such as bank bailouts] are premised on the necessity of truth” (136). However, if the concept of democracy is subordinate to Truth, then there are some significant limitations to democratic freedom. Pluralities of truth or multiple perspectives on any particular phenomena arise as an alternative to normative singularity. In terms of academic practice, this might appear as epistemic or moral framing in which scholars and students practice working with truths in a disciplined setting with the assumption that particular modes of discipline will encourage students to see the world in a particular way. Stated differently, teaching students what the Truth is becomes less important than developing their ability to understand and determine how they are perceiving the truth and communicating it to others. When a student begins their second year of studies, they are called sophomore or wise (sophia) fool (morōs) because they have encountered enough disciplinary content and structure to feign expertise. And while this title is a subtle institutional mockery of naïveté, the performative skill of a sophomore is precisely what it takes to succeed in post-truth politics.
Rhetorically this skill might generally be called the art of bullshit (Harry Frankfurt), but more specifically, we might understand it as aptitude for modulating metaphors and frames based on contextual considerations. George Lackoff offers an account of metaphor that is technical, yet succinct: “ Metaphors are mental structures that are independent of language but that can be expressed through language” (82). Metaphors pervade our thinking because they make use of subconscious and automatic cognitive systems which favor habituated “neural mapping,” while the repeated invocation of a metaphoric frame “strengthens” cognitive “recruitment,” making it easier for someone to fit new information into that frame. This suggests one rhetorical strategy available to transdisciplinary scholars: though the content of their findings might be novel, presenting them using familiar disciplinary metaphors increases the likelihood of their being received well in a particular discipline (or badly in others).
This view of metaphor dovetails with theories about individual and group behavior. Many of our transdisciplinary readings (Fahnestock, 181; Haidt, 36; Lakoff, 201; Barrett, 158, to name a few) point to the work of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species as a common topoi either for metaphor in scientific rhetoric or as a pivotal text for disciplinary formation and empirical investigation of the hypothesis of competition (or a naturalistic grounding of human selfishness). While frequent citation of a common text in transdisciplinary work is telling about underlying assumptions regarding empirical research methodology, I think more interesting uses of Darwin involve pivoting upon or expending beyond his central claims. Jonathan Haidt makes this move nicely by developing his concept of “groupishness “as an extension on the notion of selfishness. He contends that “when groups compete , the cohesive, cooperative group usually wins. But within each group, selfish individuals (free riders) come out ahead” (224). This theory is remarkable in that it accounts for human tendencies toward both selfishness and collaboration within evolutionary psychology, a transdisciplinary field that has come to acquire near-disciplinary status of its own.
Haidt is also strikingly aware of a powerful metaphor he invokes to describe the relationship between intuition and reason. By casting reason as the rider of an elephant (intuition), Haidt emphasizes the cognitive connectedness between reason and intuition while affirming they both do different useful things that can inform the other (53-54). Interestingly, he explains that he “chose an elephant rather than a horse because elephants are so much bigger—and smarter—than horses” (53). To invoke this vivid metaphor is a compelling rhetorical strategy for describing a theory about virtually invisible cognitive processes, but Haidt’s choice to explain to readers why he selected the elephant instead of the horse for this metaphor serves to expedite the processes of recruitment and strengthening of neural mapping.
Through the work we’ve read so far, I’ve been taking note of a metaphorical elephant in the room. In the space of studying academic (trans)disciplinarity, it behooves us to consider the inherited word choices we use to describe academic work. Above all else, spatial metaphors, most with agricultural and capitalist connotations stand out. When we talk about different areas of study, we often call them fields. Fields are places where seeds are sown and crops are grown, much like academics talks about spreading or growing knowledge or teaching the (forgive me, Rachel) seminal texts. This growth and production metaphor is just as much agricultural as it is capitalistic. The compartmentalization and isolation of disciplines into silos invokes images not only of mass storage of grain protected from the elements, but also a guarded protection of potency (as in missile silos). This silo effect could be accounted for by groupishness. It is through identification with and practice in an academic discipline (groupishness) that scholars gain traction in the academy, while for most researchers, the ultimate goal is to make individual contributions to knowledge (individual selfishness).
Sometimes, academics struggle with each other over turf or the territorialization of physical space, practice of teaching, or claim to intellectual lineage and legitimacy. Terms applied to the student body (or the bodies of students) are procedural (matriculation, graduation) or evocative of conscripted military service (rates of retention or attrition). And ultimately, the terminus of graduate education involves students going to (job) market, just like plump piggies on the brink of becoming bacon. For all this borrowed metaphor, I wonder, what unique metaphorical terms have originated from within the academy that have gained uptake elsewhere in society?
Perhaps the major contribution of the academy to broader society is the plentitude of disciplinary knowledge that cannot itself be reduced to metaphorical frames and must instead be represented publicly using various metaphors. In describing transdisciplinary studies as the apex in the “topology for enterprises within and across disciplines,” Marilyn Stember characterizes this “level of integrated study” as “concerned with the unity of intellectual frameworks beyond disciplinary perspectives” (4). If leveraging metaphor and frames is essential for communicating the results of transdisciplinary scholarship, perhaps it is a higher order of infrastructures that “must be created to sustain and promote interdisciplinary efforts” which is the real labor of transdisciplinary work (Stember, 10). The phenomena transdisciplinary scholars study is important; the methods of inquiry they utilize are innovative; but the unique, albeit sometimes hard to notice, contribution they make to scholarship and society is the intellectual infrastructure they build that permits their work in the first place.