The air we breathe is yellow
I’m taking a rhetoric of legal discourse class this semester, and the professor is definitely one of a kind. You get called on without warning in class, and as you attempt to craft your answer, she challenges every term you use in your response and breaks it down into its original Latin, Greek, or Germanic roots.
She then continues to pursue your logic with follow up questions, sending your mind rushing and adrenaline pumping for an appropriate answer. Your breathing quickens and you could hear your heart beating. It feels as if you are being chased by the rhetorical police who are investigating you for verbal fraud. You feel yourself running out of intellectual breath, and as you turn a corner into a dark ally, you find a long road that leads to a dead end. At this moment, as your mind is in disarray in an attempt to scramble up a cold wall that is too tall, you hear her say to you in front of the whole class, “Think far more on this”. At this, you feel your body go limp—-your ego just got arrested on charges of inadequacy and will be kept in custody for 15 weeks, released only upon conditions of satisfactory behavior. And in the back of your head, you’re thinking, “I hope this doesn’t get on my record”.
It has been 7 weeks since that first experience. We’ve had many homework assignments, each about 100 words long. Every assignment thus far has been brutally marked up. Most were filled with green or purple markings that circle, question, cross-out, or directly challenge every word we use or say.There seems to be more color from her markings than the content of our writing itself. I’ve gotten “unsatisfactory” marks on every assignment, accompanied by comments that read “think far more on all of this” at the end. Most students in this class receive the same colorful array of markings and comments that gently remind us to “think far more”.
But what’s actually more shocking was the midterm we just took. Everyone walked out of that midterm shell shocked, bleary eyed, and slightly disoriented. We got our scores back this week, and while I’m not completely certain, it seems that more than half the class performed below a “C” level, with quite a few “D” and “F”. I scrambled out of that mess with a meager “B”, and thus far I only saw one person who managed an “A-”. I’ve never been treated in this way in my four years of Rhetoric classes at Berkeley.
This morning, I decided to sit down and figure out what the heck is going on. What is it that is making this class so hard to ace? Why is my past four years of writing experience falling upon deaf ears? While I read through each comment and examined every circle on my midterm, I came up with a hypothesis:
WARNING: The following paragraph will be abstract and theoretical, and generally confusing for the casual reader. Read at your own discretion.
So my conclusion is that the professor has a philosophy of metaphysics (way of understanding the world, a paradigm) derived from Kant and Heidegger, and that metaphysics requires you to be immersed within its discourse and not to see yourself as separate for distinct from its worldview. This worldview takes a step back from the conventional rhetorical position of the particular and sees everything as essentially connected. You cannot “analyze” this. You must suspend your habitual way of looking at the world and be immersed in the fabric of its logic/metaphysics.
You must actually SEE and attend to matters in the way that the philosophy would like you to SEE, and you can’t speak as if you are removed from this phenomenon. There is no other way to be in relationship with this philosophy than to be completely IN it, and the professor expects us to express this understanding not just conceptually, but also formally in the very way we speak through our writing. We need to PERFORM this understanding, not PRESENT it in the form of analysis, since a purely analytic worldview is precisely what is being challenged here.
This demand is particularly challenging for two reasons. First, it is a position that expects you to see the air you breathe as yellow. Our Rhetoric department is very much about “critical theory”, about breaking things down, seeing how they are constructed, and understanding them as dynamic and unstable. We’re so used to this process that it’s like the air we breathe, and we don’t notice because it’s invisible. However, our professor’s metaphysics challenges the way we see the world and how we’ve learned to think in the last four years at Berkeley. It requires us to SEE the air we breathe and to notice that it is yellow. In that way, we are able to better attend to the (invisible) matter around us.
The second reason this demand is challenging is because it expects us to ACT and SPEAK in a way that demonstrates that we understand that the air we breathe as yellow. To simply “analyze” is to demonstrate that you are still unaware of the color of the air. You must disrupt your old habits and engage in a much more deliberate and careful way of speaking that reflects an understanding of the metaphysics. The difference between CONCEPTUAL knowledge and HABITUAL knowledge is being tested here, and you must modify the way you use language to reflect that understanding. This second level is probably why most of the class is having a difficult time with doing well in the class.
In fact, the way this blog post talks about the entire situation is exactly WRONG. I’m analyzing the situation, and i’m not treating it as a part of my being. The way I TALK about this issue already demonstrates that I’m outside of the metaphysics. And so, if for some disturbing reason, my professor comes across my blog post and decides to grade it, I will most certainly see it filled with colorful marks and a gentle reminder that reads,
“Think FAR more on ALL of this”.
And this will certainly go on my record.
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