ENGL 505A

Since we never got around to discussing it in class, I thought I'd go ahead and post my thoughts on the Berlin article we read last week to see if anybody else wanted to comment.

As I mentioned before, the article had the (unintended?) effect of confirming my previous suspicions about my own approach to teaching: I seem to be an unrepentant expressivist with cognitivist sympathies. I do, however, recognize the validity of the criticisms Berlin levels at both traditions, and would even argue that at no other time in the history of humanity (or at least in composition studies) has the 'cult of individuality' been more widespread, as well as more thoroughly exploited by corporations to sell the masses a sense of their own 'uniqueness.' One need only visit the local shopping mall to see the pre-packaged 'punk' image promoted at Hot Topic, or surf the Net to be drowned in a sea of 'personalized' options available on social networking sites, and s/he will have a pretty good sense of just how commodified the idea of the individual has become in today's world.

But does commodification necessarily invalidate an idea?

For centuries, if not millennia, authors and rhetoricians have spoken of the importance of self-discovery, of the quest to find one's own voice through the written (or spoken) word. It seems to me then a bit presumptuous to abandon this line of thought simply because it has been over-exploited by the global market.

Which brings me (finally!) to Berlin's social-epistemic rhetoric. Certainly the relationship that it highlights -- observer, community, and material existence -- is vital to our understanding of writing, language, and knowledge in general. Yet, I can't help feeling that Berlin is promoting an agenda that he has not clearly outlined in this article. Not that I have a problem promoting critical thinking (or "anarchistic" relativism for that matter, which seems to be where Berlin draws the line), but I do feel like there is an implicit Western bias in Berlin's approach, specifically that a Marxist critique can be 'universally' applied. As John Rickford and other sociolinguists have more recently found, that is simply not the case. Whether examining traditional South America plantation systems or postmodern Japanese urban life, there is evidence to suggest that thought -- including the very idea of critical thinking -- varies significantly from culture to culture. I find no reason to assume that the same variability would not exist in the modern writing classroom, especially when students are coming to the university from increasingly diverse social, ethnic, economic, and generational backgrounds.

Simply put, I believe the picture is far too complex to paint with broad strokes. In fact, critical thinking may turn out to be just as socially and historically situated as the competing ideologies it is so often used to examine.