Cohesion of Last Week's Readings

Hey, everyone. Huge apologies for taking so long to post, and thanks for the wealth of thought on last week's readings. You've really helped me to understand them better. It's been interesting to see how last week's readings have cohered--in class, on the concept map, and in contemplation.

At the risk of hugely oversimplifying what's been discussed already, it's interesting to see how the different authors conceptualize the social. Latour, of course, is the one who really grapples with it as an entity, to prove its nonentity, and he also seems to assign it the most identity in the process of critique. The social, in his conception, seems like this phantom mortar that we see as holding us all together. It needs to be recognized as consisting only of those who facilitate it, and what I take away from him is a need to populate the terrain that the word takes up with more human terms.

One of the authors who does that, for me, is Gee, who offers us the social as revolution in pedagogy, and gives us the disciplines that have risen out of it, along with those who have made it possible. Even that act, of naming the theorists of the social turn, seems almost to accomplish Latour's goal, on a small scale. The tracery of assocations among theories and theorists make the social itself look more like a network. Society is no longer an amorphous gravy of discourses; it's a territory populated by the theorists who defined it. Gee's discussion of the new capitalism also speaks to Latour's problematization of "social": the thinkers applying the social turn to economics seem almost to be operating with a sense of "social" as just that entity that it isn't, overlooking those who generate it, putting them into dynamic groups, instead.

In Trimbur's piece, the social comes problematized by some of the facilitators of the social turn. He uses his review of all three to critique the idea that a discourse can empower its practitioners. This idea jives with Latour's goal, for me--if there is no social without those who create it, there is no discourse without its practitioners, so discourses hold no inherent power. The social is definitely not some amorphous power for students to import through osmosis; it's very particular to the individual. The idea of teaching students a specific discourse that will open specific doors for them makes less sense, in this view, than conceptualizing teaching as network connecting those who know the discourse with those who are learning it. Gee's casting of the social turn, as a way of viewing its practitioners and implications, works with this idea of particularization, too.

Our discussion in class linked Gaonkar with the social, because of the intersubjectivity of rhetoric, as someone wonderfully pointed out. While you can't just insert "social" everywhere he has "rhetoric," his idea that rhetoric is supplementary seems to speak to Latour's idea more than that of the other author's. (Donna pointed that out, I'm remembering now; I knew I couldn't have come up with that myself.) Both rhetoric and the social are created by whatever inhabits them. Both Gee and Trimbur would agree, maybe, but neither is out to dissolve "social" as a term, entirely. They're just particularizing it, and helping to attach the idea of "social turn" to different practitioners.

LeFevre's introduction talks about the history of invention as an individual activity; the social seems like a promise not fully realized. She's presenting the social as a bedrock term, but one with more potential than actuality. It's an interesting juxtaposition with the others, because it seems to suggest the social as a concept needing to be implemented. If Latour wants us to unpack it, LeFevre's intro suggests that it might provide a stable foundation for sustained discussion.

Much of the above discussion may have already taken place in class, or may be bogus; mostly, it strikes me that none of the above authors would conceive of the social as an entity in itself, but some use it that way for the sake of helping us to get past an individualistic view of writing.