Latour is on my mind these days.

I’ve been reading Politics of Nature, and like Reassembling the Social, it’s doing its job to make most things we do, say, or think messy. And that’s, as is sometimes said on a former prison inmate’s TV show, a good thing. For Latour, the focus may be science, or networks, or the generic sense of ecology, but one can always generalize from his observations. If anything, Actor-Network-Theory’s emphasis on movement and transformation would encourage such a move. For English and the Humanities, this move can shift focus to that which almost never moves. Or it moves with a lot of brute force - and then only a little: pedagogy.

Our pedagogies are often dominated by fixed positions, or for want of a better term: commonplaces. Commonplaces are sites of stability and expectation. They are tailored, of course. But that work is done according to traditions of audience or expectation. And when they shift, pedagogies are meant to stabilize. Courses, students, programs, all are to be stabilized as a set meaning (outcomes frame that process as expectation). Often, theoretical pieces, for instance, end with the call to pedagogy, the assignment which exemplifies the theory (now…here’s how I did it…). A stabilizing gesture.

Not a crime. But a gesture. Then we get Latour. Like some other good work on the complexity of writing and media (Mathew Fuller comes quickly to mind), Latour expands the realm of what influences, shapes, transforms, redirects, relates to a given commonplace. The commonplace, then, is not a site of audience and speaker, audience and writer, writer and writer, and so on. It is a collective of a variety of forces, human and non-human. Latour calls one of these non-human forces concerns. It’s a term that sticks with me for how it, too, includes a number of relationships at once. We work within and with concerns. “[Non-humans] first appear as matters of concern, as new entities that provoke perplexity and thus speech in those who gather around them, discuss them, and argue over them” (66). Here’s where we can really mess with pedagogy.

What are the concerns which function as such entities? Sure, we have a rich theoretical tradition already which points to class, gender, race, ESL, the basic writer, the computer classroom, and so on. But each is, of course, presented as one concern. And often, as we can see in critical pedagogy, for example, the concern is a commonplace as fixed position: liberation, or put less dramatically, awareness. One concern is posed in relationship to one commonplace (a given writing situation, a given student’s one place). What we don’t have is a collective of forces in relationship to one another. “Associating social actors with other social actors” (77). “The term ‘collective’ does not mean ‘one’; rather, as I have said above, it means ‘all, but not two’” (94). All. All the forces in relationship with one another - relationships that do not claim community as is popularly understood (as in “we get along”). Instead, they recognize the forces they have upon one another. A community, if it must be named as such, as collective.

And this is pedagogy…how? When you start thinking about a given commonplace regarding pedagogy, when you see it as but one force by itself, you can begin to see very quickly its limitations. However, when you begin to trace out the networked relationships that keep changing (for better or for worse) the given pedagogy, then you begin to see possibilities and potentialities. There’s a big difference there. What we are seeing, then, is a pedagogy that mixes categories (as in folksonomies), that works as a process of relationships (networks), and that….well, here is where this stuff really kicks in. And that…should be left open as we (or “I” don’t right now) know yet (or won’t ever really know) the total of all these relationships. They keep forming and breaking apart. “Something would be lost if the work of taking into account were shortened, trampled on, or encroached upon by the work of putting in order…” (119). That is not a call for anarchy. No, it is a pedagogy of relationships. Writing and teaching as relationships.