The changing noetic field…
Jay Rosen is a journalism scholar who teaches journalism. I am a rhetoric scholar who teaches journalism. I intend no evaluation by making these statements. Instead, I want to try to answer a question Rosen asks, and it’s important to know from what academic quarter my answer comes.
Rosen offers a list of related topics (from an interview he gave recently) involving the news media, politics, and culture, and then he asks:
There’s too much reality rushing over us every day just now. And it’s pushing me to the limits of my own vocabulary. Can anyone help? Do you even know what I’m talking about? Hit the comment button and tell us: what connects the items on my list?
Yes, I know what he’s talking about. I don’t know that what I am about to say will help. But I may be able to point to a useful body of knowledge (that may, for now, merely restate Rosen’s observation). The noetic field is changing.
A noetic field (as defined by rhetoric scholar James A. Berlin in Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges) is a “closed system defining what can, and cannot, be known; the nature of the knower; the nature of the relationship between the knower, the known, and the audience; and the nature of language.” Berlin concludes from this (and I agree) that rhetoric “is thus ultimately implicated in all a society attempts. It is at the center of a culture’s activities.”
I think one commonality among the items on Rosen’s list is that each appears to me to indicate, and provide evidence for, something that I have been trying to chart recently: a change in the noetic field. The knowers, what can be known, and the relationship among the knower, the known, and the audience; and the language we use to create, interpret, and communicate are changing in more than an incremental way. And that necessarily means a re-evaluation of competing epistemologies–political, cultural, and journalistic, to name a few.
Those in the blogosphere who have recently added “Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community” to their weblogs (including Rhetorica) are reacting to these changes–some of these changes part of a conscious cultural rending of Enlightenment reason from political action. You’ll notice that I added something: (Transactionalist Chapter). The reason I added this is because the old Enlightenment paradigm is quite dead despite Neil Postman’s heroic efforts to revive it.
We live in neither a subjective world nor an objective world. We live in a transactional world in which human minds meet the facts of reality and then create something like a human reality in response–lived experience as created and evaluated by culture and ideologies. Journalism, as the most important discoursive practice in our culture, drives and is driven by the very changes in the noetic field that create the temporary semantic limbo Rosen identifies.
Where will these changes lead us? Maybe here.
[Also posted as a comment at PressThink]
I’m not an expert on rhetoric, but I thought I’d take an amatuer’s shot at applying the noetic field (see Cline) to the thread.
There are two striking lines of thought in this thread:
1. The Bush administration has plunged us into an enterprise that can only be described as Wilsonian and progressive. “Reality-based” was the domain of conservatives criticizing the etheral marketing claims of progressives and liberals. The ideal, perfection, utopia, where crime, poverty, racism and joblessness could be defeated with one more bureaucracy, one more government program, was not the domain of the “reality-based community”. Dreamers, yes. Reality-challenged, perhaps.
The Bush administration is engaged in an idealistic pursuit of democratization, globalization and capitalism. They are, like many administrations before them, marketing a war and a campaign personified by the President. FDR was not a member of the “reality-based community”. He was an entrepreneur, envisioning both the New Deal and WWII. Both containing major failures and successes.
This is the contribution of the Bush administration to a different noetic field made possible by a massive distrust in what was “known” as reality on 9/11/2001. The rhetoric of “everything changed” leaves much of what we understood and trusted about reality behind. But there is a more dynamic flow of information today, and more information available.
2. Some projects are reality challenged, and strain our ability to grasp the bounds of a noetic field. Has anyone ever been involved in a project where management, or perhaps marketing, were “reality-challenged”?
We have developed tools to map progress and productivity toward well-defined goals. An engineer takes the imagined and fictional and breaks it down into smaller, necessarily solvable problems. Each step is built upon something that came before, but may represent a leap from what was previously possible.
I can remember my grandfather laughing at the reality-challenged community that talked about rockets and space and the moon. He was a reality-based, hard working man with both feet planted firmly on the ground.
Again, the Bush administration has plunged us into a project which is “reality-challenged”. He did it in Afghanistan and in Iraq. But we, as a nation, are not working from the same milestones or risk assessments. We have different noetic fields with a smorgasbord of information available and a post-modern arrogance to see ourselves as Lippman’s “omnicompetent” citizen.
Bush is to blame for some of the dissonance, but not all of it. There are some who are now proclaiming membership in the “reality-based community” that are really dreaming of a different nonexistent reality than the one being pursued by this administration.
What is being discussed is the phenomenological concept of INTERSUBJECTIVITY (cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty); in the absence of an ideal ‘God’s-eye’ omnipositional (and thus objective) view, the agreement of multiple intercorroborational subjectivities provides the only real, that is, pragmatic, substitute available – one which can, in the peer-reviewed and multiply-experimentally-verified world of science can asymptotically approach the objective ideal (but still fail to reach it, due to our existential/hermeneutic limitations), but also one that can provide less certainty in the historical world, where situations and conditions cannot be repeated for purposes of verification.
My own take: the confusion is caused by the warring of two opposing realities, each its own rhetorical system. If you are used to being comfortably enclosed within a system with invisible walls, this is disconcerting. We can all see the walls now. Some of us have always known they were there and ignored them. Some never did and are fighting all the harder to make the other system ‘just go away’ so they may return to the comfort of their cages.
Dale Amon, Editor, Samizdata.
Too Much Reality?
Jay Rosen ponders: What I really wanted to say to the BBC guy was: There’s too much reality rushing over us every day just now. And it’s pushing me to the limits of my own vocabulary. Can anyone help? Do you even know what I’m talking about? Hit the co…
“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am, I know I am not a category. I am not a thing – a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”
- Buckminster Fuller
Reality-based politics
Jay Rosen has let out a small wail of anguish: There’s too much happening. The public world is changing faster than we can invent terms for describing it. … What I really wanted to say to the BBC guy was:…
How does ambiguity, which is always present as a variable, play a role in Rosen’s list? In your field theory, you touch upon ambiguity as part of the narrative theory:
[cross posted at PressThink]
I would offer a qualitative theme to your quantitative conundrum: ambiguity.
Ambiguity is the crack in the journalist’s armor and the underlying current that foments disagreement between ideological camps. Ambiguity is the propagandist’s wedge, dividing “Truth”, our perceptions of reality and giving birth to authoritative voices and their critics.
Philip L. Graham: “So let us drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never understand.”
I think ambiguity fuels the hyper-rational bias hunters and hyper-rational “truth” spreaders.