Articulating Thinking through Writing. A Flusserian Investigation of the Gestures of Academic Writing

A student sits alone at her computer writing a text for her Master’s thesis. This is a familiar scene ocurring in many higher education institutions, but what makes it a university scene? Student’s writing at the university has been a rather marginal topic in the philosophy of education. Some exceptions should be noted, such as approaching academic writing as formal training (Fulford, 2009), or the academic literaciers approach which sees writing as a kind of socialisation (Lea and Street, 1998; Lillis, 2003). However, this presentation asks a more basic question from an educational perspective: What kind of university pedagogy is entailed in the everyday practices of academic writing? By going beyond the prevailing conceptions of academic writing as an individual skill which must be acquired, as a discourse, or of a demonstration of student’s understanding of a topic, this paper explores what makes student’s writing at the university an educational practice valuable in and for itself. We imagine the university mostly through collective scenes of gathering, students sitting in a lecture, listening to a professor, discussing a text in a seminar, studying together or working on a project. Some thinkers have argued that this collective aspect makes the university pedagogy specific, insofar as the university’s pedagogical form is seen as a way of articulating ‘the movement of public study and public thought’ (Masschelein, 2013). Masschelein and Simons take the examples of the lecture and the seminar as the ‘paradigmatic figures’ (Masschelein, 2013) - but not the only ones - of the university’s pedagogical form. While it is easier to see how something is ‘made public’ in a lecture or a seminar, because there is an actual gathering of students and masters present in the room, hence we know who is becoming a public, it is not clear who and where is the public in the case of academic writing. Where is the university when the student writes alone in her study? What kind of university thinking (if any) is articulated through student’s academic writing? In order to sketch out an answer, I will use the work of Vilém Flusser concerning gestures as articulations of thought as a theoretical framework. According to Flusser, there are no actual thoughts which have not been articulated though gestures. Flusser gives the example of the gesture of painting as the physical articulation of imagination, or the gesture of writing as articulating conceptual thought by ‘abstracting lines from surfaces’. Gestures are codifications of thought meant to be intersubjectively deciphered: 'gestures express and articulate that which they symbolically represent' (Flusser, 2014). In other words, there are no private gestures just as there is no private language. This idea opens up the possibility of reading into every human gesture its public dimension and, hence, to understand what kind of public is addressed through a particular gesture. By looking at the gestures involved in academic writing and by applying a Flusserian-inspired phenomenology of gestures to student testimonies, this presentation will articulate a proposal for the kind of thinking involved in academic writing and its educational significance.status: publishe