listening to repeating

What is critical thinking anyway?

Oh the meta-pressure of critical intervention: identifying what is missing from a field and explaining why it matters and how you’ll add it.  It’s not a bad situation to be in; however, it’ll keep you awake at night, inattentive during any given conversation, drinking gallons of coffee, and narcissistically festering over your own self-worth.  Or maybe that’s just me, since, for the last week or so, I’ve been refining why and for whom I’m writing my dissertation.  (Ok, ok, I’ve been doing that for over a year now.  Interventions are slippery, and fields are expansive.  Give me a break.)

At the same time, I’ve had a few chats this week, including one in the classroom, about a humanist fixation that so often rears its balding head: Why bother with English?  Why study literature now?  (And, by proxy, why do we lit nerds exist, especially in a “digital age”?)  One common response is plainly put.  You study literature and write about it because—but of course!—they foster critical thinking, which I’m all for.  Yet once I hear that term several times, the jargon accrues, and the vacuous cliché gets set for mass production.  I then start to wonder what people imply by “critical” or “thinking” and, better yet, how to concretely identify, practice, and assess either of them.

Since I started grad school, I’ve had a fear that, as both an instructor and a writer, I would propagate English hipsterdom: the tendency to hyper-referentially drop names and poststructuralist polysyllables, act astonished when someone hasn’t read something canonical, and referencing something as “important” without understanding why (let alone knowing how it became important in the first place).  I have that fear because I’ve been (and, at my worst, still am) one of those hipsters.

One reason?  The fear of admitting you don’t know or have never heard.  Another? It’s really easy to look something up these days and give it a cursory gander.  One more?  No one shouts, “Shenanigans!”

The thing is, hipsterdom is not exactly antithetical to critical thinking.  For instance, I might be insecure about my work because I know what, exactly, I’m not addressing.  At moments like those, I simply play along, rather than say (for instance), “Actually, I’ve never read Derrida on the metaphysics of presence.”

The other thing is, being thorough in research or “deeply attentive” in your writing does not always necessitate critical thinking, either.  You might just be a big big fan of the topic, and enthusiasts are sometimes more invested in aggregating materials than in interrogating them.

With all of these tensions on the table, I lean toward a model of critical thinking that privileges contingency and contradiction as generative mechanisms for producing and sustaining culture without, of course, pushing either to the point of postmodernist relativism.  Nothing new or contentious there.  Usually some sense of history helps.  But my point is that it doesn’t hurt to be critical about critical thinking, including the ways in which it is imbricated in rhetorics of scale (e.g., close reading) and depth (e.g., interpretations that go “beneath the surface”).  Often these rhetorics value critical thinking positively without necessarily saying what it affords.  “Yes, we value the rigor of critical thinking.  A rubric?  Not on me.  Examples?  Looks like the website is down.”

Well give back the brains.

I recently learned that educational psychologists (and others) might study critical thinking through  “executive functioning.”  Aside from reading a few books by Daniel Dennett and having a long-standing commitment to read Teaching with the Brain in Mind, I don’t really know anything about brains or psychology or cognitive neuroscience.  Still, from what I gather after a hip reading and a few conversations with a really smart occupational therapist, executive functioning is what assists people in selectively attending to something without acting on (sensory or motor) impulse.   Associated primarily with working memory (e.g., short-term memory for wrangling with information), executive functioning is central to complex decision-making (situated here in contrast with automatic, repetitive, or rote behavior).  It reminds me of Bruce Sterling’s references to “cognitive load,” or how much information is processed and how fast.

I bring this theory of executive functioning up from the blue because it resonates with my hipsterdom concern: how to talk about critical thinking as both a value-laden social formation (oh enabler of tight-jeaned insecurities) and a practice (insert sleep deprivation and coffee break from computer screen here).   My question, “What is your executive function?”, is more a joke than anything else.  I’m generally cautious about poaching disciplines and mobilizing their terms (even if it’s hip).  Nevertheless, the question suggests that critical thinking might ultimately be a matter of how to retrace your working memory and model speculative pathworks accordingly—of mapping how you wandered from point A to Z and demonstrating how someone else could do it again, probably with different results.  (Johanna Drucker uses the term “metahuman.” I like that.)  As such, I’m not sure that “close” readings or “deep” inquiries are the only means of such an epistemological cartography.   Along the way, your inquiry might also be rather distant and superficial. Whatever the trajectory, the key here is not solely in the content or the canon, and notions of scale and depth may mislead or misvalue.

Regardless, I’m calling shenanigans on critical thinking for critical thinking’s sake.