Figure and Ground (or Why a Car Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts)

In the last pages of The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, Sherlock Holmes confronts a suspicious character and reveals that he has been observing the man’s behavior from afar. The quarry, understandably surprised to hear this, exclaims that he did not see anyone following him. To this, Holmes replies, “This is what you may expect to see when I follow you.”

While unlikely that it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s intent, there is an epistemic truth to be found here: the most significant and dynamic changes to an environment are rarely those that we detect, much less anticipate. This is true not only of covert personal intrusions – like that experienced by Holmes’s subject – but of more broad social and cultural impositions as well. The nature of an environment is often shaped less by its overt shifts and more by its aggregate unseen and undetected changes. As a general axiom, this may seem innocuous; however, the implications are very serious indeed – particularly for those in the field of education.

Gestalt psychology conveniently provides terminology to distinguish between these elements of an environment. In Gestalt, reality presents itself to us as a figure, something that we tend to consider in isolation from its context or ground - even though the two are actually inseparable. A prime example of this is Rubin’s famous vase illustration (pictured above): the eye might focus on the figure of the vase in isolation of the black faces mirroring one another; however, without the ground of those faces, the vase would have nothing to give it a form. In this sense, even though the figure is most apparent, the ground is just as (if not more important) in creating the overall environment.

This applies to more than just art. Consider the figure of a car. This shouldn’t be difficult because when we use a car, we are most consciously occupied with its figure – size, shape, color, features, handling, function, etc. However, the figure of that car only exists because of the elaborate structure of its ground - expressways, oil production, assembly lines, etc. To truly understand the impact of cars on the human experience, we must look at the dialectical relationship between figure and ground: the change in landscape that results from a system of national roadways, the jobs needed to maintain the automotive industry, the trade agreements necessary for adequate oil supply, the social implications of being able to travel in isolation, the class distinctions created as certain cars become “status symbols,” and so on. When we say that cars are simply a means of transportation, we oversimplify the situation by downplaying the fact that the technology does more than its basic function, it fundamentally changes the environment in which it operates.

Publish and Perish: Immortality in the Library of Babel

The realm of speech is temporary. By the time we reach the end of a spoken sentence, each sound and syllable that preceded it is an irretrievable part of the past. As such, one unique property of the written word is its ability to preserve and immortalize an idea, a name, a person.

The ancient Greeks had myriad rhapsodists responsible for maintaining the oral histories of the people; but it is the works of Homer that we remember best, as his were the first to be written, ascribed, and preserved. In a typographic society, that which is written is remembered – all else perishes with time. Socrates recognized this and criticized the expansion of Greek literacy, claiming that it would engender a false sense of understanding and an over-reliance on decontextualized fragments of writing; and yet, we only know of his skepticism today because Plato, his student, disregarded his warnings, and instead, preserved them in writing for future generations.

Spenser’s Sonnet 75 illustrates this same conserving power of the written word. After repeatedly attempting to write his love’s name in the sand only to have it washed away by the ocean, the speaker is rebuked by his beloved with an existential reminder that all humans will “bee wiped out lykewize”. To this, the poet replies,

“Not so, (quod I) let baser things devize
to dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare eternize
and in the hevens wryte your glorious name.”

The poet’s feeble attempts to preserve his love’s name in the sand is a fitting image for the fragile nature of orality: each person’s life – along with its respective thoughts, loves, and spoken words – will inevitably be washed away, a victim of the persistent and devastating ebb of time. Unless, that is, those thoughts, loves, and words are preserved – in this case, through written composition. This, according to Spenser, is the key to immortality: To preserve in text is to grant eternal life.

The Semantic Offenses of No Child Left Behind

In a previous posting, I outlined the basic premise at the heart of what psychologist Wendell Johnson called the IFD Disease. According to Johnson, when people do not use precise language in goal-setting, they risk “idealizing” goals to the point that they become unreachable. When goals cannot be reached (or progress toward them cannot be measured), people become “frustrated,” and, over time, this leads to total “demoralization.” The IFD Disease is, thus, a process – Idealization to Frustration to Demoralization.

While Johnson found the IFD Disease at the root of many of his patients’ dilemmas, individuals are not the only victims of its afflictions. Indeed, institutions are equally (if not more) guilty of misusing language in such a way as to undermine potential for growth and progress. Within the field of education, these abuses are innumerable. From the curriculum supervisor who wants assessment to be more “authentic,” to the classroom teacher who is concerned with teaching “critical thinking,” those involved in education are no strangers to abstract, immeasurable goals.

Perhaps the most glaring example of this in recent history is the legislation that, for the last decade, has governed most decisions made within public education: No Child Left Behind. Over the years, the bill has become an easy target for those who wish to draw attention to the failures of American public education. Levitt and Dubner devote a chapter of their book Freakonomics to the ways that NCLB creates incentives for educators to teach to the test. Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the Great American School System traces the history of the law and criticizes it for, among other things, ignoring the conflict of interest that emerges when states create their own standards and standardized tests in isolation from the work being done in other states. Teachers in struggling schools complain when states mandate teacher-proof, scripted curricula in the interest of raising test scores. Teachers in thriving schools question the efficacy of devoting millions of dollars to testing when that money could be used to support classroom learning. The list goes on and on.

Yet, even though there is no shortage of complaints that can be (and have been) raised against No Child Left Behind, most of the objections focus on political and financial abuses. But politics and economics are symptoms of a far greater abuse inherent within the legislation: the abuse of language. No Child Left Behind is a law that is built entirely on a foundation of idealized terminology, and as such, the outcry that has come from educators, students, and parents in the last decade has been the “Frustration” that inevitably follows such acts of Idealization. Though the bill was intended to create accountability within education, it has ultimately committed a generation of students and teachers to the task of striving tirelessly toward an unreachable goal.

The IFD Disease: Semantics and Sanity

When a child points to a balloon and says, “Look! A balloon!” there is little chance that English-speakers will misunderstand to what he or she is referring. The word “balloon” is a symbol that represents a tangible object in the physical world; thus, the word has extensional meaning. Words with extensional meaning do not necessarily need to be physically present in order to be extensional: we do not need to be in a city along the Charles River to understand what the word “Boston” denotes.

Words and expressions can also have intensional meaning. This is the meaning that is connoted inside one’s head. If we were to describe the city of Boston from memory or attempt to characterize the nature of a balloon based on past experiences, we would be giving the intensional meaning of these words.

Words that have no intensional meaning – or symbols that conjure no connotation within our mind – are meaningless sounds. For example, if you were to listen to a conversation between two people who speak a different language from your own, their words may have extensional meaning, but because they are using a system of symbols that are unfamiliar to you, there is no way for you to construct intensional meaning from their dialogue.

Likewise, there are certain words that hold intensional meaning for us, and yet, these symbols point to no extensional meanings. For example, words like “beauty,” “power,” “depression,” or “success.” Such words have meaning, but they cannot be seen, touched, measured, or photographed. Of all classes of words, it is these – the intensional, but not extensional – that are the most dangerous and pose the greatest threat to human sanity when they are misused.

Critique of New Commonplaces: “I Was Born This Way”

This is the first entry in what I hope will be a series of close examinations of several assumptions underlying contemporary public culture and discourse. The title of the series is indebted to Jacques Ellul, whose 1968 sociological tome shares the same name. In his work, Ellul systematically dismantles more than 30 axioms that held power over western thought in the 20th century. Needless to say, the scope of this series will be far less sweeping – in particular, because I am primarily interested in analyzing commonplaces that have influence in student life and classroom pedagogy. With that said, because these commonplaces are cultural in nature, it is also my hope that readers will see applications that extend beyond my initial inquiry and into other fields of study.

Every age has its commonplaces. These are the slogans, the cliches, the ready-made explanations that seep into the collective consciousness of society. They have an air of self-evidence. And as such, they are often accepted without discussion or debate and then proliferated through newspapers, television, popular music, art, literature, psychology, philosophy, and interpersonal exchanges. This widespread dissemination gives commonplaces a universal recognition, which, in turn, fuels their perceived self-evidence.

It is because of this self-evidence that commonplaces are seldom thought or spoken of explicitly. Once ingrained in a society, they become presuppositions upon which public thought and speech are constructed. Like a native language, they become internalized to the point where we use them without conscious thought.

But there are rare moments when commonplaces are made manifest in public discourse. And for whatever reason – I suspect it has something to do with the relative bias of Top 40 radio against nuance and subtlety – pop music currently stands as an overt stronghold of commonplace sloganeering, masterfully rendered under the guise of creative expression. A cursory scan through a few select radio stations reveals a glut of throbbing bass riffs and tinny synthesizers layered beneath soaring, auto-tuned advertisements for our modern commonplaces. Naturally, the hooks are strong enough to convince most listeners that they are experiencing a thundering pop anthem. In reality, they are ingesting a sermon.

Of course, this is not to suggest that pop singers have any realization that they are complicit in the spread of these commonplaces. By their nature, commonplaces are so deeply rooted in our collective understanding of the world that they often take on the appearance of truth. They influence political decisions, the arts, and interpersonal interactions without detection. As such, when a musician creates a song that proclaims, “I was born this way!” she believes herself to be communicating something factual, and the listeners, in turn, understand the message to be factual. And so long as no one upsets this pattern of cooperative delusion, the commonplace will continue to stand.