Knowledge, Technic and Mêtic

The Alegoría de la Prudencia by Girolamo Macchietti.

As I’ve returned to teaching, I’ve been thinking about the different kinds of knowledge that exist. Last year, I read James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, and I was particularly taken by the opposing kinds of knowledge, techne and mêtis. The former is systematic, top-down knowledge, which Scott described as being akin to scientific forestry (which is very good at producing uncanny forests designed to grow lumber), while the latter is contextual and temporally bound. The former is systemic, the latter is intuitive. The former is scientific, the latter is artistic. To put it in Deleuzoguattarian terms, the former is arborescent, the latter is rhizomatic; alternatively, it could be Royal versus Nomad Science.

For the purposes of this piece, I’m going to be using adjectival forms, one of which I had to invent: technic obviously refers to techne. Mêtic, on the other hand is my own kitbashed adjectival form of mêtis, which I will be leaving the circumflex on (in ancient Greek “Metic” meant “resident foreigner”, and I’m sure there’s a fascinating reason that it so closely resembles the word for “cunning”, but that’s something for an expert to tell me I’ve gotten wrong at a later time.) My reasoning for these terms will become clear shortly.

Over the summer, I worked a job where I watered trees. This involved a lot of new information, about how much living things need water: not just the trees, but also myself. When I first started, I was somewhat frustrated, because I was often told to “eyeball” the amount of water I gave trees, and I ended up asking for how long I should water them. This, of course, led to wildly uneven amounts of water making it to each tree: the water flowed at different rates depending on the angle of the truck bed (with the cab pointed uphill, a slope made the gravity-assisted flow stronger; with the cab pointed downhill, the opposite is true), and it would obviously flow faster the more full the tank was. Eventually, I learned to tell if the watering was adequate based on the heat of the day and the color of the soil.

What had begun as technic knowledge was superseded by mêtic knowledge.

Likewise, I suffered a fair amount of borderline heat exhaustion earlier in the summer, even though it wasn’t as hot as it became in late July and early August. While this might be partially because of adaptation, I’m sure that a lot of it was my shifting behavior in regard to the conditions. Even though it was slower, I would fill the truck from the cisterns beneath the highway instead of from the pump the city made available to us, because it allowed me to linger in a shady place with a long corridor of concrete supports down which the wind could move. I would water the street-side trees early in the day, because there were fewer parked cars and I could do the work faster, while the trees in parks would be my afternoon work, and on days when it rained they could fend for themselves, because their roots had spread further.

(Note: do not take health advice from a blog written by people with liberal arts degrees — what I am saying here isn’t to distrust doctors, I’m just repeating a piece of wisdom that they often say but using more words; i.e., “everybody’s body is different”.)

I’m not saying that this chart, from filterwater.com is necessarily wrong — I’m saying that averages are often a convenient fiction that need to be acknowledged as such.

I made sure to drink water, but this, too, is a matter of experience. The human body can only absorb so much water so quickly. You can’t simply slam a liter of water every hour on the hour and expect to function: you need a slow drip. I’ve been told that a quarter of a liter every fifteen minutes is better, but none of this is a substitute for understanding what your body wants and doing your best to follow that guidance. Just as no one’s body temperature is the same (I’ve never met anyone who was exactly 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) so, too, are all the parameters of the human body fluid and different from person to person – to the point where I’m not sure “parameters” is quite the right word.

This shift, from technic to mêtic, is part of doing anything for a long time. While training gives you rules and protocols, experience softens these things and allows you to respond to the situation instead of blindly applying formulae.

The classroom, too, sees this same issue. My students, when they arrive, think they have mastered writing. They confidently hand in a paper with five paragraphs on it, and act confused when I tell them to change it. These students might as well have shown me five trees of the same kind planted in a perfectly ordered row on a lawn cleared of everything but those trees and the grass, and ask me to evaluate their forest.

If you are a writing student in college, don’t do this.

Now I’ve written on this in the past, but I believe it easier for me to explain my point now.

This is technic writing (not technical writing, which is characterized more by the subject matter and recommended approach – in that way, it often tends to be technic.) This is writing that acts as if there are inviolable rules that need to always be followed. This is, in fact, the way that writing is often taught, and I would maintain that it’s almost exactly wrong.

Instead of being taught to always do something, students need to be taught to read and respond to situations that crop up, to develop a sense for them and respond to them.

To build on the prior example, I tend to tell my students to break paragraphs not at preset points, but to do so when there is a change in speaker, subject, or setting – clarifying that setting can be time or place, and can be to or from both general and specific. By focusing on this quality of their writing, it can unfold from the initial kernel of an idea, instead of being extruded on demand.

The reason that technic writing is so common is twofold, and neither of them has anything to do with the quality of writing. First, if you teach a solid rule and reward compliance and discourage non-compliance, the process of teaching is reduced to rote behaviorism. The process becomes simpler, but not necessarily more effective. Second, if you teach in a regime that privileges standardized testing the production of five-paragraph papers becomes much more attractive: you know where to find the thesis, you know what each paragraph is supposed to be doing, and – wonderfully, you only need to touch pen to paper a maximum of five times, yourself.

While the source for this image asks “What’s the opposite of ‘Digital Taylorism’?”, I would contend that what we’re looking at here is more of a Cognitive Taylorism.

It’s a Taylorist approach to essay writing.

I’m still working on figuring out how to create a properly mêtic classroom, partially because this requires avoiding technic impulses that I have picked up over my own career. This leads to a further insight.

Techne and Mêtis are not solid opposites: they are the polarities. Viewing them as opposites that are mutually exclusive and always opposed is, in fact, a technic read on how knowledge works. Even if you say that Mêtis is superior, you have applied technic rules to your approach. This is the problem. It has been said that “there is no metalanguage” (see Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, reviewed by Edgar here), which means that our meta-discourses always end up entangled with lower levels. Moreover, if we take the opposite position – the one I just articulated – that they are not mutually exclusive but instead different orientations in some abstracted knowledge-space, we are proclaiming a mêtic allegiance. However, doing so invites the conception of a meta-meta-discourse, and on that level, techne is victorious because a decision has been made. If you begin to think in terms of victory and defeat, between the two dichotomous ends, you slip into binary — and, to me at least, inherently technic — thinking.

This is why I frustrated by transcendental thinking. Zeno’s arrow gets stuck halfway and Baron Munchhausen begins to rise out of the bog by tugging on his own ponytail. We get trapped in the land of infinite regress.

So, better still to say that the yardstick lies outside of the discussion and say that in different situations different types of knowledge will be more useful.

Or, perhaps, pop out of the discussion altogether: one man’s mêtis is another’s techne. All universal knowledge begins with particular insights and back-of-the-envelope calculation. By spreading it around and insisting on its universality, it becomes something else, until it is internalized by the pupil and they build their own experiences atop it, creating a new mêtis.

I cannot think of the two as inherently and permanently separate, because I learned to cook a long time ago – and I still remember starting by slavishly following recipes, making sure the oven is exactly set to the exact temperature, making sure to cut the vegetables exactly as instructed. As time went on, though, I recalled what I had learned, and I began to work on my own, and I took shortcuts. Of course, some shortcuts bypass what you’re aiming for, and you end up with something more like stroganoff when you were trying to make a stir fry, and you learn not to do that again. You pick up experience and you continue onward, refining the process away from rote repetition to an expression of skill.

Still, there are limitations to this. Don’t just drink a liter of water every hour on the hour, you’ll just have to find a restroom before your alarm goes off again.

But when you get down to it, the distinction between the two is still useful, just as the directions of the compass are still useful when plotting a route from one point to another: while they are absolutes, they are not absolutely and permanently separate.

This hearkens back to an earlier lesson I learned: to think in terms of spectra instead of dichotomies, and this, fundamentally, I cannot find a good reason to abandon.

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