Abstract
Online evaluations (like Rate My Professors and Rate My Teachers) have been celebrated as forming wider publics and modes of accountability beyond the institution and critiqued as reinforcing consumeristic pedagogical relations. This chapter takes up the websites Rate My Professors and Rate My Teachers as empirical entry points to a conceptual discussion, after Félix Guattari , of the ontological plurality of digital voice, and its associated refrains and universes of reference. I turn attention from analysis of the effects of these digitized student evaluations to the moment of their formation—for example, when a student’s finger clicks on a particular star rating. Refusing to separate human bodies from objects, environment and affects, inside from outside, ‘real’ from ‘digital ’, I consider how emerging modes of online student evaluations of teaching shift individual and collective relations to ‘expression’ and subjectivity . This chapter also explores the transversal possibilities of de-subjectification offered in when the digital is understood as intercesseur: intersection/intercession.
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Notes
- 1.
While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, further work is needed that maps the reach of these sites, and how they conspire with data mining industries.
- 2.
I spell this word as subjectification after the spelling used in translations of Guattari and Deleuze and Guattari ’s work cited in this chapter. I acknowledge, however, a distinction between subjectification : “a thoroughly stratified or captured position”, and subjectivication: “subjective operations which, although operating within social machines, use the processes of these social machines to form lines of escape from them” (Murphie, 2001, p. 1315). For Murphie, both concepts “involve one’s implication in contemporary social machines” and both are “pragmatic” (Murphie, 2001, p. 1315). Both processes may be at work in manifestations of digital voice, as I argue below.
- 3.
Acknowledgement and thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this point.
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Acknowledgements
I thank the two anonymous reviewers, the editors, as well as Be Parnell, Monique Dagleish and Julian Sefton-Green for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter. The detailed and affirmative tone of the feedback of these readers is particularly appreciated. An earlier version was presented at the 2017 Gender and Education conference at Middlesex University in a symposium chaired by Genine Hook and Melissa Wolfe: Affective Relationality as Response-ability. I thank Genine, Melissa, Christine Gowlett (co-presenter), Yvette Taylor (discussant) and the attendees of this symposium for their engagement and for generative conversations around the issues raised in this paper. These voices are entwined with this chapter’s authorial ‘I’.
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Mayes, E. (2018). The Ontological Plurality of Digital Voice: A Schizoanalysis of Rate My Professors and Rate My Teachers. In: Cole, D., Bradley, J. (eds) Principles of Transversality in Globalization and Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0583-2_12
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