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27 2 Polities and Politics of Ongoing Assessments: Evidence from Video-Gaming and Blogging HERVÉ VARENNE, GILLIAN “GUS” ANDREWS, AARON CHIA-YUAN HUNG, AND SARAH WESSLER Teachers College, Columbia University Prologue But the point is that between what Ryle calls the “thin description” of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher . . .) is doing (“rapidly contracting his right eyelids”) and the “thick description” of what he is doing (“practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion”) lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which, as a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwitches) in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn’t do with his eyelids. (Geertz 1973, 7) THIS MOST FAMOUS of Geertz’s flights of anthropological writing introduces what he labels an “interpretive theory of culture.” It eventually led him and many of his students to radical skepticism about the possibility of anthropology, and—he would have added—sociology, linguistics, conversational analysis. At about the same time Garfinkel, Sacks, and others argued that social life with its twitches and winks is “discoverable . . . not imaginable” (Garfinkel 2002, 96). The analyst need not interpret because, in the real life of sheep raids, school classrooms, and video game playing, a muscular event around the eye is always twitch or wink, for these people, at this time, and for this political purpose. Anyone who follows the publicizing of this event will know how it was taken if only because of the controversy, or lack thereof, about the event. No spasms occur without the consequences of the ongoing assessment of the spasm. Introduction The term “assessment” has several histories. We consider three, given our desire to build more robust analytic tools to identify what we call the emerging polities of any assessment. In everyday life, people continually find themselves establishing the practical import of earlier statements or moves (or discovering that some thing has happened). They find themselves meting out consequences or living with consequences others are meting out. And then everyone has to deal with what has happened .1 We are thus also concerned with the politics of any assessment. As it happens, new technologies offer interesting cases for exploring these classical issues.2 The affordances of video games and blogging both expand and disrupt interactional processes in ways that may help us trace more carefully how the distant, in time and place, enters into the here and now, as well as how the here and now can transform, or not, the distant. The several speech communities or, in our vocabulary, “speech polities” that have made their history around the term “assessment” are quite distinct. The term appears extensively in the discursive traditions of schooling, mental health, and conversational analysis. There is little overlap in the literatures that trace the development, uses, and controversies surrounding the term. But all three address the issue of figuring out what happened to allow an act or a person to be identified as this or that. They are all in the business of assessing whether a spasm was a twitch or a wink, of fitting this assessment within a political process of significance for a particular polity, and then of justifying consequences. But the differences in the placing of assessment in each tradition bring out fundamental matters. In the worlds of clinical psychology and schooling, the concern with assessing a child individually can be traced, among other sources, and somewhat ironically to John Dewey’s belief that “the child’s own instincts and powers furnish . . . the starting point for all education” (1959, 20). This leads to the question that keeps moving clinical psychology and schooling: How do we figure out what those instincts and powers might be? In conversational analysis and ethnomethodology, the term “assessment” may have first appeared in a paper by Harvey Sacks on “police assessment of moral character” (1972) which had been titled, when it was first written in 1965, “Methods in Use for the Production of a Social Order” (1972, 280). Sacks’s paper, for many, showed a way that might allow us to trace how instincts and powers are identified but with no concern as to whether these are real outside the settings in which they are identified...

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