On conjuring the pea-and-thimble trick

In his article ‘Materialism and the Mediating Third’, Joff Bradley (2012) set out a theoretical model for engineering a mediating third in foreign language classrooms. Sadly, and despite the effort and care put into the paper, the result was overly abstract. In truth, he fears few will ever read the paper or take the time to understand its implications. This is a clear example of how one writes in vacuo, of how one spins on one’s own axes, of how one produces black holes and cycles of deadly repetition – a central theme of the paper. The shortcomings of the paper were many but chief among them was a paucity of concrete application. This is a regular criticism leveled at research which is excellent theoretically but poor practically, thin on the ground, as it were. The obverse is equally true. When research is focused solely on practice in itself, the findings invariably are one-dimensional, or simply anecdotal and boring. Self-criticism aside, wedding theory and praxis is never an easy task as the dialectical unity of theory and praxis – that pea-and-thimble trick as Orwell called it – is one few ever or care to master. This paper is thus a reflection on the shortcomings in Bradley’s paper and how he set about remedying them. It is the outcome of a research paradigm incorporating multiliteracies, multiple literacy theory (MLT) and critical theory, and one which widens the scope of what Guattari (1995) calls ‘the ecology of the virtual’. My research is focused on a pedagogy which identifies and isolates cartographically the black-holes of machinic répétition mortifère (social reclusivity, addiction to technologies, education for any absurd purpose!).