Why This Dissertation Matters — and What It Means for How You Learn
Here’s something worth sitting with: most of what you know, you didn’t learn in a classroom. You learned it by doing things — by handling objects, navigating situations, watching others, trying and failing and trying again. You developed a feel for it. And over time, that feel became knowledge just as real and useful as anything you consciously studied. The question my dissertation asks is: why does so much of our formal education act as if that kind of knowledge doesn’t exist?
My dissertation, completed at Michigan Technological University in 2014, makes the case that Western education has long operated under a hidden assumption — that real knowledge is conceptual, abstract, and transmissible through language, and that the body’s role in learning is merely instrumental, a vehicle for the mind. This assumption, which traces back to Plato’s denigration of sensory experience and was deepened by the Cartesian split of mind from body, has shaped our classrooms in ways most of us never question. It has given us the thesis-driven research paper as the gold standard of student knowledge. It has given us the lecture as the default mode of teaching. It has given us curricula built around what students can articulate rather than what they can do, sense, and enact.
What I argue, drawing on the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, current cognitive neuroscience, and an unexpected source — the ancient Greek Sophists who trained rhetoricians in gymnasia alongside wrestlers — is that this is only half the picture. The other half is what I call experiential knowledge: the knowledge generated when a body engages with its world, attunes itself to a situation, develops habits and sensitivities through practice, and gradually builds what Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize-winning cytologist, famously called “a feel for the organism.” McClintock spent years immersed in her corn plants, processing data her conscious mind couldn’t fully account for, letting patterns emerge rather than forcing them into a predetermined hypothesis. She was decades ahead of where science eventually caught up to her. I argue that’s not a coincidence — she was doing something that all good learners do, and that our educational frameworks rarely make room for.
The concept at the center of my argument is mimesis — a term most people associate with imitation or copying, and which has carried a bad reputation since Plato attacked it. But in its older, richer form, mimesis names something more fundamental: the body’s prereflective attunement to its environment, to other bodies, to the rhythm and texture of the situations it inhabits. It’s why engineering interns in one study described their most valuable professional learning not as the formal training sessions that “conveyed a large amount of information in a compressed amount of time,” but as the fiddling and playing around with the actual tools and systems of their workplace. It’s why a high school teacher named Karen Moynihan found that when she sent her students out into the world to physically immerse themselves in the subcultures they were researching — attending comic book conventions, spending afternoons learning their grandmothers’ collections, teaching themselves to smoke their fathers’ pipes — they came back and wrote papers they couldn’t stop writing, because they had developed a feel for their subjects that no library visit could have given them.
These aren’t exceptional cases. They describe how learning actually works when it’s working well. And they point toward a different way of thinking about what communication education — or any education — should be doing. It should be developing the whole communicator: not just the person who can construct an argument, but the person who can read a room, attune themselves to an audience, listen with their body as well as their ears, and recognize that communication is never just transmission. It’s a feedback loop in which speakers and audiences shape each other simultaneously, in which meaning is enacted rather than delivered, in which the best communicators are those most mimetically attuned to the situations they’re in.
That’s the practical stake of a dissertation that might look, on its surface, like an exercise in philosophy. The model of pedagogy I develop from it — which I call mimetic multimodality — argues for integrating body-engaged, experiential learning into the teaching of writing and communication rather than treating those courses as purely conceptual enterprises. It means taking seriously the knowledge students bring into the room before they’re taught anything. It means recognizing that the nervous student who freezes during a presentation isn’t failing to apply concepts correctly — they’ve been overloaded with disembodied information and undertrained in the experiential dimensions of communicating. And it means accepting that some of the most important things a communication teacher can do aren’t easily measured by the conventional metrics of academic assessment — but that doesn’t make them any less real, or any less worth doing.
Kevin Responds To Key Questions About His Dissertation
The synopsis mentions mimesis as a “recovery” project. What exactly is being recovered — and why did it need recovering in the first place?
Mimesis is one of those concepts that got a very bad reputation very early and never quite shook it. The culprit, mainly, is Plato. When he attacked the Sophists and the poets and performers associated with them, he framed mimesis as the production of copies of copies — images thrice removed from Truth, designed to bewitch audiences into surrendering their rational faculties. That characterization stuck. For centuries, mimesis has been associated with rote repetition, passive imitation, intellectual submission — the opposite of originality and critical thinking. The word “imitation” in English carries almost entirely negative connotations today, and that’s largely Plato’s legacy.
What I argue is that this characterization buried something real and important. Before Plato philosophized mimesis into a problem, it named something that humans actually do — a bodily, affective, largely unconscious attunement to the people, situations, and environments we move through. When a baby imitates her mother’s smile within hours of being born, that’s not rote copying. When you walk into a room and immediately sense its “vibe” and adjust your behavior accordingly, that’s mimesis. It’s a cognitive operation that links perception to action and action to meaning, and it’s fundamental to how we learn. What I’m recovering is that broader, richer understanding — which was always there in the concept but got buried under centuries of misuse and reduction.
So mimesis isn’t just imitation?
That’s the crux of the whole project, really. The standard English translation of mimesis as “imitation” has done enormous damage to how the concept gets understood. Even sympathetic scholars like Mary Carruthers and Nathan Stormer treat mimesis as synonymous with rote copying — and then argue we need to move beyond it to get to the good stuff. What I try to show is that the good stuff was always already inside mimesis, just unrecognized.
The literary scholar Matthew Potolsky puts it well when he notes that mimesis “masquerades under a variety of related terms and translations: emulation, mimicry, dissimulation, doubling, theatricality, realism, identification, correspondence, depiction, verisimilitude, resemblance” — and that no single translation can capture its complexity. What I add to that list, drawing on Merleau-Ponty and cognitive neuroscience, is something like enactive attunement: the process by which the body orients itself to a situation and generates meaning through that orientation. That’s mimesis in its most fundamental form. It’s not copying at all — it’s more like tuning in.
You draw on Merleau-Ponty quite a lot. For readers who haven’t encountered him, who is he and why does his work matter so much to your argument?
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher who died in 1961, and I’d argue he’s one of the most important thinkers for understanding cognition that most people outside philosophy have never heard of. His central claim is deceptively simple: the body is not a vehicle the mind uses to get around in the world. The body is the site of cognition. Meaning doesn’t get produced in the brain and then expressed through the body — it emerges through the body’s ongoing, unreflective interaction with its surroundings.
He was writing this in the 1940s and 50s, decades before cognitive neuroscience had the empirical tools to say similar things. When Vittorio Gallese and his colleagues discovered mirror neurons in the 1990s — neurons that fire both when you perform an action and when you observe someone else performing it — many neuroscientists pointed back to Merleau-Ponty and noted how well his phenomenology had anticipated their findings. Gallese himself has written that Merleau-Ponty’s words “fully maintain their illuminating power in the present century, even more so as they can now be grounded on solid empirical evidence.”
For my dissertation, Merleau-Ponty is essential because he gives me a philosophically rigorous account of how mimesis operates at the level of the lived body — what he calls the body schema — before it becomes conscious representation or deliberate imitation. That’s the dimension I want to bring into how we think about learning and communication.
You spend a chapter on the ancient Sophists and their gymnasia. That seems like a long way to go for a dissertation about contemporary pedagogy. What’s the connection?
It’s actually one of my favorite parts of the project, and I’d argue it’s not a detour at all — it’s the historical proof of concept. The Sophists who taught in the ancient Greek gymnasia had a pedagogy that was, by any reasonable standard, multimodal and body-engaged. Students learned rhetoric in spaces that were simultaneously athletic training grounds, philosophical discussion halls, and venues for music and poetry. There was no clear separation between body and mind, between the physical education of wrestling and grappling and the intellectual education of debate and oratory. And their core pedagogical method — what Debra Hawhee, whose work is essential to my third chapter, calls the “three Rs” of rhythm, repetition, and response — was fundamentally mimetic.
What I find compelling about this is that it suggests our current enthusiasm for “experiential learning” and “hands-on” education isn’t actually new. We’re rediscovering something the Sophists had already formalized, something that then got suppressed by Plato’s insistence on contemplative, conceptual knowledge as the highest form of education. The gymnasium is the historical precedent I need to make the argument that mimetic, body-engaged learning isn’t a fringe theory — it’s a tradition with a very long pedigree that got interrupted.
The synopsis mentions Plato, but you also engage with Rene Girard and Theodor Adorno as critics of mimesis. That’s an unusual trio. Why bring them in?
Because I think intellectual honesty required it. I’m making a largely positive case for mimesis, but I didn’t want to cherry-pick only the thinkers who agreed with me and ignore the ones who had serious objections. Girard and Adorno are probably the two most powerful negative accounts of mimesis in the 20th century, and they deserve a genuine engagement.
Girard’s argument is essentially that mimetic desire — the tendency to want what we see others wanting — is the source of all violence in human civilization. We desire things not because we genuinely want them but because someone else wants them, which creates rivalry, scapegoating, and war. That’s a provocative and genuinely disturbing claim, and I take it seriously. But what I show is that even Girard can’t quite sustain a wholly negative view. In one interview, he admits that “mimetic desire, even when bad, is intrinsically good, in the sense that it is the opening out of oneself.” He can’t escape the dual nature of the concept.
Adorno is even more interesting. He sees mimesis as something that was originally adaptive and intersubjective — a natural attunement to the world — and which got colonized and perverted by the forces of civilization and rationality. But he also insists that mimesis is the only way out of the mess it helped create. It’s both the disease and the cure. That ambivalence, which I find in all three of these thinkers — Plato included — is precisely the “dual aspect” I argue is essential to understanding what mimesis is.
Your dissertation includes a case study of a business meeting between engineers. How does that fit into a project about philosophy and rhetoric?
It fits beautifully, I think, and it’s one of my favorite examples in the whole dissertation. Christina Haas and Stephen Witte did a remarkable study in which they videotaped a meeting between a team of consulting engineers and a team of city employees who were jointly revising a standards document for a city in northeast Ohio. The document included a technical drawing of a channel easement, and there was a disagreement about a phrase in it — “top of the bank” — that turned out to be legally ambiguous.
What Haas and Witte show is that the city employees, who actually worked on-site in the channel on a regular basis, communicated their embodied knowledge of the place through gestures — pointing at the drawing, widening their hands to indicate the width of the channel, using spatial movements to suggest future states of the easement. And here’s the remarkable thing: when the city employees pointed at the consultants’ drawing, they weren’t pointing at the drawing. They were pointing at the actual channel they knew from experience, which was represented by but not identical to the drawing. Their bodies were still cognitively situated in the material world of the channel, even while they were sitting in a conference room looking at a projection screen.
I read that as mimesis in action in a completely ordinary professional context. The embodied knowledge those city employees had acquired through years of hands-on work was shaping their communication in ways that went far beyond what language alone could convey. It’s a perfect illustration of why I think writing and communication programs need to take experiential knowledge seriously.
You describe your research method as a modified Grounded Theory. Most people think of Grounded Theory as something social scientists do with interviews and fieldwork. How does that work for a project based entirely on reading texts?
The standard version of Grounded Theory, developed by Anselm Strauss and Barney Glaser in the 1960s, was indeed built for ethnographic contexts — their original study was about how terminally ill patients and their caregivers coped with dying. The key principle is that you go in without a hypothesis and let patterns emerge from the data. What I did was adapt that principle to a textual rather than human-subjects context.
I started reading in 2009 with a fairly loose thematic interest in how nonhuman things participate in our worlds — posthumanism, Actor-Network Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, that kind of thing. I had no thesis. My data was reading. And I went old-school with it — I photocopied articles, annotated them in the margins, summarized key points in whatever white space was available on the last page, and copied passages onto 3×5 notecards. Hundreds of them, organized alphabetically by author’s last name in plastic containers. Then I spread everything out — across two kitchen counters, a covered piano keyboard, my couch cushions, two small tables — and started finding groupings. Those groupings eventually became sections and then chapters.
The theory didn’t precede the reading; it emerged from it. That’s why I felt the Grounded Theory framework was actually appropriate, even in a modified form. And there’s something that felt right about using a data-driven, pattern-emergent method for a project arguing against hypothesis-driven, conceptually imposed knowledge frameworks. The methodology enacts what the argument claims.
The synopsis ends with a distinction between “persuasion” and “influence.” That might seem like a subtle difference. Why does it matter?
I understand why it might seem subtle, but I think the difference is actually quite significant — both philosophically and practically. Persuasion, in the classical Aristotelian model that still dominates so many writing and communication classrooms, is fundamentally linear and sender-driven. A skilled rhetor constructs an argument, aims it at an audience, and seeks to change their minds. The audience is essentially passive — a target. The communication is a transmission.
Influence works differently. It’s bidirectional, and it emerges from the intercorporeal, bodily dimension of communication that mimesis operates in. Think about what actually happens in a dynamic classroom, or a good conversation, or even a business presentation that’s going well. The audience is shaping the speaker in real time — through their reactions, their energy, their engagement or disengagement. A speaker who’s paying attention is being “persuaded” by the audience just as much as she’s persuading them. What I’m drawing on there is Merleau-Ponty’s concept of reversibility — the idea that the subject who touches is also touched. Applied to rhetoric, that means the communicator who influences is also influenced.
The word “influence” also carries its etymology productively: in-fluere, to flow into. There’s a sense of movement and permeation rather than impact. And unlike persuasion, it doesn’t presuppose that every communicative act is fundamentally argumentative — that everything is a claim in need of defense. Some of the most significant communication we do isn’t argumentative at all. A rhetoric of influence has room for that.
What do you hope readers of this dissertation — or visitors to this page — take away from it?
Honestly? I hope they walk away thinking differently about what it means to know something. We have this deeply ingrained assumption in Western education that real knowledge is conceptual — that it lives in the mind, that it gets transmitted through symbols, that the highest form of learning is the ability to articulate ideas in argument form. What I want to trouble is the invisibility of all the knowledge that doesn’t fit that description.
The knowledge in your hands when you’ve learned to play a chord. The knowledge in your body when you’ve learned to drive, or cook, or wrestle, or dance. The knowledge that Barbara McClintock had — and she won the Nobel Prize for it — when she described having a “feel for the organism” that she was studying. These aren’t deficient or preliminary forms of knowledge waiting to be upgraded into concepts. They’re knowledge in their own right, and they’re foundational to everything the mind builds on top of them.
For educators in writing and communication, specifically, I hope the takeaway is that our students come into our classrooms carrying enormous amounts of knowledge that we never ask them to access. And that the forms and formats we teach — the thesis-driven research paper, the technical report, the persuasive argument — are more limiting than we realize when that’s all we teach. There’s a whole dimension of learning and communicating that our curricula are currently leaving on the table.