The ontological plurality of digital voice: a schizoanalysis of Rate My Professors and Rate My Teachers

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.