Our Carl gives a nice analysis of the mechanisms of textual identification with respect to the issues I raised on style over at Dead Voles. There Carl writes:
At one level there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about this dynamic of text identification except the fact that all these smart people seem to think it’s remarkable. Every text from Dr. Seuss on up, difficult or not, has the charismatic potential to generate reverent reading communities that might be described as ‘priesthoods’. My own experience is with Antonio Gramsci, an Italian theorist who wrote about complex things quite clearly, all in all. There are a lot of pages of Gramsci, most of them in prison notebooks that he never had a chance to edit into a linear text, many of them on topics that very few people could care less about. This of course creates the opportunity for a mystery cult for those few who have virtuously read through all of it, sort of like the Kabbalah or the Hadith. Here are instances where the reading community in effect ADDS difficulty to the sacred text by digging out and canonizing every little detail, aside, and tangent. The characteristic assertion is that the plainish meanings of the core writings must be supplemented or even amended in light of these exclusive arcana. (Translation fetishists from the Qur’an to Weber and Foucault work the same way. Translations are not just workably second-best but unacceptable in comparison to the sacred revelation of the original.)
People choose these texts and these reading strategies for all the usual reasons they choose religions (and reject other religions). They may be born into them, or disposed toward them by cultural marking of the text. They may be seeking identity and collective effervescence in a community. The text may be culturally marked as normative or transgressive, enabling the effervescence of dominant or rebellious subculture identification. There may accordingly be a component of acceptance and/or rejection of authority, be it the father’s or the group’s. These are choices within structured fields of options and decision strategies. All of this falls under the sociology of what Weber called elective affinity and Bourdieu elaborated as the schemes of the habitus.
For some reason this makes me think of Virno’s discussion of fear in A Grammar of the Multitude. In the third chapter of A Grammar of the Multitude Virno argues that anguish/anxiety is one of the predominant affects of our time. I hope to write more on this later when I am not inundated with grading at the end of the semester and thoroughly exhausted. At any rate, as Marx and Deleuze and Guattari argued, one of the marks of capitalism is the manner in which it decodes all social relations and codes through processes of deterritorialization. By “decoding” Deleuze and Guattari do not mean the activity of finding the meaning behind some coded fragment of speech as intelligence officers and cryptographers do. Rather decoding is the process by which social codes are undone and destroyed.
Money, of course, is one of the primary forms of deterritorialization under capitalism. Where barter is based on qualitative use-values and the contingent encounter between two people who have goods that both serve the use-value of the other, money allows for an abstract equivalence of all goods, allowing the dimension of use-values to fall into the background. As a consequence, the use of money as a means of exchange accelerates exchange processes, leading to an intensification of certain forms of exchange that would not be possible under a barter system. Under capitalism there are also the mass deterritorializations characterized by migrations that take place as people move from their traditional homes into the factory. In contemporary capitalism, images, snippets of speech, texts, etc., are perpetually deterritorialized through new media. The very fact that Carl and I are talking is an instance of this sort of deterritorialization. Similarly, writing on a blog is a deterritorialization insofar as one cannot presume or choose their audience, but is instead thrown into aleatory encounters with others that lead to transformations of ones thought. That is, I cannot presume that the person I’m engaging with shares the same theoretical background that I have and therefore my theoretical background undergoes drift as they interpret my claims in unexpected ways and I strive to communicate with the other person without being able to appeal to shared resources.
In one way or another, all of these deterritorializations have the effect of breaking down established codes within a community, mixing codes together that previously had no contact or relation, undoing other codes. As Bourdieu notes, habitus functions as a system of anticipations allowing us to navigate our world and social interactions. If I am anxious when I meet someone new, then this is because I do not yet know what to expect from this person. In Lacanian terms, I have no idea what this other is demanding of me. In late capitalism this phenomenon is generalized as I can no longer rely on established codes to define my place in the world, gender relations, what I can expect from others and what I am for them, and so on. Instead, these relations are perpetually experienced as precarious. As Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air”. This is part of what Lacanians mean when they talk about the “collapse of symbolic efficacy”.
Nor are these decodings restricted to the deterritorialization of images, speech, and various migrations. They are now internal to the workplace in many instances as well. That is, codes underlying labor are breaking down in ways that make it difficult to know exactly what is expected of us. We are told that we must constantly innovate and invent. For example, In this years self-evaluation form for the renewal of my contract, I am asked, among other things, “what innovative teaching techniques do you use and how do you make use of cutting edge teaching techniques?” Here, it would appear, that solid learning outcomes are not enough. No, I must innovate in my classroom and apparently keep up with the latest trends in educational research in order to properly do my job. Why? I’m not quite sure. Rather, it seems as if innovation is itself valorized as an absolute good or positive thing. It is no longer enough to have found effective techniques in teaching this or that subject. Rather, we are not rising to the occasion as educators if we aren’t constantly finding new techniques. The point is that where perpetual innovation is called for, it is no longer possible to observe just what one’s job is. Where perhaps, in a different social configuration, I would be qualified as an educator after going through a certain amount of requisite education, now, as Deleuze observed in his “Postscript to the Societies of Control“, my education never ends and it is never clear that we are qualified as we are expected to be perpetually innovating. Here fear and anguish set in. “Will my response satisfy administration?” “Am I really innovating in the classroom?” “Am I suitably up to date on teaching techniques?” And, of course, the insidious result of this sort of pervasive self-doubt and anxiety is that we cling all the more tenaciously to our labor conditions, willingly accepting anything administration and our bosses might say because we live in a perpetual state of guilt wondering if we are doing our jobs correctly. For example, we allow representative organizations to be dismantled and for benefits to be cut back. All of this follows from a collapse of codes defining various labor positions. “Professional Development” has now become an integral component of contractual renewal in most professions, leading to a state where “expert” status is never reached or even available as one is never “done” with anything. It thus comes as no surprise that many commentators bemoan how the age of adulthood seems to be pushed back perpetually, such that we find 40 year olds living at home with their parents like children. Such would be a more general symptom or reflection of the decoding of labor roles in our society.
In describing these relations in terms of anguish/anxiety rather than fear, Virno is drawing on Heidegger. Where fear has a specific object (“I’m afraid of that tiger over there that looks hungry”) anxiety seems to be without a determinate object. I am pervaded by a sense of dis-ease, yet unable to locate the source or object of this dis-ease. Rather everything seems overwhelming. There is a tendency among Deleuzians to celebrate deterritorializations for their own sake, yet this is the converse, dark side of deterritorialization. Anxiety leads to reterritorializations of various sorts. On the one hand, we strive to transform anxiety into fear, localizing it in a determinate object that we could then manage. For instance, new spectres emerge in late capitalism, objects of fear that seem to inhabit all the shadows, such as the terrorist, the pedophile, the war on drugs, the looming environmental crisis, etc. All of these things can be more or less real, more or less threatening, but they also serve a sort of structural function by giving anxiety a determinate object or by naming that which cannot be named. As I argued long ago in my post on apocalyptic fantasies, these reterritorializations of anxiety onto determinate objects of fear are pervasive throughout our cinema and culture.
On the other hand, Carl seems to be suggesting another sort of reterritorialization, where we reterritorialitize on various figures and texts as a way of establishing and founding new codes. When I reterritorialitize on Heidegger, Derrida, Marx, Deleuze, Lacan, etc., I am not simply identifying with a set of claims and positions, but am also carving out a territorial code with a number of people, thereby forming a community where some measure of order exists. Everyone speaks “Lacanese” at an Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workshops conference. Everyone speaks Heideggerese at the annual Heidegger symposium. Similar attempts at recoding and territory formation can be discerned in activist political movements, emerging religious movements, organic food movements, etc. These communities are oases of stability where a community of people might collectively set about the production of shared codes. As Carl points out, the vector of these reterritorializations will be a function of identifications that precede these coded territories. For example, I was already predisposed to identify with Lacan or Zizek rather than Rawls or Habermas prior to knowing anything about them because of counter-cultural and political identifications I have going back to my teen years.
Nonetheless, while I think there is much worth taking up in Carl’s analysis, I wonder if he isn’t going too far in the direction of placing everything on the side of the reader, minimizing the rhetorical dimension of these texts. In Hegelian terms, we must avoid the trap of formulating these issues in terms of “abstract understanding” or one-sided opposition. We must be cognizant of how certain rhetorical styles function as apparati of capture for desire, while also discerning how readers bring with them a set of identifications and commitments that, as it were, actualize texts.
Larval Subjects . 
May 1, 2008 at 3:44 am
Yup, freedom sucks.
This is great stuff and there’s a lot I’d like to remark on. I too am working through the imposing stack of final papers so I’ll drop back in for mental health breaks. For now I’ll just agree with the last paragraph. For one example, I’ve been cruising the second-wave feminist blogosphere, reminding myself of a set of authoritative actualizations of my ‘personal’ ‘text’ as a white, male, privileged limb of racist patriarchy. I surely wouldn’t want to deny all reflexive accountability for my rhetorical style and its predictable affects; not to mention the real privileges my positioning in various contexts sometimes gives me. These are dynamic interactions in complex possibility spaces in which both total power and total powerlessness are unlikely extremes.
May 1, 2008 at 3:54 am
I’m fairly critical of stances that posit complete power or powerlessness. Instead I try to envision social dynamics where new collectives are formed and how these new collectivities are formed and rebound on existing social relations. I think that in the excitement following structural anthropology and linguistics there was a tendency to reify social structures, treating them as things rather than processes that have to be produced/assembled and reproduced, such that the only way change could be envisioned was by locating an empty space within structure where something new might emerge. As Saussure blandly observed in his Cours, it’s impossible for any individual to introduce a new word. Had structure been seen as shorthand for something that only exists in its enactment and as a process that is perpetually reproducing itself, French social theory might have taken a very different trajectory. Instead theorists would have done better to look at evolutionary theory, not to apply laws of natural selection or fall into a sort of biologism, but to develop vocabularies of how new social species are formed that then rebound on the entire social ecosystem. We would then find that while constrained, we have far more power than we thought through our communicative and collective formations.
May 1, 2008 at 4:12 am
But dr Sinthome I want to sleep with you now, not in some aleatory space in afterlife!
Anyway do you have some concrete example for this:
nstead theorists would have done better to look at evolutionary theory, not to apply laws of natural selection or fall into a sort of biologism, but to develop vocabularies of how new social species are formed that then rebound on the entire social ecosystem
because it does sound like a sort of a biologism
May 1, 2008 at 5:08 am
Dejan – In terms of examples (and I’m thinking here of the type of argument being made, rather than whether the substance of the example I’m about to use is itself correct): Marx presents the introduction of a new social practice – the exchange of labour power on the market – as a novelty that was both conditioned by the existing environment (in order for this novel practice to arise, you need a whole set of prior historical developments, such that you have markets and production for markets, a developed social division of labour, certain cultural and political formations, a coercive process of “primitive accumulation”, and many other things, without which the new practice would not have become “socially plausible”). So the emergence of this new practice is “conditioned” by the milieu in which it emerges. The practice itself, however, is presented as something that reacts back on the milieu in which it emerged, differentiating capitalism in fundamental respects from other social forms, even where those social forms contain many of the same components (money, production for exchange, developed divisions of labour, etc.) that remain central to the reproduction of capitalism. In Sinthome’s terms, a sort of social speciation or branching off took place, without this meaning that this process was in any sense an ex nihilo event.
The issue here, again, is not whether the specific example is correct – it can be debated whether Marx is correct about which shift releases the cascade of unintended social consequences that effects a “speciation”, but I would take this to be the sort of argument suggested here. (And, to Sinthome: apologies if this is an ill-fitted example – I’m lifting directly from one of the papers I’m writing, so the example was at hand and may not be the best for what you are after here).
May 1, 2008 at 2:53 pm
N.Pepperell’s example is a good example of what I have in mind.
Dejan, what is the biologism you’re seeing in my remarks? In particular, I’m interested in that aspect of evolutionary theory that argues that individual-differences precede species-differences. Darwin begins with the premise that organisms vary in a small number of ways or that they’re never reproduced exactly. He then proceeds to show how regularities (species) can be produced through these differences being passed on.
My thesis is first that the concepts of “society” is too abstract to get at what we, as social and political theorists, would like to get at. We begin by talking about “society” as if it were some monolithic and homogenizing to capture the actual social space. Second, the concept of structure is too rigid, making it very difficult to account for how any change would be possible. Like the concept of society, we reify structures. Instead, we would do better to look at the mechanisms by which groups emerge, how they become interdependent, how they reproduce themselves, and how they form patterns or regularities. There are only a handful of thinkers that have really addressed social questions in this way. Sartre, in The Critique of Dialectical Reason would be one example, Simondon is another, Marx is another, from what I understand Tarde approaches the question in this way, as does Latour, DeLanda, and Deleuze and Guattari. Rather than situating the issue in terms of structures, it is instead situated in terms of assemblages which must be put together and maintain themselves in time.
We can look at the blogs as an example of what I’m talking about. Blogs link to one another. Over time regularities and specific questions begin to emerge across the blogs. Customs or norms begin to establish themselves among various cross-blog communities. These communities, though in a very minimal way, impact group relations outside of the blogs, modifying those relations as well.
May 1, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Dr Sinthome, I am a very visual thinker so forgive me for translatin’ your words into visuals: you’re saying that instead of there being a stable or fixed vantage point (the fixed structure), we should follow Deleuze and see the vantage point as ”produced”, by another structure that, in itself, is ”produced”. This lends a portalic view on society, undermining the linear perspective. The vantage point endlessly shifts, as in Magritte’s paintings.
And this is all very fine and interesting until you get to the question: WHO and WHAT produces the structure and WHY? Because your materialist-biological perspective excludes the existence of a God, you’d probably go for something like a Body Without the Organs, which for me still sounds like this New Agey construct – a benevolent source of Liiiiighttt and Positivity. No wonder it’s always portrayed in Deleuzian video clips as a big white light.
There is little room here to explain the symbolic function, which still makes us very different from animals, even as this new perspective might reveal unexpected similarities with animals.
So I was fishing for a concrete example, which can also be from the micro-world, or maybe even from the world of animals, where I could see in which specific way one would be able to override the fixed structure or maybe even dismiss it altogether?
May 1, 2008 at 4:04 pm
You’re attributing claims to me that I’m not making:
You ask:
The people themselves produce the system. Actions within the system produce dispositions which then function as contraints within the system.
May 1, 2008 at 4:11 pm
You said:
Second, the concept of structure is too rigid, making it very difficult to account for how any change would be possible. Like the concept of society, we reify structures. Instead, we would do better to look at the mechanisms by which groups emerge,
which sounded like you were calling on the fact that our understanding of structures is rigid, because they are not given but in fact produced (the ”mechanism by which groups emerge”) and therefore can change and be in flux – what exactly did I misinterpret?
. Actions within the system produce dispositions which then function as contraints within the system.
It still sounds abstract: people, dispositions, constraints. Out of which examples did you get to this point?
May 1, 2008 at 4:12 pm
As for the symbolic, it only exists in its enactment. There’s no reason this cannot be accounted for in the terms I outline here. The reason that a symbolic institution such as marriage, for example, takes on an efficacy beyond the two agents involve is that other agents sustain this symbolic tie in relations to the individuals involved as well. I.e., an individual might declare that the contract is meaningless to them. However, the institutions surrounding the individual, as well as the other people in the community, have a different idea.
May 1, 2008 at 4:14 pm
You were portraying my criticism of the concept of structure as a set of normative commitments rather than as an issue of its inadequacy in explaining what we actually observe in social relations. I’ve given plenty of examples on this blog in the last two years.
May 1, 2008 at 4:24 pm
You were portraying my criticism of the concept of structure as a set of normative commitments
no I wasn’t, but the conversation will be much more FUN if I manage to antagonize you, dr. Sinthome. Anyhow going back to the example dr. Pepperel quoted,
social speciation or branching off took place, without this meaning that this process was in any sense an ex nihilo event.
sounds like what Darwin understood as MUTATION and my problem with Darwin is that there’s no reason, no symbolic value to the mutation, other than vulgar pragmatism (the need to ”adapt” to changing circumstances or something)…
this is what sounded like biologisation
May 1, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Oh yes, and where, again, was that biologism? Biologism is the reduction of social relations to the biological properties of organisms. For example, socio-biologists are biologistic in that they explain the formation of certain social institutions in terms of biological advantage. I’ve said nothing of the sort. I’ve drawn an analogy between how biological species are formed and how social groups emerge out of the interactions of individuals.
May 1, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I’ve drawn an analogy between how biological species are formed and how social groups emerge out of the interactions of individuals.
Ok let me rephrase:
but to develop vocabularies of how new social species are formed that then rebound on the entire social ecosystem
give me at least ONe or TWO words from this new vocabulary and I’ll be able to follow you better
May 1, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Hangs head. I did! As did N.Pepperell.
If you’re looking for reason or symbolic value I hardly think you’re going to find it in Lacan. The signifiers in the unconscious are nonsensical. They’re pure differential relations without any meaning or reason beyond their patterned relationships. An example of a social-speciation would be the formation of a new group of people as the result of migration into the factories and how bodies are brought together in this context. Your sticking point seems to be the idea of adaptation; which you’ll note is not a word I’ve used. Clearly these new social relations themselves create all sorts of new conflicts and struggles within that particular context.
May 1, 2008 at 4:41 pm
in fact the neoliberal innovation you describe sounds just like Darwin’s mutation, only it’s far from purposeless as it has the specific purpose to exert control by giving you the impression that you have a ”freedom of expression”
May 1, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Those bodies in the factory aren’t simply passive matters and take whatever form the managers and owners of the factory would like. They push back. You thus have the various form giving strategies adopted by the factory and the various forms of resistance that emerge among the new group or workers. In other words, the relationship isn’t unilateral.
May 1, 2008 at 4:46 pm
An example of a social-speciation would be the formation of a new group of people as the result of migration into the factories and how bodies are brought together in this context.
But, aren’t the bodies ”brought together” in a way that fits a certain pre-existing structure, which we could metaphorize as the assembly line from Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES?
Your sticking point seems to be the idea of adaptation; which you’ll note is not a word I’ve used. Clearly these new social relations themselves create all sorts of new conflicts and struggles within that particular context.
You may not have used the word, but I presume that the worker’s bodies move to the factory in order to adapt to the demand of capitalism?
May 1, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Those bodies in the factory aren’t simply passive matters and take whatever form the managers and owners of the factory would like. They push back.
However if the factory owners successfully implement the ”innovation” dictum, the workers are ENCOURAGED to change their form actively, and ”pushing back” becomes a way of ”conforming”.
May 1, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Yes and no. First, factories didn’t emerge all at once or in one fell swoop. There were feedback relations between bodies and historical practices that gradually sedimented in a particular way. I used the word “disposition” before. A disposition is a set of sedimented practices already there in the social world, prior to our individual arrival on the scene. For example, my college had a set of established practices prior to me coming to teach here. Not only did these practices consist of established protocols or guidelines for doing things, but it also consisted of prior social relations among faculty, administration, and the community outside of the college. As such, there were already a number of constraints in this setting. I do not use the word structure because I think it gives the impression of these things being more fixed than they are. For example, we might think of the structure of the Eiffel Tower. Rather, I prefer the term “assemblage” or “organization because it captures the way in which these relations, sedimentations, or dispositions shift and change as a result of the actions of those embodied within it. Chaplin draws attention to a particularly sedimented or firm assemblage in capitalism where the worker experiences himself as being ground up and processed by the factory machine in much the same way that a cookie cutter gives form to the passive substance of the dough. This doesn’t entail, however, that workers are like dough and they can’t organize and rebound to change the sedimented assemblage of the factory.
I do not like the term “adaptation” because it implies, to my thinking, a form/matter opposition where form is treated as the active principle and matter as treated as a passive principle. Here form is conceived as contributing everything and matter simply takes on form passively. The conceptual grammar of adaptation follows this logic. With adaptationist talk you have a passive organism that functions as matter and an environment or milieu that functions as active form. The organism then simply takes on the form of its environment. This, I think, is inadequate even in biology. For example, we modify our environments. Consequently, rather than saying bodies simply “adapt” to capitalism, I think it better to say they respond to the conditions in which they find themselves.
May 1, 2008 at 5:00 pm
May 1, 2008 at 5:02 pm
The signifiers in the unconscious are nonsensical. They’re pure differential relations without any meaning or reason beyond their patterned relationships.
I know that, dr. Sinthome, I have a site which is structured like the academic’s Unconscious and it’s full of sex. What I am wondering is how, and why, do these random signifiers get to be attached to their signifieds,… etc
May 1, 2008 at 5:13 pm
I do not use the word structure because I think it gives the impression of these things being more fixed than they are. For example, we might think of the structure of the Eiffel Tower.
Yes I agree, and this was clear from the very start, so I don’t know why you keep explaining it. But in this current example, even if you posit that the firm Chaplinesque assemblage is more flexible and changeable than the structuralists’ understanding of the fixity of structures would allow, the superimposed structure of ownership is something that won’t change unless the workers manage to overthrow the owners, and even then, the structure of ownership will remain for in Communism, too, some pigs are more equal than others. Responding to the other question (why is this surprising?) it’s not that it’s surprising but that somehow capitalism seems to have found a way to canonize mutation, I don’t have a better expression right now, which makes it damn difficult to introduce REAL change.
May 1, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Yes, I agree that it’s 1) damned difficult to produce real change, 2) that some pigs are more equal than others, and 3) in the Chaplin example, that things won’t change without workers overthrowing owners. What I am objecting to are theoretical forms of political theory that have posed the question at such a high level of abstraction, that they aren’t even, apparently, aware that groups exist, that they exist in concrete conditions, that they organize in particular ways, and that these organizations can produce change. What I am objecting to is forms of theory that go on and on about something like the void or the event, ignoring that it is really only the organizations we make that produce any chance of change at all. Remember Antigram? He sat here and told us all that there are no individuals only structures, treating structures like Platonic forms or demonic possessions, all the while blathering on about signifiers and jouissance as if these things have much to do with anything in a factor or global flows of capital or a tank rumbling down your street. The concepts we use make a difference in how we thematize issues.
May 1, 2008 at 5:49 pm
In Slovenly Alien part 5, dr Fossey asks Antigram what exactly are the structures he keeps hammering on about, and Antigram suddenly gets upset (”That;s totally beside the point!”). In the end dr. Fossey has to teach Antigram that she is the structure, and he only her agent.
So Dr Sinthome I AM actually asking about are those concrete ways of making change after we have critiqued the structures. Would it mean that the activism should take place on the micro-level? Is there theoretically speaking a way to oppose the capitalist misuse of innovation, for example in the retro-futuristic/hauntological reinterpretation of the past? How does this reflect on social sciences, how could you conduct research that does not fall into the trap of abstraction? Those kinds of questions.
May 1, 2008 at 6:02 pm
sorry that was Slov. Alien part 3 http://parodycentrum.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/the-slovenly-alien-part-three/
May 1, 2008 at 6:13 pm
I don’t see the aim of the political theorist as being one of explaining what changes are to be made. This is because change arises from situations themselves, not from armchair proposals as to what is to be changed. On the one hand, political theory should minimally formulate theories of the social that show how change is possible. So long as we adopt structural approaches that treat individuals as epiphenomena and see structural relations as internally interdependent, I don’t see how change is even possible in such structures. On the other hand, political theorists can help bring clarity to situations by examining the mechanisms by which they’re organized. This is why I recommended Harvey’s book the other day, as he’s someone who’s examined the concrete set of relations organizing contemporary capitalism. Such analyses can then assist those groups-in-formation in strategizing their own interventions. Rather than asking me what concrete changes are to be made, go look at those groups out there in the world that are inventing alternative communities and ways of life and ask what ways they might help to transform our contemporary moment.
May 1, 2008 at 6:37 pm
go look at those groups out there in the world that are inventing alternative communities and ways of life and ask what ways they might help to transform our contemporary moment.
in Holland this scene is completely dead. The best you can do is what I’m doing with the Parody Center. In my homecountry Serbia I think there is more opportunity, but I’m not there at the moment. I try to inform them about the developments I notice here. For awhile I was dabbling in ”subversive art”, but didn’t take me far.
Dr Sinthome thank you for a very productive discussion. Now I’m off to develop my Lacanian sex fantasy in order to hopefully come to the realization that I don’t need to look up to you for change.
May 2, 2008 at 5:53 am
[…] also remiss in not pointing to the discussion immediately prior, which began by picking up on some issues related to the cross-blog discussion about […]
May 2, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Well, I’m finding it’s really difficult to switch gears (or codes) from reading introductory history papers (many of which, bless them, barely accomplish literacy, let alone clarity) to this level of discourse. So if these thoughts seem especially stray, that’s why.
I like all the stuff about de/reterritorialization and anxiety. This reminds me of something I read when I was trying to figure out what was happening to, and what to do for, my ex-wife when she developed her paranoid psychotic delusional system. It turns out that this is not at all uncommon in people who abruptly move from a familiar context to an unfamiliar one, e.g. immigrants. The rate and intensity of these context shifts is certainly greater nowadays.
I used to teach in an interdisciplinary Human Development program that had been founded and designed by a Hungarian refugee named Ivan Kovacs. It was designed to hit students from a variety of angles to teach them how to cope with ambiguity and the diversity of perspectives they would encounter in the world. Ironically, the students got it but the faculty didn’t; for the most part, they retreated into their disciplinary shells and defensively made no attempt to learn how to perspective-shift. This made Ivan so sad.
I do think there’s a kind of power in territory (thinking of nation) or discipline (thinking of academia and of Foucault). It’s a matter of having traction and leverage. When we talk about freedom I sometimes start by asking my students if they’re oppressed by gravity. If I can take that train of thought and move it over to where they’re thinking about whether they’re oppressed by their identities, however they assert them, we’ve gotten somewhere. But I’m not sure where. Anyway, I really appreciate how you’ve interpreted my point there.
May 2, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Now, as for innovation in teaching that’s just the biggest crock of shit. I call it the ‘bells and whistles’ approach. Let’s see what new technology we can trot out to expensivate either lecturing or discussing. I’m always the weirdest, most out-there teacher anyone has ever seen, and I’m not doing a single innovative thing. It’s a little Socrates, a little bar brawl, mostly just working on having better and better quality conversations. I mean hell, it’s ‘innovative’ that I do a couple of focused studies using a couple of specific interpretive lenses and don’t try to cover the whole history of everything everywhere in World History 2: Since 1500. And I just think, oof, that’s a stupid way to define a class in the first place. We’re going to have to be selective somehow, let’s do that intentionally and productively. Critical thinking 101 right there.
And you’re right, it can be anxietizing, because what’s meant by innovation is so clearly empty and yet so totally freighted with meaning and consequence. I also think the dynamic works AGAINST substantive innovation or learning new things (which I enjoy and embrace) because you have to spend so much time defending yourself to outsiders who have no idea what to make of your codes yet have power of decision over you that you bunker up.
And what would real innovation be, anyway? At first, a ‘private language’. Try to sell that to an accrediting bureaucracy.