Hello All,
I’ve just sent you the Bybee memorandum/leaked document. Apologies for sending the wrong file before! Just a few brief reminders. Please send me, by Saturday evening, the writings you’ve done so far (and that we’ll work with directly on Saturday during class):
a) the architectual poem, based on your notes about some piece of Evergreen architecture and how it socially controls / constructs you
b) bring your CA Conrad-inspired (Soma)tic poetry exercise, written out in the basic way he proceeds. Scroll down to the older post to links to his pieces, examples, and you can search that website and look at more to get you more comfortable with the basic shape of the writing exercise (writing the exercise) if you feel you need that. Spend about 30 minutes or so constructing it, at least.
c) your “walling” writing, based off the somatic work with interrogation and the leaked memorandum that you have read. 10 min of writing after 10 min of the procedure. IT IS OPTIONAL FOR YOU TO SEND THIS TO ME.
d) Also optional is the writing work you’ve done on aspects of your body that are disciplined by you, then the examples in which they are disciplined by others/society.
We’ll share this work, and more importantly, do more writing work using it, so please bring all these items of writing with you to class Saturday. Even if you decide not to hand (c) and (d).
We’ll begin Saturday with the (FINALLY!) Foucault discussion based off your discussions–which means we’ll finish those group discussions/close readings before getting into the larger group. Then 2nd half of the day we’ll work with the writing above. Then, we’ll set up times for the derive.
Below are my lecture notes from lecture today, if anyone is interested or needs them. Please, I still need a volunteer who will take notes, or who takes notes and can make copies for a fellow student. Please email me if you are willing to be that person!
David
HOMEWORK! ZOLF is reading Friday, the 15th, remember! 7pm. Her book should be in the book store: Neighbour Procedure.
–As I wrote on my public blog a few days ago, here we are at Evergreen where the lecture, in some definable sense, is not the rule, but the exception. Dialogic education, at least in terms of our stated mission as a school (maybe not in reality but…) is more the norm.
–And I find myself giving lectures and then facilitating dialog when I perform THE STANDARD LECTURE, and it’s the lectures we so often crave (these, and more so, performative, more unusual lectures, but lectures nonetheless), very much expect and want badly, in addition to all the co-learning—and I did too, and still do! I sense you’d like to sit back once in a while here and be entertained in a deep sense, in a sense that straddles the line between beauty as entertainment and art as moral lesson in the Aristotlean sense, in the sense that Euripides, wrote Aristotle in The Poetics, could bestow on an audience: art that not only drives the senses, but the intellect, such that a moral feeling might result.
–Why? And what does this have to do with Foucault’s analysis of institutional control? And Situationist practices of analysis, the Debord?
–I sense that some of you would like the lecture to be functional in this way, in the sense that the music for use, the modernist and movement in opera and the theater thought they could have it: to straddle that line between narrative drawing the audience in, into a world of its own, and yet, being obviously art, calling attention to its being artifice as juxtaposed to reality, being different enough from the norm, and critical enough (formally and otherwise) of the everyday, such that the art, or in this case the standard lecture, can teach in a sort of sideways, but not so praxis-driven, way. It can serve to facilitate some sort of learning that enhances the dialogic process, as it itself is not complete—it’s necessarily fragmented enough for you to have to fill in its blanks.
–More so when the lecture is consciously non-normative, where entertainment has a use value beyond simply being novel, interesting:
–Were I to move my hand like this, then turn like this. And linger on this quote, from Artaud’s Theater and Its Double:
We must insist upon the idea of culture-in-action, of culture growing within us like a new organ, a sort of second breath: and on civilization as an applied culture controlling even our subtlest actions, a presence of mind
–And then go on with my lecture, leaving the quote dangling like so, I have neither sought to confound you nor have I filled you like an empty vessel. I’ve neither led you by the hand and pressed a lesson into your mind treating it like Aristotle’s wax seal, nor have I simply obfuscated things in an attempt to impress you with my knowledge.
–This quote relates to what we are talking about, but I have not explained it away.
–Not if I continue on with the lecture in order that some praxis might appear to be at work here—as, perhaps a lack of fleshing the quote out with regard to how it works with and against Freire models a certain way of essaying, trying out, playing, such that seemingly disparate strands can be connected up by you, perhaps in 25 distinct, yet potentially related ways.
–And this is to treat the non-normative lecture as a flahspoint, or maybe at least a starting point, in a recognition and activation of all subjects in this place as becoming.
–Lecture as non-normative part of critical education, and critical education as both revolutionary act and as aesthetic event ?
–Why do you crave this mode of interaction? The performative, non-normative lecture as juxtaposed to the normative, straightforward lecture that I’ve now fallen back into? And why crave lectures generally, even this one? The lecture that is self-aware as such, and seeks to aestheticize itself such that dialogic elements pock it throughout, as well as this mode?
–Noted poet and essayist, and teacher Stan Apps wrote a response to my blog post regarding this question. He writes as of yesterday:
This is a very interesting set of comments. Regarding Freire and American students, while you’re right that students enjoy the “spectacle” and “value” of the banking model, at the same time they might reject the other model because they don’t want to be liberated or deeply activated by the interaction with a professor. That can be, or seem, invasive to many students, who feel like they are obligated to come and often prefer to learn something specific and be unconfronted (unthreatened) by the professor’s ideology. After all, whether it’s true or not, American students tend to already feel liberated (since the idea of liberation is so basic to our culture), and that will lead them to reject the professor’s implication that they are not in fact liberated, which students might encounter as pessimistic or even disempowering.
–This is very much a Freirean response, and Stan meant it to be, as he, like so many of us in the arts and in education is very much dedicated to a Freirean model.
–But I think that our situation—meaning the situation of students in late capitalist America—is sufficiently different enough for this to only ring partly true to me.
–I don’t know if it rings true to you. Let’s come back to this as I move on with a normative lecture—keep Freire in your mind here, dangling!.
DEBORD & SITUATIONISM
–BACKGROUND: 68 STRIKES
–Unitary urbanism (UU) was the critique of capitalism developed by the Situationists between approximately 1953 and 1972.
Praxis producing a range of activities:
The Situation
The Derive (drift, psychogeography)
Detournement
Graffiti
Recuperation
SPECTACLE – a central notion:
Drawing on Marx’s notion of capitalism’s ideology, that of FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS:
Debord argues that in late capitalism life is reduced to an immense accumulation of spectacles, a triumph of mere appearance where “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation”. The spectacle, which according to Debord is the core feature of the advanced capitalist societies, has its ”most glaring superficial manifestation” in the form of mass-media, advertising.
Debord here is elaborating on Marx’s argument that under capitalism our lives and our environment are continually depleted, Debord adds that the Spectacle is the system by which capitalism tries to hide such depletion. Debord added that, further than the impoverishment in the quality of our lives, our psychic AND BODILY functions are altered, we get a degradation of mind/body and also a degradation of the knowledge–knowledge becomes scarce, sources hidden, glossed. In the spectacular society, knowledge is not used anymore to question, analyze, or resolve and/or tolerate contradictions or difficult matters, but to assuage people. The arts are fundamental to undermining The Spectacle.
–DEBORD: “social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.” (Marx, Capital) Developing this analysis of the logic of the commodity, The Society of the Spectacle generally understood society as divided between the passive subject who consumes the spectacle and the reified spectacle itself.
RELATION TO POETRY:
NEW POETIC PRATICES IN POETRY—THINK OF WHAT ELRICK IS DOING
RELATION TO PEDAGOGY:
THE IDEOLOGICAL SPLIT—EMANCIPATION & REFORM/TAKING BACK/RECLAIMATION we read, briefly about, in the review by Reg Johanson. DEBORD:
“The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle — nonintervention — is linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity. …The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing ‘public’ must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, ‘livers,’ must steadily increase.”
Decrease of fulfillment of deeper human needs and desires– For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires.
I had us look at psychogeography, because here, the simple ideas of the Derive, the “controlled drift” emphasize very clearly that the page, the written, is a crucial site of activation, learning, and radicalization, but it exists in, and results from, the setting up of a larger AESTHETIC ECOSYSTEM, an environment that would or will be favorable to exchanges that are divorced from, as we talked about with Foucault, pure exchange and control, person as object or commodity. To get outside of that system, one builds another system.
What are some of the features of the situation—the derive for example, or the situation generally as outlined by Debord?
THIS WEEK: WATCH ELRICK AGAIN, NOW TAKE NOTES/Write about some of the features of this film: what are some of the formal strategies being employed here, the form and content of the video poem that COMPLICATE OR EVEN FALSIFY THE 2 SPECTRA ABOVE?
Feedback loop: the transitory décor of the situation serves as a feedback loop in some sense. The poem is constructed along with a situation favorable for it; the total environment serves to ideally radicalize and activate participants, and from there participants will or might create other writings, behaviors, situations, and so forth. But it goes farther in now WE are PASSIVE PRISONERS to the VIDEO, so it ENACTS ITS OWN FAILURE IN SOME SENSE—SO IS ALSO DRAWING ON FOUCAULT, THE NIGHTMARE OF BEING UNABLE TO GET OUTSIE OF A TOTAL SYSTEM AND TOTAL HABITS…
RELATES TO THE QUESTION OF WHETHER WE HAVE TAMED/COMMODIFIED SITUATIONISM BY INTRODUCING IT INTO INSTITUTIONAL EDUCATION IN A CAPITALIST MARKET!!
YET THERE IS ALSO A UTOPIANISM GOING ON, AS THIS VIDEO is a kind of re-mapping the known world, or MAPPING OF THE OMITTED, and as such, it’s a KIND OF ORGANIZING—Where political and aesthetic actions meet or blur.
How does this relate to Freire and pedagogy, here now?
BACKGROUND: Socrates, Marx, & Freire
Freire is often spoken of—or at least POP is—in terms of five main contributions to philosophy and economy of education, beyond the Marxist dichotomy of banking education (dominant) and problem-posing, or dialogic education (sub-dominant, revolutionary). We’ll get to politics and aesthetics of Freire in a moment, but presently, Freire’s five main contributions are often thought of as liberation or critical education necessarily entailing:
1) Dialog – where dialog is sought out in forms different from the norm, i.e., setting up models alternative to mere conversation – THINK ABOUT HOW CONRAD GETS US THINKING BY UNLOCKING BODILY KNOWLEDGES, GETTING THE WHOLE PERSON TO BE ACTIVELY MAKING
2) Praxis – THE PRACTICE, AND WHEN COLLABORATIVE, POESIS – ACTIVELY MAKING TOGETHER
3) developing a historical consciousness, one that has the power, or recognizes its power, to change the world
4) site-specificity and other alternative ways of “knowing” – eg, the site of the body (political body, one’s corporeal body, etc): taking the lived experience and the context, even the room one is in, into consideration as teachable aspects, or parts of the educational dialog
5) transcendence of given roles thru dialectic, or in other words, a sort of mysticism based in Marxist Christianity, where terms like “redemption” are put into a dialectical framework: all can be redeemed, says Freire, within the banking model, the ruling classes—all can (and will!) transcend their given roles
Not that this is wrong—this seems quite right as a kind of outline of some of the more important aspects of Freire’s work, but I’m more interested in what I think, and what you think—. So what I, firstly, want to focus on are the first two of these five points, dialog and praxis, but give them some historicity, as well as to ask: what’s Freire’s possible relation to the arts, to the work we’re looking at, especially Foucault and Debord’s SItuationism (Theory of the Derive) and what’s contemporary critical education’s more general relation to aesthetics, to, say, radical art, if there is a relationship at all? Why start here?
–I think it’s right that we often feel quite liberated and that this is a superstructure ideology, our false conscience, at work (Marx). That sounds right. I know I feel free to do what I want a lot of times. But where this feeling comes from, and how free I am, is a deeply unsettling question. Unsettling enough to not want to pose it to myself if I’m trying to get to sleep. IT’S A QUESTION THAT DRIVES FOUCAULT, THAT INDEED GIVES HIS WORK GREATER PESSIMISM THAN FREIRE’S, AND IT”S WHAT DRIVES DEBORD TOO, RIGHT? IT’S A QUESTION THAT WORKERS INSIDE ACADEMIA, WHEN THEY ASK IT IN THE CONTEXT OF ECONOMIC CONDITIONS SUCH AS THESE, LEADS TO QUESTIONS AS TO WHETHER TO REJECT CURRENT EDUCATIONAL CONDITIONS COMPLETELY, OR TO TRY TO CHANGE FROM WITHIN (the article we read, the review)
–One provisional answer is to be found in Socrates, to whom Freire looked to for inspiration, as much if not more than he looked to Marx:
Socrates: If I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.
Glaucon: They undoubtedly say this.
Socrates: Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.
–Freire writes that the banking model does not, like education should, recognize subjects as in a constant state of becoming, the world not static, but malleable, changeable:
If the banking model is cast away…They (learners in dialog) may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation.
–Freire calls the banking model one that assumes, as axiom, that persons are not copro consciente – conscious beings, but possesors of consciousness (one has it, one is not one and the same as it).
–Plato Continues the Dialog:
Glaucon: Very true.
Socrates: Each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst….
When a person starts on the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible….
Because a freeman ought not be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind, bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Glaucon: Very true.
Socrates: Then, my good friend, do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find out the natural bent.
(Book 7, Cave Scene, The Republic)
—NOW, juxtaposing this with Freire and his discussion of marginalization, in chapter 2:
The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not “marginals,” are not people living “outside” society. They have always been “inside” — inside the structure which made them “beings for others.” The solution is not to “integrate” them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become “beings for themselves.” Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors’ purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientizacao.
—Freire, POP
–Here is where revolutionary education meets revolutionary politics and, of course, writing as part of social struggle and learning, on the tactical level, that is, where Freire is most explicit about his reliance on Marx and Fromm; education’s end is social revolution’s end; unlearning the ideology of the superstructure means tactically to reform “the base economy” – to set up a model in which the base economy, the vast majority of the producers (laborers, middle-class in some cases) has the greatest potential to realize that our values amount to false consciousness, that, for example, the desire for plasma screen televisions and the ability to get one one day through individual responsibility and hard work, the desire for the lecture and feeling of freely learning that comes with it – this is the superstructure ideology of the ruling class, the owners of these things, not the person’s “authentic” values, but the values the ruling class wants people to have. Here, Fromm’s thesis, that of the necropheliac, or in Marx’s term, the person with false consciousness, is quoted:
“hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. … He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life.”
–An incredibly important, perhaps counterintuitive notion, one that FOUCAULT IS RELYING ON AS WELL (HERE WE SEE MARX’S INFLUENCE ON BOTH)—it speaks to an understanding of community, indeed diversity, that isn’t integrative, and isn’t defined by bringing people into a commonality, but rather heightening difference as a GIFT TO GIVE AND RECIPROCATE, turning society less homogenous, less on common footing, and more heteronymous. A definition of community and of diversity that is quite at odds with how these terms are used, for instance, here.
–Foucault’s analysis at this level is basically the same, but his optimism about shaking free, is less obviously extant—in fact I take him not to know where shaking free would take us, and further, that our ability to do so runs counter to how we set up systems in which to operate, so rather a utopian dream…
The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit. The “humanism” of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons — the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.