Teaching and Activism

Yes, it's been a long absence. And now I'm pulling a cheap move just to keep some momentum on the blog rolling. I'm double-posting a comment I left on the blog for our cultural studies class. I want to work on this idea some more, as it's something I've continued to think about this past week:

I’m positing two rather extreme and overly-simplified positions on teaching (which I’m sure are a bit reductive of the views people have expressed), then deploy some of our CS concepts as an alternative to these two poles.

1. The first pole is a hopeful, though not complacent, view of the social impact/function of university instructors. From this perspective, universities may produce all sorts of status-quo boosting effects (training workforce, all the other points listed in Matt’s first comment) and their state or private funding may even be based on such justifications, but still they are loose enough structures so that classrooms are not entirely determined by such structural forces. Teachers, in this view, have the opportunity to appropriate the space and resources of the university for progressive or even radical ends through leading students to critical thinking and to question ideologies.

2. The second pole, which I think is close to Matt’s fear of the absolute cooption of university, denies that individual professors (or programs) can effectively fight against the ways in which universities are overdetermined by these structural forces/relationships. From this perspective, even if teachers are able to help students learn critical thinking skills and incite their resistance to accepted ideologies, the net effect of this effort may really just enhance capitalism by creating a class of more valuable creative workers, more nuanced in their understanding of culture. Under this view, students might become “critical” of capitalism, racism, sexism, etc on an ideological level, but so what? Their ideological conversions will have no effect on the ways in which these oppressions are played out through institutional means. You can love Marx and voice as much dissent as you want on an ideological level, but end up working for an ad agency, employing your cultural sophisication for capital, if that’s the “best” opportunity you see for your career.

I believe both 1 & 2 have a lot of validity. However, I think a better alternative can be described through thinking about education as a practice in CS and materialist terms: education as the possibility of creating new subject positions. From this angle, educators have a stake in subject positions students come to identify as. These subject positions are not only nominal categories, like “educated liberal,” “queer liberationist,” etc, but they are articulated to specific practices enacted outside the classroom. For example, I think education can be (though certainly not always!) good at producing the position of the “educated liberal” who renounces the practices of vulgar prejudice, such as making racist jokes or displaying intolerance for certain cultural differences. Another subject position could be articulated to economic practices such as not shopping at Walmart or buying from fair trade vendors.

The question of effects is not such much over how much student’s ideological outlooks might change through class but what kinds of practices will be linked to their new subject positions. A great limitation on teaching, however, is that the articulation between beliefs-as-subject-positions and practices aren’t often forged in the classroom. These types of articulations depend on a broader cultural matrix of opportunities. What kinds of practices will be articulated to new subjects positions is beyond the control of the teacher. Much of it is fortuitous. If there is a strong anti-sweatshop movement on campus making demands on students to take part in actions or not, then teaching Marx, leading students into some sort of “marxist-sympathetic” subject position, is likely to be articulated with organizing, protesting or other practices that are part of that movement. If such a movement does not exist on campus, then the same class could win students identity as marxist-sympathetic subjects but in a way that is not articulated with any practices contesting labor policies on campus.

So do I think teaching is a hopeless endeavor for contributing to progress or radical causes unless the cultural opportunities are ripe for students to articulate new conceptions of themselves with political practices? In a way, yes. Perhaps the content being taught in American universities in the late 60’s wasn’t any more radical or revolutionary than content being taught today but the cultural matrix at the time articulated educated subjects to more overt political practices. I know from my own experience college seemed to take on a whole different tone when the whole campus was shaken by protest over Iraq sanctions, Kosovo, etc.
The challenge for committed educators, then, in times that are not fomenting with political unrest is to create this political culture outside of the classroom. We need to work with allies outside the university. The excuse of doing enough for the cause in the classroom doesn’t cut it, at least not unless the conditions are right for classroom efforts to be articulated with extracurricular practices.

Reading Susan's Journal

A link arrived in my email today from a friend wagering, “because we’re in love with public intellectuals …why should we not read them in [their] private [moments]…?”. The click took me to a section of the NYT’s magazine that reprinted entries from Susan Sontag’s journals. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/magazine/10sontag.html?pagewanted=1)

I have always been fascinated by the prospect of reading diaries and journals (as mentioned on my first post). Regarding influential or famous people, the idea is not that their diaries will represent an authentic revelation of their non-public souls, as I would bet they (famous people) always write with some consciousness of potential public eyes. Perhaps many have so deeply ingrained the mental habit of publicity that the public, or a relatively broad public at least, is the default addressee of most of their thoughts. So it is not a chance to peel beneath all persona and posturing that is unique about encountering them through journals, but rather the opportunity to see how they write without revision. It may not always be true, but I assume that journals entries are written with greater haste and much less editing than published works (even for Kerouac). This speed I assume does reveal what comes most “naturally” for them as writers, meaning only the habits of thinking/writing that are most automatic for them. What I look for is: what kinds of mental connections and associations arise most reflexively for the writer? This is a vague statement, so let me break it down in two exemplary but not exhaustive ways. What is the texture of their quick writing like, i.e. the vocabulary range and specificity of detail? And what is the style of their narrative? Underlying these investigations is the question of how naturally (in the sense above) good writing comes to great writers. Inevitably I end up making comparisons with my own journal writing, which I tend to think of as involving overly earnest narratives and a dependance on cliched phrasing

So how did Sontag’s journal affect me? Most striking is the energy and frenzy of her thought (along with the fixated self-consciousness which is something I’ll leave unexamined here). Many of the entries follow the logic of a list, as I assumed she followed whims and swirls of thought/memory rather than approaching her journal with desire to sort everything out into a neat little story. Even through lists, she evokes some enchantment, an oddball kind of energy. She is not without her cliches. I noticed a few words that might make it to my list of “fresh words” – deracinated, marauding – but not many.

The frenetic aspect of her impression may come in part from the spin with which the journals are introduced by the Times, “Susan Sontag appears, to a reader of her journals, to have filled every idle moment with a notation.” I have sometimes thought I should pursue relentless note-taking to be really productive (of course at a certain bulk notes would lose their advantages of condensed guides, but the point is more to exercise the passage of experience to words). I can’t really say from the journal selections if Sontag had this fantasy too or fulfilled it, but clearly writing was crucial to her even in the form of notes.

Not so cool

Often when meeting a new person of a similar demographic, I find myself brandishing my knowledge of "cool" things - local bands, experimental films, coffee shops, etc. Am I just showing off a kind of indie culture connoisseureship? Maybe such cool is just an excuse to legitimize a taste for eccentricity?

Back at the U

By nature I must be an optimist because I always enjoy beginnings. Whether it’s first moving somewhere, starting a new job or kicking off a new school year, the beginning of any of these transitions always charges me with energy to fill a slate of newness with positive vision. Unfortunately I’m not the kind of optimist who is able to remain ever hopeful and optimistic about any situation once routines have set in and the horizon of possibility is more clearly defined by the land mass of actuality.

I’m aware of this pattern, and the unrealistic expectations that go along with fresh starts for me generally, but still my optimism is in full force for the beginning of this school year. Last year, admittedly, I became quite frustrated with my school progress. Was I really pushing my potential to learn, stretching my mind as calastenically as I thought I should be during a time of intensive education? I didn’t think so, and this isn’t a criticism of my graduate institution but rather it was just a fact that I hadn’t found the intellectual focus or inspiration I had hoped to find. I hadn’t kept up with the exercises I had designed for myself (such as the metaphor-a-day), hadn’t written anything for alternative press as I had wanted to do, nor had I could I be sure I had found that ever elusive writing voice any more clearly than I had in the past . I was living to the tempo of the steady mundane almost all of last year when I had been craving a more blustery rhythm. My vision of scholarship was of something more engaged, maybe even more mystical, than what I found myself able to access.

Now, I haven’t done much to reconcile the split between aspiration and reality. Still, all these good feelings of freshness are making me see a rosy semester once again.