Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Styles of Cultural Activism: From Theory and Pedagogy to Women, Indians, and Communism.

Styles of Cultural Activism: From Theory and Pedagogy to Women, Indians, and Communism. We merely show the world why it actually struggles; and the awarenessof this is something the world must acquire even if it does not want to.(Marx 214)Every institution gives a position. It does not give legitimation.(de Certeau 19)The two books "reviewed" here (or rather, addressed to andamong us as teachers of college literature) urge us to understandteaching and writing as modes of critical action. As teachers, we shape,not just inform student thinking. As scholars, we impose and create waysof seeing society, history, and literature, not just make themaccessible to contemporary understanding. In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently , there areineradicable in��e��rad��i��ca��ble?adj.Incapable of being eradicated.ine��rad moral and political dimensions to our profession that wemust acknowledge to become more objective about them. They have adynamic and a flow we cannot master. They situate sit��u��ate?tr.v. sit��u��at��ed, sit��u��at��ing, sit��u��ates1. To place in a certain spot or position; locate.2. To place under particular circumstances or in a given condition.adj. what we do asprofessionals before our work even begins.Certain constraints come to mind as we consider the institutionalenvironment in which our work occurs. How often have we heard (and used)the cant about college classrooms striving to "empower"students, although the material matrix in which we teach (or ignore) theconflicts often literally impoverishes students? What Mas'udZavarzadeh in a recent series of articles for this journal calls,somewhat contemptuously, "the me-in-crisis" of student life,with its immersion in personal experience, is not just ananti-intellectual ploy used by students to cover up unwillingness tostudy. It reminds us that the critical dialogue or thinking we strive toencourage in our classes occurs within a social context muffling ormaking shrill the student voices we need to hear. Indeed, as myepigraphs from Marx and de Certeau suggest, the quest for universaland/or local truths has an alien comrade of cynicism aboard, revealinginquiry partly as analytic game-playing, paying tuition and gettinggrades the founding moves (teachers inquire; students pay to witnessteachers inquire). As contemporary theory increasingly recognizes itsown "enfleshment" in this institutional environment, it islittle wonder that aporia a��po��ri��a?n.1. A figure of speech in which the speaker expresses or purports to be in doubt about a question.2. An insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text's meanings. and double reading have become fashionable,postmodern. The danger is that as the horizons of postmodern ennuiexpand, so do the technological possibilities for information storage,retrieval, and dissemination. The warning of postmodern theory has beenoften repeated: we are on the threshold of becoming simulacra, with allsubject positions that cannot be plugged into the power-technologyconnection placed under erasure ERASURE, contracts, evidence. The obliteration of a writing; it will render it void or not under the same circumstances as an interlineation. (q.v.) Vide 5 Pet. S. C. R. 560; 11 Co. 88; 4 Cruise, Dig. 368; 13 Vin. Ab. 41; Fitzg. 207; 5 Bing. R. 183; 3 C. & P. 65; 2 Wend. R. 555; 11 Conn. . We seem ever more mightily in aposition to reproduce things as they are, less and less capable ofimagining things otherwise. As long as computers supplement or deliveran orthodox way of teaching, a way of "developing thinkingskills," for example, we will continue to hone game-playingabilities. Questions about the game, its purpose or historical originsor destination ("late capitalism") will seem hopelesslyacademic. Why should we care?As these two books strongly suggest, self-interrogation by teachersis a critical, not an ancillary, task because a theory of teachingalready influences or controls the teaching we do. We need to evolveresponsible strategies given the following problem: how does a teacherbring critical pressure upon the dominant social powers that have vestedinterest Vested InterestA financial or personal stake one entity has in an asset, security, or transaction.Notes:For example, if you have a mortgage, your bank has a vested interest on the sale of your house.See also: Right in reproducing and expanding their own conditions of power,which usually include supporting only those educational institutions andpractices that function as conduits of information, preparing studentsas a work-force in line with corporate America's bottomline"mentality"? What could be more practical, seemingly naturalthan training students for lucrative employment? Questioning thispracticality seems a violation of common sense, but there is scientific,moral, and philosophical mandate to persist. How free are"our" colleges to pursue the true - or unravel discursiveclaims or pose alternate ones that appear true?Both books inspire valid worries about the containment of subversion,that is, about the ability of large systems, such as the modern state inits varied manifestations, to engulf en��gulf?tr.v. en��gulfed, en��gulf��ing, en��gulfsTo swallow up or overwhelm by or as if by overflowing and enclosing: The spring tide engulfed the beach houses. and neutralize anything critical ofor resistant to themselves. Indeed, as the symposium on teaching thatthis journal recently published suggests, critical pedagogy is already"successfully" divided from within. The collective desire fora shared critical perspective from which action for change can becommenced or guided is presently frustrated by institutional andbureaucratic restraints and monitorings. A recognizable consensus doesemerge, however: nearly all the authors involved in the production ofthese two books agree that political change, rather than reform alone,is a goal we should be working for. This goal of creating a just societyreflects a general sense of social crisis that current oppositionaldiscourse attributes to a splitting of libidinal from politicaleconomies, that is, to a sharp conflict between what we need and what wecan do, a "play" of contrary historical (not timeless) forcesfrom which academia in left or right wing versions is not exempt.How shall we, as teachers, recommence Re`com`mence´v. i. 1. To commence or begin again.2. To begin anew to be; to act again as.He seems desirous enough of recommencing courtier.- Johnson.v. t. 1. To commence again or anew. the experiment/experience ofdemocracy? What would a community grounded upon and working throughdissent sound and look like? Can we fit the current pieces of dissenttogether to take collective action and transform American society? Canwe make a just society? Such a task is transdisciplinary and thuslargely in conflict with mainstream reduction of knowledge and criticismto professionalism, that is, what one can do with what one knows withinthe present system. Putting critical pressure upon the value orconstructedness of what one is allowed to know seems like idleself-doubt, a spinning of "deconstructive" wheels, but it iscrucial to opening alternate ways of seeing things.In this regard, Morton and Zavarzadeh's work is enabled byMarxist critique certain of the truth-value of its inquiry, which inthis book caustically debunks or exposes the idealism or positivism positivism(pŏ`zĭtĭvĭzəm), philosophical doctrine that denies any validity to speculation or metaphysics. Sometimes associated with empiricism, positivism maintains that metaphysical questions are unanswerable and that the only ofcurrent liberal, humanist, conservative, and most postmodern positions.They identify with a "resistance" postmodernism as distinctfrom the more dominant "ludic lu��dic?adj.Of or relating to play or playfulness: "Fiction . . . now makes [language] " form it currently takes. Asdescribed by Teresa Ebert, whose work Theory as Resistance extends,postmodern thought (and life) largely styles itself as"postpolitical" while the resistant strain of postmodernismrequires, in Ebert's words, "the production of historicalknowledges that mark the transformability of existing socialarrangements and the possibility of a different social organization . .. free from exploitation" (9). While this critique positions itselfwith reference to global knowledges, Goldstein's generally"resistant" collection, Styles of Cultural Activism, shows howthe struggle for a democratic society occurs in local ways asindividuals act (or write) from their own specific sites.A pivotal concept or realm for many of these critiques that I wouldlike to explore is that of experience, and its ambiguous value forcritical thinking and activism. Appeals to and stories of personalexperience dominate all kinds of student writing and, contrary to thenovelty or originality one might expect, usually provide the foundationfor the most reactionary of attitudes and for a subjectivist sub��jec��tiv��ism?n.1. The quality of being subjective.2. a. The doctrine that all knowledge is restricted to the conscious self and its sensory states.b. or"anarchical" idea regarding interpretation and critique,namely that a work means different things to different people dependingon their experience, as if a poem or painting were no more than aRorschach test Rorschach test:see personality; psychological tests. . Both books put experience in question. Zavarzadeh andMorton reject the "criti(que)al" value of experience, which,as the ideological facade constructed by the internalized censoring ofthe senses, forms the basis of that notorious by-product of currenthistorical conditions, the illusory self. Goldstein's collectivebelieves, with some important reservations, that a person'sexperiences are capable of indicating local pathways of progress andprotest in public and private modes of contemporary life. As SandraHarding observes in arguing for "feminist standpoint theory,"the individual experiences of women can be a starting point for thoughtas long as experience is recognized to be "shaped by socialrelations" (20-21). Sara Horowitz argues for the need in the"new academy" to respect the uniqueness of Jewish history andexperience while at the same time observing, provocatively, how theconcept of Jewishness scrambles categories of nationality, race,religion, and ethnicity; "suggesting that the categories we use tosort knowledge may be off the mark not only for things Jewish, butgenerally" (158). Deploying cultural studies as a multiperspectivalcritique, Douglas Kellner shows how "the crisis in the Gulf"was experienced as a disinformational text in America, a symbolicconstruct of the Western media manipulated by power politics bent onconcealing its own complicity in creating the crisis (103-29). In herresolve to piece together a just account of European-Amerindianrelations, Jane Tompkins describes something like a Cretan-liar dilemma("All Cretans are liars," said the man from Crete) experiencedby contemporary literary theory, which holds for certain truth that"all accounts are perspectival" (199). Violence againstothers, however, demands judgment and renunciation, not meditation andobjectification. So often students say, "There's nothing I cando about it" or "I can't change the world,"unwittingly reflecting attitudes produced by an ideology of experienceas reflective, passive, and imprisoning.Indeed, rather than capitulate ca��pit��u��late?intr.v. ca��pit��u��lat��ed, ca��pit��u��lat��ing, ca��pit��u��lates1. To surrender under specified conditions; come to terms.2. To give up all resistance; acquiesce. See Synonyms at yield. , these various works take up a jointproject to identify and destabilize de��sta��bi��lize?tr.v. de��sta��bi��lized, de��sta��bi��liz��ing, de��sta��bi��liz��es1. To upset the stability or smooth functioning of: rather than naively or wittilyreinstate what Foucault calls each society's "'generalpolitics' of truth," a project that, as Henry Giroux and PeterMcLaren have conceptualized it, urges "intellectuals to developpractices that take seriously how subjectivities are constructed withinparticular 'regimes of truth'" and that "highlightsthe importance of developing a theory of experience as a central aspectof radical pedagogy" (179). The point is that experience is alwaysalready theoretical, a select way of seeing or, in Derridean terms, ofwriting the "real." The danger is that we will not heed therigorous deconstructive warning - "Before being its object, writingis the condition of the episteme" (Derrida 27) - or construe construev. to determine the meaning of the words of a written document, statute or legal decision, based upon rules of legal interpretation as well as normal meanings. it tomean that we are beyond taking stands or principled political actions.An axiom of Marxism needs reiteration: "No genuinely or radicallydifferent culture can emerge without a radical modification of thesocial system from which culture springs" (Jameson 161). Towardsthis modification, as Goldstein argues, teachers and scholars throughcritique have changed and still can change academic life positively(43-44). When not under critique, the past and experience remainmythically valorized, for example, as the "greatest teacher ofall," seamlessly bound to the ideology of practicality asenterprise and skill, money-making (a revealing common phrase, as if wewere all counterfeiters), and normalizing disciplines and routines. Thiscommonplace view denies what Foucault calls "the reality ofdiscourse," and holds that "things murmur meanings ourlanguage has merely to extract" (228). Experience is not thegateway to the natural and the normal and requires understanding as themaking of an experiment. We can change our experiences, a considerablealternative to merely having them. Yet why does this etymologicallyencouraged reading of experience as experiment sound so strange to theear? Isn't "changing one's experiences" tantamountto changing the past? Why not talk of experiencing change, a far morecommon way of thinking about experience as an empty vehicle, aneutrality that gives us access to the way things are or will become?What of the experience of imagining things otherwise? This is theactivist viewpoint and voice that comes through loud and clear in bothtexts.The "pedagogy of concept" is what Zavarzadeh and Mortoncontrast to the humanist and liberal pedagogy of experience. By conceptthey mean an explanatory idea that answers why certain historicalconditions and not others have arisen, why experience, for example, isbound by forces and means of production Means Of Production is a compilation of Aim's early 12" and EP releases, recorded between 1995 and 1998. Track listing"Loop Dreams" – 5:30 "Diggin' Dizzy" – 5:33 "Let the Funk Ride" – 5:11 "Original Stuntmaster" – 6:33 , not by nature, God, or timelessverities of human life transcending change. Class struggle andsocioeconomic asymmetries make up present conditions of living andknowing that are everywhere affected by political realities. There areno Wordsworthian "spots of time" or experiences of wonderthat, "resist recuperation recuperation/re��cu��per��a��tion/ (-koo?per-a��shun) recovery of health and strength. recuperation,n the process of recovering health, strength, and mental and emotional vigor. , containment, ideologicalincorporation," as Stephen Greenblatt has described thispossibility (17). The rare attempts in schools to cultivate theimaginary, the spontaneous, and the open conflict with the generalsystem ruled by the market condition in which only those knowledges thathave exchange value as skills are funded and stressed. All else islabeled subjective or impractical. Schools basically provide a way tomake contemporary social conditions appear natural and normal and thosewho criticize them appear deranged de��range?tr.v. de��ranged, de��rang��ing, de��rang��es1. To disturb the order or arrangement of.2. To upset the normal condition or functioning of.3. To disturb mentally; make insane. or inspired, in either case notwell-adjusted or destined for material success (at least not in thislifetime). Yet the "suffering artist" or "Van Gogh"syndrome results from the schism of cultural and political economies,not from unalterable realities of competition or from the nature of man.A Marxist teacher of critique (which differs from criticism by itsarguing for social change rather than displaying the taste or punditryof the critic) emphasizes how thick the walls of the classroom are. Theclassroom is recognized as an alienating environment where studentstrain to allow themselves to be exploited or to exploit others, groomingto be part of a labor market labor marketA place where labor is exchanged for wages; an LM is defined by geography, education and technical expertise, occupation, licensure or certification requirements, and job experience where any happiness is always at theexpense of someone else. "Mutual pillaging," as Marx observed,is at the base of the political economy of capitalism: "Weourselves are excluded from true property because our property excludesthe other human being" (280). The systematic exclusion of others isbuilt into the structure of our relations, "every man forhimself" not a description of a theoretical Hobbesian state ofnature but of power relations in place here and now. Yet"alterity Al`ter´i`tyn. 1. The state or quality of being other; a being otherwise.For outness is but the feeling of otherness (alterity) rendered intuitive, or alterityvisually represented. " is hardly ever theorized in politico-economic termsnowadays. This is one strong reason why Theory as Resistance is auseful, necessary critique of conservative and liberal versions ofpluralism that routinely assume ("a thousand points of light")that all our democracy need do is learn to acknowledge diversity. Thereare indeed different ways of reading and constructing symbols. Theproblem is that the status quo [Latin, The existing state of things at any given date.] Status quo ante bellum means the state of things before the war. The status quo to be preserved by a preliminary injunction is the last actual, peaceable, uncontested status which preceded the pending controversy. is built upon exclusion and surveillance(containment) of the economically exiled, part of the "Americanexperience" that needs to be systematically denaturalized,demythologized. Towards such an enterprise, Edward Guerrero inGoldstein's collective articulates the dilemma of African-Americanmales: "In a nation that is driven by fantasies of material successwhich have become the dominant index of self-worth, and where the veryidea of manhood is defined as one's ability to provide forone's self and family, black men in vastly large numbers have beentotally marginalized and rendered economically obsolete" (82).Zavarzadeh and Morton would take Guerrero's critique still further;the issue is not to recuperate re��cu��per��atev.To return to health or strength; recover. black males back into society throughrehabilitative programs (family counselling and vocational training), asa reformist reading of Guerrero's statement might conclude. Thedilemma of black males and other excluded groups is no plight ormisfortune or hangover from historical oppression and conquest, but, asZavarzadeh and Morton emphasize, "a result of positions assigned tomarginal groups by the machinery of the present cultural/social/economicsystem" (217).Rather than grow mean-spirited or only cynical, however, Zavarzadehand Morton's ideal radical pedagogue deploys theory as "acritique of material intelligibilities and a producing of historicalknowledge of the social totality" (12). Thus, theory as resistanceis not an ethical imperative but an epistemological one, because anyother mode of learning would be subservient to the ruling powers andthus void of real critical knowledge. To struggle is to know.The end of this union of praxis and theoria is of course to bringabout through action a classless society, a conceptual imagining of theachieved resolution in time of contemporary social, political, andeconomic contradictions caused by the division of labor that alienatespeople from true social bonds and true work. Ideology functions tonaturalize nat��u��ral��ize?v. nat��u��ral��ized, nat��u��ral��iz��ing, nat��u��ral��iz��esv.tr.1. To grant full citizenship to (one of foreign birth).2. To adopt (something foreign) into general use. alienation, that is, make it invisible as a humanconstruction. In the West, this has meant the promoting of a program ofsuffering and pleasure, actually the result of the extraction of surpluslabor, but represented and "experienced" as the testing orawarding of the subject (soul) by God through personal experience or bynature (Mother Nature) however apparently indifferent to human existencescience reveals nature to be. A critical identification of this Westernideology is established by Marx in The German Ideology. Traditionalhumanism sanctions a programmatic "suffering" or conditioningof the person whom it instructs to look beyond, yet through, individualexperiences to fathom how one's life connects with timelesspatterns of nature and man and, it might reluctantly add now, woman("the" human condition). Poststructuralist paradigms ofknowing forestall such sanctioning, pointing towards mythographic(Michel Serres) or linguistic (Derrida) bases of the human"need" to naturalize and normalize normalizeto convert a set of data by, for example, converting them to logarithms or reciprocals so that their previous non-normal distribution is converted to a normal one. the conditions of its ownlonging - in effect, to create mirror images through representation,which deconstruction and Lacanian analysis reveal as an active shapingof the world, the writing or making of a "presence" allegedlybeyond the play of signification SIGNIFICATION, French law. The notice given of a decree, sentence or other judicial act. . Zavarzadeh and Morton themselvesutilize poststructuralist strategies to assault self-congratulatorygestures in academe (principally Syracuse and Duke Universities) thatpurport to have abandoned, in their "new" curricula, grandnarratives (Lyotard) understood as effects upon language of the will toknow and as the maze-like discursive operations of principles of reasonthat claim access to things as they are. Through such revisions of thecurriculum, presumably pre��sum��a��ble?adj.That can be presumed or taken for granted; reasonable as a supposition: presumable causes of the disaster. the "literariness" (de Man) of thecanon (and the non-canon) emerges to offer a multitude of subjectpositions beyond referentiality. But Zavarzadeh and Morton question howthis program attempts to legitimate itself through resistance to theory,how in fact it represents a cooptation of poststructuralist strategiesto reinsert Re`in`sert´v. t. 1. To insert again. a postmodern self, an apolitical phantom at the service ofcurrent modes of production. Their critique indeed connects with theludic postmodern fear of totalizing gestures, such as Marxist views ofhow the division of labor accounts for why only certain things get doneor written. But the critical use of a concept of totality and thepractice of totalitarianism, the former demanding scrutiny, the latterindeed meriting real fear even while it encourages paranoia, must not beconfused in a generalized thinking that is, ironically, itself totalizedand totalizing through paranoia about large explanatory concepts. Onewould think that the "containment of subversion" descriptionof how a system maintains itself would bring some positive recognitionof the need for a concept of totality, of total systems and how theyoperate (the way capitalism has constructed itself, for example). Howelse would we learn to work our way outside them? This is a destinationthrough, not beyond, the critique of experience, which never exhauststhe possibilities of what we can imagine even as it threatens toseparate people from each other ("the me-in-crisis" syndrome)and seduce us into thinking that randomness, chance, or other"natural" circumstances dominate our lives beyond all humanchange.WORKS CITEDCerteau, Michel de. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans.Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology gram��ma��tol��o��gy?n.The study and science of systems of graphic script.[Greek gramma, grammat-, letter; see grammar + -logy. . Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born February 24 1942) is an Indian literary critic and theorist. She is best known for the article "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. .Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.Ebert, Teresa L. "Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, andLabor: Bringing Materialism Back into Feminist Cultural Studies."Cultural Critique 23 (Winter 1992-1993): 5-50.Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. SheridanSmith. New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : Pantheon, 1972.Giroux, Henry A., and Peter L. McLaren. "Radical Pedagogy asCultural Politics: Beyond the Discourse of Critique andAnti-Utopianism." Theory/Pedagogy/Politics: Texts for Change. Ed.Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the NewWorld. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge,1990.Marx, Karl. The Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society.Ed. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat. New York: Anchor, 1967.Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. "The Pedagogy of Pleasure 2: TheMe-in-Crisis." College Literature 21.3 (October 1994): 6-14.DiMatteo, associate professor and Chair of English at the New YorkInstitute of Technology The function of higher education was highly debated at the time. There was growing concern that American schools and colleges were failing to meet critical national demands, particularly the need for scientists, engineers, and high-level technicians. , writes on Renaissance poetics,poststructuralist theories of writing, and critical pedagogy. He hasrecently completed a book, Natale Conti's Mythologies: A SelectTranslation (Garland 1994).

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