In this second paper, I return to Ms. Gage and her classroom, but here, I apply the theories of Foucault and Butler as I grapple with understanding (in a rather discursive and ongoing way) how regulatory practices of schooling serve to produce certain ways of knowing which are in tension with the critical approaches to teaching that Ms. Gage, and other teachers like her, attempt to bring to their students. Although I had initially intended to use Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977) alone in working through my questions, I find myself returning to Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990/1999/2006) again and again as a way to bring agency into the workings, or technologies, of power, something which I find particularly difficult to pin down in Foucault’s work. At the same time, I move forward with some caution here because I always want to challenge myself as a researcher, writer, and thinker to remain both critical and optimistic when it comes to individual and collective agency. Foucault writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), “I have not denied—far from it—the possibility of changing discourse: I have deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it” (p. 209). I am reminded by these words that agency is slippery and easily misidentified in fields of power. Yet, Butler does attempt to locate agency in her text, although she too, troubles the location of it all the while. And so in writing about Foucault and Butler together, I am better able to locate my own notions of agency and subversion in the field of literacy and identity – although those locations are likely to shift as I write even this.
As I was preparing for writing this paper, I did some searching through files from another class where I read Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge as part of a small group project. In doing so, I came across an email to one of my group members questioning how Foucault’s regulatory rules of formation, something he writes about in Discipline and Punish as well, fit with Freire’s notion of consciousness (conscienization) and naming the world in order to change it? In other words, if, as Foucault writes, we can never be outside the discourses of power, can we ever truly practice liberatory education in the way Freire and critical scholars who follow his work suggest? How are we to create new practices and transform our realities? Are Foucault and Freire incompatible?
These questions, then, brought me to the example of Ms. Gage and her classroom as well. Ms. Gage, as I’ve written about in my first paper, lives and breathes a critical approach to teaching, even though she may never name it as such. Her entire curriculum and way of being in her classroom challenge her students to critique and question both word and world through analysis of media representations. More importantly, she then moves her students to the production of their own critical representations in film and image. Instead of being passive consumers of their worlds, they become creators of meaning within them. This is not, however, without its difficulties for reasons onto which Foucault sheds some light.
Power
Foucault traces the history of punishment and discipline as it shifts from a focus on prisoners’ bodies to their souls. Alarming as it may be, the transfer of Foucault’s argument about prisons to schools is not a difficult one to make. We readily observe the disciplining of bodies into regulated times and spaces within schools, and more importantly, we witness the instantiation of that discipline on the very souls of our students as we label them, in often subtle ways, as either good or bad, normal or abnormal within the available discourses of schooling and education. When students fail to fit a particular model of the good or bad student, power, in its ever economic fashion, merely shifts the definition of the “crime” of nonconformity to fit the behaviors and dispositions of individuals and continue to mark the gaps between them. Even more, students place the regulations and rules of identity onto themselves and each other in such a way that the classification of our students happens quite readily and efficiently among and within them. Such is the capillary function of relational power; it moves everywhere, subtly and economically.
Within the capillary functions of power, what effect, in the sense of production, do such techniques have on the role of the teacher as well? From my own experience in the classroom and through my observations of Ms. Gage, it is clear to me that teaching critically and innovatively is not without its consequences. The mark of a successful school, according to Foucault, is one that functions efficiently. The mark of a successful teacher, then, is one who does not disrupt the efficient movement of bodies in space. Does not the teacher who asks her students to critically examine the world commit crimes of that very disruption? And by asking her students to become critical and questioning consumers of their world and to participate in the disruption of discourses, does a teacher like Ms. Gage place her students at the peril of being gathered up by the mechanisms of power. In other words, does such disruption become defined as a crime, merely serving the very economy of power against which it pushes? Not only does Ms. Gage then become the “Other” of teachers who better fit the normative model of teaching, but her students become the “Other” of a normative model of learning.
My questions bring me, then, to the relationship between power and knowledge as well. For Foucault, at the heart of all mechanisms of power is the “truth-power relation” (p. 55). He writes that punishment, in any of its many forms, does not make use of the body any longer, but makes use of representation. In other words, regulation of ideas and representations is a more efficient way to control than regulating bodies – one follows the other. For Ms. Gage, her entire critical approach to instruction and analysis is to question representation and to ask her students to determine whose interests are served by various representations of ideas and people. In this way, she asks her students to uncover and critique ideology, but in doing so, she must give them a new language with which to even imagine and speak such things.
Foucault writes, “It is not simply at the level of consciousness, of representation and in what one thinks one knows, but at the level of what makes possible the knowledge that is transformed into political investment" (p. 185). Thus, regulatory and normative practices determine what is even knowable. In order to teach critically, a teacher like Ms. Gage places her students in a crisis of language and truth as they seek the words and ideas that push against the very frame in which they have been realizing their world. “Power produces;” Foucault continues, “it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production" (p. 194). Here, then, is the crux: Ms. Gage and her critical approach to teaching can still never exist outside the power that produces what is knowable. Indeed, by being in opposition to a notion of Truth (with a capital T), Ms. Gage still reinforces and produces that knowledge in opposition to her own way of viewing the world through multiple truths (lowercase t).
No wonder she stays up at night worrying that she may never move her students to change their worlds.
Agency
Foucault is difficult for me because as much as I try to find flaws in his argument, the more I live in this world, the more I think he is right. But like Ms. Gage, I won’t give up searching for a fissure in the workings of power, and here is where Butler helps.
Although she finds a foundation in the philosophy of Foucault, Butler takes up the question of political agency in a way that Foucault does not. In her discussion of the construction of gender, Butler contends that certain performances and rituals of the self become normative, while more incoherent performances, or subversions, merely serve to keep normative practices in tact (the “Other” against which the norm is once again defined). Moreover, she agrees that we can only express an ‘I’ through the language made available to us.
At the same time, however, Butler finds possibility in the “iterability of performativity,” and views this repetition with supplementation as “one that cannot disavow power as the condition of its own possibility” (p. xxv). What she seems to be saying here, is that there is possibility in the repetition of performances and in the possible supplement to or subtle shift in that repetition. Because there is movement, there is possibility. She does not dispute Foucault’s argument that power always produces within the same matrix of power, but she does raise the question of disruption within and through that same matrix. Tanetha brought us this example in class when she spoke about “using the master’s tools.” Butler, too, seems to believe, in her examples of gender ambiguity, that in its productive function, power may produce a different version of the repetition. She asks, “What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?” (p. 44). And although she does not necessarily answer such a question, she wonders if parody, hyperbole, dissonance, and confusion might not subvert in powerful ways.
In returning my thoughts to Ms. Gage, then, the production aspect of her class becomes critically important. The possibility for her students to create representations of their world through parody and dissonance, albeit always within the matrix of power and using the master’s tools, creates a small fissure for subversion to arise. Agency, for Butler, becomes a question of signification and resignification at work, and as Ms. Gage’s students resignify, a theory of agency is at work. It is the incompleteness of representation, the blip in the iteration, the et cetera, that opens the possible space for change.
And yet, Butler is not so naïve. She ends her book reminding us that all performances are not without their punitive consequences. She notes that we cannot go through the world feeling that our identities our unsuccessful or in constant subversion without great sacrifice and pain. “For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary” (p. 201). The construction of identities is not opposed to agency, she goes on, but “is a necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible.” Agency, too, must be intelligible within fields of power.
So, I end in a similar place to where I started: still wondering about critical teaching pedagogies and their consequences on students and teachers. Foucault and Butler offer a mollified and optimistic view at the same time. I turn, then, to that copy of the email I found while planning to write this paper for a suitable answer to my question about the compatibility of Foucault and critical pedagogy. To my question, my friend and colleague answered this: “any attempt to make [students’] experiences more equitable and humanizing is far from trivial.” That sounds pretty good to me.
References
Butler, J. (1990/1999/2006). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Bulter -- Locating Subversion
I really do think that Foucault and Butler complement each other nicely, so here are some other notes I've been thinking about incorporating into my crazy late paper.
practices become normative -- performances and rituals of self
"Sometimes gender ambiguity can operate precisely to contain or deflect non-normative sexual practice and thereby work to keep normative sexuality intact" (p. xiv) -- I'm not thinking about sexuality here, but the ways in which the non-normative serves to render the normative all the more normal
"an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates" (p. xv)
subversion carrying market value
Butler focuses more than Foucault, I think, on political agency, but she certainly complicates it as well -- "The iterability of performativity is a theory of agency, one that cannot disavow power as the condition of its own possibility" (p. xxv) -- agency is never isolated from power
We can only express an "I" through the language available to us
Power produces the subjects that it then judges and represents -- Foucault -- this is really important in my thinking about innovative and risk-taking teachers
So ... Is there a teaching subject not constituted by the discourse of the discipline of school? Does that make sense?
"parading in the mode of otherness" (p. 17)
"Is 'unity' necessary for effective political action?" (p. 21)
Butler speaks in terms of gender, but can we use her thinking to understand the performance of any identity -- that the "incoherent" and "discontinuous" define the normative
there are multiple teaching identities, but always constituted by the "field of power" into which they are articulated
the perceived cause becomes its effect -- power produces
Butler asks a lot of questions, but doesn't answer them. Still, the questions are productive too: "What possibility exists for the disruption of the oppositional binary itself?" (p. 37)
Prohibition -- Lacanian theory
Can there be a subversive?
"Power, rather than the law, encompasses both the juridical (prohibitive and regulatory) and the productive (inadvertently generative) functions of differential relations" (p. 40) -- everything emerges in the matrix of power
Important question: "What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?" (p. 44) Do they become mere parodies of the original? And is that subversive? Hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation (p. 43)
Confusion as a site for "intervention, exposure, and displacement of these reifications" (p. 43)
Becoming, then, is essential -- there is no origination or end
On Foucault -- bodies produce their own regulation (p. 183); the soul is present through its absence (huh?)
identity is a fabrication (p. 185)
"Hence, as a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences" (p. 190)
Agency is in the incompleteness, the possible "blip" in the iteration -- the supplement, the et cetera (p. 196)
Agency becomes a question of how signification and resignification work (p. 197)
"Indeed, to understand identity as a practice, and as a signifying practice, is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life" (p. 199)
Parody -- a failed copy
"For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary" (p. 201). "Construction is not opposed to agency; it is necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible."
The question is HOW to repeat and DISPLACE in local strategies
practices become normative -- performances and rituals of self
"Sometimes gender ambiguity can operate precisely to contain or deflect non-normative sexual practice and thereby work to keep normative sexuality intact" (p. xiv) -- I'm not thinking about sexuality here, but the ways in which the non-normative serves to render the normative all the more normal
"an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates" (p. xv)
subversion carrying market value
Butler focuses more than Foucault, I think, on political agency, but she certainly complicates it as well -- "The iterability of performativity is a theory of agency, one that cannot disavow power as the condition of its own possibility" (p. xxv) -- agency is never isolated from power
We can only express an "I" through the language available to us
Power produces the subjects that it then judges and represents -- Foucault -- this is really important in my thinking about innovative and risk-taking teachers
So ... Is there a teaching subject not constituted by the discourse of the discipline of school? Does that make sense?
"parading in the mode of otherness" (p. 17)
"Is 'unity' necessary for effective political action?" (p. 21)
Butler speaks in terms of gender, but can we use her thinking to understand the performance of any identity -- that the "incoherent" and "discontinuous" define the normative
there are multiple teaching identities, but always constituted by the "field of power" into which they are articulated
the perceived cause becomes its effect -- power produces
Butler asks a lot of questions, but doesn't answer them. Still, the questions are productive too: "What possibility exists for the disruption of the oppositional binary itself?" (p. 37)
Prohibition -- Lacanian theory
Can there be a subversive?
"Power, rather than the law, encompasses both the juridical (prohibitive and regulatory) and the productive (inadvertently generative) functions of differential relations" (p. 40) -- everything emerges in the matrix of power
Important question: "What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?" (p. 44) Do they become mere parodies of the original? And is that subversive? Hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation (p. 43)
Confusion as a site for "intervention, exposure, and displacement of these reifications" (p. 43)
Becoming, then, is essential -- there is no origination or end
On Foucault -- bodies produce their own regulation (p. 183); the soul is present through its absence (huh?)
identity is a fabrication (p. 185)
"Hence, as a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences" (p. 190)
Agency is in the incompleteness, the possible "blip" in the iteration -- the supplement, the et cetera (p. 196)
Agency becomes a question of how signification and resignification work (p. 197)
"Indeed, to understand identity as a practice, and as a signifying practice, is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life" (p. 199)
Parody -- a failed copy
"For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary" (p. 201). "Construction is not opposed to agency; it is necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible."
The question is HOW to repeat and DISPLACE in local strategies
Monday, November 24, 2008
Still working on some paper ideas... yes, late
I've been doing some thinking on the disciplining of teacher bodies in schools and how innovation is, in many ways, prohibited. Foucault and Butler will both be useful in sorting this out, and I'm just now starting to gather some ideas and notes. Bear with me. . . not everything below will be useful.
modifying the definition of the crime (p. 33)
Technology and techniques of power
"Justice pursues the body beyond all possible pain" (p. 34)
Economy of power
"They must if possible judge and condemn themselves" (p. 38)
"...reducing to the minimum the work of investigation and the mechanics of demonstration, the confession was therefore highly valued" (p. 39)
"It is as if investigation and punishment had become mixed" (p. 41)
"Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person" (p. 42)
Public execution and the ceremony of it... (p. 47)
"the truth-power relation remains at the heart of all mechanisms of punishment..." (p. 55)
Shift to a more generalized punishment
"it was an effort to adjust the mechanisms of power that frame the everyday lives of individuals; an adaptation and a refinement of the machinery that assumes responsibility for and places under surveillance their everyday behaviour, their identity, their activity, their apparently unimportant gestures..." (p. 78)
"there was too much power in the hands of the judges who were able to content themselves with futile evidence, providing it was 'legal' evidence, and who were allowed too great a freedom in the choice of penalty" (p. 79)
"The reform was not prepared outside the legal machinery and against all its representatives; it was prepared, for the most part, from within..." (p. 81)
"insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body" (p. 82)
vagabondage (p. 88)
"The least crime attacks the whole of society" (p. 90)
"If effect the offence opposes an individual to the entire social body; in order to punish him, society has the right to oppose him in its entirety" (p. 90)
"One must take into account not the past offence, but the future disorder." (p. 93)
"One must punish exactly enough to prevent repetition. There is, then, a shift in the mechanics of example..." (p. 93)
"Punishment has to make use not of the body, but of representation" (p. 94)
"punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty" (p. 108)
"learned economy of publicity" (p. 109)
"an inversion of the traditional discourse of the crime" (p. 112) -- shame upon the heads of the guilty -- punishment becomes a lesson
Part Three: Discipline
"infinitesimal power over the active body" (p. 137)
treating the body en masse -- control of bodies together in space; the object of control is not the behavior or the language of the body, "but the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization" (p. 137)
disciplines as "general formulas of domination"
The art of distributions
1. Discipline sometimes requires enclosure
2. Disciplinary machinery works space in a flexible and detailed way
3. Functional sites code space
4. Rank matters -- the place one occupies in classification (p. 145)
"Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations" (p. 146)
The ideal: maximum speed and maximum efficiency (p. 154)
Disciplinary time (p. 159) imposed on pedagogical practice -- when exams must be given and when students must be at a particular stage
"the ultimate capacity of an individual" -- to be useful "according to the level in the series that they are moving through" (p. 160)
the macro- and a micro-physics of power
"Thus a new demand appears to which discipline must respond: to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed. Discipline is no longer simply as art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine" (p. 164)
"The individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others."
Individuality: cellular, organic, genetic, and combinatory (p. 167)
Creates 'tactics' -- "the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes, mechanisms in which the product of the various forces is increased by their calculated combination are no doubt the highest form of disciplinary practice" (p. 167)
The means of correct training
"Instead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform mass, it separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units" (p. 170) -- where is teacher collaboration?
"Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals as both objects and as instruments of its exercise" (p. 170)
Coerces by means of observation -- hierarchized surveillance
Who ends up in this particular classroom?
"Discipline makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, subsitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes" (p. 177) -- a subtle power
A double system: "gratification-punishment" (p. 180)
"the disciplinary apparatuses hierarchized the 'good' and the 'bad' subjects in relation to one another" (p. 181) "Through this micro-economy of a perpetual penality operates a differentiation that is not one of acts, but of individuals themselves, of their nature, their potentialities, their level or their value."
"This distribution according to ranks or grade has a double role: it marks the gaps, hierarchizes qualities, skills and aptitudes; but it also punishes and rewards" (p. 181)
"a constant pressure to conform" (p. 182)
the regime of disciplinary power: 5 operations (p. 182) -- "In short, it normalizes" (pp. 183-84)
"It is not simply at the level of consciousness, of representation and in what one thinks one knows, but at the level of what makes possible the knowledge that is transformed into political investment" (p. 185) Discipline makes determines what is even knowable -- the power/knowledge crux
Examination and discipline "fix" individuals into places (p. 189) -- "formalization of the individual within power relations" (p. 190)
The "case" (p. 191)
Normalizing through comparison -- normal and abnormal
KEY: "In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production" (p. 194)
Panopticism
"the penetration of regulation into the smallest details of everyday life" (p. 198) -- "capillary function of power"
useful wherever a "particular form of behavior must be imposed" (p. 205)
exercise of power supervised by society as a whole
discipline mechanism -- power moves rapidly and lightly -- "the design of a subtle coercion for a society to come" (p. 209)
"discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions" (p. 219)
modifying the definition of the crime (p. 33)
Technology and techniques of power
"Justice pursues the body beyond all possible pain" (p. 34)
Economy of power
"They must if possible judge and condemn themselves" (p. 38)
"...reducing to the minimum the work of investigation and the mechanics of demonstration, the confession was therefore highly valued" (p. 39)
"It is as if investigation and punishment had become mixed" (p. 41)
"Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person" (p. 42)
Public execution and the ceremony of it... (p. 47)
"the truth-power relation remains at the heart of all mechanisms of punishment..." (p. 55)
Shift to a more generalized punishment
"it was an effort to adjust the mechanisms of power that frame the everyday lives of individuals; an adaptation and a refinement of the machinery that assumes responsibility for and places under surveillance their everyday behaviour, their identity, their activity, their apparently unimportant gestures..." (p. 78)
"there was too much power in the hands of the judges who were able to content themselves with futile evidence, providing it was 'legal' evidence, and who were allowed too great a freedom in the choice of penalty" (p. 79)
"The reform was not prepared outside the legal machinery and against all its representatives; it was prepared, for the most part, from within..." (p. 81)
"insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body" (p. 82)
vagabondage (p. 88)
"The least crime attacks the whole of society" (p. 90)
"If effect the offence opposes an individual to the entire social body; in order to punish him, society has the right to oppose him in its entirety" (p. 90)
"One must take into account not the past offence, but the future disorder." (p. 93)
"One must punish exactly enough to prevent repetition. There is, then, a shift in the mechanics of example..." (p. 93)
"Punishment has to make use not of the body, but of representation" (p. 94)
"punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty" (p. 108)
"learned economy of publicity" (p. 109)
"an inversion of the traditional discourse of the crime" (p. 112) -- shame upon the heads of the guilty -- punishment becomes a lesson
Part Three: Discipline
"infinitesimal power over the active body" (p. 137)
treating the body en masse -- control of bodies together in space; the object of control is not the behavior or the language of the body, "but the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization" (p. 137)
disciplines as "general formulas of domination"
The art of distributions
1. Discipline sometimes requires enclosure
2. Disciplinary machinery works space in a flexible and detailed way
3. Functional sites code space
4. Rank matters -- the place one occupies in classification (p. 145)
"Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations" (p. 146)
The ideal: maximum speed and maximum efficiency (p. 154)
Disciplinary time (p. 159) imposed on pedagogical practice -- when exams must be given and when students must be at a particular stage
"the ultimate capacity of an individual" -- to be useful "according to the level in the series that they are moving through" (p. 160)
the macro- and a micro-physics of power
"Thus a new demand appears to which discipline must respond: to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed. Discipline is no longer simply as art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine" (p. 164)
"The individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others."
Individuality: cellular, organic, genetic, and combinatory (p. 167)
Creates 'tactics' -- "the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes, mechanisms in which the product of the various forces is increased by their calculated combination are no doubt the highest form of disciplinary practice" (p. 167)
The means of correct training
"Instead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform mass, it separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units" (p. 170) -- where is teacher collaboration?
"Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals as both objects and as instruments of its exercise" (p. 170)
Coerces by means of observation -- hierarchized surveillance
Who ends up in this particular classroom?
"Discipline makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, subsitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes" (p. 177) -- a subtle power
A double system: "gratification-punishment" (p. 180)
"the disciplinary apparatuses hierarchized the 'good' and the 'bad' subjects in relation to one another" (p. 181) "Through this micro-economy of a perpetual penality operates a differentiation that is not one of acts, but of individuals themselves, of their nature, their potentialities, their level or their value."
"This distribution according to ranks or grade has a double role: it marks the gaps, hierarchizes qualities, skills and aptitudes; but it also punishes and rewards" (p. 181)
"a constant pressure to conform" (p. 182)
the regime of disciplinary power: 5 operations (p. 182) -- "In short, it normalizes" (pp. 183-84)
"It is not simply at the level of consciousness, of representation and in what one thinks one knows, but at the level of what makes possible the knowledge that is transformed into political investment" (p. 185) Discipline makes determines what is even knowable -- the power/knowledge crux
Examination and discipline "fix" individuals into places (p. 189) -- "formalization of the individual within power relations" (p. 190)
The "case" (p. 191)
Normalizing through comparison -- normal and abnormal
KEY: "In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production" (p. 194)
Panopticism
"the penetration of regulation into the smallest details of everyday life" (p. 198) -- "capillary function of power"
useful wherever a "particular form of behavior must be imposed" (p. 205)
exercise of power supervised by society as a whole
discipline mechanism -- power moves rapidly and lightly -- "the design of a subtle coercion for a society to come" (p. 209)
"discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions" (p. 219)
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Some Notes on Bauman's Globalization
Introduction:
Globalization as a vogue word – pretends to make things transparent but is actually more opaque
Time/space compression – unifying and dividing effects – “What appears as globalization for some means localization for others; signaling a new freedom for some, upon many other is descends as an uninvited and cruel fate” (p. 2)
ON THE MOVE – even if we physically stay put
“globals” set the rules of the life game – consider in relation to Bourdieu’s field
“Being local in a globalized world is a sign of social deprivation and degradation” (p. 2) – not sure I agree – consider anthropological studies. He says they are losing their “meaning-generating and meaning-negotiating capacity” – yet, isn’t that a construct anyway? Could the shifts be agentic?
Globalization from the bottom up – globalization is also LOCAL – glocal
“An integral part of the globalizing process is progressive spatial segregation, separation and exclusion” (p. 3) – with that I agree
Is there really a “receiving end” of globalization?
Bourdieu might critique this – where are the micro level practices that support Bauman’s macro level analysis? How do individuals actually ADAPT to globalization in surprising ways?
Chapter 1: Time and Class
Last quarter century as the Great War of Independence from Space – freeing decision-makers and decision-making from the constraints of territory (p. 8) – consider our current economic crisis – there was no money where we pretended there was
Companies belong to share-holders – who are free from spatial determination
“Whoever is free to run away from the locality, is free to run away from the consequences” (p. 9)
MOBILITY – powerful and coveted – “freedom from the duty to contribute to daily life and the perpetuation of the community” (p. 9) – who bears the consequences?
Mobility is also freedom from otherness – “the moment ‘otherness’ tried to flex its muscles and make its strength felt, capital would have little difficulty with packing its tents and find an environment that was more hospitable – that is, unresistant, malleable, soft” (p. 11). “No need to engage if avoidance will do.” – consider habitus and field here – social reproduction is easier than change; crisis is avoided
Freedom of movement and the self-constitution of societes
Distance and geography as social products – national boundaries and identities are blurred – hybridized (p. 12)
Bill Clinton – no difference between domestic and foreign policy (Sarah Palin, anyone?)
Near and far binary – dissolved? “distinctions of here and there no longer mean anything” (p. 18) – but Bauman also points out the consequences of separation as it exists have ever more profound consequences
Fragility and short life-span of communities (p. 15)
“Cheap communication means quick overflowing, stifling or elbowing away the information acquired as much as it means the speedy arrival of news” (p. 16) – forgetting is easy when new information is readily available
Wetware– what's that?
New speed, new polarization
“rather than homogenizing the human condition, the technological annulment of temporal/spatial distances tends to polarize it” (p. 18) – freedom for one means a marginalization of another
“the mobile elite, the elite of mobility” (p. 19)
Cyberspace as freedom from the human body and “security of isolation” – p. 20
“Deterritorialization of power therefore goes hand in hand with the ever stricter structuration of the territory” (p. 20) – Bauman goes on to talk about Flutsy “interdictory spaces” – I think he is getting at the loss of public space, but I’m not sure
“The elites have chosen isolation and pay for it lavishly and willingly. The rest of the population finds itself cut off and forced to pay the heavy cultural, psychological and political price of their new isolation” (p. 21)
“Urban territory becomes the battlefield of continuous space war…” (p. 22) -- bricoleurs -- “rituals, dressing strangely, striking bizarre attitudes, breaking rules, breaking bottles, windows, heads, issuing rhetorically challenges to the law” are attempts to make territorial claims audible – playing the game – consider Bourdieu here
Exterritoriality of the elite is forced territoriality of the rest (p. 23) – which feels evermore like prison
“…local populations are more liked loose bunches of untied ends” (p. 24)
Meeting places served as spaces where norms were created – “Hence a territory stripped of public space provides little chance for norms being debated, for values to be confronted, to clash and to be negotiated” (p. 25).
Chapter 2: Space Wars: A Career Report
Measuring the world with the body
The battle of the maps
“The elusive goal of the modern space war was the subordination of social space to one and only one, officially approved and state-sponsored map” (p. 31)
Space Wars: Uniformity, regularity, perfection, order against chaos, randomness, the haphazard, accidental, and ambivalent
"In the space of the city, just as in human life, one needs to distinguish and keep apart the functions of work, home life, shopping, entertainment, cult, administration; each function needs a place of its own, while every place should serve one and only one function" (p. 42). This seems to contradict the notion of technological globalization to me. Isn't space compressed? Maybe he's speaking of a different time here.
How do the Space Wars relate to schools and education (as I think they do).
The death of the street.
"The suspicion against others, the intolerance of difference, the resentment of strangers, and the demands to separate and banish them, as well as the hysterical, paranoiac concern with 'law and order', all tend to climb to their highest pitch in the most uniform, the most racially, ethnically and class-wise segregated, homogeneous local communities" (p. 47). Think about education here as well.
"Keeping our neighbors at arm's length would take care of the dilemma and make the choice unnecessary; it staves off the occasions when the choice between love and hate needs to be made" (p. 48)
He seems to suggest that even though there is no more public space there is also no private space -- storage of data about everything we do online especially (p. 50) -- "the surveilled, supplying the data for storage, are prime -- and willing -- factors in the surveillance."
Being included in that database means one has "credibility" -- literally. The database as an instrument of selection, separation, and exclusion.
Synopticon: "from a situation where the many watch the few to a situation where the few watch the many" (p. 51). Illusion of mobility.Locals watch the globals.
Chapter 3: After the Nation-state -- What?
The nation-state is withering away due to transnational forces.
Loss of control -- "new world disorder" (p. 57)
Globalization refers to "the global effects, notoriously unintended and unanticipated, rather than to global initiatives and undertakings" (p. 60). Notion of a lack of control here -- can't help but think about the global markets getting away from us
What is a "state's" identity then? He refers to a lack of cultural resources (p. 62) to maintain distinctiveness, but what does that mean?
States serve to protect the interests of corporations -- makes me think of the Republican party and rampant deregulation
"The dominant pattern may be described as "releasing the brakes": deregulation, liberalization, flexibility, increasing fluidity, and facilitating the transactions on the financial real estate and labour markets, easing the tax burden." Here, btw, is what that looks like:
The global hierarchy of mobility
'glocalization' -- unbreakable unity between 'globalizing' and 'localizing' pressures -- (p. 70). This is where Bauman may contradict himself. He referred earlier to the "receiving end" of globalization, and I get where he's coming from there, but 'glocalization' is a two-way flow of influence. Hybridity, if you will.
Chapter 4: Tourists and Vagabonds
Chapter 5: Global Law, Local Orders
No time for more notes, but I'm really interested in the "prisonization" of inmates and how this connects with Bourdieu -- is this a shift in habitus?
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Bourdieu, Education, and Me
I care about this class because I’ve seen what it can do to you. I’ve seen it change you. You have to decide if you want to be here. You won’t have experiences like this again. Not in this school. This class matters to me. Something cool and magical is gonna happen if you stay. Be grateful. I expect something of you. Rise up.
(Field notes: September 6, 2007)
Introduction
I begin with the words of Ms. Gage and a description of this particular situation because my goal in this paper is to use the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to better understand the context of this classroom and the social identities constructed therein. As a research assistant on this project which analyzes critical engagement in this high-poverty, urban high school English classroom, I could not help but think of Ms. Gage and her students as I read Swartz’s text on Bourdieu, and several questions frame my thinking as I begin making connections between my observations and his work. How are students’ identities shaped by their social conditions and in what ways do they resist or give in to those conditions? What strategies do they use in the practice of identity making and how does literacy learning inform those strategies? How does Ms. Gage define and redefine engagement for her students knowing they come from high-poverty social class backgrounds? Finally, how does all of this shape students’ visions for their futures and agency in their design of them?
These questions are big, I realize, and this paper will serve as only a starting point for thinking through them. Following Bourdieu’s advice, I will attempt to think about these questions on both the macro and micro levels without necessarily delving into transcripts of data or language analysis – although this will come later. What follows, then, is a view of the research context through the lens of a number of Bourdieu’s constructs: field, habitus, social reproduction, and change.
Field and Legitimacy
Bourdieu writes that power resides in the “belief in the legitimacy of the words and of him who utters them” (cited in Swartz, 1997, p. 88). On many levels, the school where we conduct this classroom ethnography is in what Bourdieu might call a crisis of legitimacy. School enrollments in this large metropolitan district have been dropping consistently over the past decade, and this particular school is no exception from the trend. According to a local newspaper, the drop in enrollment is due in part to a “school choice” program. This program allows parents the flexibility to choose the schools their children will attend regardless of proximity to home neighborhoods, but increasingly, it also means that middle-class families are choosing to send their children outside their home districts.
Many students who attend the high school do not live near it, and those who do, are often part of a lineage of relatives who have attended the school and seek to maintain tradition. The school is also a site for Somali and Latino English Language Learners (ELL) in the district, and 78% of the school’s students qualify for free and reduced lunch. As such, students tend to bus from various locations and the school struggles to maintain active after school programs – athletic, academic, and otherwise.
Bourdieu’s concept of field is an important one here because it offers a way to understand the ways in which economic and political interests are in play, despite the ways in which they are misrecognized by society. Instead of recognizing how schools are subject to dominant ideologies of open choice and freedom of the market, parents and the media might see “failing” schools instead as the result of offering the wrong “choices” for students – or a matter of what Bourdieu refers to as “taste.” The concept of field denotes social spaces of “production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors” (Swartz, p. 117). As such, public education might be viewed as a field in struggle with other fields such as business as it fights to define itself outside the social constraints of market thinking, while, according to Bourdieu, it defines itself through that very struggle. When a school such as our research site fails to meet standards as determined by a dominant group, it also serves to legitimate that standard. Bourdieu points out that while standards are absolutely arbitrary, the consequences of failing to meet them are not (Swartz, 1997). For this school, failing to meet the arbitrary standard of a “sellable” school could mean failing to exist at all.
Field offers a way of thinking through resistance to domination as well. Perhaps most significant within Bourdieu’s notion of resistance is that struggle takes place “within the logic of reproduction” (Swartz, p. 121). In other words, because the struggle is a fight over legitimacy within the field, there is little social transformation. Thus, even as this school attempts to make itself legitimate, it can do so only in the eyes of a larger field of power which determines its legitimacy. Thus, the field never changes, only the potential position of actors within it. Fields impose on actors the rules of the game. In this case, the game to be played is that of being perceived as better than another school despite the social constraints of funding, bussing, attendance, and their link to poverty.
Habitus
Beyond the institutional context, influenced as it is by a struggle for legitimacy, I am interested as well in how that struggle informs identities at a group and individual level within the classroom – in both productive and restrictive ways. The excerpt that starts this paper offers one example. Due to a struggle for enrollments at district level, Ms. Gage must sell her class as a “magical” one that will “change” her students. At the same time, she expects “deep” thinking and prolonged effort from her students despite the movement out of her class that she witnesses weekly. An important aspect of this research, then, is whether her students take up or reject her challenge for them and the particular strategies they utilize to do so.
Applying Bourdieu’s notion of habitus offers an understanding of the impact of the institutional context as embodied in individuals. Bourdieu argues that cultural capital exists in three forms: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. The first of these is the dispositions internalized by individuals while the second refers to objects that require particular abilities to use and the third to the educational credentialing system. Each of these influence individuals’ habitus, or the “deep structuring cultural matrix” (Swartz, p. 104) that mediates action. In other words, the struggles within fields of power at the school level inform the dispositions, beliefs, and perceived opportunities of its students. When other students see their classmates leaving the school and hear about how their school compares with others in the district (something many of them spoke about), they internalize structural disadvantages and come to believe that certain opportunities, such as a rigorous education and college, are “not for the likes of us” (Swartz, p. 106). They begin, as well, to view their hopes and chances in light of others’ expectations of them. Indeed, the individual who is socialized into such thinking is not in opposition to society, according to Bourdieu, but is “one of its forms of existence” (Swartz, p. 98). Society is reproduced with little energy exerted through the class habitus of individuals.
Change
Swartz makes clear that Bourdieu’s theories of capital, habitus, and field are better suited to understanding social reproduction than they are to understanding change, but that does not exclude the possibility for locating agency in the everyday practices of individuals. Agency, too, may be misrecognized. Bourdieu refers to actors as “strategic improvisers” who act upon opportunities within constraints. Habitus, according to Swartz, privileges action that is governed by a “practical sense” of how to move in a social world (p. 115). What is practical to do, say, or believe depends, then, on the best method for getting along in the world.
In a way, Ms. Gage attempts to bring students into what Bourdieu refers to as a situation of crisis which “disrupt[s] the immediate adjustment of habitus to field” (Swartz, p. 113). Only in such moments is a redistribution of capital possible. At the same time, he points out that not all moments are taken up because resignation to habitus is far easier than revolt – although certainly there are consequences for both. My interest, then, lies in identifying the moments where Ms. Gage attempts to open up a space for revolt for her students while realizing that structures continually constraint their possibilities. Given the nature of our conversations with Ms. Gage and her students, it is evident that they see fairly clearly the power relations that structure their lives and struggle to locate the resources to change them. How, then, do they begin to chip away at a habitus shaped by disadvantage?
One way in which Ms. Gage attempts to open up space for resistance and change is through production. As a documentary film making course, she engages her students in constant analysis of representations and definitions of their identities and social worlds, what Bourdieu refers to as the struggle over classification. Critical readings of the world around them encourage students to see their own lives differently and more importantly, to produce alternate visions of social worlds in their work. This engagement in the fight over symbolic representation is one way in which students begin to locate agency within structures – by recognizing and talking back to those structures. The strategies which they employ, even at a micro level, become what de Certeau (1984) calls the “everyday creativity” with which individuals subtly “rent” capital where they might otherwise not own it.
Conclusion
I have merely skimmed the surface of possibilities here for using Bourdieu to grapple with the data we have collected from our study. On a broad level, applying this theoretical framework seems to make obvious sense, but on a more micro level, writing through a few of my ideas also points to the nuances of Bourdieu’s work which may be valuable at the level of language and body as well. Perhaps most valuable for my future research is how readily Bourdieu applies to the orchestration of identities as socially constructed responses to surrounding structures. Despite the constraints, I view this still as what
References
de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life.
Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.
Grasping Bourdieu
I'm trying to process some ideas for my Bourdieu paper and am not finding it easy in the least. I'm interested in writing about agency in his work in order to think through a connection that I find with Bauman's notion of production in a digital age. At the same time, I think I need to spend my five pages on Bourdieu alone in order to know his ideas better. I can bring Bauman back later.
So, I'm feeling a little behind on this paper process (as far as the actual writing goes -- the thinking has been ongoing). Some notes here may help.
Production -- There's cultural production and reproduction, but also an individual agency within those constructs. Structure and agency. And redistribution. Obviously I don't know what to say about this yet.
Legitimation, Recognition, Misrecognition -- I'm really interested in this idea. Habitus is formed, partly, by what others legitimate. As is Symbolic Capital. This process of socialization works only through the process of recognition. Of being recognized as a certain kind of person and not of another. Bourdieu also makes clear that Fields are defined by the struggles between them -- that inclusion in a particular field means exclusion from another.
Whiteness -- Bourdieu also has me thinking back to Thandeka's book Learning to Be White (which I cannot locate in my collection right now). She argues that white people experience a loss as their white communities teach them racial separation. This loss, she believes, is abusive and painful. Is it possible, then, that as white people develop habitus around a racially separated selves that they experience a loss as well when faced with their privilege? In other words, learning privilege is painful because it means separation from a white community embodied in habitus. This maybe doesn't make any sense, but again, I'm processing.
Determinism -- Bourdieu tries really hard not to be deterministic (or that's Swartz's take). This relates again to agency, but I want to locate the places for the agency. Bourdieu seems to only hint at it at times.
Taste -- A student in the classroom I observed once said that people don't separate based on race any longer, but on style. She is a white student, but several students of all races seemed to agree with her. How does this relate to what Bourdieu says about taste and what Bauman says about style?
Mobility -- Having social, cultural, and symbolic capital offers the individual mobility -- moving between Fields, perhaps, and social worlds. This, as we talked about last week, is what we want to teach our students. Yet, I'm a bit uneasy about mobility. In all of the movement, who gets left behind? I rejected a while ago any notion of the authentic self, but that doesn't mean that our society has rejected that notion. So in the process of moving from here to there, where do individuals experience loss of a perceived idea of self, community, being?
So, I'm feeling a little behind on this paper process (as far as the actual writing goes -- the thinking has been ongoing). Some notes here may help.
Production -- There's cultural production and reproduction, but also an individual agency within those constructs. Structure and agency. And redistribution. Obviously I don't know what to say about this yet.
Legitimation, Recognition, Misrecognition -- I'm really interested in this idea. Habitus is formed, partly, by what others legitimate. As is Symbolic Capital. This process of socialization works only through the process of recognition. Of being recognized as a certain kind of person and not of another. Bourdieu also makes clear that Fields are defined by the struggles between them -- that inclusion in a particular field means exclusion from another.
Whiteness -- Bourdieu also has me thinking back to Thandeka's book Learning to Be White (which I cannot locate in my collection right now). She argues that white people experience a loss as their white communities teach them racial separation. This loss, she believes, is abusive and painful. Is it possible, then, that as white people develop habitus around a racially separated selves that they experience a loss as well when faced with their privilege? In other words, learning privilege is painful because it means separation from a white community embodied in habitus. This maybe doesn't make any sense, but again, I'm processing.
Determinism -- Bourdieu tries really hard not to be deterministic (or that's Swartz's take). This relates again to agency, but I want to locate the places for the agency. Bourdieu seems to only hint at it at times.
Taste -- A student in the classroom I observed once said that people don't separate based on race any longer, but on style. She is a white student, but several students of all races seemed to agree with her. How does this relate to what Bourdieu says about taste and what Bauman says about style?
Mobility -- Having social, cultural, and symbolic capital offers the individual mobility -- moving between Fields, perhaps, and social worlds. This, as we talked about last week, is what we want to teach our students. Yet, I'm a bit uneasy about mobility. In all of the movement, who gets left behind? I rejected a while ago any notion of the authentic self, but that doesn't mean that our society has rejected that notion. So in the process of moving from here to there, where do individuals experience loss of a perceived idea of self, community, being?
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Bauman and Identity
I returned to Bauman's Consuming Life in order to take my discussion of his ideas beyond my own housing issues (although they are still significant and interesting to me). As it relates to my own focus in both teaching and research, Bauman's discussion of identity was most powerful to me.
On this topic, he writes
Bauman goes on to say,
This is similar to to Bauman's earlier discussion of England's immigration policy where the needs of the market are given "the right to define the 'needs of the country' and to decide what (or whom) the country needs and what (or whom) it does not need" (p. ?). And what the market seeks, according to Bauman, is the "exemplary consumer."
We can bring such thinking back to education as well. Schools are constantly under pressure to prepare students for a global, neoliberal world where market forces drive the needs of the work force. Locally, then, schools are forced to constantly reconsider the ways in which to prepare their students in a competitive market. And on the level of the individual, students need to be what James Gee calls "shape-shifting, portfolio people" -- fluid not only in skill, but fluid in being as well.
Bauman also brings in the growing ubiquity of online worlds where identities are even less fixed (if that's possible). He writes, "The wondrous advantage of the virtual life space over the 'offline' consists in the possibility to get the identity recognized without actually practising it" (p. 114).
What strikes me as ultimately important here is the need for identities to be recognized if they are to be legitimate at all. So while there seems to be agency in the fluidity and constant becoming of identities, structural forces also stand ready to name some identities more valuable than others. And according to Bauman, those identities are those most able to consume. The failed consumer, or the underclass of which Bauman writes, does not have the agency to write the stories of their own identities.
The second part of Bauman's quote above, about practising identity (love the British spelling) also has significance to education. If we want our students to be constantly shape-shifting, does this mean they perform any of their identities well? In fact, if getting recognized is what defines an identity, perhaps doing an identity well enough is all that matters.
On this topic, he writes
In the liquid modern society of consumers no identities are gifts at birth, none is 'given', let alone given once and for all and in a secure fashion. Identities are projects: tasks to be undertaken, diligently performed and seen through to infinitely remote completion (p. 110).I'm of two minds in thinking about this statement because on the one hand, I like very much the idea of identities in a constant state of becoming (the post-structuralist notion of identities as fluid, not fixed). And I'd hesitate to say this is a quality exclusively of a liquid modern state, although perhaps things are more fluid now. And I would agree that the project of identity is something more evident in media than before. The ability to reinvent yourself or to be 'born again' can be found everywhere.
Bauman goes on to say,
Remember that consumers are driven by the need to 'commoditize' themselves -- remake themselves into attractive commodities -- and pressed to deploy all the usual stratagems and expedients of marketing practice for that purpose (p. 111).Here is where I am of another mind (or on the other hand -- whichever of my metaphors you prefer to follow) because I do see how this remaking of identity is problematic given the 'commoditization' of self and the need to make oneself attractive to others. In the first sense of identity as fluid, one need not be any one thing, but in this second sense, one need be all things to all people. In other words, the marketing of the self means that someone, somewhere determines whether you fit the right criteria for a particular way of being.
This is similar to to Bauman's earlier discussion of England's immigration policy where the needs of the market are given "the right to define the 'needs of the country' and to decide what (or whom) the country needs and what (or whom) it does not need" (p. ?). And what the market seeks, according to Bauman, is the "exemplary consumer."
We can bring such thinking back to education as well. Schools are constantly under pressure to prepare students for a global, neoliberal world where market forces drive the needs of the work force. Locally, then, schools are forced to constantly reconsider the ways in which to prepare their students in a competitive market. And on the level of the individual, students need to be what James Gee calls "shape-shifting, portfolio people" -- fluid not only in skill, but fluid in being as well.
Bauman also brings in the growing ubiquity of online worlds where identities are even less fixed (if that's possible). He writes, "The wondrous advantage of the virtual life space over the 'offline' consists in the possibility to get the identity recognized without actually practising it" (p. 114).
What strikes me as ultimately important here is the need for identities to be recognized if they are to be legitimate at all. So while there seems to be agency in the fluidity and constant becoming of identities, structural forces also stand ready to name some identities more valuable than others. And according to Bauman, those identities are those most able to consume. The failed consumer, or the underclass of which Bauman writes, does not have the agency to write the stories of their own identities.
The second part of Bauman's quote above, about practising identity (love the British spelling) also has significance to education. If we want our students to be constantly shape-shifting, does this mean they perform any of their identities well? In fact, if getting recognized is what defines an identity, perhaps doing an identity well enough is all that matters.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Consuming Life
With the housing market on my brain lately, Bauman's discussion of the urge and haste to discard and replace in a consumerist society instead of protecting for durability and longevity struck me as relevant to my own situation. Upon first meeting with potential realtors to help sell my house, the need to update my stove and refrigerator was made clear -- despite never having had a problem in all of the time I owned them. Now prettier and less solid items sit in their place, but it takes a little longer to boil water. The producers of my old Sears Kenmore stove from 1960 would be proud to know that their product made it through several tides of change over the years, while the sales person for my new model hardly tried to sell me a warranty. What's the point, right? I'll just get a new one when this one breaks down. Perhaps this example is a little mundane, but I think Bauman gets at something important when he writes:
Is this illusion, founded on a lie, what Bauman refers to as "subjectivity fetishism"? That in a consumerist society out selves become what we fetishize? The Cartesian "I shop, therefore I am"? Here's a spot where I need some class discussion.
I have more I want to think through in this post, but in the sake of time I think I'll just move toward an ending with this: I'm intrigued as well by what Bauman's Consuming Life means for education. I'm worried, as he is, about the "causalities of consumerism" -- those who are marooned by the shift from a producer to consumer society. As students imagine and design their futures, for example, can their illusions ever become reality? Does our society push them ever toward NOT reaching their goals and meeting their desires (so they'll abandon them and move onto to new hip, interest free ones)? How does the uncertainty of time and the impossibility of 'telos' inform our teaching and students' learning?
Questions to ponder. In a later post, perhaps. Until then.
So when those objects of yesterday's desires and those past investments of hope break their promises and fail to deliver the instant and complete satisfaction hoped for, they should be abandoned...Consumerism is tied to our hopes and our desires -- who we imagine ourselves to be. My stove and fridge represent more than working appliances. They represent the illusion of a better life, a new beginning. The entire "staging" of my house for potential buyers relates to this illusion of a better way of being available through the purchase of my house.
Is this illusion, founded on a lie, what Bauman refers to as "subjectivity fetishism"? That in a consumerist society out selves become what we fetishize? The Cartesian "I shop, therefore I am"? Here's a spot where I need some class discussion.
I have more I want to think through in this post, but in the sake of time I think I'll just move toward an ending with this: I'm intrigued as well by what Bauman's Consuming Life means for education. I'm worried, as he is, about the "causalities of consumerism" -- those who are marooned by the shift from a producer to consumer society. As students imagine and design their futures, for example, can their illusions ever become reality? Does our society push them ever toward NOT reaching their goals and meeting their desires (so they'll abandon them and move onto to new hip, interest free ones)? How does the uncertainty of time and the impossibility of 'telos' inform our teaching and students' learning?
Questions to ponder. In a later post, perhaps. Until then.
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