“Censorship and censorial debate are denials of our right and our capacity to explore and change our alienated and/or colonised selves and the discourse which continues to mystify our conditions.”
- Marica Langton, Well I Heard it on the Radio, and I Saw it on the Television …., 1989: 57.
1519: map of Brazil issued by Portuguese explorers.
30 May 2008: “Members of an unknown Amazon Basin tribe and their dwellings are seen during a flight over the Brazilian state of Acre along the border with Peru.” (Sydney Morning Herald).*
* (29 May 2008: “Funai fotografa índios isolados na fronteira do Brasil com o Peru” (National Indigenous Peoples Foundation, the government agency for “protection and education of indigenous peoples”).)
Is this for real? I’m sure I’ve got a drunkenly written film script sitting around somewhere that involves Mal Brough being presented, via Keith Windschuttle, with a medal from a society of the same name.
I couldn’t have scripted for this, though, so it must be true. See you all outside COAG next month.
“The idea is to remove hierarchy rather than deliberately behave as if there is no hierarchy. That is solid bad faith. There will never be a total absence of hierarchy. And that’s what’s fun in the classroom, it’s not that you’re being ethical, it’s that the ethical might flower.”
- Spivak in Mark Sanders’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory, p. 120
s0metim3s tags me for the Passion Quilt. What am *I* most passionate for students to learn about? Didn’t someone ask me that in an ‘Introduction to Tutoring’ workshop once? The theory being that if YOU just finds YOUR teaching passion YOU will be a happier and harder worker. Yes … I’m afraid that the very idea of ‘a passion quilt’ makes me think primarily of the uses or work of passion in the humanities and social sciences departments that employ me for tutorials and lectures from time to time. Passion is sacrificial labour for many of my colleagues; the more under-resourced the department, the more people I find who remind me of social workers (in all their compassion). I agree with s0metim3s that “passion cannot be imparted”; “it can be sparked” - I don’t really care whether I do that or not, especially in Weeks 11 & 12 of semester when the students who are still turning up demonstrate so much exhausted, bored passivity (enough to bring on social work burnout - after all I’ve done for them!).
I do feel passion in the classroom sometimes, I feel it spilling from me in the amorous and angry sense - bell hooks has spoken of the erotics of teaching (and I don’t mean in the sense that Helen Garner did in The First Stone). But it’s usually just because I’m cheerfully getting off on myself, what I know and what I care about. Who knows how and where the spark that ignites and connects burns; hopefully not only in my righteous breast. Then again, it worked for Lulu (third from the right).
In whipping the thread up and off, I don’t know any other “educators” with blogs to tag … so I will just say this - liberation from pedagogy!
(PS Let there be no doubt - the image is a still from To Sir With Love).
“… whatever happens, the kids have got to go to school, the adults have got to turn up to work, there’ve got to be police and we’ve got to have measures that stop the booze and the drugs and everything else which leads to the horrible things that we now know was happening.”
- Former Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, here.
I just found Austrade’s Globalisation Posters and Activities Books.
Particularly since the NT intervention lurched onto the public scene last year, I feel the urge to keep up the critique of government and non-government ‘helping’ regimes. I’ve quoted it before, and I’ll quote it now: “the judgement ‘good’ was not invented by those to whom goodness was shown!” (Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality).
So. On this. Whilst flicking through the notes I had made whilst I was overseas, I was reminded to share this little gem with the critiquitariat: Arzu Rugs. It was advertised in an aeroplane magazine, I forget which one. At first glance it seemed to be the usual marketing package of decorative non-western crafts attached to a charity venture: ‘conscious’ consumption with an ‘ethnic’ feel. Arzu brokers the sale of rugs crafted by Afghan women, “creating opportunities for women to obtain a consistent income”. But their trade has an even sharper twist than similar ‘fair trade’ products: it’s not just money, its empowerment, too, apparently:
“Core to the Arzu approach is our social contract with weaver families where we agree to pay the weavers market rate for their weaving, plus an additional 50% bonus on top-quality carpets.
In return for this higher wage, families must agree to send all of their children under age 15 to school full-time and to have at least one woman from each household attend literacy classes. Where children cannot attend a government school, Arzu partners with education providers and pays for classes to be set up in villages. Since most girls are well behind the education standards for their age group, Arzu funds “Fast Track” classes so they can catch up and join their peers at a government school wherever possible.”
This is a remarkably explicit ‘contract’ imposed on ‘third world women’ by ‘first world women’ in the name of salvation from the consequences of imperialist wars brought to the former by the kinsmen of the latter. I mean, those girls and women should sure be grateful. I wonder what they did before Western intervention in their lives?
Image: Gertrude Duby Blom with Lacandan friend, date unknown.
“We formed the first governmental expedition of the State of Chiapas to establish contact with the Lacandon Indians. A contact not to exploit them, nor to study them anthropologically. The mules carried very little of our things, the majority of the cargo were gifts for the Lacandon from the government. Our goal was to investigate the necessities of these remote Indians, to construct modern houses and to establish a relationship between them and the government.”
- Franz and Gertrude Blom, La Selva Lacandona, Vol. 1, p.69, 1955.
“A discipline is always something other than an exploitation of this territory, and therefore a demonstration of an idea of knowledge [savoir]. And this idea of knowledge [savoir] should be understood as a regulation of the rapport between … [knowledge and ignorance]. It is a way of defining an idea of the thinkable, an idea of what the objects of knowledge themselves can think and know. It is therefore always a certain regulation of dissensus, of its dehiscence [écart] in relation to the ethical order, according to which a certain type of condition implies a certain type of thought. (…)
… a discipline is always much more than an ensemble of procedures which permit the thought of a given territory of objects. It is first the constitution of this territory itself, and therefore the establishment of a certain distribution of the thinkable. As such, it supposes a cut in the common fabric of manifestations of thought and language. The disciplines found their territory by establishing a dehiscence between what the phrases of the woodworker say and what they mean, between what the woodworker describes to us and the truth hidden behind the description. (…)
In-disciplinary thought… must practice a certain ignorance. It must ignore disciplinary boundaries to thereby restore their status as weapons in a dispute. This is what I have done, for example, in taking the phrases of the joiner [woodworker] out of their normal context. This normal context is that of social history, which treats them as expressions of the worker’s condition. I have taken a different path: these phrases do not describe a lived situation. They reinvent the relation between a situation and the forms of visibility and capacities of thought which are attached to it. Put differently, this narrative [récit] is a myth in the Platonic sense: it is an anti-Platonic myth, a counter-story of destiny. The Platonic myth prescribes a relationship of reciprocal confirmation between a condition and a thought. The counter-myth of the joiner breaks the circle. The indisciplinary procedure must thus create the textual and signifying space in which this relation of myth to myth is visible and thinkable. (…)
This implies another practice - an indisciplinary practice - of philosophy, of its relation to the human sciences … seiz[ing] the moment in which the philosophical pretension to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming the declaration … of the arbitrary nature of this order. (…)
… at the moment in which it [philosophy] wants to found its status as a discipline of disciplines, it produces this reversal: the foundation of foundation is a story. And philosophy says to those knowledges [savoir] who are certain of their methods: methods are recounted stories. This does not mean that they are null and void. It means that they are weapons in a war; they are not tools which facilitate the examination of a territory but weapons which serve to establish its always uncertain boundary.
There is no assured boundary separating the territory of sociology from that of philosophy of that of the historians from literature. No well-defined boundary separates the discourse of the woodworker who is the object of science from the discourse of science itself. After all is said and done, to trace these boundaries is to trace the boundary between those who have thought through this question and those who have not. This boundary is never traced other than in the form of a story. Only the language of stories can trace the boundary, forcing the aporia of absence of final reason from the reasons of the disciplines. (…)
The poetics of knowledges does not claim that the disciplines are false knowledges. It claims that they are disciplines, ways of intervening in the interminable war between ways of declaring what a body can do, in the interminable war between the reasons of equality and those of inequality. It does not claim that they are invalid because they tell stories. It claims that they must borrow their presentations of objects, their procedures for interaction and their forms of argument from language and common thought.”
- Jacques Rancière, trans. Jon Roffe, Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge, Parrhesia, No.1, 2006, pp.1-12.
Powered by WordPress