First, current experience: I've been reading Mary Catherine Bateson's
_Peripheral Visions_ for a couple of weeks now, whenever I'm not
doing something else. I'm reading it in a particular context: a
woman I barely know, named Liz, recommended it -- with some passion
-- during a conversation about school and schooling, over coffee at
a function in Halifax. She's in the School of Occupational Therapy
at Dalhousie University, and in most ways we have little in common.
But the conversation was one which led me to believe that the Bateson
book was one I ought to read. I bought it some weeks later, in
Montreal. All of that has a lot to do with how I understand the book
(the woman in Halifax was agreeing with a point I had made about
learning being usually a byproduct of an activity, not what the
activity was focused on); I read the first few chapters on my way
home from Montreal, where I'd given a workshop on a new cross-
disciplinary first year course and thus was thinking about that.
But the extent to which those things are what the book is actually
_about_ isn't clear to me. There are lots of things in the book
about experience of and in other cultures, and across cultures,
which are becoming more central as I read, and there are other issues
in the book which are a surprise to me but which match things I've
been thinking about anyway: for instance, she makes the point a
number of times that we normally don't learn ahead of activity, but
during it, and we engage in the activity before we can possibly
understand what the activity is. All that obviously has resonance
for my interests in language and literacy learning and practice (in
the old drill-ahead-of-activity sense) as opposed to praxis, but
it's not clear to me that another reader, with different hobbyhorses,
would see the same things.
Further, it's not clear to me whether, if this question had been
raised on another network, I'd be responding with different issues
-- reconfiguring my memory of and engagement with the book to allow
me to say things more relevant to the interests of that list -- say,
the children's literature list, or the First-Year Experience list.
One thing that seems clear to me (but, again, this matches my
prejudices, and what Doug Vipond and I think we found in our research
on "literary reading") is that the book is functioning as a web of
utterances in a larger web of dialogues that I'm engaged in. I'm in
contact with Liz on email about the book, and I'm reading chunks of
it aloud to my wife, and I'm writing a post to XMCA about it, and in
each case I'm taking fragments of the book and importing them into my
discourse, making up the bricolage of who I am in this context.
When I can't do that with them, texts don't live in my mind and I
often find myself not finishing them. Or forgetting them.
So when Mark Gover says,
> my assimilation of what I read (and, presumably hear and witness)
> has a lot to do with the nature of my thinking up to that point.
> The seeming serendipity of information retrieval may really be an
> indication that ideas favor the soil of prepared minds (kind of
> like "ya' hear what ya' wanna' hear").
I think, yes, but it's important that "the nature of my thinking" is
shaped strongly by the dialogic relationships I'm already in, and
what I read is often seen as a new dialogic relationship. On the
other hand, I don't think it's
> Frightful to think we lead so with our preconceptions.
I don't think we have much choice. Nor do I think
> Meaning lies somewhere between what the author intends and what I
> seem to understand.
I don't think meaning lies anywhere. It's a verb. We make it, over
and over. And, as Mary Catherine Bateson says, we make it
inefficiently and inconsistently: what I mean is different from what
you understand, by definition (not because we've failed to use
language in the right way).
Let me finish with a quote we'll all read differently, but which I
think can lead us toward being able to work together in our imperfect
community. She cites the common kid misunderstanding of "Gladly the
Cross-eyed Bear":
We assume that the adults know what they are saying, more or
less, and the children will work it out by the time they are
grown up. But grown-ups do not share a complete and unified
understanding of the culture of their community. They can
participate without doing so, continuing to learn in the
process. This is especially true in complex, diverse, and
rapidly changing societies, but I believe we have
underestimated the extent to which it is true of all human
societies. (p. 166)
I'm also reading Jay Lemke's recent _Textual Politics_, and
constructing all sorts of connections, mainly because I've been so
engaged by what Jay has had to say on xlchc (and, I hope, on xmca)
about the nature of community.
So: can I read Bateson in any other way? Is there a sense in which I
could read her like a camera, simply taking in what she says and
imprinting it? I don't think so. I can't, as Carolyn Burke at
Indiana University used to say, go around in a context-free situation.
-- Russ
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