Re: legitimizing practice:breaking the vase
Tony Michael Roberts (roberts who-is-at mail.msen.com)
Sun, 23 Nov 1997 08:43:36 -0500 (EST)
Zizek believes that questioning a dominant idealogy generates such fierce
resistence precisely because that "vase" is so fragile. His idea is that a
certain willing suspension of disbelief is always involved in ideology. An
ideology basically "is" a community of people who are helping each other
act "as if" something were the case. Such communities are always based in
projection and denial. Each participant is, first and foremost, acting "as
if" she or he were someone she or he is not. Think of this persentation of
self as counterfeit money and then ask what would happen if a large group
of people decided to accept it as legal tender. Now imagine some poor
niave fool walking up and refusing to take a five dollar bill because it's
purple and has Jerry Garcia's picture on it. By doing so, this fool has
destroyed the "common wealth" which is the real stuff which holds the
community together as a libidnal ecomony and brought into question the
only sense of identity the ideologue feels comfortable living out in
collaberation with others. This is, from the ideolgues point of view, the
threat of a kind of death which can be subjectivly experienced. Zizek's
best example is someone who acts "as if" he were a Furher/King. As long as
other people accept this "as if" and respond as Good Germans/Subjects
the authority of the Leader is as real as the order which it cornerstones.
Every "Good German" has an identity/place within this order and thus every
"Good German" will respond to any attempt to bring the "Leader's"
pretensions into question as if this were a threat of personal extinction
(in symbolic terms, it is). Anyone who refuses to accept the signs central
to our own sense of identity at face value will be percieved as a radical
threat. In the classroom, this radical threat is the student who does not
accept the teacher as "one presumed to know". This same teacher could
easilly be exactly this same threat for exactly this same reason from the
point of view of an administrator. The public school system is based on a
need to control behavior based in a deeper need to maintain one's own
identity through validation by the other's response. Any student who does
not validate teachers will be labeled in some way which discredits his or
her perceptions. Any teacher who does not validate administrators will
experience the same. Any "educational researcher" who attempts to place
public school practice within a larger horizen of critical awarness will
experience the same. We need, as researchers, to give up the idea that
teachers and administrators don't really know what they are doing and
would change their behavior if we could make it clear to them what they
really are doing. Most teachers and administrators take immediate
satisfaction in playing out their role in the "as if" of the school.
They are not Good Germans because they believe in the Furher. They
beleive in the Furher so they can live the jouissance of being Good
Germans.
See ya,
Tony michael Roberts