Taking a compassionate interpretive stance is obviously not
answer enough - while it aims to render the performances of
otherness/difference/pain more "readable" it can also, as
is plentifully evident, mask/colonize the stories of others.
If we interpret pain through our own losses, we lose the
opportunity to know more by way of engagement, interaction,
invitation to the other to say/do/be - the PERFORMANCE of empathy
[i.e., the present-Absence? presence-in-abstentia? the interlocutor? -
But we can hardly imagine this stance except by a
PSYCHO[not social]analyst, where it may be assumed
behind closed doors for a limited amount of time and for a fee.
Within our culture, the engaged interlocutor seems an appropriate
stance only in response to sickness. And the ones in pain, outside
the doctor's office, are to suppress it, hide its externalizations,
keep silent for the comfort and protection of an authorized social
body.]
In this sense, written performances are no substitute for
on-the-spot, f-t-f inter-action. Not laughter necessarily,
but withdrawal, tears, expressions of rage, demonstrations
of leadership (as symptom not strategy) - these are Invitations
for changes in the structures of participation. How do we,
as insiders of the moment, not observers, respond? It seems
to me that adequate theory will begin when the here-and-now
of the theorists changes.
It seems to me that Diane is making some headway, maybe more
than she admits. Just her frustration at the parallelism of her
different interpretive approaches suggests that we are heading
towards a better view of the horizon where those lines do seem
to meet. But now again I wonder if the language she yearns for
is what she/we/i really want.
Would a fuller account of social structure that renders
more readable the signs of
>difference-as-isolation
take us toward that more compassionate world?
Someone once said to me that postmodernism is learning how
to deal with (our own/others') pain. What do you think?
Judy
>If it is only through externalizing ourselves that we can reveal our
>complex identities, however, it is also only though a compassionate
>analysis that "others" can become more adept at understanding the
>significance of the ways individuals "externalize" to the world through
>speech, writing, gestures, tears, laughter, withdrawal, leadership, etc...
>
>This, what Jay described as "empathy," signals an intersection of social
>theory and theories of identity and difference.
>
>I have tried to understand teacher education this way, that is, using
>sociocultrual theory to describe the complexities of the context, and the
>structures of participation; and this, through an analysis of
>identificatory possibilities, that is, those moments in "time" when the
>body's history actively participates in an those experiences of
>difference-as-isolation;
>but to no avail, as yet. The languages don't blend. While each seems to
>offer a parallel perspective on a similar situation, the ways to describe
>these invariably clash in incomprehensible spaces (is this social theory?
>or identity theory?);
>
>what I mean is, finding ways to usefully incorporate both perspectives
>theoretically
>would require first a lexicon, or a glossary of terms, at least.
>
>diane
>
>
>Social theory lacks an accounting of social isolation; and theories of
>marginal realities lacks an accounting of social relevance and pragmatic
>responsibility.
>
>Lave & Wenger's LPP, it seems to me, makes a useful move towards accounting
>for, e.g., social isolation by explicitly articulating a theory of
>identification through participation; that is, the language of "identity"
>is theorized socioculturally -
>
> but there lacks, by the same token, an accounting of difference.
>Difference is most easily written in the ways we have been talking, that
>is, historically; each body is historically constituted,
>in relations to participation and association;
>
>but a queer take on this, for me, needs to account for a Freudian notion of
>identification through trauma, that all identifications occur through
>traumatic losses, the ego compensates for its object-loss by assuming that
>object's identity internally, and this, for better or worse, throughout our
>lives;
>
Jay wrote
>Academic stances toward social phenomena tend toward the
>'critical' more than the compassionate, despite the origins of 'critical
>theory' in the fairly evident compassion of Marx. My efforts a while back
>to understand the viewpoint of various sorts of 'conservatives' was a kind
>of exercise born of compassion, or at least an effort toward empathy. If
>social theory rejects an 'above it all' stance and recognizes that we
>analysts and observers are also participants and very much 'in the fray',
>then it should take seriously, as Diane suggests, the methods and metaphors
>of insight that apply on one's own level, from one insider to another,
>rather than those that take an outsider, or 'from a higher level' view. And
>chief among the royal roads to insider insight is, in my term, empathy: the
>skill (you have to learn it I think, or learn how not to refuse it) of
>seeing-and-feeling from another's perspective, or at least of imagining.
>
>Perhaps neither 'compassion' nor 'empathy' as terms have the full resonance
>I would be looking for: that we open ourselves to feeling the pain that
>others feel, that we use our own pain as a bridge across the gulf that may
>separate us from an Other. Scholarship is for many people a way to escape
>pain, their own and others'. If our culture teaches us that feeling pain is
>not an intellectual practice, then we have to ask why it would say such
>rubbish. Indeed we need to feel the pain that makes such a belief popular
>with some people, and the pain that a culture which exploits this belief
>inflicts on still others. JAY.
>
>
>
>
>"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
>Ani Difranco
>*********************************
>diane celia hodges
> faculty of education
> university of british columbia
> vancouver, bc canada
>tel: (604)-253-4807
>email: dchodges who-is-at interchange.ubc.ca
>
>
>
>
Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183