you know what struck me most as I was reading Popkewitz, and the other
arguments, the postmodern stuff, what
suddenly actually frustrated me
has all been itemized and described for the convenience of all,
and is a pretty much just another lunge towards an appearance of coherency...
a) I get the impression that Popkewitz reads history as
linear, ya? so the past is behind, already happened, then, and is
no longer happening?
HISTORY IS AN ASSUMPTION:
I think within this limited conception of time, it is pretty easy
to interpret ideas as situated/constituted by their "time" in terms
of all the details of, what shall we say, that fabric, that complex weave
of politics and ideologies and economies and war and capitalism and the
Depression
etc etc etc;
and the Russian context - very interesting to read Popkewitz's take on
Vyg's historical location...
(by freak coincidence i've been reading about avant-garde art in early 20th
century Russia) -
HISTORY IS CONVENIENTLY ORGANIZED FOR A REASON: IT MAKES IT EASIER TO FIND
STUFF:
from the perpective of time that Popkewitz assumes, then ya, I can see how
he'd be spooked;
gotta be careful about the stuff you pick up along the way,
METAPHORICAL COLLOQUIALISMS THAT WILL MAKE SENSE TOMORROW:
you just never know where it's *been* right? Like when mothers say
"don't put that in yr mouth" and so you do; tastes like salty dirt, so what,
no harm done,,,,
my point is twofold actually.
1.) FIRST, the work of interpretation is always "wrong" because whatever
the process or activity or languaging that we make use of WILL BE also
structured within the "read". Reading reproduces the parameters of the
interpretation but
who the heck notices?
2.) ASSUMPTION JUNCTION:
If the limits of consciousness are a social construct and all, it is easy
hell it's damned convenient to look back and compare with the "present" and
see all the differences and think about how far we've come
2-A)...except the "present" can
only exist betwixt the quotation marks;
so if the present ha no existence, by what reasoning
can we identify how the past was/is any different?
3.) THE PRESENT IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE BY DESIGN:
The present, in Popkewitz's assumption of time is... when? now? or now?
see? The existence of grammatical tenses and words like "WHEN"
and number lines for YEARS and the asumption that mortality is evidence of
all these extremely convenient contructs time as a location,
are pervasive on purpose,
but that doesn't make it so.
4.)UNEXPECTED LEAP! UNEXPECTED LEAP!
Simultaneity: time exists in simultaneity, which has been conceptualised in
the desire for a mechanism that produces perpetual motion = Perpetual
motion machines are translations of
the unconscious immersion in simultaneous time.
5.) WALKING WITH IT NOW...
SO,
when any historical context is identified as constraining or contaminating
the utility of ideas, we must also share in the assumption
that things have changed since then,
6.) TAKING IT HOME...:
Really, and here I mean *really* if we take this out of Popkewitz's
assumptions, nothing has changed in thousand of so-called years.
We dress better,sure; but in terms of "time" we are still barbarians.
I am being deliberately literal to force a metaphor
The "historical" is, like meaning and interpretation and reality and
truth and lies and "progress" are all necessary fictions and
the function of the fictive limitations is to minimize purely for
the childlike pleasure in collecting little things; minimizing
is play.
SEEMS TO ME WE'RE DUE FOR A 'THEREFORE,"
whatever Dewey and Vygotsky are/were
doing/thinking/writing/publishing/believing to be true and so on...,
... betcha dollars to donuts we're all still immersed in that same very
same same moment -
In other words, the appearances of things change,
but really really, we are all still pretty naive, gullible,
easily enchanted by simple games like minimizing, reducing, organizing,
lining things up in a row, making sure that everything that is hard to
understand can be expressed with
simple geometric shapes and lines -
EXAMPLE: like the persistance of
dualisms or dichotomies as "actual" entities - i really wish we could
get over the idiocy of putting two things together,over and over,
like playing "Go Fish" and matching pairs of cards to win, or "fish"....
AND SO IN CONCLUSION, ALSO ASK YOURSELF "WHAT IF...?" BECAUSE AS
GAMES GO IT's ONE OF THE BETTER ONES, DEFINITELY MORE INTERESTING
THAN PLAYING "GO FISH,"
What if pairs are fictive relations and the really true relations are
triadic?
more likely they are mosaic - which is why we still can't see it.
(got any mosaics? nah. go fish.)
THE ENDLESS ADDENDED ADDENDUM:
For example, pedagogy is just another word for "maintenance" or
"transmission of dominant belief structures" or "story-telling" or
mhelping the little cave boy trace over daddy's stone etchings of
the big food kill and the hurting killing stick that daddy used.
Nothing has *really* changed.
AND ANOTHER THING...Popkewitz's critique - utterly groundless, to me - .
also assumes that if we made a mistake then and we accidently
repeat the mistake, it'll produce repercusssions aieeeee the future the
future...as though that mistake is isolated and only happened once in all
the
world's perpetual spinning,
Personally, I think we really got stuck when we "discovered" gravity
and identified it as a force. But that's a whole other story.
Am I making sense? cause I know exactly what I mean. Dewey & Vyg (GO FISH!)
are "here" because they ARE "here" but mostly because SOME PEOPLE want THEM
to be here and the only thing any of us can do is keep digging through the
books we all keep digging through old books
because,
(a) we don't know anything for sure because of the time thing. I mean, we
pretty much all seem to agree that the time structure is fine and true and
real
but actually its the time thing that disorders our perception of time,
and
(b) we are still very easily enchanted, magical thinkers and all.
Popkewitz, for example, is enchanted with a belief that "ideas" cease to
exist when
we all start dressing differently, or something like that.
Oh ya - theory is distinct from practice. in one respect.
but ideas are not distinct from the body , so
in that respect, really, there is no separation,
It;s the time thing again, because we are immersed
in simultaneous motion and are still doing the same things we were doing
forever, because we still play "Go Fish" when we could be cheating and winning
at bridge while blindfolded...
aiy. hey. sorry I wouldn't just engage with the ideas, but I
was just truly frustrated by the time thing,
and, well. Popkewitz writes with this real snotty tone that
just irks me for no reason. like Rorty. Just the tone
of the text annoys me to this extent.
back to work for me. thanks for the interruption and the precis -
it's been like a mini-vacation from perpetual motion or something, ha ha
kidding.
diane