At that rate (and maybe I should call timescale "rate-scale" instead? I
realize better now that my physics background entails a number of
assumptions and intertexts -- like "time constants" and "dimensionless
scale factors" -- that mediate my leap from timescale to rate-scale), I get
perhaps a different feel for the issues than one does when reading more
slowly and with longer time between stops on the xmca train.
So one echo I heard was: what's the role of consciousness in learning?
resonating with the need I have long felt to find a way to talk about such
issues without either reifying our ways of being reflexively in the world
into a notion of 'consciousness' (which seems to me to lead only to the
infinite homuncular regress) and without reifying into some unitary
phenomenon called "learning" a whole lot of really rather different sorts
of things we do that leave their mark on our organism, or on our
serially-situated-organism-in-interaction.
Some of the surface trouble in the discussion seemed to me to arise from
the semantics. If we contrast internalization as what happens, with
appropriation as what we do, then the difference is about agency (whether
it's about consciousness or not). But internalization tends to have a
rather 'reproductive' connotation -- what we've internalized is the same as
what was more external before. And appropriation STILL leaves the object
the same, it's only that we may find a new use for it, place it in a new
context. But since 'the object' (really a way of doing) is mainly defined
relationally (doing is a relation among processes and participants), it
can't really "be" the same, neither after internalization nor after
appropriation. We can insist it be (do work to make it seem) the same; we
can set up functional criteria so it's 'as if' it were the same, but we
know it can't be. The question is: are we interesting in constructing the
similarity, or in highlighting the difference? internalization seems more
the former, appropriation more the latter.
Then people also wanted to push _resistance_ to reproduction further; but
even the metaphors of resistance tend to keep the object the same (we just
don't want it, or we want to substitute something else for it). For
appropriation, we start, especially in a Bakhtinian view, to get some
element of transformation (certainly in the relations, and so the meaning,
but maybe still not focussed on the object).
What if we talking about 'twisting' the object? saying that whenever we
internalize, or appropriate, the ways of doing in focus are transformed by
their new contextual relations with and through us? (the 'happens'
semantics) AND furthermore that the internalized or appropriated know-how
has always lost some of its former affordances and gained new ones 'in us'
(i.e. as a part of our larger complexes of ways of doing things in the
settings as they are to us, ala Umwelt)? AND now go a step further (in the
'doing' semantics) and imagine that we can not only assimilate and resist,
and recontextualize, but that we can 'twist' ways of doing deliberately
AGAINST their functional affordances (and ideologically supportive usual
roles), or obliquely, winding up with something dysfunctional in the old
system but pregnant with new possibilities incompatible with that system.
And maybe if we are 'queer' in any way (gender/sexuality, but also lots of
other and linked dimensions of human variation, and degrees of
stigmatization or danger-to-status-quo as well), then we cannot NOT twist
as we appropriate, because we are not the 'intended readers', do not live
and do in the ways the learning is supposed to support. And of course we
are all queer in one way and another, fortunately.
Herewith a strong hypothesis. The most radical twisting occurs by
internalization in the queerest of us, and it is much harder and much rarer
to get such radical twisting by deliberate appropriations or efforts to twist.
New ways of meaning arise from different ways of living, on relatively long
timescales, and especially those that are regarded as crazy or dangerous by
the promulgators of the 'higher' learning. It is much harder to find some
kind of articulable work that can do this same job. Radical creativity
arises from the anomalies of our positioning in the space of human
variation, (social inter-) action, and (social) experiencing, on timescales
long enough that the systems which engender these anomalies (much more
extended than our local neighborhoods) cannot be readily changed or
manipulated to restore us to 'normality' in the next breath. Social systems
create anomalies to give them reserves of such creative alternatives. We
can hide our anomalies, sometimes they don't matter very much, we can learn
to emulate other ways of living/feeling, but we can't help feeling 'wrong'
what others feel as 'right', and internalize/assimilate only 'with a twist'
that makes the result not just different from but antagonistic to the
smooth integration of the new behavioral complex into the system that was
trying to teach it to us.
This is perhaps an underdeveloped perspective in education. Working class
students being taught middle-class culture in schools. Girls being taught
historically masculinizing traditional disciplines, knowledges,
perspectives. Young humans being taught adult or middle-aged humans' norms
of behavior. Africanized and otherwise differently enculturated students
being taught euroculture. Queers of all stripes being taught the narrowest,
straightest-laced official known-false (i.e. obviously unrepresentative,
and not descriptive) version of the community's culture ... with what
consequences?? NOT just resistance or appropriation or deliberate mockery,
transformation -- but an inevitable twisting of the dagger so its point is
aimed at its makers. Education for a time focussed quite a bit on the
'hidden curriculum', on the hidden meanings of the overt curriculum (e.g.
be on time, obey instructions precisely, defer to authority, don't joke
around, doubt your own competence, etc.), and there was in this theory a
notion of the 'received' curriculum (also there was the enacted or
performed curriculum) -- but not so far as I know theorized except as a
subset of the overt or intended curriculum, merely what was successfully
internalized and what was not.
Do you know of research that looked seriously at the antagonistic twists of
the learned curriculum? at the queered and monstrous versions, or less
dramatically and from the dominant viewpoint, the merely bizarre and
hapless ones? I do not mean here what students do in schools instead of
learning; there is a lot of research on that. Nor the ways in which queer
students learn by different kinds of doings, we also know a bit about that.
But about what we make of the learnings themselves? how the doings we learn
get twisted so that they become anomalous ways of talking, thinking,
drawing, performing, relating ... no longer suited to their original
functions, and with considerable potential as antagonists to those
functions and the systems they support?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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