I wonder if we could say something like the positive/negative valence
depends on whether or not you are alone? I'm thinking of an
example: rural lesbians in the 1950s and early 1960s, before this wave of
lesbian feminism was well articulated. If you read back to one of the
first lesbian publications in the country, The Ladder (which started in the
1950s), there are many cris de coeur from readers who are horribly
isolated, and where the twist/torque of being in the closet is so painful
it's difficult to read. Lesbian writing took on a very different tone in
the 1970s as communities and social movements began to coalesce. In both
cases, there is the torque of queer identity meeting "the grid" to use
your other metaphor. But the valence is very different.
There's a resonance in your talk about the queerest among us being the most
radical twisters. This is the old literature on the stranger (Simmel,
Schutz, Robert Park) as embodying dual consciousness, and because of that,
having a kind of privileged view of the taken-for-granted. There is much
wrong with this literature (mostly its romantic depiction of the marginal
personal), but there is some important grain of truth there too.
Double-vision is something Black folks have talked about, going back at
least to WEB DuBois.
L*
>Of course I am not just reading the discussion of our November conundrums,
>and flashed rather quickly through a week of internalization and
>appropriation as well.
>
>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.
>
>---------------------------
>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>
>---------------------------