I will expand this in the following queries: (1) Who or what is developing
in Hoeg's tale? (2) What is the role of language and who is the subject of
the language? (3) What is the meaning of liminality (outsiderhood) in the
overall structure of the story?
(1) Who or what is developing? Of course the three students as individuals
are developing, but what is the group whose development is of interest?
Judy states that "the order of the school endures without structural
change." This seems to imply that she sees the school as that which should
have developed but didn't, rather the "development is entailed by the
unrealized possibility for the [school's] structural change."
In my reading the three outsider students are the subject/objects of
development and the tale involves two scenarios of this development. One
is that of the school which has taken two of them, Peter and August as part
of an experiment designed to adapt and integrate social deviants or
outsiders into the framework of the larger society. This scenario parallels
Anthony Burgess's description of Alex's reform in the novel, "A Clockwork
Orange." Katarina was already at the school when her parents die and this
experience establishes a basis for her bond with the two boys. From the
school's perspective, the larger society is the moral society of the
bourgeois world. Biehl's academy is "an elite, private school", one known
to have high standards, whose motto is "Soli Deo Gloria" [All glory is
God's??]. The second scenario of development is that which actually occurs
among the three students. It is particularly instructive that their
emergence as a "collective" involves their attainment of a true level of
morality, exactly that which the school putatively attempts to create, but
which dialectically results in the demise of the school's experiment and
tragically in the destruction of the three students as well.
The comparison of Peter's experience of the Crusty House ethic with that
which he discovers at Biehl's academy in the company of August and Katarina
illustrates this attainment. At Crusty House an ethic of strict repayment
of every debt prevailed. One for one. Or as anthropologists would call it:
a system of restricted reciprocity lacking even in the social subtleties of
"when" repayment is made.. Such systems of restricted exchange are the
minimum social relation, what Sartre referred to as the queue: " . . . their
isolation is not an inert statute . . it is actually lived in everyone's
project as its negative structure . . ..as the impossibility of uniting with
Others in an organic totality." The order of the school militates against
expanded social development, all debts are canceled, at the end of each
cycle everyone remains with what is theirs alone: no debts, no credits. The
same order prevails at Biehl's academy but here Peter, Katarina, and August
discover a system of extended reciprocity amongst themselves in which a
truly generalized Other emerges with whom there is no calculation of debt or
credit. Peter discovers that "the law of reciprocation could not be a law
of nature after all." Peter's realization that " . . . you did get
something in return . . . you could set yourself free by helping others"
epitomizes the social ethic in which one recognizes oneself in the other.
And this social ethic is precisely that which exists as the abstract
ideology of the Good and the Moral.
To summarize, the three students are developing. The school has one image
of how this is achieved and what it means. Of course the school, the
official codification of the state and proper society, is duplicitous. In
the course of the tale the students do develop, in fact they achieve the
transition to sociality and moral consciousness that the school putatively
seeks. But only in opposition to the culture of the school. Hence, in
Hoeg's tale, the development to realization of a moral sociality entails
the destruction of the system, the termination of school's experiment. .
(2) What is the role of language and who is the subject of the language?
Judy states that "the three 'outsider' students are bereft of language.
(Note that Peter's description of Crusty House does not refer to Biehl's
Academy.) You write, that they come to language "when one begins the
search." "Language comes by disrupting the environment."
I think this is one of the central themes but Judy doesn't draw out its
full implications. At Crusty House "one had no language of one's own" but
one gradually learned that the language of the institution. and socializing
oneself within its narrow pathways, was "the road in." as the road out of
the total isolation of no language at all "One adopted their language,
that of the teachers and the schools." Initially this language appears as
liberation but "Much later one discovers that what was let into . . . was a
tunnel. From which one can never again escape."
This language of the schools locks one into the hierarchical system of
alienation. In contrast to language's role in the collective as a vehicle
for opening horizons, as a tool for communication and experi-mentation, (as
all tools are experi-ments and all experi-ments tools), the language of the
school functions as a tool for shaping and restricting all those who are
part of it. Subordination of the individual to a pseudo-totality; a fascist
projection of abstract universality over individual subjects, if you're
paranoid, or an authorless massification of social ensembles to the
practico-inert structures of history if, as with Sartre, one views History
as an exteriorised agency to which all individuals are subjugated.
But another language begins to emerge in Hoeg's tale when the three students
come together as a group (collective). Pulling a thread from another
discussion that has been going on, there is clearly a break here in the
coherence of the world that the school language encompasses. This first
occurs between Peter and Katarina when they begin to talk in the library
about a letter Peter has sent her. Then August comes and they recognize in
him the same liminal or borderline status they recognize in each other. The
three students have internalized this school language and its logic of
hierarchical liberation. But this logic, this language does not provide an
answer to the question: Why were Peter and August brought to this school?
As a result of this initial questioning they begin a project together based
on Katarina's original questioning of the role of time and its organization
in the school.--They form themselves spontaneously, collectively and in the
process expand and communicate about the experiment which is quite simply an
exploration concerning the reality of their situation. In discussing this
Yrjo clearly points to their development as a collective as the basis for
their own personal development. Their existence as a group and their
ability to speak with their own voices emerge simultaneously: the individual
development cannot be separated from the development of the group which is
likewise the appropriation of voice.
The formation of this group and its independent mediating structures, its
experiments, its language, draws a prompt response from the school.
"Communication between the three is prevented." Communication between
Katarina and Peter is curtailed even before August arrives at the school.
But when the three communicate, and three being the minimum number necessary
for a group as opposed to a dyad, the apparatus of overt repression comes
into play. The experiment within the experiment throws Biehl's Academy off
schedule. The paradoxical fact that Peter, August, and Katarina have
achieved the hallmark of the bourgeois society's moral understanding passes
unnoticed. Clearly the students must surrender their own language to
achieve the liberation Biehl's Academy proffers and it appears that Hoeg
makes a clear statement concerning experimentation (free exploration and
modification of reality), group formation, "one's own language", and morality.
(3) What is the meaning of outsiderhood (liminality) in the overall
structure of the story? Yrjo asks very explicitly in what way the three
students develop as a collective. He points to the importance of
outsiderhood as the necessary complement of Piaget's and Vygotsky's theories
-- this "question of entirely different worlds meeting," the horizontal
dimension, the "'contact zone' and 'third space.'" Like the role of
violence and destruction in the process of development, like the
indissoluble unity of individual and group development, the bridging of
previously separate worlds can only occur in a liminal space, outside of any
one's own world, a new space in which communication must be generated anew,
originally.
When Judy touches upon this, writing that "One aspect of this model . . . is
the genesis of mediational means [that] aren't given by the culture,
sedimented, but invented on the spot . . . by the incapable, the
inexperienced, the vulnerable" she doesn't go far enough. First of all, the
principal characteristic of these students is their liminal, "borderline",
status, not their vulnerability or incapableness. Perhaps her failure to
clearly identify the group of the three students as the locus of development
impedes the recognition that their "outsiderhood" is one of the conditions
of their development as a group and as individuals.
In this context I think of Victor Turner's extensive explorations of
liminality in rituals and millenarian movements, as well as revolutions.
Rituals, especially initiation rituals, all contain liminal periods when the
world is, so to speak, turned upside down. Elders reveal the arbitrariness
of the "sedimented" cultural traditions and the initiates (at least some of
them?) are brought to see that they can make and unmake the inherited
cultural meanings. Turner was heavily influenced by Bakhtin, especially
Bakhtin's "Rabelais and his World", another key source for analyzing the
role of outsiderhood and liminality in the process of collective generation
of meaning . Likewise Sartre, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason,
describes in detail the absolute state of outsiderhood that characterizes
individuals at the moment of the fusion of a group. More to the point,
their realization of their status as individuals isolated by material
forces. Most importantly, especially for Sartre, once a new groups "fuses"
out of the liminal states in which individual subjects transcend the bounds
of their own subjectivity as determined within the previous historical
order, the new group which they have brought into existence comes to exert
itself as an external historical force in its own right. Is this what
happens in "The Borderliners?" Is the exteriorised dynamic of the three
students as a group one of the factors in its own destruction? For Sartre,
this interaction of social determinism, group formation and individual
liberation (development?) constitutes a fundamental dialectic of historical
development. At a more concrete level, this same problem can be examined in
the Luxemburg-Lenin debate over role of the communist party in relation the
mass movements of the workers in the period after WWI.
Two points in conclusion. First, my reading of Yrjo's paper and does not
lead me to see a return to micro-level oriented, "genre discussions
articulating the relations between language & activity" as Judy proposes.
Rather it indicates the need to situate activity theory and developmental
approaches more firmly within the macro-level processes of group formation
in cultural historical time. Second, time is one of the main themes of
Borderliners. It's first sentence is:: "What is time?" The protatonists'
actions develop around investigations into the institutional structuring of
time and questions concerning the individual experiences of
phenomenological time (as in Peter's description of games with death "when
instants become eternities"). . This seems to me to be an avenue for
exploration of the cultural-historical construction of time and its
relationship to ontogenetic development of individuals. In a sense this
ties into Mike's post concerning COG:/artifacts among which calendars, daily
organizers, watches, and clocks, figure importantly, but no so the phases of
the moon, the movement of the tides, or the exact points on the horizon
where the sun rises on any given day.
Paul H. Dillon
dillonph who-is-at tidepool.com