Tony Michael Roberts <roberts who-is-at mail.msen.com>
Tony Michael Roberts (roberts who-is-at mail.msen.com)
Tue, 23 Sep 1997 23:12:44 -0400 (EDT)
I will be granted an Ed.D. in Educational Psychology from Northern
Illinois University in Dec of this year. While at Northern, I worked with
Gary Shank (semiotics) Tom Roberts (Transpersonal Psychology) Bob Suchner
(Methodology) and a whole bunch of Instructional Technology types. The
book I most wish I had written is Sherry Turkle's "Life Onscreen". The
author I am struggling with/being inspired by most these days is Slavoj
Zizek. I buy Lacan's idea that the fact that we become by interpellating a
symbolic order which is finally contingent introduces an irreducable
ontological insecurity into our human condition as a kind of critter that
means and has its being in meaning. The other is a radical threat to our
being to exactly the extent that his otherness makes the contingency of
our own interpellations obvious. I want to use this idea to construct a
critique of Richard Rorty's multiculturalism. We can not help, being what
we are, but be terrified by difference to exactly the extent that this
difference is a difference which marks off the kind of person that we are
(us) from the kind of person we can not imagine becomeing (them). Alterity
provokes sublime terror. Most multiculturalism denies this and, thus,
amounts to a kind of whistling in the Dark. Any assumption that deep down
we are all the same, that we all share some vastly important, immutable
something in common, is a denial of our own contingency and of the
possibility of an encounter with alterity which might force us to
acknowledge that contingency. That's the kind of thing I've been muttering
darkly to myself of late and intent to mutter darkly at Ya'll now that I'm
here.
Glad to be here,
Tony Michael Roberts