tristes topiques
“sans jamais remplir son projet, le bricoleur y met toujours quelque chose de soi.”for fun: songsmith
Mashups, shitty remixes, irreverent ‘covers’, and all around musical laziness has become that much easier with Microsoft’s Songsmith. Apparently, the industry’s been using it for years.
the conference paper
The bottom line: the reflection that plagues tenured professors in the twilight of their years is but an inflection of the successful academic trajectory. The notions and motions of academics depends on their space in the field, such that, at the other end, younger scholars adopt oppositional yet deferential positions– heterodox, but doxic– in their strategies to stay and succeed in the game. The conference paper is an artifact that seems to crystallize this logic.
Trying to understand a life as a unique and self-sufficient series of successive events (sufficient unto itself), and without ties other than the association to a ’subject’ whose constancy is probably just that of a proper name, is nearly as absurd as trying to make sense out of a subway route without taking into account the network structure, that is the matrix of objective relations between the different stations. . . In other words, one can understand a trajectory (that is, the social aging which is independent of biological aging although it inevitably accompanies it) only on condition of having previously constructed the successive states of the field through which the trajectory has progressed.
– Bourdieu, “The Biographical Illusion”
Next week, I am giving a paper at an undergraduate anthropology conference in which I investigate socially the use of emotion in social investigation. Difficulties formulating an argument and condensing my thought led me to reflect on the process and products of such conferences.
Reading a paper or giving an address, in the sense of the peculiar academic practices which they are, take on sociological significance when they are related to the intellectual field. Their salient property is the time restriction. The manipulation of time works to discipline young scholars into the discipline by encouraging the strategy which they must adopt to advance to the professoriat: short, strident, dramatic, dense action and especially reaction. The format discourages subtlety, removes room for self-doubt, and demands adherence to the sacrosanct debates and consecrated formulae that define relevancy in the intellectual and ideological cosmos which the aspiring academic attempts to enter.
This is demonstrated, a contrario, by the luxurious use of keynote addresses by tenured and well-known intellectuals who are able to define their own topic, but, more relevantly, who are defined by their relation to the topic: they relay a leisurely, obscure, learned lecture, which, despite elaborate language, references to the literary canon (especially Shakespeare and Greek drama, at least in the generation currently in their twilight), latin phrases and latinate phraseology, and an arsenal of personal anecdotes and reflections on the field, try to say in a simple, even spartan way, something of deeper ethical, historical, or personal relevance which may enlighten the hurried, frenzied, provincial mass of junior researchers, caught up in the sound and fury of problems and problematics which their long road of experience has shown to be intractable and, perhaps, eternal. . . but will more likely occasion only murmurings and knowing nods amongst the similarly wise. (The initiates themselves will either be exasperated by their irrelevance and self-importance, or, less commonly, will look up to these antediluvian ancestors and, after admiring their wisdom, plunge immediately back into the fray.) The two extremes that these ways of ‘giving a paper’ represent put on display the remarkable extent to which thought is wedded to time and relationship to time: that is, to trajectory within academia as a social and socializing institution. Thought is largely dictated by relationship to thought, text by context, content by deployment.
Bourdieu, as is often the case for me, served as both an example of the tendency under scrutiny, and of the way to analyze it. The illuminating “Biographical Illusion” (1986) is available here.
what is “the investigator”?
The bottom line: In this letter submitted to my college’s “journal of social and political thought”, I reflect on its role in socializing students into the technocratic mores and norms of the ruling class. I particularly insinuate that writing and reading such journals becomes the limiting form of politics in such an impoverished worldview. [Particulars have been changed.]
[The man of letters has] a higher aim,– to enlighten, instruct, improve. It is his duty to assert boldly the right, to thrust himself into the breach for the defence of attacked principles, to disregard the reeking breath of popular applause, to rebuke fearlessly and openly the unbridled licence of rabble violence, and on the other hand to arouse the popular mind to a just enthusiasm for all that is great, lovely, and true, to a just sense of right, and duty. . . “Men of Letters”, The Investigator, February 1849, page 219.
The Investigator is but one of many sequalae of the septic socio-logic that constitutes, materially and symbolically, the social arrangement of a ________ education. It is a pedagogical tool, an instrument of inculcation (and at the same time the expression of its success ) that elaborates the subconscious conditio sine qua non of the College itself: the anti-democratic idea that polity and society is best dictated by an elite minority.
The Investigator is one didactic mechanism among many at _______ that functions to create in us the dispositions accompanying our inevitable positions as ‘knowledge workers’, ‘symbolic manipulators’ (or whatever terms the right and its newly resurgent Clintonesque flatterer, the Attisian Obama left, toss about to obscure and obfuscate the true socioeconomic condition of the middle classes in an age of regnant hypertrophic capital), ideologists, technocrats, crapademics, managers, ‘social entrepreneurs’ , philanthropists, and other ‘pillars of the community’ (our distribution within which is largely an effect of sociobiography, such that the academically talented petit bourgeois ‘ascend’ to the professoriate, or, if less talented or more sentimentalist, to posts in the ‘helping professions’; the academically ungifted bourgeois go on to serve in the neocolonial paternalism of organizations like Teach for America, or apply to second-tier professional graduate programs; the feudal ‘second sons’ of the rich land in NGOs, while their more successful peers move directly into business if not finance; and the working class or lower caste often back home for a while and take a series of dead-end jobs until they can figure out which one of these options they want to commit to). Specifically, the uniting idea, or better, ideology (because most powerful when remaining unrecognized as such) that the College strives to bestow upon its students is that they are special and that they not only know better than the rest, but that they know best for the rest. The Investigator is one of many mechanisms of the implicit curriculum of our College that socializes us (the few of us that need conversion—the valuation of a ‘liberal arts education’ at an ‘elite private college’, itself obviously a prerequisite for admission, is but a bastard bastion of the reproduction of classism in a ‘meritocratic’ era in which the naked reproduction of class must be disguised as such) into our roles as the leaders, makers, movers, and shakers of the next generation. Ochlomisia is instilled with narcissism in the alembic of our technocratic initiation.
In short, this magazine represents and reinforces the idea that we are smart, we know how to run shit better than others, and that that takes the form of ‘rational’ debate, monographic and monochromatic writing, and management from the summit of steep inequalities of knowledge and power.
This demophobic presumption characterizes all contributions and contributors to The Investigator, whether liberal or conservative (but oh, for the wit of another Montana!), Jew or Gentile (how fucking many partial and partisan articles on Israel / Palestine does one campus need, that they even spill over into the venerable Student!), proVagMo or misogynist, Doc Benway or SHE, as writing comes to be seen as the limit form of political action and intellectual exercise. To formulate an argument, write it up, and submit it to be published; to subscribe to the vanity that your thoughts are special and unique (if not witty and penetrating), and to be confident that they will be heard, heeded, and in some way acted upon, is to exhibit the conceit that our schooling creates in our politics: that we dispense knowledge from on high, forming and informing lesser mortals. Our socialization into this manner of acting on the world (we ever kneel at the Baal of ‘social and political thought’ rigidly divorced from action or practice, thanks to a reactionary registrar, a castrated center for community engagement, sociopolitically withdrawn faculty, a mandarin administration, and our own self-importance) is the corollary to our abstract and abstracting vision of it. The editorial is but the most pure artifact produced by institutions and habitus that encourage the confusion and conflation of thought, opinion, and fact; the infusion and inflation of egoism and solipsism; and the illusionary illation of ‘true’ (because abstract and idealist) understanding of the social world. The perpetual puzzlement of Student staff at the relative popularity of its rival is parochial; the fact is easily explained by the simple truth that reading, writing, and responding to no-stakes, glitzy, faux-academicist editorials is training and preparation for _______ students’ inevitable futures. Objective reporting (talis quails on this campus) is just so. . . pleb, and the academic trajectories of the staff of both publications will show this.
The indispensible and characteristic effect that elite colleges bestow upon their charges through that magical artifact, the degree (and the years of mandatory residence and indoctrination leading up to it) is not only the illusion of impersonal competence and technical qualification, but also the illusion of personal merit and just desert. _______ is not only an entitled place, but an entitling one, flattering students that they possess and manipulate a rarified knowledge that will save the poor and needy, if liberal (never realizing, of course, that that mentality is the product of the same social process and political-economic arrangement which produce those categories of the population) or that will prove their superiority to the poor and needy, if conservative. This is the elitism of technocracy; this is the substance and substrate of an _______ education.
The College (of which the Investigator, formal classes, limited, incremental, and accommodationist service opportunities, dorm culture, narrowly self-interested clubs, and bourgeois forms of political action and consciousness-building are but some of the more self-evident techniques) equips us with the affective and effective tastes and talents necessary to act on the world rather than in it. We are taught to disdain ‘the masses’ and participatory democracy as strictly and dispassionately as we are segregated from them. The institution reifies expertise over experience, management over involvement, and a consecrated elite over alien others.
If I can accomplish anything by this hypocritical collaboration** in the forces that I describe, I hope that it may be in putting the atrophied view of politics that I decry to work by causing one student or staff member, next time they see our seal or hear an intonation—or invocation—of the school’s motto, to consider just who is lighting the world, with what, and why (and to consider what dark, agencyless, and pitiful forms this necessarily implies).
↔↔↔↔↔
** I am very aware of the discrepancy that I evince by writing to the same journal. It was not a decision that I came by easily, and it is without justification or resolution. In the final analysis, I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m not above or outside of what I describe– indeed, my participation and especially its form (e.g. the language that I find it ‘natural’ to write in, despite the fact that it so clearly borrows outright from one or two authors) are testament to my collusion and collaboration in the (re)production of privilege and distinction.
Works consulted: Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction and Lemann’s The Big Test.
a sentimental educationalist
The bottom line: it is common knowledge among its practicioners that social research is “fraught” with ethical and moral “dilemmas”; indeed the investment in this fact yields a profit in academic, public, publishing, and funding institutions (if it is not an out-and-out requirement of admission to them). However, this knowledge is undertheorized as such– most “ethical” concern is with academic freedom, personal decisions, practical judgments, the repurcussions of representation– and a sociology of the problems of the sociologist is badly needed. Here, I argue that the sentiments of the social scientist in such “fraught” situations are an excellent epistemological and methodological “way in” to reflexive research because these affective moments are made and made possible by the intersection of the “local” field(s) and the field(s) of the researcher herself. That is, emotional or ethical issues cannot be resolved at their own levels because they are the product of a specific socioeconomic arrangement which must be uncovered and explored so that its effect on the research and researcher can be understood. Or finally, emotional and ethical moments of pause can be used to help us analyze the structures of the conjunctures and conjectures that the researcher is caught up in; failing to do so can lead only to unreflexive and impoverished work at the level of the work and its effects.
. . . it is of these emotions, thus exampled, that society is built and individuals put together. Attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education. What he learns there is what his culture’s ethos and his private sensibility (or, anyway, certain aspects of them) look like when spelled out externally in a collective text. . . {Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures}
Insitutional and departmental Review Boards, books and volumes and panels on the ethics of research, dull and dutiful sections of applications and proposals, a “secret curriculum” and implicit pedagogy of the rules and strategies that apply when graduate students go “into the field” (consiting of anecdotes, pointed questions, and horror stories), journals and their special editions, career-making and breaking controversies, intrigues, and revelations (consider the cottage industry that was both reaction to and cause of the “crisis of anthopology” in the 1980s)– the whole social scientific field has institutionalized, in diffuse but thus inexorable forms, the “need” for considering the ethics of research on others. But what should be a metadiscourse, a critical inquiry into the structure and purpose of the work leading to its ultimate approval, qualification, or disqualification, instead becomes a part of the project. That is, the institutions of academia have encouraged a sort of “category mistake” whereby reflecting on the ethics of a project is not an activity that presumes a perspective that can make strange and judge the work, but instead an activity that subsumes its own critical potential in its reduction to the same discursive level as the work itself. (eg, Instead of outlining the Object, Method, and Scope of potential research, and then using an ethical lens to evaluate the former– potential research now simply includes the Object, Method, Scope, and Ethical Concerns. It has become a banal part of the proposal, rather than a means of considering it.)
Why this concern with ethics? The ethical and emotional crises of those in the field and returning from it are almost a part of social research. Indeed, this is what occassions my thoughts today. In my research, I wonder how I am going to be able to bring myself to critique and criticize the professors and students with whom I work. How can I say something mean, when they are so nice to me? Surely, I only stand to gain from my work, while those I criticize could suffer professionally (and perhaps personally) from what I write– this unbalanced structure is cause for concern. I am a sentimental educationalist.
But I realize that prior to affective responses to the social conditions of research are the conditions of research themselves. If I am concerned with what I am doing, what I will say, how it will reflect, and what its result may be, the question is not what should I do? but why this concern? Or: not What do I do with these feelings? but What has caused me to feel this in the first place? An ethical and emotional crisis can be resolved through self-reflection, repression, or disengagment, but I think that they are better understood if understood sociologically. Other considerations of ethical dilemmas and emotional difficulties in the field give advice on how to handle, displace, avoid, gloss over, or “solve” them. But they cannot and will not be solved until the conditions that give rise to them change; the subjective experience of social researchers requires a socioanalysis. These conditions of research I will trace out briefly.
To reduce the problems of social research to problems that can be resolved textually, individually, or methodologically is to betray an ignorance of the conditions of possibility for social research. Social research, at least in its current form, requires a division of the self (who is producing the text, in extention who will be reading the text) and the other (they whom the text is about). This orientalism can be understood in many ways, as a division between subject and object, opressor and oppressed, and so on. But this division must not be sentimentalized. A central error in social scientific reflection is that this division cannot be surmounted by its traditional tools. ”Cultural” difference will not disappear on the “cultural” level: no matter how we recode, write about, describe, value, or think through difference, the objective structures that produce the difference that is often erroneously diagnosed as cultural remain in full form and function. So, social science is posited upon social difference, but it fails to grasp the structures of the production of that difference. The ethical and emotional contradictions that arise from social research arise from precisely this fact. The difficulties in knowing about, speaking with and to, trusting and being trusted by, writing about. . . an other will persist as long as their is an other. Or, to approach it differently, we can say that almost all social research discovers and describes social difference in one of two ways: it either romanticizes that difference, depending implictly upon a universal humanism to minimize or justify it; or it demonizes that difference, regarding it as pathological. What is not considered are the social processes that require the production of difference in the first place. By explaining difference, by making it understandable and palatable, we naturalize the social processes that produce and require it.
What we require, then, is a new ethics and practice that is not based upon explaining the other, but of explaining the common situation that gives rise to the division between self and other. Opposition to social science that, either because of the text or an effect of the text, criticizes it on moral grounds is bankrupt. Certainly, the social science that criticizes the social world on moral grounds is ineffective. Rather, the forging of a new social science needs to be rooted in knowledge of the objective relations that academic production requires, the objective relations that enable and “require” that form of production, and the way in which these relations of production have become outdated and unjust. Moments of pause caused by ethical confusion or emotional uncertainty, are not caused by sentimentalism– such reactions are, instead, subjective reactions to objective conditions that must be recognized as such.
consuming romance
The bottom line: The ideal of romantic love functions to preserve capitalism. It is a social institution that creates an illusion of satisfaction and happiness– which often fails to do even that, because its ideal is impossible for most, because it is differentially distributed across society, because of its obvious shallowness, because of its irreducible tendency towards gender oppression, and so on– which prevents people from creating the social, economic, and political conditions for true satisfaction and happiness through their collective truth and expression.
That I am not in a condition to return your youthful romantic love, I knew from the very beginning and felt deeply even before it was explained to me so coldly, cleverly and rationally. Oh, Karl, my distress lies precisely in the fact that your beautiful, touching passionate love, your indescribably beautiful descriptions of it, the enrapturing images, conjured up by your imagination, that would fill any other girl with ineffable delight, only serve to make me anxious and often uncertain. Jenny von Westphalen to Karl Marx, 1839; translation here.
Last night a friend and I undertook a terrific socioanalysis of my lifelong and consuming desire for desire, for the one romantic relationship. So of course, when I went to write about it today, I immediately found that many have already written about it, with more penetration than I could manage (for material reasons, of course. . .)
A few points, and then some directions for further reading.
We hypothesized that romantic love encourages the dis-integration of collectivities as affect, labor, and self are reserved for only one other (and later the nuclear family). It displaces social and affectional needs onto the pursuit of romance and the act of sex (i.e. it sublimates the alienation that men and women feel because of their (differential) placement in the class structure of production and reproduction into a form that actually preserves that generating structure instead of challenging it). These, I think, are its most important functions. Secondarily, the idea of romantic love allows for those social and affective needs to be ‘met’ through an entire set of industries and practices that conform perfectly to the logic of capitalism and even create profit for it– whether while learning about love, pursuing it, imagining it, practicing it, simulating it, or despairing at the lack of it. It creates an ideal relationship of gender and sex that oppresses those that do and those that don’t abide by it, as the ideal is enforced through law (e.g. children are imprisoned in the family, subjected to a literal paternalism of political and economic powerlessness; non-heterosexuals and their relationships become a target for regulation and a marker to contain social threats to the doxic arrangement). It is analogous to the bourgeois idea that if you don’t ‘make it’, the blame is on you as an individual.
I encourage you to check out Philip Wegner’s review of Eva Illouz’s work, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, for an evocative summary of what may be, to some, a provocative view. The book discussed seems a little too reliant on the methods and traditional subjects of cultural studies, but perhaps that is a matter of taste. Click here to read.
Less materialist but admirable for its broad strokes and focus on gender inequality is an essay from Jesse Katen. Click here to read.
I end with the traditional tag lick of a blog post: More later.
view on reviews
The bottom line: A brief critique of cultural studies here, on the materialist suggestion that democracy is not a projection, but a project. Online examples of movie reviews are considered and evaluated for their critical possibilities.
The pernicious influences that this ‘discipline’ has had are mostly due to the extent that it decontextualizes its objects from social and economic relations, while providing its own political (or politicized) readings. One cannot determine whether texts either reproduce the hegemony (see late-blooming apologist of capitalism Sahlins here for some dated barbs on this term) of identity hierarchies hierarchically ordered; nor can one evaluate their capacity to resist modes and models of inequality, injustice and domination by assuming that they have such a capacity. Indeed, that capacity lies in and relies on real people, the producers and consumers of these texts. Despite their claims of ‘democratizing’ academic studies or ‘legitimizing’ popular culture, the careerism of the cult studs actually has the opposite effect, especially in that they fail to see that doing either and especailly both of these things gives a justification to capitalists, who, if they create products that support equality, only do so for profit: this is paradox is seldom considered.
Exception: Giroux, who uses these texts as pedagogical opportunities. Their power lies, accordingly, not in their form or content, but in the ability of a teacher or parent to encourage the critique of the text. (Let us not forget, however, that this opportunity, and the discourse and desires that would make it effective, cannot be assumed, as Jenkins III and IV do– teachers, time, parents, language, access, etc all vary across class, race, education, and so on.) So, I might say that the following reviews, like the movies themselves, are useful not in themselves, for generating conversation with an Other hopefully leading to critical knowledge of current conditions and more active subjectivities that would put that knowledge to use.
Two model discussions follow. I encourage people to talk about every movie they see, and these reviews and the discussions after them model (for me) what might interest readers who have gotten this far: intelligent, if linguistically and logically elite, interrogations of movies and the positionalities of those who have watched them.
The professor at “Professor, What if. . . ?” has written a wonderful review of Teeth that situates it fully within the context it requires: the sexist violence of horror movies, the American debate over student sexual activity and knowledge, and current bio-political notions of female empowerment. Read it only after you’ve seen the movie, which should be available at your local video store, library, or Netflix watch instantly for free page.
An interesting debate is happening over at coolercinema, where Jason Bellamy makes the argument that Gran Turino “teaches us that slurs are okay, even if you mean them, so long as you’re charming. It teaches us that the Hmong might be good people, but that if they want to get anything done (fix appliances, clean up a yard, end a gang war) they need whitey to help.” And the film is especially able to make these claims because of the lack of history and intensity of animosity between whites and Asians.
[Mr. Bellamy's assertions are interesting, but I disagree with them. This is not to say that they are wrong, but that I think they require a more sensitive and measured delivery. Particularly, they read too heavily into the movie itself, without considering the social conditions for, and social effects of, the transmission of a message. Critiquing a movie in terms of itself is seldom productive, and is always subjective. Accordingly, concerns over lasting, enduring, and real effects of the movie require not judging the movie but the audience. (The "us" in his above quote is, at best, an unconscious fictive universalization of personal experience, at worst, an intellectualist narcissism that actually assumes objective truth.) Hence, the largely unfortunate irrelevance of cultural studies, literature, and a very great many websites.]
delpit vs bourdieu
The bottom line: Bourdieu and Delpit have made influential contributions to the study and practice of education. It is argued that this is because of their educations. Bourdieu preceded and presaged Delpit in suggesting that implicit cultural codes, expectations, and valuations underlie schooling, and that this both results from and ultimately results in the reproduction of an unequal social structure. But while Bourdieu neglects to see that their prescribed solution of making this culture and code explicit (training teachers to be conscious of it and teaching students how to succeed in it) is only half the battle, Delpit goes further: the sociological reason for this is their biographies.
In 1988, Delpit suggested in her still-influential article “The Silenced Dialogue”[1] that there is a “culture of power” at play in classrooms (her work focuses especially on linguistic patterns, disciplinary strategies, and sometimes curricular content). She posits that:
1. Issues of power are enacted in classrooms.
2. There are codes or rules for participating in power; that is, there is a “culture of power.”
3. The rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the rules of the culture of those who have power.
4. If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring culture easier.
5. Those with power are frequently least aware of– or least willing to acknowledge– its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence.
The first three are by now basic tenets in the literature of the sociology of education, but the last two have seldom been addressed.
Of course, it seems to be a rule of academia that the more you think yourself original (which, to be fair, Delpit doesn’t exactly do), the more you are wrong. Bourdieu wrote in a 1973 paper[2] (which sets forth many of the arguments developed in Reproduction– except the following, which to my knowledge was only implicit in the fact of the publication of that volume) that
Inasmuch as it operates in and through a relationship of communication, pedagogic action directed at inculcating the dominant culture can in fact escape (even if it is only in part) the general laws of cultural transmission, according to which the appropriation of the proposed culture (and, consequently, the success of the apprenticeship which is crowned by academic qualifications) depends upon the previous possession of the instruments of appropriation, to the extent and only to the extent that it explicitly and deliberately hands over, in the pedagogic communication itself, those instruments which are indispensable to the success of the communication and which, in a society divided into classes, are very unequally distributed among children from different social classes.
[I would explain, as below, the irony contained in this statement—its demand to democratize the conditions for the transmission and appreciation of knowledge, made in dense and difficult language—in terms of biography. The usual claim of his defenders that he deliberately subscribed to occult discursive embellishments in order to break with common-sensical meanings and usage of language is a weak one in that this is hardly necessary in every case (it would lend itself more to social and sociological terms that are overdetermined, rather than the structure of sentences; ie vocabulary rather than grammar), in that it is especially inappropriate here, and in that his language and approach to language are better understood as shibboleths necessary to his establishment and advancement in the academic field, ie as a strategy to invest and increase cultural capital, made necessary by the enduring stigma of rural origin.]
These theories have given rise to educational practices that emphasize the “making explicit” of everything: reasoning, strategies, expectations, rules, regulations, and so on. In theory, I agree that this is necessary; I agree with the above. In practice, it is far from sufficent, I think, because of student volition, an aspect of learning overlooked (more accurately, undertheorized) in these overly sociological analyses for entirely sociological reasons. To start with the former: a strict reading of these two assume that, if all impediments to pedagogic communication were lifted, systemic and implicit mechanisms of differentiating students as they progress through their schooling would be lifted. But the acquisition, organization, and application of knowledge are not made equally available to all in this scenario because the desire of students to acquire, organize, and apply knowledge would still be likely to vary among groups and individuals (contra Bourdieu: see post above). That is, the structure of teaching is not the only barrier to equal schooling. The content of teaching plays an equally determinant role. Or again, what is being taught can still dissuade students to learn, regardless of how it is being taught.
I think that Delpit appreciates this more than Bourdieu. Elsewhere she emphasizes exactly this importance of making the content of curricula relevant to the experiences and knowledges of the students being taught. I would argue that this is because Bourdieu introduces his relationship to the object into his study of the object. A white, male (if rural) student who rose to the top of a centralized, national system of education, he must have acceptedby that fact, ie, in that process and as that product of schooling, the objective value of the knowledge that was being imparted. Even if he explicitly recognized that that knowledge was (a cultural) arbitrary in his most relativistic stage [see Reproduction], the fact that he used it to establish and criticize this fact suggests that he ultimately believed in the libratory potential of his ‘classical’ education. His failure to appreciate the necessity of reforming the content of pedagogy, then, is located in his social trajectory and the academic strategies that it determined.
Delpit appreciates this fact more because of her position as a black woman in an especially discriminatory field. Further, as a practitioner in that field at multiple levels, and not just a theorist of it, she was arguably more aware of the ability of knowledge itself, not just its transmission, to be racializing, discriminatory, and differentiating. While her claims were hardly original, her prescriptions were more penetrating and accessible than Bourdieu’s; she is and will be more widely-read and understood amongst educators than Bourdieu. Their respective effects on the field of American education are directly related to their own educational experiences.
[1] Here is “The SIlenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Teaching Other People’s Children”, available in her volume Other People’s Children, New York: Free Press, 1995; or in the August 1988 issue of the Harvard Educational Review.
[2] Here is “Cultural reproduction and social reproduction”, which appeared in Knowledge, education and cultural change: Papers in the sociology of education, R. Brown, editor, London: Tavistock, 1973.
race, bullying, and categorization
The bottom line: Seemingly neutral or beneficent instruments and interventions that examine race in young populations have the effect of teaching them that theory of race. By this mechanism and others, they produce the dynamics of racial inequality of the previous generation.
At the middle school where I currently work, I was asked to tabulate the results of a school-wide survey on bullying. While I have a lot to say on the concept of ‘bullying’ itself, I’d like to point out a few things about the logic and practice of race that this survey demonstrated.
The survey consisted of a few dozen questions on bullying behaviors (defined helpfully for the respondant) and school climate. Most were answered, in classic psychological reductionism, on a 0 to 5 scale. It concluded with a few ‘about you’ questions, including age, race, gender, and grade.
The inclusion of a question asking for the respondent’s race turned out to be triply ironic. First, because the ostensible belief in “race” manifested in the survey is at cross-purposes to the explicit curricula and policies of the school and district. Second, it was at cross-purposes with the demographic of the school: after white, the largest “racial group” identified in the survey were those who answered “other.” This category demonstrated much confusion about strict racial categorizations– some answers written in included ethnicities, nationalities, qualifications, percentages, duplications of the categories listed above, questionmarks, ‘idk’s, and one response saying that “this is a non-inclusive question”– but also responses that clearly could not fit into the given categories of black, white, asian, biracial, hispanic, pacific islander, and native american. There are many, many mixed and uncategorizable kids in the school, as in the US laregly. Finally, third, it was also at cross-purposes with the survey itself. Exhorting students to identify as one of the clean-cut and easily definable (hence ahistorical and fictional) ‘racial categories’ of the US Census actually failed to help us identify the majority of the victims of bullying at the school, who left the question blank. That is, the more a student identified having been physically, verbally, indirectly, or cyber-bullied, the less likely she was to identify her “race.”
I think that we increasingly should keep in mind that students are coming from homes, countries, schools—and perhaps a generation—which does not use the same categories of racial vision and division that we do. The causal relationship, however, cannot be determined from the data here—is it that students don’t identify because they don’t want to, or is it that they don’t want to identify because they don’t? (ie, are they are afraid of being personally identified by administrators while perhaps even believing in these categories, or is it that students don’t identify because they don’t personally identify in these racial categories?)
This argument can be carried further. The imposition of conceptual categories—race, but also definitions of bullying, attitudes and actions taken towards bullying, opinions on the ‘climate’ of the school—onto the takers of the survey benefits our bureaucratic and administrative interests while failing to benefit the interests of the students. This is because we [adults] assume the concepts deployed in the survey are universal and self-evident, when they are in fact specific to our understandings of the situation. Consider the essentializing understanding of ‘bullying’ itself that emerges from a reading of this survey: the school is divided into discrete and identifiable ‘bullies’ and ‘victims’, instead of assuming that all students (teachers, staff) are capable of bullying behaviors in different social contexts. Combine this tendency to impose our understandings of the situation with the fact that our understanding benefits from unequal power relationships, such that: We collect and code information according to our categories. We then construct policies based on our categories and at the same time use them to evaluate those very policies. Thus, this survey, in itself and as part and parcel of a larger effort to ‘know’ and ‘act’ on students, follows a logic of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that it helps to create the very image of students and a problem which it purports to be investigating. (Thanks, Bourdieu!)
As a corrective, I submit that we should derive the conceptual categories that students are being asked to think about and respond to from students’ own conceptual categories, those that they already think with and respond through. This might be done in a more qualitative way through fora that allow students to speak for themselves about the problem of “bullying”, what it is, where it happens, who is involved, and why. The idea would be to engage students in a dialogue aimed first at eliciting and understanding their views on an issue, then on considering the limitations of those views, as well as looking for a student-proposed solution to the problem and the limitations of the definition of the problem. Such an ultimate solution is supported by the attitudinal information returned in the survey, which reveals not only a hesitance or uncertainty in involving adults in social life and school conflict, but also a strong willingness and desire to solve and mediate problems between students by students. Accordingly, I hope that these types of investigations into “social problems” might come to represent less administrator-imposed ways of making the administration more effective or benign, and more student-centered ways for improving student experience through peer-mediated involvement.
Many people, including black critics of survey data and methodology, close their arguments with a concession to the instruments that they criticize. Racial classifications in quantitative social research are, ultimately and unfortunately, necessary, they argue, because they can provide metrics and measurements of racial inequality. (Surely, this is no alternative.) I would say, however, that such a point is indefensible when studying youth because of the power of these types of investigations and the interventions they inspire to actually constitute and create what they are ostensibly looking in to, especially when dealing with youth that are still learning about the social world. That is, because these techniques for knowing and knowing about students (how unfortunate that this is the method we are reduced to) operate in a period in which students are still learning what race is, and may not necessarily conform to, subscribe to, or even know about its logic, they have the function of pedagogical tools for maintaining the racial order that the dominant of the dominant generation seek and see. Racial categorizations are not only increasingly useless, arbitrary, and inappropriate to the social world objectively speaking; they are also increasingly dangerous, insiduous, and harmful in that they produce racism (belief in race) in the young and thus reproduce inequality. This implicit and contradictory teaching of racial consciousness, in and by the mechanism of an apparently neutral or benign questionnaire, is unforgivable. Unfortunately, it inheres in much administrative thinking and action.
white guilt, white privilege
The bottom line: To dismantle white privilege, it is more effective to attack the social and institutional mechanisms of its transmission, rather than the people who currently hold and benefit from this privilege, because we make both white guilt and feelings of personal victimization irrelevant to the process. This may do more bad than good, however. . .
After a long discussion last night, ranging from South African to US racial contexts, my girlfriend managed to reduce my understandings of racism and reform to a variant of ‘an eye for an eye’-style retribution.
he's back. . .
To hyperbolate, I might have well said that white people in the Western Hemisphere have had their 400 years; now justice would require the institution of an equal and opposite societal reaction for the next 400 years.
Ultimately, I agree that this is would be no solution even if it was possible: as a sort of reverse-orientalism, it preserves and reifies the racial vision and division that created inequality in the first place; thus, it would fail to eliminate race-based thinking. Further, and at the subjective level, my girlfriend points out that this would foster race-based animosity on the part of the (newly disadvantaged) whites, and thus maintain racism at both levels in both populations. Surely, the best way to surmount race is to make race a TRULY (see Brown et al, Whitewashing Race for a dissection of “non-” or “anti-racist” discourse that is anything but) meaningless signifier.
But how to do so? What was valubale about the discussion, I think, is that it reaffirmed my conviction that the best way to attack race-based systems of privelege is by introducing time into the theory and practice of inequality, and so being able to dismantle mechanisms of transmission, as opposed to having to attack individuals and the capitals that they might posess as such. cf, my girlfriend’s source of discomfort: in her view, not all white people are at fault.
What was also valuable was my girlfriend’s resistance and opposition throughout the conversation. She is white and I am not; she is working-class and I am middle-class. Accordingly, much of my racial radicalism ran up against her understandings of standards and systems of inequality and discrimination that are not based on race.
I find myself trapped by the traditional odds and ends of achieving equality, ie in the discourse that has defined the quest for racial equality since the Civil War (if not earlier). Let white folks up easy, as the Christian thing to do (see MLK jr, Washingon, Baldwin, and others) or exact true equality (as by Malcolm X, perhaps DuBois, and others). I favor the first, but is it because I’m not black?
