OPM 175, August 8 Meditation (2004 & 2014)

There aren’t many days that I recall vividly from the writing experiment I undertook ten years ago, but today is definitely one that I remember.   I was attending the International Network of Philosophers of Education (INPE) conference in Madrid, where I was, in fact, presenting the paper that had initiated the experiment, the somewhat infamous “Tune In, Turn On, and Let Learning Happen,” which I first presented at the Oxford Philosophy of Ed conference earlier in the year.  There were some really strong reactions to the paper, which, for some in the audience it was the first time they’d encountered my New School formed voice, with its unapologetic Arendtian and Heideggerian style and substance.  A few months later I found myself not only presenting the same paper to a different audience, a bit more diverse and also a bit more open, but also presenting material from the experiment to the second gathering of Ilan Gur Ze’ev’s Critical Pedagogy collective. (Coincidentally, I am recalling the parallel meeting organized by Ilan just moments after I completed the final review the final galleys of my review essay on Ilan that will be published by the journal Educational Theory).  As the recollection intensifies I remember that there was some hostility in response to my presentation to the Critical Pedagogy group, specifically, from my Norwegian colleague, Lars Lovlie, who did not for a moment appreciate my position that I found myself in after making a critical turn from critical pedagogy by privileging listening and silence over critique and judgment.  He and others weren't persuaded to even concede the legitimacy of the fundamental questions I was raising with my project: Is it possible that we could identify an alternative form of praxis in the work that cultivates openness?  Does such work constitute ‘history making’?  Moreover, given Ilan’s suspicion of the dominant language of critical pedagogy, didn’t the forerunners of Critical Pedagogy, especially writers like Adorno and even Benjamin, invite us to do something experimental with our writing, so that we weren’t so much making theory, which I continue believe is just another form of metaphysics, but making something like art or music, a praxis of poeisis?  Ilan, to his credit and unfailing support for me, which I will never forget!, was open to my move, so much that he published what I contributed to the meeting.  (A few years later, back at Oxford for what would be our final gathering as a group, I met one of Ilan’s graduate students from Haifa who had been in a seminar where they had read the book with our contributions.   She told me that of all the pieces, she and the others felt that my contribution was one of the few that was actually saying something, and was trying to work out something new.  It was a sincere compliment, and I was deeply moved by it.)

But on this day ten years ago the meeting of the critical pedagogy group had passed, and I was taking a long afternoon break from the INPE conference.  I ended up on the second floor of the Starbucks on Calle Gran Via.   I tried in vain to find a local coffee house, but Madrid is a place for writers who enjoy beer and wine and tapas (the Hemingways!), and is not so much a city for coffee drinkers.   The Starbucks is in a beautiful 19^th century building, with a perfect view of the streets below.  And it is Madrid, after all!  

Anyway, when I read the meditation from this day ten years ago I am brought back to that moment when I perceived the twofold play between peace and freedom revealed in the Spanish word nosotros.  As I was writing that day I happened to stop for a moment and think about the exhibit I’d visited the day before.   I was focused on the post card that featured an image from the exhibit, but more so on the exhibit’s title: Nos.Otros.   I thought about the title, especially the way it was written with the ‘.’   (...now that I'm sharing my vivid recollection of that week in Madrid in August 2004, I’m tempted to write about the Derrida interview I saw on Madrid tv hours after arriving…perhaps tomorrow!)   The exhibit’s title caused me to return anew to one of the ethical implications of the event of appropriation.  (The meditation from this day ten years ago begins with that citation from Heidegger I’d been mining repeatedly: “we must experience simply this owning in which man and Being are delivered over to each other, that is, we must enter into what we call the event of appropriation.”)   If this event has the potential to situate us in a particular way so that we can, upon reflection, understand it as having a normative implication (something that Heidegger would never admit), then this implication is directing us toward a specific relational modality, one that is outward in orientation.  If the event of appropriation completes the ‘extinction’ of the ego, the result is an orientation to otros (others).  If nosotros usually denotes ‘us’ or ‘we’, it’s possible (I conjectured) to read nos-otros as ‘our others.’  “What is important here is the relation between peace and freedom as expressed in the relation between ‘nos’ and ‘otros.’  The ‘nos’ is a delusion or an illusion apart from the ‘otros’, the ‘others’ that are concealed in the ‘not yet’.”(8/8/04) ( 'Otros' are the presence of what is hidden...the roots...)  What I was attempting to do was stretch the claim that the learning community was both a space and location of intimacy, of familiarity, and shared commitments, but also one that was always oriented towards the future, towards what it was not yet, or not at all:  the community to come, should we decide to have one!   “The learning community is thus given the name nos-otros (‘us-others’), the name anatman (nonself) as it is assigned to the learning community.”(8/8/04)  

As I move from the past 8th of August in Madrid to the present today in Portland, a day that, coincidentally, happens to be the anniversary of our move to Maine, I have a prompt that comes, appropriately, from one of Thoreau’s Maine woods essays, “The Allegash and East Branch.”  I encountered the passage this morning, and immediately recognized it as yet another example of what I call his epiphanic fragments, moments when  his detailed chronicle and phenomenological description are interrupted by a sudden moment of speculation, happening by way of a kind of transcendence into the archaic and into what call the originary past.   In the example I read this morning, Thoreau is describing the moment when one his companions, his guide Joseph Polis (Penobscot), asked him if he’d ever heard “Indian sing.”  As Thoreau had not, he asked Polis “if he would not favor us with a song.  He readily assented, and lying on his back, with his blanket wrapped around him, he commenced a slow, somewhat nasal, yet musical chant…”   After describing the song, and then the others that followed, Thoreau’s recalls the music prompting in him a kind of transcendence: “His singing carried me back to the period of the discovery of America, to San Salvador and the Incas, when Europeans first encountered the simple faith of the Indians.  There was, indeed, a beautiful simplicity about it…The sentiments of humility and reverence chiefly were expressed.”

I could not help but feel an intense solidarity with Thoreau at that moment because his vision of that first encounter resonated so clearly with my LAPES project; and, so, now for the second time I encounter a direct link to my project, and I’m feeling inspired.   And why not?  I read the preceding and was immediately connecting it with the following that I wrote for the Lapiz piece that will be published: “Without exaggeration I want to argue that the originary question of Latin American philosophy is the question arising at the origin of the Latin American reality, at the inceptual encounter on the island of Quisqueya between Tainos and Iberians.”   (And the originary question is none other than the same one – I discovered last month – that Thoreau asked upon ascending Katahdin:  Where  are we? or Donde Estamos?)  

But the matter isn’t all so neatly organized, and, of course, I have to underscore that this is all a matter of the blues.  Indeed, the originary question is an expression of the blues.  Where  are we? Donde Estamos?, is asked because we are in a constant state of dis-location, thrown into a ‘new’ world after a seismic collision between two previousely co-existing old worlds.   And these blues are the blues of the past, present and unknown/able future of the learning community, both in its singular and collective form.  Nos.otros is a sign of the blues.   I say all this because despite his transcendence from his time, particularly, the trenchant colonialism and institutional racism of his era (pre-civil war America) via his civil disobedience against paying a war tax, and his support for the abolitionist movement, Thoreau was captured by his time much in the way I am caught in my own.   While Joseph Polis’ music lead his thinking back to the originary moment, “back to the period of the discovery of America, to San Salvado and the Incas…” Thoreau was unable to think in a totally originary way.  He description of the music as having “a beautiful simplicity” is somewhat tainted by the qualifier that in the music, “nothing of the dark and savage, only the mild and infantile.”   These qualifiers, unfortunately, undermine what seems to be an earnest attempt by Thoreau to think beyond his time.  But rather than cause me to dismiss his project, the historicity of Thoreau’s thinking is a cautionary note and a reminder that the ‘strange ownership’ that Heidegger speaks of (and also caught him!!!), is not only the pre-historical force of Life, but also the force of the historical epochs we have been thrown into.   Those cultural laws... that Aristotle identified in his Rhetoric...they also have a claim over us. And while we may attempt to struggle against our time, those laws remain a part of the nos, part of ‘us’ and thus part of the answer to the question, Who are we?