Monday, August 25, 2014

OPM 192, August 25th Meditation (2004 & 2014)

The mediation from this day ten years ago demands attention in the way that many at onset of this commemorative project demanded attention.   There is a fresh line of thinking  happening that was put underway in the writing from the day before, and it seems that the etymological method is brought back into the fold.  And because this material is part of the original writing that was not included in Being and Learning, it is worthy of some attention.

The meditation picks up where yesterday’s writing left off, taking up the link between fabrication (making) and fabric (woven textile).  It begins “Fabric, fabrique, fabrica, related to faber.  ‘Something put together, a system of correlated practice; a building, an artifice; a frame or structure; wovern, felted, or knitted material; mode of construction,’ related to fabricate ‘to build, to construct; to form by art or manufacture.’”  Making this connection is all very Arendtian, which is to say, I’m borrowing the set of terms that addresses the world as what arising in common, and arises because it is built or fabricated.   The fabrication is itself important, because this common world is a tapestry woven by the threads of interconnected stories.   Within the context of the ongoing work to build a world, a place we can share equally, storytelling, or the sharing of stories functions in place of theory or science, on the one hand, and intimacy, on the other.   The language of science and theory is too specialized, and the person who articulates it remains veiled.   The language of intimacy is too particular, the inverse of the universalism of science and theory.   Story telling happens on the middle ground between the two because it has a universal appeal but is expressed in the non-specialized language of everyday life.   Story telling is the work of a person without being personal, and in this way can be shared.

But the meditation is not a wholesale embrace of Arendt.   My emphasis on intersubjectivity compelled me to think storytelling as a dialogic narrative process.  So I turned to Bahktin and his application of the musical form of polyphony to the novel.   This is the logical implication of the death of the theorist, which undergirds Arendt’s ‘modernism.’   Like many of her generation whose thinking was formed in the first part of the twentieth century, and confirmed by the horrors of the second world war, Arendt was convinced that a break had occurred (via the Industrial Revolution?) in so-called tradition that had left us with no other choice than to rebuild, slowly but surely, a common world that was built, in part, with the fragments recovered from the past.   The implication of this is that there are no longer any grand narratives, or any one book (or author) that has the authority to organize or gather the human family.   For me the most compelling implication of modernism’s discontent, which is shared by post-colonial and decolonial critics, is the fragility of subjectivity, a vulnerability that forces us into community where we seek and are offered strength and vitality.   (For me, this summer, the question that has captured my attention is the one on this very matter of ‘intersubjectivty,’ specifically, whether or not this vitality is offered in a more significant way when we form community, or are gathered into the community, with Nature?  In other words, does the vulnerable subjective only ever achieve intersubjectivity with other humans, or does Nature provide us with that opportunity?)  

The move from the storyteller as the single author to polyphonic, dialogic storytelling follows Bahktin’s literary theory that the real authors of a novel are the characters.  They have an independence from the author, who is merely describing them.   Of course, this begs the question concerning the persona of the author within the system I am working out.  There is an analogy to be worked out, or so it seems:  is the learning community a collection of ‘characters’?  and is the community a ‘novel’?  


The meditation from 8/25/04 doesn’t take up those questions in detail, of course.   And such is the fragmentary character of the daily meditation: it offers undeveloped musings, brief interpretations and applications of etymological findings.   In this case the meditation that begins with fabrication and fabric ends with the following: “the ‘novel’ is the dwelling constructed by their participation within a system of interdependent meaning-making, where each ‘thread’ of their being is woven together into the tapestry of the text.  The community of learning is such a text, the ‘original’ words of the learning, the product of their evocative saying, their improvisational performances.”

1 comment:

  1. 3.0 (Sunday, Portland, ME). As soon as I became focused on the sabbatical book writing I stopped noting where the OPM appeared in "Being and Learning." So I'm pleasantly surprised when I read in the 2.0 that this far into the original project there is material that didn't make the final cut. I have no recollection of the editing process, only that I completed the Foreword at Saints Cafe in State College, PA (Kelly's hometown).
    Responding to the above, I would note that in the current stage of the project I remained with Arendt in her transition from work to action but stopped short of section on story telling and narrative. The "story of one's life" is revealed in action, and, in fact, we are not the author's of those stories (there can never be one final story or narrative). We provide the action and speech but others tell our stories. This is all related to the disclosure of "who" we are. But as I describe it, this is most definitely not the concern of education. Since writing my dissertation and concluding with the what, borrowing from Habermas, I call the post-traditional dialogic modality, I have consistently described learning as the negation of identity. The modality of the student or learner is not the same as the "who" that is disclosed in the Arendtian sense. What I am interested in is learning for the sake of learning, a play on art for art's sake. And because it is a performance art the discussion moment of learning is not directly related to the identity of the performer. Students are action performing a play of philosophical discussion that is exploring possible interpretations of the text. The analogy is that we can't reduce the character to the identity of the actor, the music to the identity of the musicians, etc. I'm interested in a kind of transcendence from the personal that is initiated by the text and continues with the discussion. Since Friday I've been thinking about the spiritual and even mystical implication of this move. Could it be that what I am describing is a form of moksha (spiritual liberation) in the Buddhist sense, where freedom is the overcoming of the personal identity and the movement into the modality of anatman (no-self)? That discourse is definitely a source of my thinking, although I don't believe that I use that precise language in the first draft. Perhaps I will!

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