At the Pulpit
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 Pedagogically, I am a prophet with a single message, that the linear perception of cause and effect is an illusion. I take this as an extension of Kermode’s reflection on endings, turning the focus from results to process, from “main” characters to the chorus who provide relevance and who must be main characters within their own, underexplored frames. As young adults enter college, they are oriented on the goal of graduating, of beginning a career, of succeeding. Their past experience of education and the American cultural mythos incline them to believe that self-application and a degree of effort will be rewarded, even when, realistically, we all know that this is not necessarily the case. I perceive my job to be that of encouraging each student’s confidence in their own identity in order to give them perspective on the contexts of “success” as primarily relevant to themselves and not to socially received standards and expectations.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 When I first began my own studies, my object was to use literature as an anthropological device to explore humanity. It sounded noble and interesting, but what it quickly devolved into was an endless effort to perform rhetorical exercises for the sake of praise and grades, so that I became a Pharisee. I think I might have taught as a demonstration of my love of art (in effect, to show my own cultivation), but what I needed was the spark of my redeeming message to encourage me to finally seek to do what had been my intended vocation for the bulk of my life.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Perhaps it seems incongruous that I might seek to proselytize through the medium of literature. The other day, I was reading a text on film that emphasized the way in which we judge a narrative by its realism in relation to life. What it left unsaid was how easily we may approach the ideals (or infamies) within the fictional and use them as a yardstick to judge the appropriateness of life as it is presented to us. If utopia exists in fiction, then the proper response to encountering it is not indifferent complacency sheltered in metaphor, but an interrogative which probes the impediments that prevent that utopia and a regard for the steps which can and may redirect reality to more approximate the desired fiction.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 The ideal that is central to all of this is based on communication between thinking, feeling individuals, and, unexpectedly, this turns out to be problematic. As an instructor of college students, my place is describable from two angles, as the person who assists learning within the classroom and the liaison functionary who mediates between the student and the university. As Moten and Harney illustrate in “The University of the Undercommons,” the college classroom is designed essentially as a conservative space. Critical thinking which might guide the evolution of education is observed primarily through form, presenting an appearance of challenge which resolves readily into reconciling hopes to “realities.” Scholarship is therefore, primarily, involved in the business of replication, rather than innovation, producing functional replacements for worn-out intellectuals (managers, planners, organizers, in the sense as Gramsci has it) as they conform to production in academic and non-academic settings. The Reorder of Things by Roderick Ferguson emphasizes the malleable facade of the corporate university as it presents a front of “seeming” change, displaying concession to difference by inclusion and representation, which forms a model for society’s analogous government to also concede change, “seemingly.” Tokens of representation acknowledged in receipt of difference are summarily re-valued by the university or the governing body as chits that absolve any issues that might have ever arisen out of such difference, dismissing them from the view which reassumes the consensus (majority) understanding. The university is a machine, whether it is subservient to the state or in reciprocity with it; its status as a machine cannot be denied, and it is into this inhuman space that I seek to intrude my understanding for the development of identities, a concern for me as an educator and as a human, but only peripherally as a function of the machine to which I attach myself. Thus, Moten and Harney point to the space between the lines, the “undercommons,” which is not recognized by the framework of the university machine but should be inherent in the human components that make it up. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Touching Feeling, emphasizes this split between institution and individual, describing involvement in protest, noting the excitement, the energy of those expressing themselves and the seawall of inertia erected by entrenched institutions, saying, “the protest function is so routinized and banalized by the state and media… that enable it” (28).
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 3 My project must therefore be an exploration of the degree to which that human element can be emphasized and exploited within the framework of the machine. Thankfully, others before me have considered the problem. Touching Feeling deals with affect, a concept that, once abstracted from situation, seems doomed by its specificity and inutility. Despite that, Sedgwick demonstrates how it is possible to apply affect (a universal to the human experience) as a theoretical universal in approaching literature. The sense of feeling that is innate within us is thus intimately connected to the sense of feeling as we explore and connect through media which primarily reflects relational concepts, not simply information pertinent to replicating the function of the machine. Affect theory, per se, may not be the ultimate answer, but it provides a face and a direction for the chaotic “undercommons” which exists only to resist, a worthy testament to the glorious, unconquerable spitefulness which is nearly synonymous with being human, but as nebulous chaos can only have a limited productivity beyond providing friction which impedes the governing machine. In specific, Sedgwick shows how the major work of Henry James may be interpreted through the lens of affect, providing an explication that not only deepens our understanding of how affect influences our relationship with the world but also resolves conflicts in our understanding of an author. Using affect, Sedgwick revitalizes standard tropes of psychoanalytical criticism. Whether affect is the way to accomplish this is not the point. The relief felt when the leaden trope of Oedipus is shoveled off the stage is so literally palpable that, once experienced, it inspires the reader to seek and approve any way of reaching such an end, of making a fresh start, if only in the name of novelty.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Sedgwick posits that what is central is considering both what we know and how we know it. This contextualization of knowledge is central to the text of my litany which, above all, emphasizes the contextualization of individuals as they understand themselves and their relationship to the world.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Ferguson, Roderick A. The Reorder of Things. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. Print.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Forgacs, David, ed. An Antonio Gramsci Reader. New York: Schocken, 1988. Print.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney. “The University and the Undercommons.” Social Text 79.22 (2004): 101-115. Project Muse. Web. 06 Sep. 2013.
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.
I love your statement about complicating, and individualizing, the ideas of “sucess” and, I suppose, meaning in life. As someone who has struggled to articulate that my own idea doesn’t necessarily conform to anyone elses, I heartily approve of helping our students grapple with this question (irregardless of their ultimate decisions) I agree that realism (in one sense or another) is a ‘intuitive’ measure by which to judge texts. that realism might be situations or histories, or in the case of more speculative fictions it may be sciences, or ideologies, or logic, or more basically, ‘humanity’ or people-ness, but it can be as rigidly or flexibly applied as needed, based on the ‘something’ (or the “most important something’) that the author or reader or time thinks is the most, deepest, true. Looking as well, at the ways in which judging lit by reality also invites us to judge reality by fiction is a coherent, workable, play-able idea. I may steal it to offer directly to future students for their tasting. I also like the way you analyze the ‘seeming’ change, the way in which underlying realities can be disguised by shifting (term, term… ) how about vocabularies?
Affect theory looks like a pretty useful way of trying to organize these undercommons, this resistance, although I do like the way you make clear it isn’t the only way or the ‘one true answer’. It makes sense, though, and the way you position it as contextualization and a way of understanding the world in such terms looks really useful and worth exploring.