Dissconceptualizing Curriculum: Is there a next in the generational text?
Journal of Curriculum
Theorizing, 18 (1): 7-19, 2002.
Peter Appelbaum
Associate Professor
Arcadia University
Department of Education
450 S. Easton Road
Glenside, PA 19038-3295
215-572-4476
New collective assemblages
of enunciation are beginning to form an identity out of fragmentary ventures,
at times risky initiatives, trial and error experiments; different ways of
seeing and of making the world, different ways of being and of bringing to light
modalities of being will open up, be irrigated and enrich one another. It is less a question of having access to
novel cognitive spheres than of apprehending and creating, in pathic modes,
mutant existential virtualities.
--Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis (1995)
The reconceptualists were excellent conceptual
terrorists, in the Foucauldian sense, and their first children did a fine job
of building new conceptual discourses out of the rubble left by their Doktorvaters and -mutters. Yet what are the
youngest children to do? Looked upon as
spoiled and too comfortable by their elders, less enterprising and
disrespectful by their older siblings, they (we) seek a way of being curriculum
workers not restricted or denatured like those from whom they (we) inherit
discourses and projects. Dissing the
notion of a conceptual discourse itself, I read recent curriculum theorizing as
ideological practices, discursive generational texts, and aesthetic responses
to a theory-practice dichotomy. I am
egged on by my colleagues, yet ignored like a ranting adolescent by those
interested in systems engineering and power textiles. The technology of morality this envelopes is surprisingly similar
to the very traditions that the "terrorists" themselves were hoping
to disinherit.
When a set of rebels now sits back and scans the
terrain -- delights in their achievements -- there is less textile fashion
experimentation encouraged and more appropriation expected of the
proteges. It is tempting to orchestrate
institutions and dynastic realms of power.
This is the state of contemporary curriculum theorizing if read as a
canonical text of difference. However,
new scholars are refusing the roles of appropriator and executor; some are
advocating a playfulness with conceptual discourse itself[1]. In doing so they point out the modernist
project of the reconceptualists and even of their older siblings' (the earlier
doctoral students of the reconceptualist Doktorvaters/mutters)
"post-modern" projects, which turn out to be just as modernist in
their hegemonic goals and objectives.
The field of curriculum in this reading looks more and more monolithic,
more and more of the same fabric whether of the traditionalist cloth or the
reconceptualist cloth.
I critique reconceptualists, their heirs, and recent
scholarship that points in new directions, including those that
self-referentially challenge the never-ending claims that the curriculum field
is moribund. That tactic worked for the
original Foucauldian terrorists: for the eldest children (the heirs), it turns
out, the same tactic won't work, despite current efforts to make this same
declaration. In fact, the field is not moribund, thanks to its newest
scholars that are abandoning the field metaphor itself in favor of nomadic
discourses of curriculum and educational studies. There is a de Certeauian or Sahlinsian flavor to my argument
--that, as always, everything is up in the air -- anything can happen -- even
as people poach, imagine, and play, even as people work to save tradition
simultaneously with changing it.
Attention!
Much of my interrogation of curriculum as hypertext
understands its origins in the rise of "attention" as a component of
modernism. As Jonathon Crary (1999)
comments, a great deal of critical analysis of modern subjectivity during the
twentieth century dwelled on the idea of "reception in a state of
distraction," as articulated by Walter Benjamin and others. Crary elaborates on the paradoxical
intersection that has permeated modernism and beyond, between an imperative of
attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and
mass communication, and a kind of ideal of sustained attentiveness as a
constitutive element of a creative and free subjectivity. There is a way in which seemingly
qualitatively different notions of attention, such as a "cultivated
individual gazing at a work of art" and "a factory worker
concentrating on the performance of a repetitive task" become examples of
a purified aesthetic perception inseparable from the processes of modernism
that made the "problem of attention" a central issue in new
institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity.
Thus there is a way in which curriculum theorizing
supports the notion that the postmodern efflusion of distraction and
multiplicity of approaches is simply nothing more than a reproduction of the
modernist notion of attention. This
occurs in the tenacity with which curriculum theorists adhere to the pleasure
of conceptual discourse, and in doing so, strive to guide attention and to
manage perception in the service of the discourse itself. The "project" of curriculum
theorists has been wedded heavily to the attainment of conceptual attention at
the hegemonic service simultaneously of individual perception and social justice,
each of which is no more than an element of the conceptual discourse.
Moribundity of the Generational Text
Two nodes of this conceptual discourse that play
into this dilemma are the phobia of moribundity and the construction of new
concepts that are intended to rebirth the field of curriculum theorizing. There is a pleasure of genealogy by which a
search for origins as clarification for concepts is the attentiveness desired
in the phobia. The unfolding drama of
this encounter is one of setting up a history of generations, and in these
generations we find both a maintenance of what is constructed as the
"concept" as well as a narrative of history in which the concept
creator is at once heir to the concept and the savior of curriculum for the new
generation. Dwayne Heubner (1976),
responding to Schwab's cry of moribundity, found solace in William Torrey
Harris and John Dewey. If the
curriculum field is moribund, he asked, what is curriculum anyway? For after all,
The term curriculum
no longer serves to unify us. The dispersing forces are too great, the
attraction of new associations and the possibilities of new households too
compelling... If the diverse interests and collectivities that have been
gathering over the past seventy years were cleared away, we might be able to
see the original conception of curriculum and to do and describe our work more
effectively. (Heubner 1976: 243)
Heubner is thus my first benchmark in my own search
for genealogy, as I wonder if there is a way to do this without also saying,
"Hey look at me. Let ME into the
household”. ... Or is that what I am saying? For Heubner, Harris had successfully constructed curriculum as
presenting the collected wisdom of the culture to the students through
texts. For Harris, the concern for the
course of study in educational institutions is a concern for content, which is
in turn derived from conceptions of culture, thought of as the accumulated
wisdom of the race; culture was for Harris defined as what is found in books. The way in which the culture is made
accessible or present for the students, the educational technology, is through
interpretation of textbooks.
Dewey, in Heubner's story, agrees with Harris in the
first of the two themes -- that the selection and formulation of content grows
out of the "experience of the race," or "wisdom." The identification of technologies by which
this content can be made accessible or made present to particular individuals,
is where Dewey differs from Harris. Out
of this juxtaposition, Heubner is able to set up the two themes of 'identifying
the content of the course of study' and of 'determining the technology by which
it is made present' as the work of curriculum. And in doing so, he particularly
attends to the perception that all
curriculum work since has thus been challenged by the tension between the
interests of the individual and the social interests that have impacted upon
that individual. But of course, Heubner
starts with Harris and Dewey, so he starts with theorizing that occurred in the
center of modernist attempts to live in and through modernist processes that
set up the individual as being trained to attend.
By the end of the nineteenth century the
specifically modernist project of attention is identifiable as permeating
discourses of the arts and sciences (in attending to a work of art or in
cultivating the careful skills of an observing scientist), and as part of a
dense network of texts and techniques around which the truth of perception was
organized and structured. Crary writes
that it was through the "new imperatives of attentiveness that the
perceiving body was deployed and made productive and orderly, whether as
student, worker or consumer." (p.23) That this ultimately led to, for
example, the diagnosis of some people as disordered because of a deficit in
their ability to attend, the project of educational psychology grounded in the
notion of motivation and management, and the telescoping of instruction to
skills of focusing attention on key concepts, skills, and facts, is a story we
have heard in many other contexts. But
I am not sure that we have thought much about how our own research agenda is
but a piece of the same project. It is
hard to dismiss! After all, even the
honored Gilles Deleuze has defined philosophy as nothing other than
constructing new concepts. What could
be more romantic? But it may be that a
'next generation' of curriculum workers, growing up with the conceptual discourse, experiences its tasks in a
disconceptualist way. In Crary's
analysis, being and appearance has parted company and truth is no longer
supposed to appear, to reveal, and disclose itself, to the mental eye of the
beholder; in this way, the emergence of modern forms of beholding, of
attention, is inseparable from the dissolution of anything fixed, permanent, or
eternal. He refers to Hannah Arendt's
understanding of modernity as not simply a reversal of doing and thinking, but
a destruction of contemplation in the original sense altogether. If the idea of contemplation as beholding truth
is rendered meaningless, then modern distraction is not a disruption of stable or 'natural' kinds of sustained,
value-laden perception of the sort that had existed for centuries but is an effect, and in many cases a constituent
element, of the many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects. If distraction emerges as a problem in the
late nineteenth century, it is inseparable from the parallel construction of an
attentive observer in various domains.
Deborah Britzman (1998), too, searched her
genealogy, and I choose her because I admire her work so much and because we
seem to share many common sources of inspiration. In her chapter, "On Making Education Inconsolable," she
reads Maxine Greene in juxtaposition with the memories of dancer and choreographer
Bill T. Jones. "The Bildungsroman of the school," she
writes,
is also the dialogic of the discontent: the artists
who offered through their texts, the future stuff of curriculum -- their
anxious, celebratory, and transgressive dreams. What they offered, and what Maxine Greene engages, is their
refusal to guarantee meaning. (Britzman
1998: 52)
The project for us, as for Maxine Greene, is to make
education "inconsolable," as a practice of always doing something
"more." Deborah Britzman's
choice is an interesting one, for this work by Maxine Greene is one of her most
historically grounded narratives of a nation built from the messy confusions of
slavery, genocide, Free Nations peoples and a global diaspora. So that, in reading Greene and pulling out
the clarifying concept of the inconsolable, Britzman also pulls along with it
the need for understanding oneself as a generation with a legacy. And in doing so, she highlights the purpose
of education and the work for those of us in education as one specifically of attending, within a generational text.
This legacy raises a sort of counter-perspective on attention and perception
within my larger framework: Conceptual discourse is an insipid, lingering
malady of modernism that perpetuates the hegemony of perception; yet perception
itself can be seen as working against itself, in asking that one attend to the
inconsolable that is constructed in the attention to attending. This legacy,
however, is not the same thing as the generational inheritance that Heubner
articulated, and the difference could be significant in its acceptance of the
diversity of attempts to play with new methods and treasures, the diversity
that Heubner deplored.
Two recent works can help us see the implications of
this difference in the ways that they support the work of new scholars
appearing in the terrains of curriculum, Contemporary
Curriculum Discourses, a compilation of selected articles published in the
first 20 years of the Journal of
Curriculum Theorizing, and Turning
Points in Curriculum, a memoir and potentially new version of the canonical
textbook on curriculum often used in university courses. In Contemporary
Curriculum Discourses, William Pinar dons the robe of father in his
introduction to the compilation, and carries the discourse to its fruition:
I decided ... that for the project to be true to its
origin -- that is, the support of new work, to allow for the next wave to
break--it needed to sweep away the father. ... it was past time to step aside
and let the younger ones do whatever they deem appropriate without looking over
their shoulder at me. (Pinar xiii)
Yet, as a particular kind of father, he sets up a
particular generational text: "The
point has never been about building monuments or traditions, it has been about
tearing them down, allowing new ideas to emerge and take hold." Ironically, the father of reconceptualizing
did indeed add his wing onto the cathedral of conceptual discourse, for
reconceptualizing is still conceptual discourse. The project is still to construct your new idea and make a place
for it, to establish oneself as "somebody" in the profession, as
someone who does "life history," or "chaos," or "the
inconsolable;" "psychoanalysis," "Deleuze;" or, in my
case, now, "deconceptualizing."
And, like the positivist paradigm that so much of reconceptualizing
struggled to undermine, conceptual discourse will always turn around at anyone
who attempts something "outside the box" and label it with a
conceptualist label. Those who took on
the mantle of reconceptualizing look at those of us who came a bit later and
label us with something, and we say, "no, you don’t get it," like the
younger kids that we are. And if we
don’t lay out a new conceptual discourse that catches on, we haven't "made
it" as a curriculum theorist in their book. But, just like the reconceptualists who in the past said to the
Tylerists and Bobbits and Psychologists of Deformity, "you don’t get
it," there is a new generation of curriculum theorists hanging around and
they can talk to each other and they know they make sense, a different kind of
"sense" than a conceptual sense.
In getting out of the way, the father might be making it possible for
the younger ones to come along. But in
a larger professional context, in which even the first children of the
reconceptualists still are not legitimized on many campuses, and the newest of
the lot are likely to be teaching 'methods of quantitative evaluation' at a
regional state university as they dream of a career in curriculum theorizing,
this doesn’t quite work. That father
has to play the game and give the clout to those youngin's, and we're hurtin'
without that help. It is pretty much
like a child graduating college just as their father or mother dies, suddenly
discovering that they don't have the trust funds and connections that other
people have to help them get a job and find a home to live in. It makes their lives creative and
innovative, but nomadic and transient and marginal.
William Pinar does provide the scaffolding in Turning Points, for which he writes the
introduction. He places the book as the new, declaring on the first page of his
introduction that it is a "stylistic achievement,"
not only an aesthetic accomplishment ... but an
intellectual and pedagogical accomplishment as well. This book represents nothing less than a new type of genre of
scholarship, a genre -- what shall its name be? -- that combines other genres
and in so doing creates a new one. (v)
The introduction continues to describe how the book
is very much a hypertextual or postmodern pastiche of scholarly commentary,
impressionistic portraiture, parallel takes, interviews, and excerpted
scholarly materials. Each is juxtaposed
and interwoven into a tapestry that strives to create a memoir for our times. And
in so doing, this memoir is intended to be read by a "next
generation" of curriculum workers, weaned on the tapestry, nourished in
the comfort of disjunction and juxtaposition, of interwoven threads.
Nevertheless, the canonical elements have taken root in this potentially new
text of curriculum theorizing.
Historical markers, and the placing of key ancestors in context serves
the primary purpose of guiding readers in their own project of locating
themselves, or relocating themselves, among the players and participants who
helped to shape the curriculum field.
The questions I want to ask, however, are as follows: Is curriculum a
field in which individuals are placed?
And if one does not place oneself in this field, is one outside? If one does not have a plow path from
oneself to another, key self in the field, is one nonexistent? What if we take seriously the postmodern
critique of the modern, bourgeois "self"? Can we "introduce" a "next generation" to
curriculum without giving them a lineage, either one of status and power or one
of invisibility, without asking them to situate themselves in "the
field" by producing a conceptual fruit that captures the farmers'
attention?
The Next that Comes 'After' in the Generational Text
The metaphor of field is a dangerous one with
dangerous implications, and I am not sure how it plays out in understanding
whether or not there can be a "next" in this generational text, a
next way that doesn't live in the conceptual discourse.[2] And in asking this I recognize that even I
am plagued by this conceptual discourse we use, that even this question I am
asking is steeped in all of the problematics I have raised. I am plagued as a generational heir of
Maxine Greene and Deborah Britzman -- and yes, of John Dewey and William Torrey
Harris, and Pinar and the reconceptualists, but also, like Maxine and Deborah,
many others who are not names that are found in commonly used histories of
educational thought. And I am captive
in the fantasy of thinking the unthought of difference, of imagining that
communities are something to do, something to make. Just as the arts ask education to tolerate them even as they must
tolerate the intolerances of education, I ask with Brtizman if the "real
curriculum theorists," the people that many of us would "know"
as doing "curriculum theorizing," can tolerate the "next"
while the next generation may not be able to tolerate the intolerances of a
generational text.
Now, in the beginning of this essay, I mentioned a
"conceptual category," aesthetic responses to a theory-practice
dichotomy. And I did so in the context
of my own curriculum work, in which I am hired to teach math, science, and
technology education to prospective and current teachers. And, in which there is strong ridicule of
curriculum theorizing as having a "place" in a college of
education. At first, I took my job as
the perfect challenge. Warmed by
critical pedagogy, I took my students as who they were, and where they
were. And I thought seriously that this
was really the only respectable kind of work to be doing. I presented numerous conference papers in
which I described justifications for others working in seemingly
"irrelevant areas" of education to infiltrate those spaces labeled as
important and central to educational practice.
But in my eight years at my current job I underwent 'recapitulation of
the generational text,' coming around to a point where I could no longer accept
that my interests and ways of making meaning had so little respect. I began to think as a reconceptualist,
paralleling much of what Bill Pinar wrote about in the early years of JCT.
But, as someone without the family legacy, and without the family
connections, most of my presentations and publications went unseen, unheard;
they were invisible. And rightly so,
since they were not the unearthing of a concept found in a previous, and
famous, curriculum worker's writing.
The "next" part of the story, though, is
that I found other people in the same "place," and some of these
people seemed to come with the family credentials that should have given them
the privileges and status we all thought we deserved. So what was the problem?
The problem was, and is, that we are seen as not fitting into the
scheme. The problem is that we are a
next generation that is working with what we were given, not just a new
generation doing better with what we got.
We are like the youngest kids in a family who are not satisfied
accomplishing what the parents didn’t quite get, the ones who want to, and do,
"something else." And this
something else is not given to us, either, like Maxine Greene's
"inconsolable." Nor are we
claiming something new and different and important; we just want to do it, and
to be able to do it.
Distraction is the effect of attention; now it is
the experience. Those for whom
distraction/attention is the experience rather than the creative project can
take nomadic epistemology as their tool.
The point is not to find a home or homelessness in marginality, but
shelter and transport in nomadic
epistemology and practices.
Stop looking for Attention
Attention might seem at first to be a backward move
toward traditional epistemological problems, in fact those very problems that
were radically transformed or made irrelevant by the modern shift to semantic and
semiotic frameworks of analysis. So
that I may be misunderstood as arguing in this essay against a hermeneutic turn
in favor of epistemology. What I mean
to suggest is that this fixation on attention as a way of describing or
explaining, of becoming a perceiving observer of educational practice, a
perceiving observer of curriculum theorizing itself, is actually a symptom, as
Crary writes, "of the same general epistemological crisis, the termination
of various faculties of consciousness, and the increasing insignificance of the
dualistic models within which classical epistemology had operated. Once an observer was understood in terms of
the essential subjectivity of vision, attention became a constitutive (and destabilizing)
component of perception." (Crary 44)
The strongest contemporary indictment of the
academic "observer" is presented in Israel Rosenfield's (2000) witty
comic novel, Freud's Megalomania. In this fictional analysis of a newly discovered
posthumous manuscript of Freud, Rosenfield lays out a reconstruction of
psychoanalysis that places a heavy emphasis on the psychotic "authority
figure" in response to the traditional attention
to the neurosis of morality evident in the "followers of
authority." As megalomaniacs,
academics claim a higher link to a conceptual discourse -- what Foucault would
have called a regime of truth; they do so in self-deception, but mostly because
of an inability to attend to their own self-deception in their pursuit of
deceiving others. Foucault's kindest
phrasing of this great eschatological dream of the nineteenth century was 'to
make this knowledge of man exist so that man could be liberated by it from his
alienations, liberated from all the determinations of which he was not the
master, so that he could, thanks to this knowledge of himself, become again or
for the first time master of himself, self-possessed. In other words, one made of man an object of knowledge so that
man could become subject of his own liberty and of his own existence.' What we understand about the psychology of
attention at this juncture, writes Crary, is that "the more one
investigated, the more attention was shown to contain within itself the
conditions for its own undoing -- attentiveness was in fact continuous with
states of distraction, reverie, dissociation, and trance. Attention could not finally coincide with a
modern dream of autonomy."(Crary 45-6)
In my reading of Rosenfield, it is the purveyor of conceptual discourse
that should give us pause. When we are
convinced to attend to some new
concept, we are deceiving ourselves because we are not understanding that we
are doing so because of our own neurosis, our own need for megalomania cal
attention.
The megalomaniac should give us pause in our
everyday discourse. When we are
prepared to find a subject important, when we are prepared to defend with our
lives our honor, our nation or our God, we should know that we are deceiving
ourselves, that what we call "human psychology" is showing its bare
bones. Normally our megalomaniacal
states are limited to moments. But the
true megalomaniac not only is constantly preoccupied with the important questions,
but they are so difficult, so obscure, so much a part of his privileged domain,
that no ordinary person could in any way understand them. It is this concern with the difficult and
the obscure that places the magalomaniac outside of everyday society and
creates a mystery around his personality. (Rosenfield 2000: 116)
Rosenfield's fictional Freud analyzes the
megalomaniacs he himself has encountered, and notices, for example, that the
air of mystery must remain, for the constant need to appear to fully grasp the
concepts, and to own them as originating from herself or himself, forces the
megalomaniac to keep from sharing the sources of her or his conceptual
inspiration.
Hypnosis, Spectacle, and ADHD
Hypnosis stood for a very long time as the extreme
model of attention. Demonstrating so
powerfully the precariousness and malleability of what had been thought of as
consciousness, hypnosis posed an unprecedented challenge to the separability of
psychological, physiological, and social factors. It was G. Stanley Hall who wrote that most of the phenomena that
are given the name of hypnosis are not due to mesmeric forces but simply to an
unusual concentration of attention.
Television is our most pervasive and efficient system for managing
attention; and it has become so integrated into everyday life that certain
statements about it cannot even be spoken (e.g., addiction, habit, persuasion,
and control)[3]. Film
viewing is the ultimate example of this 20th century modern
attention: we remain spellbound in front of the screen immersed in a
collectivity but simultaneously isolated, separated in absorptive
solitude. Laying the television/film
transparency over the spectacle of the conference, of the academic curriculum
theory journal, we can see that there is no sense to be made of
"next" if there is no generational text. (Spectacle itself is another symptom of the modernist attention.)
This is because, as Debord describes a spectacle, it is the development of a
technology of separation; it becomes multiple strategies of isolation. Spectacle is the inevitable consequence of
capitalism's restructuring of society without community. (Think for a moment of Foucault's example of
the public beheading in Discipline and
Punish.) An encounter with
conceptual discourse via the megalomaniac is the spectacle of generational
text. And the result is a loss of
community in the collective. "The
logic of spectacle prescribes the production of separate, isolated, but not
introspective individuals." (Crary 79) As Freud once wrote, "I
usually remain spellbound; then I begin to feel too lonely in the crowd."
Modern attention fluctuates between two poles--it is
a process of losing self that shifts between emancipatory evaporation of
interiority and distance, and a numbing incorporation into myriad assemblages
of work, communication and consumption.
When William James wrote, "My experience is what I agree to attend
to," he clearly meant it as an affirmation of an autonomous self-choosing,
world-creating subject, liberated from the receptive
status of a subject for whom experience was "the mere presence to the sense
of an outward order." He certainly did not suspect that this equation
might be an indication of a historical crisis in the nature of experience
itself. That is, attention, both a
simulation of and compensation for a chimerical "real" experience.
The state of fascinated absorption is not comprehensible apart from the sense
of isolation that immediately follows.
Yet, when placed in the context of genuine homelessness, the bourgeois
notion of "lonely" that we are referring to looks pathetic. This pathos, however, is an example of the
sort of attention we are speaking to here: the pathos is one end of the two
poles. This explains the common
complaint from "outsiders" that conceptual discourse does not "make
a difference" -- it feeds simultaneously into the pathos and the
alienation, the commitment that promises liberation and the numbing isolation.
Nomadic epistemology sets up a different
relationship with attention and spectacle.
In a hypertextual or hypermedia environment, history and generation are
a thread, but the role of the "father" is decentered. More important than the conceptual discourse
are the interwoven strands of connection that link the concepts in
ever-increasing ways. Two images are
popular for imagining the processes involved:
cat's cradle and rhizomes. In
cat's cradle, the necessity of more than one person in the constantly shifting
formulations and patterns becomes crucial to the image. In rhizomes, the paths and growths are
nonlinear, interwoven, and spread in all directions without a beginning, middle
or end. Another image, of getting lost
and making do with what you find, is suggested by Alan Block (1998).
Is 'not conforming to the discourse' a kind of
professional ADHD? Perhaps there are
just a few abnormal folks who are paralyzed by conceptual discourse. Just as a science of attention might be
understood as constructing the notion of attention deficit, so might a
commitment to conceptual discourse construct nomadic epistemology. Metaphorically, some people cannot participate
and need to move around, they cannot find a way to sit still and attend to the
concepts. There might then be a
cure? My reading of Rosenfield speaks
to this as well, in his use of Julius Wagner-Jaurreg, Freud's lifelong friend
from his days in medical school and Nobel Laureate (1928). His clinic treated soldiers considered
"malingerers" (or "simulators") with electric shock during
the First World War, and then returned them to the front. Freud was an "expert witness" at a
trial brought by some of the soldiers after the war in 1920. The fictional Freud "writes,"
What I had misunderstood at the time was the
psychology of the young men whom Wagner saw fit to torture, I had suggested
that their neuroses could have been "cured" through psychoanalysis since
these neuroses were the consequence of unconscious affective conflicts. But this was to replace Wagner's torture
sessions with a "talking" cure.
I was as prepared as Wagner to send these young men back to the front,
and consequently my criticism of Wagner lost its force. (Rosenfield: 90)
What he realizes in his (fictional) posthumous, last
manuscript, is that he had overlooked an important clue about psychological
structure, and I believe we can use his (Rosenfield's) insight to talk about
the state of the "next" generation that in its work abandons the
generational text, weaving this text as a thread of hypertextuality. The young men that the "real"
Wagner "cured," who had developed paralyses, were refusing to accept
the madness of the State. "There
was no way they could argue against the State, no way they could justify their
fears, because there was no social-protest of any importance. ... Yet after
their experiences at the front they could not justify, at least to themselves,
the State's claim to moral authority; nor could they reject the State."
(Rosenfield 90-91) They were in a sense
abandoned; yet they had a deep sense of fear, not just out of a need for
self-preservation, but through their (perhaps instinctual) understanding that
"there was something absurd and unjustifiable about the circumstances in
which they had been placed."
Nevertheless, they were unable to articulate what was troubling them
within the discourse of the time, simply because there was no familial or
social structure, no conceptual discourse, that could understand or assist them
in such a task. "Their paralysis
was both a symbolic reaction to circumstances beyond anyone's control and a
very real solution to a fundamentally hopeless bind."
The fictional Freud now comprehends the paralysis as
a representation of an inability to continue self-deception. No longer able to accept themselves as hero
or patriot, and no longer able to communicate their awareness that the world is
an irrational place, no longer able to accept the authority of the State,
indeed any authority, because such
acceptance is a form of self-deception, the "simulators" of World War
I become a model for paralysis as the "rational" response, as a
plausible refusal to continue the process of self-deception. Freud's recollection of his involvement in
Wagner's trial now leads him to a startling realization: "Authority is by
its very nature psychotic -- and this is a form of megalomania."
(Rosenfield: 100)
The "dark side" of megalomania is evident
in the practices of Wagner, who later went on to receive a Nobel prize for his
horrendous practice of "curing" syphilis by giving the victims
malaria. But it is also present in the
depiction of the rapist Hans Hellbach, who subsumes all morality within
himself. He cannot see himself as
guilty of any of the rapes he commits scattered across Europe because he is
beyond the notion of rape of guilt, he is the spider on the web, waiting for
his latest victim. Hellbach is the
reverse side of the simulators, he acts in order to avoid self-deception rather
than dwell in paralysis. For the
"next generation" of curriculum workers, I think we can agree that
neither model is a satisfying option.
The equivalent of a Wagner or a Freud, the expert who provides a
"cure," is a reconceptualist, a practitioner of the art of conceptual
discourse. The equivalent of a Hellbach
is an in-service provider, selling a bill of goods as he hops from victim to
victim on the web. The current
generation of curriculum workers refuses any of these images as they build the
web and tear it down, repair it and transform it. They get jobs teaching methods courses, attend professional
development school meetings, and theorize articles for publication, presentations
for conferences. They remain inconsoled. They read the generational text, which
becomes a thread of their life and work.
They bounce from concept to concept.
Yet they are none of these singular identities, nor are they just a
multiplicity of identities conflicting and oscillating in "control"
of who they are.
James MacDonald (1995) foreshadowed some of this in
his essay, "A Vision of a Humane School." There he wrote of four different ways of talking, none of which
takes precedence over the other.
The positive thrust of this idea is the image of
schooling as the continuous creating and recreating of meaningful experiences
among the participants involved, and patterns and experiences evolving in terms
of individual self-development and the ever changing differences in life
circumstances and persons -- through freedom guided by imaginative
contemplation. (MacDonald 1995: 64)
He used the term conversation where I might place
weaving, and he strapped himself in by believing in the project of conceptual
discourse, which required him to identify and explicate four particular
concepts. But if a practitioner of
conceptual discourse wants to pin down my lineage, MacDonald may be my Harris
or Greene. There are ways in which
conversation can take on aspects of hypermedia, and include a multiplicity of
threads, interconnections, links, and spontaneous non-sequitors. In particular, conversation raises the
appropriateness of humor, emotion in general, and all of the political, social,
cultural, and dramatic elements of discourse that have been examined and
analyzed by practitioners of many different fields of study. However, conversation has a directionality
within which curriculum theorizing need not be imprisoned.
But what is the experience of the initiate who is not
experiencing this as something new, but as the "way things are"? Simultaneously perpetual "jazz" in
Melissa Scott's terms, and a perpetual conviviality of the spectacle.
References
Anijar, Karen (2000) Teaching Toward the 24th Century: Star Trek as Social Curriculum. NY: Falmer.
Block, Alan (1998) Curriculum as Affichiste: Popular culture and identity. In William Pinar (ed.) Curriculum: Toward New Identities, 325-341. NY: Garland.
Block, Alan (2001) Ethics and Curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 17 (3): 23-37.
Britzman, Deborah (1998) On Making Education Inconsolable. In Lost Subjects, Contested Objects. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Crary, Jonathon (1999) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Daspit, Toby (1999) Rap Pedagogies: "Bring(ing) the Noise" of "Knowledge Born on the Microphone" to Radical Education. In Toby Daspit & John Weaver (eds) Popular Culture and Critical Pedagogy: Reading, Constructing, Connecting, 163-182. NY: Garland.
Debord Guy (1967) The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. NY: Zone Books.
de Certeau, Michel (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1991) What is Philosophy? NY: Columbia Univ. Press.
Guattari, Felix (1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Paul Bains & Julian Pefanis, trans. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press
Heubner, Dwayne (1976) The moribund curriculum field: its wake and our work. reprinted in The lure of the transcendent: collected essays by Dwayne Heubner, edited by Vikki Hillis. Collected and introduced by William Pinar, 241-256. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
James, William (1950/1890) Principles of Psychology. NY: Dover.
MacDonald, James (1995) A Vision of a Human School. In MacDonald, James, Theory as a Prayerful Act: The Collected Essays of James B. MacDonald, Bradley MacDonald (ed.), 49-67. NY: Peter Lang.
Marshall, J. Dan, James T. Sears, and William H, Shubert (2000) Turning Points in Curriculum: A Contemporary American Memoir. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.
Morris, Marla (1996) Toward a Ludic Pedagogy: An Uncertain Occasion. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 12:1, 29-33.
Pinar, William (1999) (ed) Contemporary Curriculum Discourses: Twenty Years of JCT. NY: Peter Lang.
Rosenfield, Israel (2000) Freud's Megalomania: A Novel. NY: Norton.
Sahlins, Marshall (2000) Culture in Practice. NY: Zone Books.
Weaver, John & Grindall, Karen (1998) Surfing and Getting Wired in a Fifth Grade Classroom: Critical Pedagogical Methods and Techno-Culture. In Joe Kincheloe & Shirley Steinberg (eds.), 231-251. NY: Routledge.
[1] See, e.g., Marla Morris 1996, John Weaver & Karen Grindall 1998, Karen Anijar 2000, Toby Daspit 1999, and Alan Block 2001.
[2] Following the field metaphor and our focus on the period of modernism, I might say, "go to the city." But as many have pointed out, the city too is a preeminently "modern" construct.
[3] Guattari(Chaosmosis): "when I watch television,
I exist at the intersection of 1) a perpetual fascination provoked by the
screen's luminous animation which borders on the hypnotic; 2) a captive
relation with the narrative content of the program, with a lateral awareness of
surrounding events -- water boiling on the stove, a child's cry, the
telephone...3) a world of fantasms occupying my daydreams. My feeling of personal identity is thus
pulled in different directions. How can I maintain a relative sense of unicy,
despite the diversity of components of subjectivation that pass through
me?"