www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000630.html
ran across this. thought you might like it.
Yay, binaries! Either/Or. Liberal/Conservative. With us/Against us.
Reductionist Learning. Luv it.
Kids are always smarter after watching "Punch and Judy."
The new book Bush's Brain shows that Karl Rove consciously deployed the strategy of "divide and conquer." By choosing polarizing issues, Rove sought to divide the nation into small, aggressively self-defined units that he could then target market according to the one issue that defined them. He never intended to win over more of these units than was necessary for Bush to win each election.
Smackdown Learning may help to create clearly identifiable target-marketing units.
Gray,
"Doug also challenges my interpretation of Heidegger's 'das Man,' the existential mode of 'going with the flow,' in terms of a person's being stuck in a contextually limited ideology. Instead, he seems to intepret Heidegger's 'das Man' as if it were Pierre Bourdieu's 'habitus,' or a nexus of overlapping contexts. In this sense, Doug sees critical thinking as being situated in our 'going with the flow,' and not a movement out of it."
I don't recognize myself in even ONE of those summary statements!
First off, I have never "challenge[d your] interpretation of Heidegger's 'das Man,' the existential mode of 'going with the flow,' in terms of a person's being stuck in a contextually limited ideology." I've never said anything about it, in fact. I agree with it, or rather I like it, but this is the first time I'm saying so. What I have challenged is Heidegger's mystification of critical thinking as complete liberation from das Man--his binarization of das Man as bound and authentic Dasein as free.
And it may seem as if I'm conflating das Man and habitus, but I'm not--and certainly not as "a nexus of overlapping contexts." I reinterpret both concepts in terms of what I call the somatic exchange, the circulation through a population of hegemonic impulses, which also (a) shift and vary as they move from person to person (Bourdieu's "distinction") and (b) channel concealed or repressed counterhegemonic impulses as well.
And this--"In this sense, Doug sees critical thinking as being situated in our 'going with the flow,' and not a movement out of it"--is just simple-minded. Look back at what I wrote:
As you know, I take Heidegger's das Man as one theoretical exfoliation of the somatic exchange, and consider it absolutely essential to all meaningful social interaction--and am therefore utterly disinclined to binarize "going with the flow" and critical thinking. Heidegger wants critical thinking to be heroic, of course; to my mind, though, it's just another kind or level of "going with the flow." There is some kind of theorists' somatic exchange at work around and through me that makes critical thinking flow into and out of me. I have to concentrate really hard to stop it.
This is very different from "situated in our 'going with the flow,' and not a movement out of it," which implies that there is a SINGLE flow that we all go with, and that I see nothing outside of that flow. As I read your reading of Heidegger, you see das Man as one monolithic nexus of shared opinion and critical thinking as an opposed but equally monolithic impulse to escape that nexus. A nice tidy binary: bondage or freedom. The critical thinker is heroic because he opposes bondage and fosters freedom. That's the binary I'm trying to s
Hm, looks like we've got some length limits here. Continued from above:
... smash. My view is that there are hundreds of thousands of flows, and we're all always caught up in many of them, and they conflict, exist in tension with each other, and any impulse we have to break free of one is not only conditioned but overdetermined by others. I call these flows somatic exchanges--the circulation of regulatory impulses through a group. Bourdieu's contribution to that theory is that, because we're all different human beings, every time a regulatory impulse travels through us as individuals, it changes slightly--that's what Bourdieu calls "distinction." I would add that the very repressive nature of social regulation circulates repressed resistances and rebellions through the group as well--another source of the impulse to think critically.
What we do as teachers in first-year writing classes is to try to direct a certain kind of flow into and through our students--a flow that is different for every teacher, certainly, but will hopefully include a concern for complex thought and expression. Phenomenologically that flow may be experienced (by us, by our students) as a simple liberating resistance to "going with the flow"--that's how you've been trying to thematize it--but that mystifies the extent to which it is saturated with the flows of our own pedagogical and theoretical groups, the colleagues we talk to and the theorists we read, who circulate regulatory impulses through us all the time.
What I'm trying to do here, in fact, is to direct a certain kind of flow into and through you, with the intent of breaking up your more simple-minded binarisms. You are resisting those pressures and working as hard as you can to redirect my pressures back into your binary categories. Since we've read a lot of the same theorists and discussed them at length, we have a certain commonality to work with--a shared flow--but you and I are different people, have experienced the world in different bodies and different groups, and tend to channel that flow in very different ways. And that's how social interaction ALWAYS goes: every individual channeling all those other group flows into this new encounter, and meeting resistance, and trying to overcome it (make the other person agree), and usually failing, but in the process inevitably transforming the regulatory impulses that flowed into the encounter. Those clashes are another source of the phenomenology of "breaking free" from "going with the flow": social encounters make us aware of difference, the differences between what I take to be normal (the unstable sum of all the flows I go with) and what the other person takes to be normal, and those differences generate cognitive and somatic dissonance that we feel we have to resolve.
I frankly don't care whether you agree with me, but I do find rigid and simplistic binarisms intensely annoying, and as your dissertation director will work as hard
Last continuation:
as I can to make you think more complexly whenever I stumble across one. I also care very much how my theories are understood, and will happily expound at length on precisely how simplistically you're trying to fit me into your narrow binaries, whenever the middle ground I'm exploring doesn't fit your model. I'm glad to see you too had a vague sense that it was unfair to reduce me to a thumb-sucking hysteric who wants only enjoyment out of life--but rather disturbed to see that your fierce need to binarize overrode your qualms and drove you to lock me after all into the realm of the hysteric who "encourage[s] students to enjoy writing, even if that enjoyment is all they get out of a writing course." You've observed my teaching. You know that I want more out of my students than that. But your binarization-obsession dulls your thinking, so that you somehow magically forget what all else you know about me and my theories and my teaching.
And where does that binarization-obsession come from? Is that part of the heroic critical-thinking impulse that monolithically liberates us from das Man? The silliness generated by much critical thinking defies any kind of going-with-the-flow/critical-thinking binary, and can be amply explained by my more capacious theoretical model--it's a theoretical trend that the thinker has internalized from the group, from the somatic exchange, something that needs to be thought through more carefully, and will be, once someone else comes along and puts pressure on the group to undertake that rethinking process. And I guess in your model that other person who comes along and puts pressure on the group of critical thinkers to think more critically about some critical-thinking dogma they haven't yet questioned would be the Heideggerian Hero. In my construction of this dialogue, that Hero would be me--except that I don't heroize myself, and don't binarize the exchange, so that I recognize that there is a lot in my thinking as well that I've taken over uncritically from other people, and that you are in an excellent position to challenge, from your different perspectives.
I apologize for confusing your theory of somatic exchange with your interpretation of Heidegger. I thought your challenge to Heidegger's tension between "das Man" and "heroic critical thought" was built on your interpretation of Heidegger's "das Man" (because you concluded your point in the rhetoric of "going with the flow" that I in my post had equated 100% with Heidegger's "das Man"). In other words, my misinterpretation of your statement was an honest one that had rational, though nonetheless wrong, reasons.
By the way, Heidegger in "Memorial Address" works against the "heroic" interpretation of what we're calling critical thinking (he calls it "meditative thought"). Obviously, pre-Nazis Heidegger sees critical thinking in terms of the "greatest potentiality for Being," which has this Nietzchean ubermensch ring to it. In the 1950s, he tries to revise that elitist stance a little: "anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking.... Thus meditative thinking need by no means be 'high-flown'" (You can find the article in _Discourse on Thinking_ 47). I think you're right: both interpretations are always there. Heidegger likely sees critical thinking both in terms of a heroic gesture and an innate ability that social factors stifle. In other words, it's a romantic gesture.
I'd like to silence the heroic part and emphasize the "everyman" aspect of it.
By the way, I'm not creating a binary, Doug. I'm analyzing a movement away from critical thinking towards first ideological thinking, and then a multiculturalist suspension of difference, etc. In other words, in a call for critical thinking, I'm studying what enables movements away from critical thinking. That's not binaristic. That's genesis and movement. And the only reason that this movement is unidirectional is because I've merely just started the analysis.
The reframing of what I'm doing into freedom vs. bondage is like what I did with your statements. You're rationally--though nonetheless wrongly--attributing a frame to what I'm saying. The frame is yours, not mine (just like the "'going with the flow' equals Heidegger's 'das Man'" was mine, not yours).
By the way, Doug, I don't understand why my challenging your statements has lead to this attack of what I say with terms like "simple-minded." If you're allowing me to enter into this profession as a peer, then I should be allowed to challenge your statements. I have never written anything derrogatory about what you've written (like you just have about what I've written). I've simply argued against some of it.
Do you find what I'm doing to be disrespectful in some way?
Gray,
"I apologize for confusing your theory of somatic exchange with your interpretation of Heidegger": I'm lost here. What happened, exactly?
I build my theory of the somatic exchange in part out of a reinterpretation of Heidegger, finding more positive elements in das Man than he does, and finding das Man to be an element in ALL social interaction, including, as I've been saying, critical thinking. I also build it out of Bourdieu, and other thinkers.
As for the movement that seems binaristic to me, I guess I'll have to wait and see what develops!
Gray,
Do you find "simple-minded" to be a derogatory remark? I find Heidegger to be sometimes simple-minded, and have written as much in published work. I think everybody, including me, has a tendency to simple-mindedness. It's something we all fight, obviously, but not always successfully. If other people don't call us on our simple-mindedness, we tend to miss it. The tension between simple-mindedness and complex critical rethinkings is always at play in intellectual labor, and accusing a theorist of simple-mindedness on a specific point is to my mind part of the dialogical interchange that pushes us all onward.
I would, in fact, try very hard not to call a freshman paper simple-minded, because when I interact with freshmen (and even upperclassmen) I'm wearing my teacher hat. You're so overwhelmingly smart and well-read that it always surprises me when you read something simplistically--and in fact I've had that kind of surprised reaction several times in our recent exchanges. I guess it's because you're just starting to work through this stuff?
Here's the context I was responding to:
"Heidegger wants critical thinking to be heroic, of course; to my mind, though, it's just another kind or level of 'going with the flow.'"
I mistakenly assumed that this statement meant: "Doug sees critical thinking as being situated in our 'going with the flow,' and not a movement out of it." --which is what I wrote in the post.
I don't think it's a simple-minded misinterpretation. But alas, maybe I'm wrong.
I think I identified the source of the conflict: you're upset because I've associated Lacan's "hysteric's discourse" in part with your pedagogy. I also associated Lacan's "analyst's discourse" with your pedagogy. As I've tried to point out, Lacan sees the analyst's discourse as the highest discourse. (So too do Alcorn and Bracher.)
In my writing about this subject outside of this post, such as in my dissertation, I've tried to avoid Lacan's terms for these discourses because I believe they are all good discourses-- not something we should avoid. I want my students to enter into the hysteric's discourse, the master's discourse, the university's discourse, the analyst's discourse-- but the terminology governs Alcorn's, Bracher's, and your gut responses to them. People read that they've entered into the hysteric's discourse and think they've been told they're a mental patient. People read that they've entered into the master's discourse and think they're control freaks. But that's not true. Each discourse has equal value in different circumstances.
It's kind of like the common attack on psychanalysis for the terms "phallus," "castration," etc. The social response to the terms get in the way of the ideas.
As for my comment that you "encourage students to enjoy writing, even if that enjoyment is all they get out of a writing course," you told the graduate instructors that if all a student gets out of our course is a love for writing, then we've done our jobs. That's what I was responding to. And I understand the logic behind your statement: If a student learns to enjoy writing, then that student will keep writing and likely improve with time.
What I'm trying to work out are the aspects of writing and thinking that suck and that cannot be reframed into a form of enjoyment. How do we encourage students to do that type of work? That's all I'm trying to work out here.
Gray,
You're right that this--
"Heidegger wants critical thinking to be heroic, of course; to my mind, though, it's just another kind or level of 'going with the flow.'"
--could be easily (rationally, not simple-mindedly) misinterpreted to mean that there's just one flow. What I meant there was that there are lots of flows, and lots of different kinds and levels of flow, and critical thinking is circulated through ANOTHER. But you're right, I didn't make it clear there.
The reason I was surprised was that you were still getting this wrong, though, and called your misinterpretation simple-minded, is that we had this same discussion a week ago:
You wrote: "I honestly have never understood how you see das Man as a form of critical thinking."
And I replied: "That's because you misunderstand what I say! I've never said that das Man IS a form of critical thinking; I've said that the circulation of group pressures that Heidegger calls das Man is at work in the desire to question or challenge that circulation as well. Denying that seems to me to heroize the critical thinker, the one True Individual who can resist the tide of the masses."
Your reduction of that to "Doug sees critical thinking as being situated in our 'going with the flow,' and not a movement out of it" (especially since you've also recently reread my chapter on this from "The Somatics of Language") seemed simplistic to me--but then of course I have this irrational notion that other people keep track of the specifics of my theories as carefully as I do, and am always being surprised when they don't. (I think I expect it of you more than others, in fact, because you ARE usually so careful with these things--because you keep track of precisely what Heidegger says and what Lacan says and what Zizek says, whereas I just grab what I need and forget about the rest. Your ability to keep track of such things in minute and complex detail often makes me suspect that you're smarter than I am. I often suspect that I'm a hack theorist, cobbling theoretical models together out of bits and pieces of other people's conceptual houses.)
I see what you mean about the hysteric's discourse, too. I did react badly to that word, you're right. And I did tell the grad students that it's enough if our freshmen come away with a love of writing--precisely because that kind of affective orientation is an engine that powers and steers motivation. But I'm also constantly feeding them structures and strategies (Svetlana gets tired of all the charts and checklists and formulas I've put into the textbook, in fact), and I've been getting a little tired of people (Jaime at their head) reducing that textbook to some kind of "fun is good/academic discourse is bad" binary.
I like this, though: "What I'm trying to work out are the aspects of writing and thinking that suck and that cannot be reframed into a form of enjoyment." That sounds like a worthwhile pursuit.
Got cut off again: I added, "I'm still not sure why you would want pedagogically to cut yourself and your students off from enjoyment. But as a theoretical exercise, it sounds interesting."
I understand that you feel like your statements, pedagogy, and textbook are getting reduced unfairly-- not merely here, but in general. I'm sorry you're having to go through that, and that what I've written contributes to what you're going through. In fact, my last post on CompSpot was meant to draw disagreements with your textbook or whatever else out into an open discussion so that we can work out the tensions in a sustained open discussion.
If only the instructors could talk out their misunderstandings amongst themselves for long enough, then perhaps various people would speak up on your behalf and give your statements a greater validity than merely your own voice. To a certain extent, this started to happen in our meeting with Jaime. Of course, that type of sustained discussion never goes on for long enough (it's not enjoyable enough), so I don't know what the answer is.
By the way, I'm not interested in cutting myself or my students off from enjoyment. Instead, I'm interested in looking for other motivating factors for learning, critical thinking, writing, etc.-- so that we both in and out of the classroom are not critically limited to what we can enjoy, and thereby barred from the difficult, sustained engagement in a confrontation with difference. In other words, I agree (to a certain extent, anyway) with Zizek's claim that we live in a social setting governed by the hidden injunction to enjoy-- a logic which tends to inform both teachers' and students' organizations of and responses to the classroom.
My work is built out of my own frustrations. I'm frustrated with my students' refusal to partake in what they don't enjoy. And I don't see a satisfactory answer in the hidden imperative of "But you do enjoy it-- you merely haven't figured out how you enjoy it." I think this logic limits critical thinking as much as it promotes critical thinking. Sometimes we just have to suck it up and face something we intellectually don't want to face, and we have to do it for sustain periods of time.
Ironically, although a couple of weeks ago I said I could never figure out how you interpret "das Man" as a type of critical thinking, I'm now seeing how certain types of critical thinking inevitably do play a role in "das Man." The only type of critical thinking that doesn't play a role is the questioning of one's own premises.
By the way, I tend to compulsively reread and study only those authors I don't understand: Joyce, Faulkner, Lowry, Gaddis, Pynchon, Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, Zizek, etc. I failed Spanish in high school and then moved to Spain to study Spanish linguistics. That's why I retain so much of certain authors' works-- and not so much of everyone else's works. I compulsively revisit only what I consciously feel uneasy about.
That's also why I have problems relating to those (insert student name here) who refuse to confront what they don't understand. Obviously, my way is not the right way. And any justification I have for my way-- such as it enables us to work out differences at a time of increased ideological and cultural contact-- is a retroactive justification of why I do what I do. How's that for criticizing my own premises?
Gray,
I wonder. Nietzsche wrote The Genealogy of Morals in rebellion against the utilitarian notion that everything we do we do to increase pleasure or decrease pain; against that notion, he argued that historically one of our main motivations has been to increase OTHER PEOPLE's pain, for the payment of a debt. But even there the only way someone else's pain could constitute payment of a debt was through sadistic pleasure: the pleasure you derived from watching your debtor suffer was your payment. So his theory was still utilitarian--just what I call a demonic utilitarianism.
I know that people willingly do painful or unpleasant things. Why? Out of duty--which provides pleasure. Out of some competitive urge or another--which provides pleasure. Maybe it's just me, but I have a very hard time imagining any human motivation for doing anything that wasn't in some way directly or indirectly related to the production of pleasure. I guess that's what makes me a hysteric? (The word no longer bothers me.)
My sense is that the trick in the classroom is not to develop motivations that are not pleasure-related, but helping students find new pathways through unpleasant things to pleasure.
An example that I can imagine for myself would be running. (Putting myself in our students' Nikes.) Runners say they get addicted to the endorphin high--but back in my younger years, when I was still trying to experiment with that notion, I was never able to break through the pain and suffering to any kind of pleasure, so that running seemed like sheer torture to me--and eventually I gave up. That must be how writing feels to many of our students. Certainly it must be how critical thinking feels to large portions of the population. People talk about writing addictions, but all they experience is pain, so they either figure the pleasures of writing are sheer bullshit or (more complexly) they figure that the pathway through the pain to the pleasure is too convoluted, too much work to be worth the candle. My strategy is to help them find pleasure earlier in the process, to keep them motivated--sort of like a breathing exercise or visualization exercise that would make the endorphin high easier for novice runners to achieve.
"Ironically, although a couple of weeks ago I said I could never figure out how you interpret 'das Man' as a type of critical thinking, I'm now seeing how certain types of critical thinking inevitably do play a role in 'das Man.' The only type of critical thinking that doesn't play a role is the questioning of one's own premises."
I don't think I do interpret das Man as a type of critical thinking. I work it the other way: critical thinking has an element of das-Man-type group pressure to it. This is especially clear when our group has thought through the regulatory norms that are accepted blindly by other groups ("liberals hate America," "women are all vain," "blacks are more athletic than whites," etc.). What we do in our own heads--before we say anything--when we encounter this sort of proposition is critical thinking, but it is critical thinking that is clearly preshaped by our group(s). (In fact that is what liberal education IS: the (p)reshaping of students' older carceral thought in liberating ways by the group of educated people hired by the university to bring about such a change. It's liberating, but the liberation is not the effect of one individual thinking through what s/he has been taught in isolation; it is a liberation brought about by a group REregulation.)
The need for critical thinking is even more obviously and complexly provoked by arguments and other encounters between or among conflicting group normativities when the ideological lines are not so clearly drawn--as between you and me, today. Our disagreements drive us to rethink our positions. I take that rethinking also to be overdetermined by various forms of group regulation, including not only norms for argumentation but for civil discourse, for hierarchical power relations, etc.
In addition, as I say above, in other comments, there are two different strains that I see surging through the kind of depersonalized social regulation that Heidegger calls das Man, which I think collectively condition us to question our premises or otherwise enter into critical thinking:
(1) repressed resistance or rebellion against the regulatory impulses, which is carried BY those impulses, and can be mobilized by individuals and groups for purposes of rethinking or restrategizing;
(2) more or less random or idiosyncratic deviations from group pressures caused by the fact that we all live in different bodies and experience things in slightly different ways (Bakhtin's dialogicality, Derrida's iterability, Bourdieu's habitus).
I understand. From the first of your two posts, the type of enjoyment you're discussing is jouissance-- the joy of releasing tensions, either through sustaining the pleasure principle or transgressing it. And I understand that our call for critical thinking comes from academic ideological adherences.
While I agree that our individual experience of the habitus affects the degree and manner to which we experience that call for critical thinking, I don't believe we repress our rebelliousness through critical thinking. That's what I was trying to get into with my first post on CompSpot: We fetishize meaning in order to repress indefiniteness. When meaning fails to sustain the repression and we're forced to confront what we're trying to repress, we suspend our response to that indefiniteness by acknowledging our response only ironically-- think of Thomas Pynchon's response to the Cold War, Jackass's response to cultural differences, and Louis Black's response to the Bush administration.
Questioning our premises forces us to destabilize that meaning such that we have to confront the repressed indefiniteness.
That's why I don't mind that academic social groups organize and mobilize our critical drive. (I wouldn't call it "desire," since desire requires an object. Drive has no object, is repetitious, and can be extremely destructive.) To the extent that we perpetually re-evaluate our premises, we decrease the repressions of split-subjectivity and foster an environment that supports and promotes change.
"While I agree that our individual experience of the habitus affects the degree and manner to which we experience that call for critical thinking, I don't believe we repress our rebelliousness through critical thinking."
I didn't say we repress our rebelliousness through critical thinking--I said our (rebellious) inclination to think critically is repressed AND thus also carried by the somatic exchange. This means that dominant regulatory groups teach us NOT to think critically, but (by the force of Freud's negation) that very teaching plants a counterideosomatic seed that PROMPTS us to question, to challenge, to resist, to rebel. That's one of the senses in which I think collective regulation conditions us to (not) think critically.
"That's why I don't mind that academic social groups organize and mobilize our critical drive. (I wouldn't call it 'desire,' since desire requires an object. Drive has no object, is repetitious, and can be extremely destructive.)"
I like this a lot.
Gray,
Check out my latest post to CompSpot. What would Heidegger do?
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