Date: Sun, 30 Apr 1995 23:50:13 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jon Beasley-Murray <jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu>
Subject: Re: teaching, etc.


I've been skimming many recent posts a little too fast recently, so I may 
have missed some of what's been going on, but still...

I think I share some of Erik's and Malgosia's positions, and think 
perhaps the most useful way to think about these is to think about the 
institution of the school (for is that not what the "teaching" thread is 
all about) as exemplary of any other such institution, although the 
school also does have its own specific problematics etc.

While I'm basically in sympathy with the idea that "teaching" in itself is
something of a State-regulatory farce and think that Bourdieu and Passeron
in _Reproduction_ are more interesting on this particular institution than
D&G ever are (indeed D&G seem more naive than anything else in their
discussion of "conceptual personae" in _What is Philsophy?_--why could the
"teacher" not be such a persona for those who are into such stuff?),
Bourdieu and Passeron also point to the difficulty of positing any simple
"outside" to such institutions, and as such present an interesting 
problem for D&G or any others who wish to gesture (or move, pursue lines 
of flight) towards such exteriority.

At the same time, the teaching situation clearly does present its own set 
of rhizomic divergences militating against simple teacher-student 
hierarchies of power and/or knowledge... among students, in the 
corridors, resistances, refusals to read the texts, play-actings, 
performances, cheating, note-passing and so on...  Moreover, if the 
classroom situation (here) is viewed as such, it is not as if the teacher 
disappears, and not merely because he or she always threatens to 
reterritorialize such energies (though the exam, the exemplary student, 
the paradigmatic punishment) but because he or she is also as fully 
implicated in such networks as any other person (or piece of furniture, 
architectural arrangement) in or outside of the room.

As I understand it, opening up from Oedipal triangulations, onto the
strata of history or sociality, does not mean doing away with the
institution as if by performative fiat, but must always include an
accounting for all the lines and all the segmentarities in play.  (I'm
thinking in part here of the multiple levels of analysis provided in
plateaus such as "One or Several Wolves?")  Otherwise analysis lapses into
mere voluntarism (which is, after all, the most common criticism of
_Anti-Oedipus_). 

Surely we can do better than that?

Take care

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons

     ------------------