Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 13:49:38 -0400 (EDT) From: Tom Blancato <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com> Subject: Re: Educational Practice & Nomad Philosophy On Fri, 11 Oct 1996, Mr Christopher McMahon wrote: > Dear Tom, > Not Tony, sorry. > Thanks for the email clarifying your position on toughtaction. But is it really a position? I found the > egs of nurses etc. especially helpful. In what way? One has to bear in mind that thoughtaction as I'm understanding it here has that example operating at the infinite limit of philosophy. I'll have to meditate on this some > more. Clearly you are not using the idea of violence as I am familiar with > it. For one ting, I have always been suspicious of the hard barrier > between thought and action - but I think thoughtaction only makes sense in > certain rather peculiar fields (eg: Teaching Literature where violence, > it stikes me, actually is, or can be, differance). Can you explain this more? Teaching literature (e.g. 18th cent. lit.) or literature concerning teaching (pedagogy)? How do you have violence *as* differance? Isn't it possible that the deference/deferral/difference of differance is precisely the "opposite" (so to speak) of violence in that it *understands itself* and marks itself out in that spacing in such a way that it avoids the immediacy that marks violence? I suppose, at bottom, > I'm not really confident that I could or would want to do away with > violence, Am I suggesting "doing away" with violence? But just out of curiousity, what sort of violence do you want to "keep"? In any event, isn't it a nonviolence that maintains the worry you have here, i.e., you fear a violence to something, if not simply to violence, then to a way of life? or reach the sort of plane of awareness that would let me know > when I am being violent. Perhaps what is at issue here is that nonviolence in its *already existing state*, as, roughly, somewhat alienated, tends, when it "goes after" violence, to get too positional, and when it exploses hidden commitments, etc., tends to attack, and to lose itself as nonviolence? I.e., Nietzsche exposures of Christianity certainly that operate out of a certain nonviolence, and the identification of a "violence" to "health", to a certain "decency" (eg. "how evangelical!"), but do so violently *in that they too freely ascribe a violent intention" too totally. Perhaps the exposure or "plane" (which is a positionality you are positing, and precisely a positionality nonviolent thoughtaction would be vigilant against, since the *plane* as such is constituted not only by the singular position, but, worse, the temporal maintenence of a divisional positionality) you speak of is *accomplished precisely by granting and affirming precisely the reservations you have articulated (somewhat) here. For one thing, the perception of violence seems > fairly positional. The perception? I don't know about that. But to get what nonviolence means in tersm of such perception, what its logics are, etc., requires some passage into/through "deep nonviolence" or whatever one might call it. It is possible that it only begins to accomplish itself when the sensibility *grounding* the perception you have in mind is itself activated, problematized. I sense that you're basically anticipating/fearing a "stern moral gaze", varius varieties of prescription, injunction, legitization, etc., all of which I think would be things to be vigilant against. > > So what sort of classroom practices stem from this philosophy anyway? What > do you actually do, what do they do? I don't do any actual practices right now. That's partly why I'm writing these posts and inviting dialogue. I've done some projects in a much more limited setting, such as setting up a school for refugees, which used a lot of the narrower thinking. I teach piano, refinish furniture and various odd stuff, and think and what not. What the practices -- a highly positional word -- would be, I'm not exactly sure right now. They wouldn't be so much *practices* as *thoughtpractices*, that is to say, *thoughtaction*. Getting that is part of it, I think, I mean, really grasping it, going right into the *presumed/assumed* sense of "practice", and grasping that the *problematization of the theory/practice distinction* is not so much simply an occasionly question or even outcry on an email list, and not the "hot", driving, capitalized and domesticated "radicality" for one's theses or writing in a tenured position (be it the tenure of the professor or of the graduate or undergraduate student), but a radical rifting elision, waxing/waning plunging resonance, emergent accomplishment/arrival, etc. So the question you ask can be answered in the inner and irreducible progression, as relentless and intractable or irreducible as "deconstruction" in the Derridean sense, and in many ways, I am guessing, indistinguishable from it. My strong *position* here is this: That this is in fact what is *required* to do justice to the question of something really different and something responsive to the educational issues being raised. This position, you see, is much more restricted and much closer to specific issues we are dealing with. I'm not putting this well enough, but I wonder if you see what I mean. It's a *minimal* positionality, and, I would be likely to maintain, *precisely the kind of positionality you yourself are likely to take for granted*, and I'm saying that I'm granting your reservations *everything* (within limits) and am in fact going beyond precisely that. I'm saying that when you get sick of staying in the space you are working to preserve, but which to continue to recognize its issue and *positions* (heh), this, *or something like this* is where you go. Tom B. > > - Chris > > __________________________________________________________________________ "The sanctions are not spectacular, and operate slowly, but they kill and maim as remorselessly as bullets and bombs, and are destroying a generation of Iraqi children." Brad Lyttle, delegation to Iraq member. "The characteristics of the treatment that caused people to be outraged and shocked are now kind of masked so that the procedure looks rather benign," said New York psychiatrist Hugh L. Polk. As many permutations of molecules used in making psychiatric drugs can be developed today in 2 hours as used to take a lifetime for a researcher. __________________________________________________________________________
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