File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9806, message 191


Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 02:20:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: "M.A. King" <kingma-AT-mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca>
Subject: RE: academia




On Fri, 19 Jun 1998, Liano Sharon wrote:

> 	Try writing something that does not reference and IS NOT ARGUED according
> to modes recognizable as coming from the tradition. 

If someone asks you a question, and your response is literally
unrecognizable as an answer to that question ... well, I think you can't
really be surprised if s/he doesn't think it's a great answer.  You want
to reserve the right to ask your own questions, but why should anyone else
recognize them as good questions?  How can they, if you don't engage with
them on their terms?  (I have some vague notion of "black holes" from ATP
kicking around my brain on this point--something to do with lines of
flight that never connect with anything, lead to isolation.  I may be
completely off on that one....)

I wonder how you think the university should work.  You seem to think it
should not have standards of any kind--anything the student wants to do
should be acceptable.  Either that or professors should have some
supernatural power for discerning genuine genius from self-indulgent
gibberish.  How do you think it should be decided who gets to be employed
by the university as a teacher?  How do you think it should be decided who
is "good enough" to continue as a professional academic?  I'm genuinely
wondering; I don't mean this as a challenge--you obviously seem to think
the university should be somehow different, but I don't know what kind of
differences could satisfy you.

I suspect it isn't possible that any reform, no matter how drastic, of the
institution could satisfy you.  You seem to want an institution without
norms, which is an impossible thing.  Maybe you only want a loosening of
standards, a broadening of what is considered acceptable--but no matter
how much standards are loosened, there will always be *someone* who
doesn't "measure up", echoing your complaint....

To want to change the value of the currency is a fine thing.  But surely
you can't expect the bankers to help you ... and if they did, what would
be the point?  In an undergrad philosophy class, I had a prof who gave us
hell for the lack of imagination we showed on our first set of papers, our
unwillingness to stray from "the tradition".  As an example of what he
considered a good essay, he showed us a painting which had been submitted
by a student in a previous class.

Well, that's OK ... but I get the uneasy feeling that if you're
*encouraged* to do something out of the ordinary, if it's made ordinary to
do something out of the ordinary, then what's so ... out of the ordinary
about it?  I get the same feeling about "progressive" elementary schools.
It's one thing to have your imagination and curiosity carefully
cultivated; it's another thing--a nobler thing, if you'll forgive me--to
have people try to drill those things out of you but hang onto them
anyway.  (That's how you see yourself, anyway, isn't it?;)  Not that I'm
saying that educators *should* try to drill them out of you ... but
they--we--ought to be aware that *any* education is normalizing.
Personally, as a TA I've been given a good deal of leeway as far as
setting standards for assignments is concerned ... and personally, I'm
inclined to tell my students to follow the party line, so to
speak--because it's much more impressive--more courageous--when they're
told to do that and don't than it would be if they didn't because they
were told not to.  I'm also afraid that telling them "knock yourselves
out! Use finger paint!" would produce a bunch of smug little geniuses,
ever so impressed with their own originality--when they were just doing
what they'd been told to do.  

Anyway, this has been a fascinating thread so far.  So off-topic that it
inspired me to go and pick up *The Logic of Sense* today, which perhaps
will inspire me to pick up *Alice in Wonderland*. :)

----Matthew A. King------Department of Philosophy------McMaster University----
     "The border is often narrow between a permanent temptation to commit
     suicide and the birth of a certain form of political consciousness."
-----------------------------(Michel Foucault)--------------------------------


   

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