Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2002 00:02:19 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: the idiot and stupidity


Eric/all

Whilst Eric's reference point in 'dumb and dumber'  is defined against 
mainstream cinematic production, it's worth remembering it's roots in 
Doestoevski's 'The Idiot' - perhaps the ultimate attempt to represent 
'goodness' in a book, it is an attempt that has been rarely repeated, in 
these post-Beckett days we are more likely to think of sheer 
impossibility of a reasonable existence. The discussion of the everyday 
detritous of Beckett, or the horror of 'Endgame' seems more appropriate 
as a representation of the 20th C than the usually reactionary attempts 
to represent 'goodness'.  Post-enlightenment culture has found it 
extraordinally difficult to represent goodness and has tended to 
conflate it with idiocy, endlessly returning to the debasement of the 
holy fool. Perhaps in these post-phenomenological times we cannot 
imagine an unproblematic act, one which is unreflective, pre-social, 
altruistic and consequently 'good' without invoking the ghost of 'the 
idiot'. The typical invocation of the Other results in the necessity of 
recognising the  horrors of our  treatment of the human-other.

Education should perhaps be understood through the shorthand phrase 
'education, class language and ideology' - referencing education, and 
the endlessly normalising essentialist ideology associated with it, as 
an ideological state apparatus - which being a blunt and perhaps more 
appropriate understanding of the educational apparatus; enables the 
possibility of understanding how a Socratic education (which is the 
closest to a 'philosophical education' that can be imagined) and the 
current mutating 'fomal institutional' educational apparatus can be seen 
to function in the same way.  Whilst I'm slightly uncomfortable with the 
origins of the line of thought referenced here, I think it's attempt to 
understand education as a system of practices from which there is no 
easy escape through a notional resistence that might attempt to 
seperating one set of education practices from another. Perhaps it is 
worth reemphasizing that the glorious lack of stability in the work 
place, in the economic and the social it is also clear that it is no 
longer possible to know what will be a useful and utilitarian education.

Bearing in mind the notion of education referenced here - the riposte to 
the 'innocent act'  and 'culture and education' that Eric raises - is 
that of the indeterminism (which is in truth a wide-range-determinsm)  
Lyotard refers to in his Inhuman essays. Indeterminism is an adequate 
pointer towards why no educational knowledge can ever be appropriate. 
The education Lyotard refers to in 'About the Human'  where he says 
that  '...All education is inhuman because it does not happen without 
constraint and terror'  he clarifies this through placing his reading 
within the psychoanalytical process of the Father, (castration) and 
which lead Freud to say '... in relation to the good way of bringing up 
children, that in any case it will be bad...'  This 'bad' is the origin 
of the indeterminsm. the remainder (etc) to which he refers. Under this 
naming it is relatively easy to recognise the impossibility of  ever 
managing to get to the level of absolute/appropriate knowledge necessary 
to address the everyday horrors of the human world. To become 
philosophical then also requires the recognition that it is necessary to 
engage in the ACT, to work towards filling the void.

(but it's always worth adding that these 'processes'  that Lyotard is 
using are not solely within the domain of the human species) 

regards
steve