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Anselm Kiefer The Women of the Revolution, MASS Moca |
1. Reflection, Refraction, Diffraction
My first comment, which is a minor point but may have significance, would be that my text is not a set of 'reflections on’ Spivak’s texts, but 'refractions of’ them, as the title says. It is not a process of mirroring or throwing the texts back on themselves, of trying to get to their inherent or original ‘truth’, but of taking them elsewhere, of deflecting them, to find or discover, i.e. to ‘create' using Spivak’s textuality, another ’truth’ in them, the potential truth of a form of otherness, the otherness of the class/room, as specific learning environment.
The choice of term here relates to the discussion of the use of optical metaphors raised by Donna Haraway and extended by Karen Barad.
Barad (2003: 803) highlights Haraway’s use of the term ‘diffraction’, noting that:
"Haraway proposes the notion of diffraction as a metaphor for rethinking the geometry and optics of relationality ..."
Haraway (1992: 304) elaborates:
"Diffraction does not produce "the same" displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear.”
Barad (2007: 88) explains that whereas reflection is about mirroring and likeness, seeking homologies and analogies between separate (assumed to be whole and pre-existing) entities, diffraction examines patterns of difference and attends to specific material entanglements.
In Barad’s diffractive methodology: “Diffraction is an ethico-onto-epistemological matter.”; it “is a matter of differential entanglements.”; and it is "about the entangled nature of differences that matter.” (Barad, 2007: 381)
Furthermore, Barad adds,
"Diffraction owes as much to a thick legacy of feminist theorizing about difference as it does to physics." (Barad, 2014: 168)
These issues are explored in greater depth on the Glossary page of the Open Readings website, where Barad’s use of the terms ‘diffraction' and 'diffractive methodology' are discussed.
Rather than attempt a Harawayian or a Baradian ‘diffraction’ of Spivak’s text, I am seeking only a ‘refraction’, but may have accidentally caused a diffraction.
2. ‘You are always situating yourself'
From the Grene interview, two phrases and a recommendation of the value of three authors’ works stand out for me. The phrases are ‘you are always situating yourself’; and ‘all knowledge is orientation’; and the authors are Michael Polanyi, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and James Jerome Gibson.
It seems to me that all three authors are seeking to effect some kind of displacement of the abstract, decontextualised, ego cogito and, in doing so, present different theorisations of ‘perception’ or ‘recognition’.
Polanyi contrasts explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge; Merleau-Ponty moves from mind to body, while emphasising the social character or grounding of ‘body’ (as inter-corporeality), in which the body is a perceiving entity, interwoven with an awareness of being-perceived, of being located (in place), situated (inter-corporeally) and positioned (inter-subjectively); and Gibson contrasts perception as a passive reception of sensory data to perception not only as an active (psycho-dynamic) construction of perceptions from sensory data but also as an active, responsive environmental scanning related to sensori-motor navigation of specific material environments, as well as to the pragmatic action (the situation) in which the perceiver is engaged.
While Gibson focuses on the ‘physical’ and the ‘animal' environment, his insights can be extended to the ‘social’ environment, acknowledging that the ‘physical’, the ‘animal' and the ‘social’ cannot be separated within an ecology as a dynamic, living system, an insight that takes us towards Merleau-Ponty’s inter-corporeal, and may take us some way to Haraway’s insights concerning cybernetic organisms and their environments, insights which Barad seeks to extend, perhaps not entirely satisfactorily, through her conceptions of the ‘apparatus’ or ‘dispositif’ (as ’system’ might be re-conceived), ‘agential realism’ and ‘intra-action’ (in contrast to inter-action).
What Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson might be taken to say is that the conscious mind, as a bodily phenomenon, not a separate substance as in Descartes, is afforded the opportunity to learn within specific environments, and that each environment affords/offers a different potential for learning, and that each learning environment, as part of an emergent learning ecology, affords a different emphasis upon learning: in terms of the tacit knowledge of the body understood as forms of dispositions/habitus towards, first, a set of bodily techniques for acting and interacting; second, a set of permissible feelings, emotions and affects; third, a set of accepted reasoning practices (whether as common senses, disciplinary thinking or professional practices); and, fourth, a set of textual (or otherwise encoded, e.g. pictorial) teachings.
To engage with Grene’s rubrics, then, it is not so much that 'you are always situating yourself’, but perhaps that, on the basis of being somewhere, you are always examining your location, your situation and your position, and considering the affordances that are offered by that located, situated positionality.
To say, 'you are always situating yourself’ might seem to assume that you find yourself in a situation of your own making or your own choosing, which you can simply re-make, through choice. Here, we are simply re-working Marx’s (2003, 1897) statement concerning men and women making their own history but not as they please, i.e. not making it under self-selected circumstances, but under already existing circumstances, given and transmitted from the past, encoded and repeatedly re-enacted through the affordances of habit, habitus and habitat. This takes Gibson’s affordances to breaking point.
So, perhaps, rather than 'you are always situating yourself’, it is that ‘you are always already situated’ or that ‘you are always somewhere’, and that ‘somewhere' is dynamically structured, including your dispositional sense of the affordances which that environment and that situation proffers. This could be one way of characterising the learning environment in general terms, wherein the classroom is one particular kind of place, a particular kind of being-located, in a situation, within which one has to position oneself.
It may therefore be said that 'you are always struggling with the situation in which you find yourself’, in which you are partaking, and in relation to which you are agonistically located, situated and positioned, relational bonds of varying degrees of strength, but bonds that can be opened up to contractual negotiation, to negation, to opposition, to disagreement, to critique, to dissent and to disavowal; and, going forward, to realignment.
Only in this sense of multi-dimensional engagement can it be said that ‘all knowledge is orientation', a process which may begin with more or less severe dis-orientation, the process of learning how to orient.
3. The learning ecology
The Savin-Baden (2008) article highlights similar issues concerning the value of considering material environments in relation to thinking practices, or of habit-in-habitus-in-habitat, encoded and performatively re-enacted; through whose performance, it should be added, the potential to act otherwise emerges.
She seeks to move away from the notion of learning styles:
"To move away from the idea of learning styles removes possibilities for generalizing learner approaches and instead presents the notion that learning is complex and specific to the learner and must therefore be located in the context of their lives and their stories.”
To do this, she introduces the notion of ‘stance’:
"The notion of stance is used here to indicate that the learners, at different times and in different spaces, ‘locate’ themselves as individual learners. To some extent stances in and towards learning are invariably formulated through school experiences and parental expectations.”
This, once more, emphasises two of the main sites of the scene of teaching: the parental home and the school classroom, as evidenced in Bernstein (see The Scene of Teaching 1, 2, 3, 4).
Savin-Baden contends that,
“ … this model of learning stances ... stands against the notion of learning styles and deep and surface approaches, arguing instead that stances relate not only to cognitive perspectives but also to ontological positioning within learning environments. Conflict between expectation, identity and belief in a learning context can result in staff and students becoming stuck: experiencing disjunction in learning and in teaching, either personally, pedagogically or interactionally."
The learning environment in a learning ecology, then, Savin-Baden suggests, is an ensemble operation, a Lefebvrian social-spatial practice, a set of ‘apparatuses’ through which the learner is co-constituted in/as a field of relations, as afforded orientations to learning and as a desire-to-know, a perpetually moving goal, which continually removes the certainty of knowing, and whose end can never be attained/mastered/possessed.
References
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (3), 801–831. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/345321 [Accessed 7 June 2012].
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20 (3), pp.168–187. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 [Accessed July 15, 2014].
Fogle, N. (2009). Social space and physical space: Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory as a model for the social dynamics of the built environment [PhD thesis]. Department of Philosophy, Temple University. Available from http://cdm2458-01.cdmhost.com/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/40829 [Accessed 22 November 2015].
Haraway, D.J. (1992). The Promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In: Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., and Treicher, P.A., eds. Cultural studies. New York, NY: Routledge, 295–337. Available from http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-the-promises-of-monsters-a-regenerative-politics-for-inappropriated-others/ [Accessed 30 July 2014].
Marx, K. (2003, 1897). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Mountain View, CA: Socialist Labor Party of America. Available from http://www.slp.org/pdf/marx/eighteenth_brum.pdf [Accessed 27 November 2015].
Savin-Baden, M. (2008). Learning spaces: creating opportunities for knowledge creation in academic life. Maidenhead, England: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. Available from http://www.germ-a.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Learning_Spaces__Society_for_Research_Into_Higher_Education_1.pdf [Accessed 19 November 2015].
