Schenectady Synecdoche

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April 28, 2005

About analysis

Sanctimoniousness has been a theme running through some of my recent posts, and I've also been paying attention to teachers' derision of their students. That derision is, I think, complex: part of it may be a way of laughing about our own frustration; we so much want our students to learn, and they fall so short of our hopes for them. Our derision may also express our contempt for our quotidian work: we blog about the books we read, speaking both negatively and positively of them, but I've seen precious few (zero come to mind) blog entries about specific student-produced texts. We don't blog about our students' texts qua texts. Much. And as my last entry on the topic suggested, our derision may actually be an attempt to demonstrate that we do understand how contemptible our work (i.e., our students) is.

But now about analysis: The fact that I am blogging about this does not mean I'm innocent of it (though it does mean I'd like to be innocent of it!). Analysis is seductive, establishing an (apparent) distance between analyst and object and establishing, too, an apparent superiority of analyst over object. That's where sanctimony comes in. One is seduced by one's own analysis into believing in one's superiority. So just as our derision of students' texts may be an attempt to distance ourselves from our (contemptible) students, so my analysis of that derision certainly is an attempt to distance myself from that derision. Yet as a previous post admitted, I am not in fact always distanced from that derision. I just wish I were.

Analysis is dangerous, too, for its apparent conclusion to a sequence. Once one has analyzed an object, the case is closed. The illusion is first that analysis accomplishes the distancing, absolving the analyst from complicity. But it's also that analysis will reveal error and instruct the erroneous. Once we see the problem, the problem will disappear. In this case, once we see how bad it is to make fun of our students, we not only will quit making fun of them but we will quit wanting to.

And that's itself an error. There is no there out there.

Hence the activist pedagogy and scholarship that some of my colleagues are engaged in: Analysis doesn't effect change; it's just a first step. Active intervention effects change. It's not enough to correct consciousness; we also have to remediate being.

I don't have a conclusion here, because there's so much more to say.

Posted by senioritis at April 28, 2005 02:22 PM

Comments

Posted by: tyratae at April 28, 2005 07:06 PM

Posted by: senioritis at April 28, 2005 07:55 PM