The Grove of Academus, Site of Plato's Academy
Sitting here, late at night, in a tower of Academe, I am writing about the occupation of Wall Street, thinking about how the trope of “occupation” has found such a strong resonance. I imagine it is in no small part because we have been raised on the images of education. Not the images within education, but the images of some hypothetical education, images that allow us to know where we fit and how we are to navigate the “real world.” Among other things, we Race to the Top, Leaving No Child Left Behind, and so it should be no surprise that when these tropes fall flat, we are left to wonder what it means to occupy something that doesn’t exist, or to occupy the pathways themselves. Enacting stories of being on the move, we find ourselves in the midst of things.
What is it that we are occupying ourselves with while we are there? And if this is bound up with the story of education, what is it that we are learning?
Interestingly enough, the story of Academus is a story of a person inextricably in relationship to a place. And this connection, over time, comes to stand for an odd bargain sparing things from occupation. As Plutarch would have it, Helen of Troy has been abducted, and her brothers are on the move, looking for where she might be concealed:
At first, then, they did no harm, but simply demanded back their sister. When, however, the people of the city replied that they neither had the girl nor knew where she had been left, they resorted to war. But Academus, who had learned in some way or other of her concealment at Aphidnae, told them where she was hidden. For this reason he was honored during his life by the Tyndaridae, and often afterwards when the Lacedaemonians invaded Attica and laid waste all the country round about, they spared the Academy, for the sake of Academus. —Plutarch, Theseus, 32.
What is the pact that the Academy must make to have it’s space spared, what secrets must it reveal of another place? And since we find ourselves there, what does it mean to occupy a space that is protected from occupation?
As the imagery of occupation shows its wild unwillingness to stay still, searching perhaps as it is for Helen, it finds itself everywhere or anywhere. But before we too quickly set out to Occupy Education, we should be careful to reflect on it as a question. What are we doing when we occupy the groves of the Academy? We should also be careful, however, to not treat it as a question for mere reflection, as only academics can do. A subject for suitable inquiry. Instead we have to realize the place that is this question is busy being occupied. We have been busy occupying ourselves in it. We are Lacedaemonians and Greeks alike. And the challenge we face is to see whether we can not just inhabit the difficult place we are in, but to do so as an active question, a question of activity.
I like your take on this. Even though I helped start the Occupy Education tumblr page and campaign, I agree. We need to think deeper about what we are doing. Part of the occupation is just providing space for discussion and then action. I think we do need to do that in education, but not with the people you are doing the talking now. Students, teachers and parents really need to ask Why do we educate? Is it just to become part of the system, is it to find ourselves, or reach the american dream, is it a natural part of modern life… there are volumes of book in libraries that discuss this, but very few who ask the people actually spend 12-19 years in school.
would be interested in your take on the Occupy Education Tumblr page. http://www.occupyedu.tumblr.com
feel free to email me at [email protected]
David Loitz
Hey David!
I’ll definitely take a deeper look, and let’s be in contact. One of the things I like about the Occupy Education Tumblr is that it embodies such a multiplicity of perspectives and concrete engagements. You’ll have to pardon me for going to the Greeks! It was to make the point that this is a long history, in which our notions and our actions intertwine in odd ways. But all the more reason to place ourselves in the moment and see what we can do.
I wouldn’t want you to think I was critiquing the “occupation of education.” If anything, I was trying to point out how that already happens and thus gets complicated. But all the more reason why we need to take it on and struggle with it.
In fact, this Friday, some colleagues and I will be having an open meeting–and food/clothing drive for OWS–on “Occupy Education?” at Teachers College.
Details here:
http://ecogradients.com/#/post/11981555879
As you point out, creating a space for discussion and action is critical, especially within an educational context which tends towards every place being accounted for.
knowledge-(and)-power…
easiest way to find security is to subjugate oneself to the nearest tyrant, whose respect for ‘symbolic’ information rests on hir willingness to ‘lay waste’ to anything that gets in hir way. it’s a pact with the devil; the academy’s reliance not only on the forebearance, but also (beneath the surface of this tale) the $$$, of the malevolent…
an anecdote:
“Plato and Diogenes confront one another, and Diogenes Laertius gives an account of this. One day, Plato would have seen Diogenes the Cynic washing his salad. Plato sees him washing his salad and, recalling that Dionysius had appealed to Diogenes and that Diogenes had rejected his appeal, he says to him: If you had been more polite to Dionysius you would not have to wash your salad. To which Diogenes replies: If you had acquired the habit of washing your salad ‘you would not have been the slave of Dionysius.'”
-in Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010), p.292.
Nice. This makes me think there is something very interesting going on with time. You give an account; find oneself either washing your salad or slave to Dionysius, and have to work out who you are backwards. What happened? The appeal and acceptance/rejection is reassembled from the fog by a gesture. In Tom Stoppard’s retelling of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find themselves on the road (I paraphrase):
Guildenstern: What’s the first thing you remember?
Rosencrantz: NO, no good, it’s gone.
Guildenstern: You don’t get my meaning, what’s the first thing after all of the things you have forgotten?
Rosencrantz: We were sent for! A royal summons!
OWS is like this. Wait, what God’s appeal have we accepted? What tyrant have we been busy subjugating ourselves, occupying ourselves with? We find ourselves on the road, waking up from a royal task. “Glean what afflicts him.”
Hmmm… Lately i’ve been teaching meditation like this: “notice when your mind HAS BEEN wandering, and then gently bring it back to the breath.”
-because you can only ever notice what your mind has done in retrospect… We can only ever see what we HAVE BEEN up to, because what we ARE up to is this very seeing… We can, then, only approach ‘mindfulness’, ‘concentration’ (samadhi), or ‘self-consciousness’ BACKWARDS, as it were. If we pursue it ‘forwardly’, we pursue a mirage; a mirror-image with which the mind plays tricks, leaping from partial-object to partial-object and carrying us away in the current…
Don’t institutions (http://icls.columbia.edu/events/) always seem to find themselves on the wrong side of this counter-intuition? Social experience takes on the character of a Shakespearean tragicomedy of errors precisely because of the pathetic insistence on POLITICAL (global) advocacy of PHILOSOPHICAL (local) values like honesty, authenticity, transparency, clarity, directness, and reflectivity…
Plans, designs, & structures thus come out predictably biased in favor of programmatic rather than pragmatic self-conceptions and ‘all-at-once’ rather than ‘step-by-step’ implementations.
Communication breakdowns inevitably fracture the dysfunctional (dissonant) networks that spring up around the ‘virtual transcendental’ objects of desire that have governed the planning process, since what these value-objects mean IN PRACTICE (and from within, as it were) is quite unlike what they mean IN PRINCIPLE (or from ‘above’).
In fact, I’d like to go as far as to suggest that these interpretations will be antinomic / antithetical. Further, this STRUCTURAL antinomy usually goes unrecognized, which means that the dissonance (which increases with the scale of operations) is consistently attributed by each ‘splinter’ to the FUNCTIONAL shortcomings of various others. The ‘Right’ vs. ‘Left’ schism that dominates American politics and culture(s)-at-large is an example of how (seemingly thru a kind of ‘transference’) this antinomy can settle into relatively stable REGIMES of reciprocal misinterpretation (ex: what Bateson called ‘double binds’ or what in General Semantics parlance are sometimes called ‘quandaries’, lol). [The stability of a regime is therefore an effect of a reciprocal misrecognition of the gap/interval between name and form.]
So when we’re talking about OCCUPATION, about creating spaces for HUMAN inhabitation, -which would not merely repeat that most timeless of socioeconomic gestures: the ‘clusterfuck’, but would somehow sidestep, reverse, or finesse this tendency- it seems to me that these reversals, or inversions, actually need to DOUBLE themselves. Perhaps we could suggest the possibility of some kind of a protocol for collective (inter-) action which would entail the recognition of a ‘mutual blindness’ of practices and of institutions (processes and structures) for one another? This would presumably (and profoundly?) ‘deterritorialize’ the antinomy, so that it would function as a kind of a limit on any identity / regime-of-identification couplet. Institutions would need to realize the importance of approaching their ‘human capital’ BACKWARDS, just as much as we human capitalists need to ‘back up’ on our own ‘creative capital’ (concentration & productivity)…
I agree, there is something weird going on here with the temporality; to me it feels something like nested clusters across whose thresholds temporal flows are reversed (or appear to be?)… Ontological speculations aside, in the interest of navigating such a clusterscape, one would presumably work on developing a feel for these thresholds; the points of inversion where the flows eddy and mingle, and new possibilities can unfold… (?)
Working backwards (is there any other way?!)… Thresholds: yes, we would do well to know them, and as reversible. We live in an age of the event horizon, the impending line, that once we cross it will cross us, irrevocably. Working thresholds are much subtler: http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/minimal-action
And now of course, I am thinking of them in terms of memory. I’ve actually got something in the works for a museum around navigating a place in order to learn something about both its thresholds and one’s own recollections. A kind of transition mapping.
Can you say more about the doubling? I’m not sure what that would look like as a protocol. What I’m sensing is actually a kind of proliferation. When you slip under the usual threshold of stabilized reciprocal misrecognitions, as you put it, what seemed like two choices actually gets fluid. As Feldenkrais put it, you need at least three options to have a choice. Two, we could say, is always a Hobson’s choice. But more precisely, we could say that the illusion of a quantity of choices emerges in hindsight, as a result of a gesture either of consolidation or shimmering. In the moment there is not choice but variation, a variable line, movement. Your mind has been wandering…
Yeah, I guess I’m picking up late on this thresholds thing, lol ; )
Regarding ‘doubling’, I agree that it would indeed herald and entail a proliferation, and that (furthermore) it can only become apparent as such in hindsight… I guess I’d want to insist on its intelligibility; the comprehensibility and hence the reliability of this proliferation… It proceeds algorithmically, as it were (i.e. as it will appear to have been), in the sense that it can only ‘unfold’ step by step (which does not necessarily entail its programmability or linearity)…
Perhaps the ‘first’ doubling is when the threshold perceived in the other is also perceived in oneself; the mote you notice in thy brother’s eye provides the occasion for you to recognize the beam in thine own.
This opens up the possibility of a reversal of attitude: I no longer assume that ‘I am right’, and then infer from this that you must be ‘wrong’ (to the extent that we disagree); rather, in taking upon myself the responsibility of being ‘wrong’ (to some indeterminate extent), I infer that you must be (at least partly, or to a reciprocally indeterminate extent) ‘right’.
There is no guarantee that you will immediately reciprocate this attitude, but if/when this’second’ doubling takes place, we will have transformed a vicious cycle into a virtuous one. With neither of us immediately blaming the other for systemic shortcomings, the structure’s own rigidities and elasticities come into focus as sources of dissonance. A ‘third’ doubling comes into play with the realization that with this awarenesss it has become possible to work with these constraints (which were perhaps never really any more than the residues or traces of our interactive habits), and to change them. The system itself, we could say, thus becomes ‘aware’ of its shortcomings, and begins to transform them, in just the same way as we, its constituents, had first to create self-awareness by inverting the programmatic projection/reaction habit and working with similarly-inverted others to trace the contours of plasticity in the code-structures of our shared languages. Note that an inverted institution would need other, similarly-inverted institutions to work with at the level of interinstitutional plasticity, and that there would be no theoretical limit on the scales that this proliferation could cross…
In each case, as you say, the choice (which is, indeed, perhaps not so much a choice as it is a kind of risky exploration, a gesture of venturing, reaching, or stretching) is really between different registers of choice, or as Bruno Latour puts it, between different Cosmopolitics (i.e. rather than between cosmos and politics, cf. http://www.ethicsandglobalpolitics.net/index.php/egp/article/view/6373); in each case the move seems to be one of in-volution & com-plication; a ‘zooming-in’ from digital to analogue, quantity to quality, and timespace to spacetime…