Grammatology: Reading the Child

1. Grammatology: Reading the Child Reading: Ulmer, G. (1985), ‘The Scene of Teaching’ in Applied Grammatology London, John Hopkins University Press ‘…the classroom as a place of invention rather than of reproduction…’ (163-164)

2. Assignment 2 - (2,500 word essay): Assignment 2 - (2000-2500 word essay): Use the concepts of inventive and reproductive education provided in week 6 to help show how either Swift, Blake or Rousseau (choose one) present the child or childhood in their texts. DUE on Tuesday, week 12. [also think: how can your chosen text be inventively taught]

3. Education ‘My purpose in this chapter is to open the question of the nature of educational presentation (the manner of the transmission of ideas) adequate to a poststructuralist epistemology and to air some of the rhetorical and polemical notions relevant to a pedagogy of general writing.’ (157) Poststructuralist = theory involving implicit critique of all absolutes Epistemology = a theory of knowledge Rhetorical = considered communicative discourse Polemical = loaded communicative discourse Pedagogy = a theory of teaching General writing = lived experience as the experience of signs

4. Teaching Philosophically ‘One of the principle goals of the Group for Philosophic Teaching [GREPH]…is to extend the teaching of philosophy to earlier levels of schooling. The chief problem for such an undertaking is to find ways to teach philosophy “philosophically” to young people.’ (160) ‘It is not surprising that a pedagogy committed to change rather than to reproduction would seize upon the irreducibility of the medium to the message (apropos of education as a form of communication) as the point of departure for its program (to be discussed further in terms of the pedagogical mise en scene). (162)

5. The Age of Reproduction • Age of reproduction: • a) student as ‘intent observer’ and imitator • b) only instructed via language (not other signs) • c) the ultimate goal is the ‘subordination of sensation and perception to thought, resulting in a capacity for true observation’ (166)

6. Against Reproduction • ‘To appreciate the deconstructive strategy adopted by Derrida – its practical value in the context of education – it is helpful to review a current assessment of the educational institution within which grammatology must operate. The essential point of modern social analyses of education is that education is a device of power and control whose chief purpose is to reproduce the dominant values of society and legitimize the authority of the state (finally, of the class structure). The difference between current assessments and nineteenth-century views like those summarized above is that the association of education with state power and its advocacy of the ideals of universalism and nationalism are now perceived as problems rather than as objectives. In this vein, for example, Foucault discusses the relationship between the functions of the educational and the penal systems.’ (169)

7. Against Reproduction • ‘According to [Bourdieu and Passeron], pedagogic action is by definition authoritative; it is in its very nature a kind of symbolic violence. Therefore, all nonrepressive educational theories from Rousseau through Freud (to Reich and Marcuse) are finally utopian and are violent in their very illusion of being nonviolent. The conclusion that all such utopian pedagogies eventually self-destruct (being self-contradictory) would seem to be verified by the failure of nonrepressive experiments in many universities in the wake of the student protest movement.’ (169) • ‘In Bourdieu and Passeron’s view, then, professorial discourse – the literate mastery of the word – prevents learning, alienates the students, and condemns the teacher to “theoretical monologue and virtuoso exhibition” even while maintaining the fiction or farce of dialogue. Pedagogical discourse has become a hieroglyph in the worst sense – that of the mystified and festishized symbol prior to the epistemic break of the historical grammatologists. (172)

8. Mise en Scene • ‘The essential feature of Artaud’s theory relevant to pedagogy is the demotion of speech, reversing the history of theater in the West, which has used mise en scene (and all aspects of staging and spectacle) merely to illustrate the verbal discourse (just as writing has been categorized as merely the representation of speech).’ (175) • The scene of teaching is not about getting rid of representation but allowing it to be: • Transformed/Transduced (changed from one thing to another) • Deconstructed (its originary prejudices unravelled ) • Originarilly translated (translation particular to the particular context of teaching)

9. Spacing ‘Given that grammatological presentations are neither reproductions of reality nor revelations of the real, it is clear that grammatology involves a displacement of educational transmissions from the domain of truth to that of invention.’ (179) ‘My argument is that what we are meant to discern (able to discern) when nothing takes place but the place is precisely the places and commonplaces (based on an analogy with commonplace books, although we have other ways to generate materials now, such as computers and all our hypomnemic technology) to be utilized for invention. A major challenge to the teaching performance in a classroom space conceived of as a metaphor of inventio is how to show the places taking place.’ (180)