PRETEXT, a Re/INter/VIEW
       with Jane Gallop 12

Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 11:56:29 -0600 From: "Joan L. Richmond" richmond@TARLETON.EDU Subject: jr>Another general post

After following along the posts, I was most interested in the way this whole episode speaks to teaching. I asked a question early in the discussion about this in relation to T. R.'s marvelous description of "sensationalism." What follows is not really so much a question as a wandering sort of questioning in general, to no one and anyone. I apologize for the length of the thing.

Jane wrote:

"I'm trying to make a point about my labor and my sense of duty, not only b/c I've felt them misrecognized here, but b/c the situation is for me so completely reminiscent of teaching. In my daily duty to the list, I felt like the teacher -- not b/c I knew more or anything ridiculous like that, but because I was the one who had to show up everyday, who had to do the reading, no matter how busy I was or how tired, or how sick my kids were, who couldn't decide to cut class when I wasn't in the mood or had something better to do. That is probably the biggest difference btw the teacher & the student."

As a full-time instructor and graduate student, I have to say I don't find so much difference between the two experiences in terms of duty. And I would say my undergraduates are in general quite serious about their role as students. Perhaps that's because I teach at a small, primarily small-town/rural university that draws a lot of first generation college students. Yes, there are students who blow off class responsibilities, but in truth, believe it or not, I find students (here, at least) for the most part earnest in their work. If I were to characterize all students as lazy and irresponsible, this would be to misrecognize many of them.

I think Jane's characterization of students is perhaps at the root of this issue of empathy with students, of feeling their pain, etc. Jane says,

"And I make this point b/c all the emphasis on the teacher's power in contemporary pseudo-political discourse on pedagogy neglects perhaps the most essential thing. And something we might not want to neglect in our politics. LABOR. Teachers labor for students. Students do not labor for teachers. Students benefit from our labor; we do not benefit from students' labor. Any application of the Marxist class model to our classes tends to neglect this very basic thing."

The classroom is a sort of community, I think. As Victor says, not a sentimentalized community, but a collection of people talking and working together to create something. I.m not sure I labor for students any more than students labor for me. It's a pronoun thing, perhaps. We're working, but working *with*, in a sort of para-laboring sense. Okay, yeah, I get paid to "teach" students. And they pay to "learn" from me as "teacher." I recognize the traditional structure.

But a classroom might also want to be a place where these structures/identities are broken down, or "reterritorialized," to borrow a term from Deleuze and Guattari. When I am learning from them about a topic they're working on (as Jane is learning about feminism from her student), or when I am learning something from them about teaching, who is the "teacher"? Who the student? The roles begin to blur (or expand). Given that we all have to work out of an institutional setting, how can we expand that opportunity for "making knowledge"? Roland Barthes says in his essay "Seminar" that there is a pedagogical and social structure that reflects a "relation of superiority" that limits. And despite his best intentions, he recognizes, "Law resists, mastery continues to weigh upon me, difference risks being perceived by fits and starts as vaguely repressive . . . Each time I want to hand the seminar over to the others, it comes back to me: I cannot evade a kinds of 'presidence,' under whose gaze speech is blocked, hampered, embarrassed."

So within this "institutional space," Barthes says he tries not to "say what I know" but to "set forth what I am doing." And then allow students to do it. A classroom can be a place where relations are established, and the most important ones are among the students themselves, where "each relation . . . is made original: discovers the originality of bodies taken one by one, breaks off the reproduction of roles, the

repetition of discourses, counters any staging of prestige, of rivalry."

This process is one in which the paradigmatic structures -- the territories -- of the classroom can be deterritorialized, opened up for exploration. For Barthes, to "get round this paradigm. . . we must rephrase it; we no longer set the dry intelligence in opposition to the warm heart; but we employ the formidable machinery of science, of method, of criticism, in order to express *gently*, *occasionally*, and *somewhere* (these intermittences being the seminar's very justification) what we might call in an antiquated style, the motions of desire." The expression of these motions, these "sensations," to show (and even perform) what I do with them and how I follow them, is, to me, "the job," my "duty."

Jane writes:

"The fact that we learn from our students (& of course we do) is a bonus. It is not necessary to the structure, not part of the job description. It is our job, our duty to teach them; it is not their job, not their duty to teach us. Our work is justified by its benefit to them; their work is not justified by its benefit to us. Their labor of learning is justified by its benefit to them. "I was wrong to say "we do not benefit from students' labor." I know that we do. but it is contingent, accidental. I was speaking in structures not experiences (w/o of course explaining that fact). I meant that it is necessary that our students benefit from our labor; it is not necessary that we benefit from theirs."

In a modernist sense, the classroom is a structure, a model. For me, it is a territory to be continually remade. In this redescription, my learning is not contingent or accidental, it is necessary, and if I do not benefit in some way then I am NOT doing my "job," I am not "being there" -- crucial, since it's all of us "being there," students and "teachers" alike, that facilitates the relations that this classroom territory emerges from. Not that either model is free of politics, sexual or other/wise, but the classroom does not have to be a polis -- it can be a Lyotardian pagus, a continually rediscovering of the country/community/territory, where my "job" is to facilitate students’ (and my) exploration, learning the customs of the country and inventing some more along the way, always on the edge, the borderlands of the institution.

Perhaps, in the end, I'm the one who's naive. I'll take on that identity, too, in that case. I can't do this and be a cynic. I can inhabit the naive "genre" for awhile, if that's how what I'm doing is going to be "reterritorialized," redescribed. And of course everything we do *will* be redescribed, inevitably, so I don't mind. But by then I'll be moving along elsewhere . . .

Joan Richmond

Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 10:30:05 -0700
From: krause@mind.net (Steve Krause)
Subject: Re: jg: labor

In part, Jane wrote:

The fact that we learn from our students (& of course we do) is a bonus. It is not necessary to the structure, not part of the job description. It is our job, our duty to teach them; it is not their job, not their duty to teach us. Our work is justified by its benefit to them; their work is not justified by its benefit to us. Their labor of learning is justified by its benefit to them.

I was wrong to say "we do not benefit from students' labor." I know that we do. but it is contingent, accidental. I was speaking in structures not experiences (w/o of course explaining that fact). I meant that it is necessary that our students benefit from our labor; it is not necessary that we benefit from theirs.

I see what you're getting at, and at a certain level that I would desctibe as the institutional nature of my job, it's clearly true. When I go up for tenure, when I am evaluated by colleagues and students, even when I discuss my teaching in forums like this, I am not routinely asked what it is I learn from my students. It's not part of the official job description.

But I think it ought to be, and, as I think you're implying here Jane, I think the process of learning from our students is inevitably part of teaching well. And, for my own selfish reasons, I for one wouldn't be nearly as interested in teaching if I didn't think I could learn things from my students that would have importance in my own life.

Now, I don't want to take this too far and I'm really not trying to irritate Jane or anyone else (especially since we're coming to the end and people seem to be generally making nice-nice), but I wonder how much of this assumption about what we can get from students influenced the direction of this discussion? I understand and even partially agree with what you're suggesting in your e-mail, that students have more to learn from teachers than teachers have to learn from students. Well, in this particular situation, did you go into this as a teacher?

--Steve

Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 14:02:01 -0500 (EST)
From: cyberdiva radhik@bgnet.bgsu.edu
Subject: Re: jr>Another general post

I think Jane's characterization of students is perhaps at the root of this issue of empathy with students, of feeling their pain, etc. Jane says,

"And I make this point b/c all the emphasis on the teacher's power in contemporary pseudo-political discourse on pedagogy neglects perhaps the most essential thing. And something we might not want to neglect in our politics. LABOR. Teachers labor for students. Students do not labor for teachers. Students benefit from our labor; we do not benefit from students' labor. Any application of the Marxist class model to our classes tends to neglect this very basic thing.."

On another (tangential, perhaps) note - I'd like to ask anyone who cares to answer why and how

"This experience has convinced me that my ignorant suspicions of lists was right. Now I know I'd never want to be on a list." (I quote from one of Jane's posts)

The people who are questioning you are the same people you probably meet at conferences etc. - in the aisle of the Academia so to speak. The questions they have asked have probably been asked of you in various ways even f2f.

Why do you find lists so much more uncomfortable than any other kind of discussion?

Whether I get any kind of answer or not - just wanted to say this has been an interesting discussion. Thanks Victor, Jane and Dana (and all the others who asked qs ).

thanks,

Radhika Gajjala

Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 07:33:45 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas ma@panix.com
Subject: Re: toughness of lists

The people who are questioning you are the same people you probably meet at conferences etc. - in the aisle of the Academia so to speak. The questions they have asked have probably been asked of you in various ways even f2f.

Why do you find lists so much more uncomfortable than any other kind of discussion?

It is often said that the problem with e-mail is its relative "anonymity", which makes people behave more irresponsibly and aggressively; and also the difficulties of making oneself understood. In addition, on lists no sooner has one made oneself understood to one person than another pops up who has misunderstood in a completely different manner. This is all true.

But I think the main "toughness" factor lies in fact that on e-mail lists the expectation of thoroughness -- or as Victor put it, of the "candor" -- of the interviewee's response is much higher than under any other circumstances, while at the same time there is no pre-arranged protocol that would prepare the interviewee for the tenor, nature and range of questions asked. The expected "candor" is that of writing; the person is expected to approach the task of responding with the earnestness with which one customarily approaches writing for the public. This is different than at public F2F question/answer sessions, where it is fine to just swat flies. But at the same time, the stuff that one is supposed to be earnest about is not submitted once and for all, as is the case with most written interviews that are not e-mail -- anything can suddenly be asked, and yet the same standard for excellence of response holds. On lists, one also does not have the chance to "get the interviewer's number" and learn to play hir -- there are many interviewers; they spring up at libitum and they all have different numbers. But always one is supposed to respond as if one had infinite resources of time, mind, decorum, patience and readiness for self-examination. AND the interviewers know this and can easily abuse it for sheer sport. Very, very tough.

-m

Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 01:39:57 +0900
From: dana@yaksi.eco.saitama-u.ac.jp (Dana Beckelman)
Subject: Listing Towards Lhasa

Isn't it all just so deliciously symptomatic? I must say I'm wrecked our analysand is running out of the room before we can all fondle her on the couch a little further.

Cyberdiva (great name!), as pretty much of a list virgin (which isn't to say I haven't had my pub(l)ic hairs flammed a few times), I think lists are a "gas, gas, gas" (meaning they can often be filled with fume-emitting "winds" that seem to be a biological imperative, but they are also the fuel that allow me to zoom my Monster Macho Mama 4x4 [Toyota, of course!] over fields and fountains, moors and mountains, and do my patriotic part to widen the ozone hole so that the aliens will have a better view of us, as Nancy sang before Bette, "from a distance"). I'm sure Steve or Cynthia can give you all the high flalutin' la-dee-da lowdown ;) on why this is so, but for little ol' cowdyke me, it levels the playing field between quick thinkers and slow thinkers, of which I will gladly "shout, shout it out" that I am the latter. First day of class I used to tell my students (since most of my students here do not understand a single word I say in English and, thus, all the more reason why I babble on lists), "Delayed reactions are always welcome and I will have many of them myself. Just because that pithy comeback doesn't come to you until you're in bed tonight, doesn't mean at least I, and I daresay the other pithy-challenged people in the class, won't appreciate it tomorrow or whenever."

Which is not to say that lists are not still bound by that time that "keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future," just that there's more time to muse and be (a)mused and (be)mused as well as have your butt chewed by the muse (because s/he can be one helluva wicked wench!) in the process always in (re)vision. In short, it gives all of us, but especially academicians suffering from the syndrome Jane so symptomatically illustrated, the chance to say the hardest three words ever uttered: I don't know. But maybe I will tomorrow or maybe I don't give a hoot in hell about knowing or maybe I will after (perhaps the second three hardest words of the syndrome) you tell me!

I would argue Jane could have been just as performative on this list as she is in person and/or has been in her books (and, thus, she's clearly not naive that writing is a performance), which I *think* Malgosia was getting at (and which I laughed and laughed about until I wondered, in classic paranoid academician fashion, if her joke was on me, in which case I can still say, Ha-ha! Very funny!). Being on the "hot seat" (since things rather than space are what is usually heated in Japan and, thus, is often the "warmest" place in your rabbit hutch) does not mean just because you view your audience as hecklers that you still are not the stand-up comic we've all come to see (and I daresay be entertained by and have your responses to the hecklers also be part of that process, especially when you can get back to them tomorrow!).

Lizzy asked (or said what was important to her was) what sticks to you when you read and while my response after this list might be, Can anything coming from Teflon Jane stick?, what stuck (and has stayed) in my (re)readings of the book is ultimately disappointment. Not simply because my helping her have made the story was concealed, bracketed, erased, or as Jane would say, "anything ridiculous like that," but because I expected a better argument, a better performance, a better view from that mountain she's on of how us little ol' ants should change our ways. And this list could have been a chance for her to have her own delayed reaction to herself (which I *think*, having run home to my lover who's read a zillion more books than I have and doesn't have a PhD, and asked her, What the hell was _Dorian Gray_ about?, Victor was getting at), to fill in our obviously still virgin gaps (sorry, but we just didn't "get it" the first time), to *in fact* enact (if she saw herself as the "duty-bound" teacher) the very sexualized seduction on us as her "students" as she (e)spouses in her book, to make, as Dharma might say in "Dharma & Greg," jungle love knowledge with us.

But you pay your money and rent your video and tell yourself, Thank the goddess I didn't spend the money to see this in the theater (which is the difference between $4 and $18 in Japan)--c'est la vie, or shoganai, as the Japanese say, "it can't be helped."

Joan Richmond, who, for those who weren't lucky enough to have been born a Texan, teaches at what we in Texas call the "cow/boy/girl/dyke college," I just wanted to thank for making them there Frenchy fellas so much more accessible to me in your last post (truly, sincerely, even sentimentally, because, as you say, I don't have to play the who's more cynical than who American academic game; I'm in Japan where our speed skater "burst into tears" when he won, and we, because community is everything in Japan, cried with him). And here all this time I thought when D&G (not to be confused with "Dharma & Greg") proclaimed it was a grass rather than a tree thang that they were saying, Power to the (puff, puff) people!, which I would still argue helps them make a lot more sense (and it is a biographically noted in someplace, somewhere, which I will leave it to Victor to (re)mind us of, *fact* that Foucault was also doing the wild thang with the wicked weed, though maybe for AIDS reasons, but still, as ddd would say, there ya go!). Nevertheless, even being in grass-less Japan (literally; I just took my daughter to a park today that was nothing but dirt), you inspired me to quit using _A Thousand Plateaus_ as a doorstop (and, boy/girl, does it make a good one!) and at least hold it to my forehead and pray for divine osmosis intervention. You're the teach/student/cowgirl who can stay on that (baloney) pony! Yowsa! As George says in "My Best Friend's Wedding," "Love the hat, love the shoes, love the bag" (or something like that).

Johanna, I feel like I'm starting to overstay my welcome here, so suffice it to say that my lover says the answer to your question is a public/private thang (as in, when you make your private thoughts public [as in rousing the troops to do "hate" crimes], is that a form of harassment?) and I say it's a mind/body thang (as in, if Jane wants to theorize her right to play, as my pop would say, "smacky lips" with her students, do they have the right to theorize smacking her [as in punching her (en)light(enment)s out]? and why is "sex" considered tres chic by the academy and "violence" not?, which I could say is a delayed reaction to what was lurking behind my physicality question) and we're still arguing about it, but have thus far at least agreed that "freedom" is more than "just another word for nothing left to lose."

And finally, Ron Hugar, boy/son/brother/comrad, I just wanted to say I thought your response to Malgosia and last question(s) to Jane were, in my best gestalt of Finkelstein (and here I suppose I am arguing that one could skip, even though I haven't read it, "Homer's Contest," and just go straight [or gayly forward] to watching "Dharma & Greg"), Right on, (hu)man! And I thought of you this morning, watching a video of "Sesame Street" with my Wild Child, who didn't seem nearly as interested in it as I was and so at least at this point I can't say it warped her for life. It seems the theme of this particular show was pretending and distinguishing between what is "alive" and what is not, and I let it go (with the flow), not wanting to be the PC Police, when they sang some song about rocks not being alive without introducing the Native American belief that all things have spirits that speak to us (though white people seem hard of hearing) or that Shinto-ists (since, after all, we have a 400-year-old sacred tree down the street at our neighborhood shrine) believe that rocks and trees and mountains embody and/or house gods (and goddesses, Victor! Kannon, the goddess of compassion, is a major macho biggie here), and I let it go when they showed a tea party, in which they in fact got big points for having at least one boy among the girl/female characters, but still had the boy in a derby and all the girls in sun hats and boas and didn't have (which is no doubt why I would have been warped for life) any girls in a derby and boa, nor did they explain why all the "teddy" bears had to be boys (and don't think I haven't written to Land's End and "smacked" them all the way to yesterday for making all their Rugby Bears males!). But what I couldn't let go (and maybe because I'd reached my third time is the charm limit case) was when was Ernie was holding two pots and asking Bert to guess what he was. And I'm sure in what the producers thought was radical, Bert guessed daddy first and then son and then, "You're not the Mommie are you? Ha-ha-ha!" And Ernie said no and Bert went on to guess every nephew/uncle/male family member imaginable until he gave up and Ernie announced he was a stove! And while I laughed and thought it very clever and important in terms of the point they were trying to make about pretending aliveness, I had to find it oh so symptomatic of at least American culture that the message seemed to be that it's easier (or more acceptable) to pretend you're a stove than a different gender and what that means about the power gender has over us.

Now, since I haven't watched much "Sesame Street" and don't know the lexicon, maybe Bert is the "good ol' boy" who could not possibly imagine being a girl or wanting to be a girl, and we're all supposed to take his "jokes" as a reinscription of his territory, as Joan might say. But as the "dykier" (i.e., I prefer jeans to my lover's leggings or panty hose or jeans, all of which I find sexy on her, but which my "feminist desire" simply does not find comfortable to wear except jeans) of a couple, in which I gave birth to our (with a little help from a sperm bank donor whom I had to adore for answering the question, Why are you doing this? with, Because I'm getting paid for something I like to do!) child (and related much more to "Junior" than "Nine Months" during my pregnancy), I find troubling. Why can't we pretend we're girls being boys being girls or boys being girls being boys or any exponential equation of all of the above? What is it about gender that makes Bert and I daresay all of us shake in our (Nancy Sinatra) boots? And what is my own culpability in the process when, even as I certainly agree with my lover when she demands to put Cheyenne in dresses that she looks lovely and can still climb onto the kitchen table and beat her Tarzana chest, I can't help but feel a burst of dykely pride when Cheyenne looks oh so seductively handsome in her overalls while stealing a drum away from the older boys [and maybe older girls, too, if there were any] at her day care?

That's my chip (off the ol' dyke block)! Go, Little Darling, go! Maybe it's queer theorists, speaking as mutations of the Darwinian survival of the fittest, who will problematize gender in a way feminism(s) have yet to do. Or maybe geneticists will "prove" that cultural imperatives are *in fact* chemically/hormonally/biologically based. But, getting back to what teachers and students have to learn from each other, what I have most learned from my daughter is that competition is innate (at least for her genes). I can tell her to share and be cooperative and worry about whether she's gonna "plow" boys in a skirt or "plow" girls in overalls all day and all night, and she just looks at me like, Are you out of your friggin' feminist, psychedelic-hippie mind? I'm gettin' mine! Which is a function of her heading for the "terrible two's," but which, having just gotten horribly depressed reading (what no doubt some might call a Victim Feminist tract) _Reviving Orphelia_, I cannot help but hope she retains while doing so without, as Ron says, just waving her mine's bigger than your's bamboo stick around. But how to teach that? And how to learn that? And how to live that in a community of "others"? Those questions remain and weigh heavy on me as a parent/student/teacher/child.

I was thinking (a)loud with my lover (whose name is Karen, btw) about the whole Jane/mama, me/child thang and was wondering, if there are always two Janes, or two faces of Jane, as Cynthia might say, if she didn't want to be both mama and daddy, to which Karen said (and here I will proudly say brilliantly), No, Jane wants to be the daddy and daddy's girl, and you the student, as Gary has illustrated, are supposed to be the mama, the nurturer and she-wolf protector saying, Don't you be saying tacky things about my husband/child or I'll hit you with my frying pan! Just a thought to leave you with (with so much left unspoken) while you move on to other lists and other lives since it appears that everyone is saying "sayonara" (which is pronounced sah-yoh-nah-rah, and since I know you'll want to pronounce your Japanese r's as well as your French, start to say a d and come out with an l, or just remember [for Victor's sake] LBJ speaking Spanish).

I don't know about the rest of y'all, but I, as that "sentimental" dance song goes, "have had the time of my life," enjoying both reading your posts and writing my own. As my students say when they finish their introductions (and which I say to them after mine), which is also the classic equivalent of "nice to meet you" in all Japanese introductions, Doozo yorishiku oneigaishimasu, which literally/interestingly/culturally means, "Please take care of me" (which I guess is my contribution to making "nice-nice," Steve ;) ).

All the best, Dana