Submitted by Anne Dalke on Sat, 03/01/2008 - 1:16pm.
Alexandra—
What tickles me about this paper is that it has its own “emergent” quality; you give an historical account of your own characteristic “genre” for thinking about life (“tragedy”), and some of the events that have contributed to that construction; you describe several, sequential challenges into that narrative—Paul’s talk, Bateson’s book, our class—and you weave all that together into a different sort of genre, the emergent composition, to describe your own life story. You find a number of very telling passages from Bateson’s book to illustrate your argument, and end up telling a very hopeful story: not only about the direction your own life might take, but about how contingent and random the process of education is.
I actually don’t quite believe that you are as “open to the endless possibilities that have yet to be conceived” as you claim (there is some evidence, elsewhere on Serendip, of your more conflicted reactions—terrified AND happy-- to
"composing a class with improvisation"!)
There are also a couple of spots where I think you overstate or overgeneralize your claims: one is when you claim that you are learning “to free yourself from the past.” But emergence, like narrative non-foundationalism, has a historic dimension. The past is still present, and still plays a role in the present; it is just not defining, or determinative, or over-determining what is going on now. The second spot where I see you over-stating is when you toss out “continuity” altogether. I’d say that acknowledging the inevitability of contingency and chance doesn’t mean that there will be no continuity in our lives; it’s just—as Bateson illustrates so well in her book—that you can’t identify the goal and direction ahead of time, but only be able to recognize that continuity retrospectively.
Where I’d most like to hear more from you is just @ the spot where you stop, agreeing with Bateson’s comment that American liberal arts education “provides a good base for lifelong learning and for retraining,..but the institutions themselves often exemplify the opposite.” I agree (and have been spending a considerable amount of my time @ Bryn Mawr @ work on changing the culture of this place) but why do you? What is your evidence? Why do you agree with Bateson here?
Another possible direction for this paper would be of course to loop back again to Melville, and compare the attitudes of various characters in Moby-Dick: what is Ishmael’s, what Ahab’s, what Melville’s attitude toward the notion of “composing our lives as emergence stories?”
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Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate
but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)
Emergent Life, Emergent Education
Alexandra—
What tickles me about this paper is that it has its own “emergent” quality; you give an historical account of your own characteristic “genre” for thinking about life (“tragedy”), and some of the events that have contributed to that construction; you describe several, sequential challenges into that narrative—Paul’s talk, Bateson’s book, our class—and you weave all that together into a different sort of genre, the emergent composition, to describe your own life story. You find a number of very telling passages from Bateson’s book to illustrate your argument, and end up telling a very hopeful story: not only about the direction your own life might take, but about how contingent and random the process of education is.
I actually don’t quite believe that you are as “open to the endless possibilities that have yet to be conceived” as you claim (there is some evidence, elsewhere on Serendip, of your more conflicted reactions—terrified AND happy-- to "composing a class with improvisation"!)
There are also a couple of spots where I think you overstate or overgeneralize your claims: one is when you claim that you are learning “to free yourself from the past.” But emergence, like narrative non-foundationalism, has a historic dimension. The past is still present, and still plays a role in the present; it is just not defining, or determinative, or over-determining what is going on now. The second spot where I see you over-stating is when you toss out “continuity” altogether. I’d say that acknowledging the inevitability of contingency and chance doesn’t mean that there will be no continuity in our lives; it’s just—as Bateson illustrates so well in her book—that you can’t identify the goal and direction ahead of time, but only be able to recognize that continuity retrospectively.
Where I’d most like to hear more from you is just @ the spot where you stop, agreeing with Bateson’s comment that American liberal arts education “provides a good base for lifelong learning and for retraining,..but the institutions themselves often exemplify the opposite.” I agree (and have been spending a considerable amount of my time @ Bryn Mawr @ work on changing the culture of this place) but why do you? What is your evidence? Why do you agree with Bateson here?
Another possible direction for this paper would be of course to loop back again to Melville, and compare the attitudes of various characters in Moby-Dick: what is Ishmael’s, what Ahab’s, what Melville’s attitude toward the notion of “composing our lives as emergence stories?”