deconstruction not rendering things meaningless

Below is a portion of an essay that sort of helped me understand deconstruction a little better. I think.

http://jamesfaulconer.byu.edu/deconstr.htm

Deconstruction
by James E. Faulconer
(Revised 15 June 1998)

To think about the difference between Heidegger's and Derrida's notions of deconstruction, consider an example: I am writing a book on community. I will work over it repeatedly until I am satisfied that I am done. But what does done mean? Doesn't it mean "say everything I want to say"? And what do I want it to say? Everything. Everything, that is, about what it means to be a community. Of course, there will be this or that minor point that I may ignore or safely overlook, but as long as something significant remains to be said about my topic or as long as the connections of important points have not been made clear, I am not done. When I am done, therefore, I have produced something that claims to say everything of importance on my topic; that I have written the book on my topic is implicit in its existence as a book, even if I insert footnotes and apologies and disclaimers to the contrary.
However, when I have finished the book and have (I hope) a publisher, what is the first thing I will do? I'll write an introduction. But introductions are odd things. If they can say what the book says, then what need is there for the book? If they can't, then what need is there for the introduction? Sometimes they are appetizers, things designed to get people to read the book (or at least to buy it). Most of the time, however, an introduction is a short version of the book, an overview. It sets the problem in context, it shows the readers how important the problem or solution is, it gives the argument in a more easily understood form. Introductions add to the book to improve it, to supplement its work.
Thus, though the book implicitly claims to say everything needed, as a supplement, the introduction says "one more thing" or "the same thing briefly," deconstructing the book's claim to completeness and self-sufficiency. In deconstructing the book, the introduction doesn't show us the irrelevance of the book. It doesn't show us that the book is meaningless. It doesn't show us that just any interpretation of the book will do. It shows us that the book claims more than it can deliver, that it has left something out though it claims to be complete. I take that to be the general meaning of the word deconstruction as Derrida has used it: not just using our words and concepts against themselves, but showing what has been left out or overlooked. In fact, better: showing that something has been left out or overlooked, that omission is structural to any text -- and that we can find those omissions in the structure of the text -- without necessarily being able to specify what has been omitted.
Notice, however, that once, by means of a deconstruction, we have seen something that was omitted, we won't be able to go back, insert the missing piece, and then be finally done. The omission is structural to writing and explaining because it is structural to existence and experience. Omission is unavoidable. The reason why is not difficult to see. For one thing, no one can say everything about anything; things are never that simple, not simple things, especially not "first things."

This inability to say everything is not a failure of language, something to be overcome. Neither is it a point of new-age silliness or old-age magic (though it may be an origin of the latter). It is one of the properties of things.(3) If I hold an object up before someone and ask her to tell me what she sees, she can give a list of the thing's properties. If she works at it, she can make that list very long. It may become ever more difficult to add things to the list, but there is really no end to what she could truthfully say about the object. She can, for example, always relate it to another thing in the universe or even to the list she is making. Though we seldom have any reason to go on and on in such a way, there is, in principle, no end to the length of the description one can give of an ordinary object. As a result, it is impossible to say everything about an object, material or otherwise.

Sami's posting on Sarah Palin reminded me of something. I remember when the movie Monster came out. Some a%%hole reporter in Miami wrote a scathing editorial on how the praise of Theron's acting was overblown; after all, she only gave up her own 'natural' beauty (which, let's be honest, is amazing but often augmented with cosmetics) in favor of a chunkier, less appealing visage to play the role of a woman struggling with abuse, poverty, and possible mental illness. What galled me most was that the reporter admitted to not yet having seen the film! And shortly after Monster, for which Theron won an Oscar for Best Actress, Nicole Kidman donned the persona of Virginia Woolfe, but she received more attention for donning a fake nose. Kidman also won the Oscar, and there were many people who commented that all these beautiful women had to do to win an Oscar was to 'ugly' themselves up.

Just one year before Monster, Salma Hayek starred in Frida, and the artist's lover Diego Rivera as played by Alfred Molina. Hayek was actually criticized for not wearing Frida Kahlo's distinctive mustache throughout the entire movie. Meanwhile, Molina's performance received rave reviews--no one attributed his success in the role to the fact that he'd gained a lot of weight to play the muralist.

So women, it seems, are damned if they do, damned if they don't, while men don't have to prove themselves; they change their appearance, but they are still humans. Women change their appearance, and it changes the entire objectified construct of WHAT they are.

PBL Brainstorm

Problem-Based Learning. Talk about a Problem. For weeks now I’ve relegated this assignment to the back of my brain. What am I going to plan? Doesn’t this type of unit seem ill-suited for English classes? Other than the idea of which new words to place in the dictionary, the back of my brain couldn’t come up with an original idea for a problem-based unit.
Since we read about designing units for class this Monday, the PBL scampered back up to the frontal cortex (or wherever our current thoughts reside). Bevin’s classroom discussion was fresh in my mind, as was the chapter in M&M about choosing literature. But because we’d just discussed the idea of choosing new books for a class, I don’t want to be a copycat by using that as my problem.

What else is there? I realize this is really boring, but I’m sort of using the blog this week to brainstorm ideas. One that occurred to me was to set up a committee (Students-in-Disguise) for determining if certain movies should be allowed to be shown in high school classrooms (ex. Blackhawk Down, Vera Drake, Juno).

But I did sort of want to be inter-disciplinary. Utah State’s got a PBL website, http://library.usu.edu/instruct/eng2010/pbl.php , and there are some good ideas on there, but I didn’t see any one that appealed to me. I thought maybe I could modify one of the problems to have the students decide if there should be a tax on junk food, just like there’s a tax on tobacco. The writing an researching components, along with the structuring of arguments, would lend themselves to desired English standards. But it sounds really boring, and I can’t imagine that my high schoolers would want to delve into this topic. And would it really take 2 or 3 weeks to come to a conclusion?

Despite my desire to find something original to do, I may just steal part of one of the units from M&M, the one on Media; I think it was in chapter 13. Just to flesh this out, I’m thinking of having certain students be engineers, like for GE Healthcare or for 3M. These students would have the problem of coming up with a product, an invention, because the company owners need something new to stimulate investor interest and to generate new cash flow. So that group develops the product and explains it to another group, who will be portraying marketers. The advertising/marketing people must then come up with print, radio, and television campaigns to sell the product. They must make the product appear useful, if not necessary, to the public--and they must make the product look cost-effective to the CEO, the CFO, and the upper management.

Should I have a third group be the upper management and company officials? Or will that be too boring. While the previous groups are working on their projects, this management group could be researching their roles, but that doesn’t seem like very much fun to me. Then again, I’m not drawn to business-y things; I don’t find justifiable expenditures and overhead and all that interesting, but some of the students might. Or should I let the students decide--maybe the first group (the engineers) could turn into the management group and could then judge the product and the ad campaigns.

But is this too structured? I really don’t know what the heck I’m doing here. I guess I’ll have to ‘work it out,’ Project Runway-style. Auf Wiedersehen.

Marshmallow propaganda

Ahh, yes. Here we have an innocuous, family-friendly image: a marshmallow being chased by the chocolate and graham cracker cohorts of a s’more.

Run, little marshmallow, run!

When viewed with a critical eye and some knowledge of race relations and propaganda, however, we instead see the story of Birth of a Nation. Intent on harm, an angry, destructive, dark-hued chocolate bar chases innocent little “whitey,” while the “cracker”--complete with poor dental hygiene and an ignorant look--trails behind. The whitest are victims, the darker-skinned are villains, and the poor trashy “cracker” dimly but enthusiastically perpetuates any injustice it can find.

Quite an image. Now the biggest beneficiaries of the white privilege system can relax in our toasty-warm ivory towers, having vilified ‘non-whites’ and blamed it on the ignorant, gap-toothed cracker. Both ‘others’ are cast as dangerous creatures.

And the torches! Torch=Fire=Power. As if the only demographic without the power is the lily-white puff. Well, shine a magnifying glass on this tableau and, trust me, you’ll find traces of us puffy white bastards everywhere. We act a good game, but our shit sticks to everything.

This is seriously what I see when I look at this image.

Notes from the margin--well, another margin

Oh, fractal! (that's my expletive of choice)
and it was all going so well…But up pop
my old nemeses Mary Belenky, et al. UGH! Rather than changing the societies that raise most girls to believe that competition is not appropriate, not feminine,

Belenky and her think tank
just buy into and replicate the
masculine/feminine
aggressive/passive
rational/emotional
detached/personal
abstract/concrete
(read exaltedimmaculateMIND=male and basefallibleBODY=female). As
Martin Luther espoused. In the 1500s. Yeah.

Eat your heart out, Chastity Bono. I don’t even have to have a sex change to be a male.
I do that by employing logic and competitiveness.

That ought to be too hard for me. Society told me it wasn’t proper, and they all--Belenkytank--just assumed that I bought into society's demands.

Mine is a ‘deviant’ learning style.

Kumashiro: “that [pedagogy] where teacher/learning is rational, abstract, and detached from personal experience” is one of the “masculinist pedagogies that tend to benefit boys and marginalize girls” (29).

Bullshit. Cowshit. UndifferentiatedorsexuallyandgenderedlyexperimentalbovineSHIT.

Differentiate the teaching because all people are different; don’t just group us by vulvas and penises.
Don’t teach in ways that promote detachment and also in ways that promote personal experience just because society tells us one is right for one gender, the other is right for any Other gender; differentiate because no two people are identical; because people’s learning styles are myriad.
Don’t teach differently to me because I happen to be a so-called female. Teach in different ways to everybody because we’re all human and worth some introspection and effort on your part.

Ahh, redemption: “we should deconstruct the Self/Other binary” (45).

Yes. Because before the ‘norm’ can define itself as the ‘norm,’ it has to identify and define the ‘Other’ as other.

“Without the over determined discourse that creates third world, there would be no (singular and privileged) first world” (Mohanty 215).

That’s the stuff.

--“‘how the production of deviancy is intimately tied to the very possibility of normalcy’” (qtd in Kumashiro 36).
-- “that they (often unknowingly) are complicit with and even contribute to these forms of oppression when they participate in the privileging of certain identities” (37).
-- “changing oppression requires disruptive knowledge […] Students need to learn what is being learned can never tell the whole story” (34).
-- “always ask what has not been said” (34).

Yes, fantastic…

High Horses

In M&M I’m actually finding some useful tips to remember. The traits of a successful teacher, for example, are helpful to review; I especially like the brief discussion on flexibility, with the reminder that “we teach people, not subject matter.” The importance of maintaining a sense of joy and possibility in the classroom, the fear of high achievers that they will suddenly be labeled ‘ordinary,’ and the tendency for teachers to ignore the good, ‘normal’ students are all important to keep in mind, especially as we look forward to student teaching.

My sister was one of the “forgotten ‘ordinary’ students” discussed in M&M (18-19). She was overlooked and underestimated until she got to graduate school (she’s now a speech pathologist in Tomah). All through middle and high school, she was picked on mercilessly; and she was so kind, quiet, and shy that she rarely stood up for herself. She also rarely stood out in class. And while a few teachers were kind to her, most of them dismissed her and her mediocre grades as not worth the effort.

Ah, college. Not having had the best grades, my sister went on to a 2-year school to prove she could do college-level work. There, she took many classes, including Spanish, her favorite subject. But again, she was not the most promising linguist, as the professor soon found out. One day, my sister arrived in class, sat with her group, and prepared to correct an essay that had been passed out to everyone. Though the name had been blacked out, my sister immediately recognized the essay as hers. She had to sit through an entire class with the students around her picking apart her essay, making snide comments about the “stupidity” of the paper’s unknown author. My mild, kind sister was devastated; she cried for hours when she got home. Though four years younger, I wanted to march into that professor’s office and let her have it. Not long after that, my sister gave up studying Spanish.

So back to M&M. Yes, I agree with the need to support, encourage, and pay positive attention to students who would otherwise be overlooked. These students are often the most fragile because they haven’t built up a thick skin from getting into trouble, and they don’t have a buffer zone from being a celebrated “success” in the classroom. But I have to point out that, while M&M talk a good game, they also quote an 11th grader--by name--and draw attention to her spelling mistake, “pedistle” (5).

‘Oh, isn’t it cute, the little high schooler misspelled pedestal. Let’s not bother to substitute the correct spelling in editor’s brackets, it’s cuter to just to leave it.’ chuckle, chuckle, nudge, nudge.
But how is this student going to feel, being immortalized in a textbook with a ‘cute’ little spelling mistake overshadowing her comments. Because she’s right, this Jill Witthuhn, teachers need to get off our pedestals of superiority--and we need to reflect on how we share students’ work, opinions, and insights with the world.

Although the authors undoubtedly had Jill’s permission to publish her comments, I still think they could have been more sensitive in handling this quote. Though not nearly as harmful as the Spanish professor incident that my sister endured, I’m fairly sure that Jill felt a pang when she saw her words treated this way.

Or maybe I’m the oversensitive one…In my defense, the air IS kind of thin up here on my high horse.

test

Hay un gran liquidacion--cerca de la plaza mayor.