Être Autre

In the days I whiled away as a would-be academic, I thought about challenging the dominant position of dyads in theorizing about communication and learnt from observing the teaching situation:

Pedagogical situations are sensory. They are also interpersonal. Because they are sensory this makes even learning by oneself interpersonal. Egocentric speech is like a dialogue between the senses. In Vygotsky's and Luria's experiments, children placed in problem-solving situations that were slightly too difficult for them displayed egocentric speech. One could consider these as self-induced metadiscursive moments. The self in crisis will disassociate and one's questionning becomes the object of a question.

Storing and Sorting

Years later, I am struck by the concluding paragraphs to Karin Cope's Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live With Gertrude Stein and her call to enter into the play of a play.

As I hope this play makes clear, I am not asking my reader to suspend his or her judgment of Stein or of me (as if such a thing were possible anyway); what I am asking is that when we look at how Stein made and revised or "forgot" certain judgments, we consider also how we do such things as well. A judgement should not be simply another name for foreclosure; a play, I hope (matched by all of its notes), opens up the space where it is not.

I will be glad if you begin to hear insistent other voices, voices you do not yet think of as your own, demanding of you, their author, an audience. If that happens then perhaps the play, or I, or Stein will have done our work.

And imagine my delight when I read this epigraph to a paper by Willard McCarty (Modelling, ontology and wild thought)

The only way you can catch yourself in the act of reflecting on yourself is by becoming another self – a self which, when it looks down on your reflecting self, will not be included in the reflection. If you want to understand yourself better, you always have to keep on the move.

Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice (1999)

As I concluded back then

The fracturable affiliable self calls for reproductive models suitable to the interactions of multi-sensate beings, models that render dyads dialectical, questionable, answerable. Narrativity understood dialectically does not merely mean making sequences or strings of events into stories but also stories into things, strung together for more stories. From such an understanding, emerge non-dyadic narratives of reproduction, narratives where a thing-born transforms itself into an event, comes to understand itself as a process.

The ever elusive event...

And so for day 2089
01.09.2012