Put another way…
Posted on | August 22, 2005 |
Re-reading the amazing Roland Barthes collection, Image Music Text, I stumble upon a passage which seems to encapsulate so much of what I was trying to express in the last post. This is a section called ‘The Teaching Relationship’ and it begins by saying, ‘Imagine I am a teacher’:
I speak, endlessly, in front of and for someone who remains silent. I am the person who says I (the detours of one, we or impersonal sentence make no difference), I am the person who, under cover of setting out a body of knowledge, puts out a discourse, never knowing how that discourse is being received and thus for ever forbidden the reassurance of a definitive image – even if offensive – which would constitute me. In the exposé, more aptly named than we tend to think, it is not knowledge which is exposed, it is the subject (who exposes himself to all sorts of painful adventures). The mirror is empty, reflecting back to me no more than the falling away of my language as it gradually unrolls…
Scarcely have I made the audience smile with some ‘witty’ remark, scarcely have I reassured it with some progressive stereotype, than I experience all the complacency of such provocations; I regret the hysterical drive, would like to retract it, preferring too late an austere to a ‘clever’ discourse (but in that contrary case it is the ‘severity’ of the discourse that would seem hysterical to me). Should some smile answer my remark or some gesture of assent my stereotype of intimidation, I immediately persuade myself that these manifestations of complicity come from imbeciles or flatterers (I am here describing an imaginary process). It is I who am after a response and who let myself go as far as to provoke it, yet it suffices that I receive a response for me to become distrustful. If I develop a discourse such that it coldly averts any response, I do not thereby feel myself to be any more in true (in the musical sense), for I must then glory in the solitude of my speech, furnish it with the alibi of missionary discourses (science, truth, etc).
Parts of this paint for me the frightening sense of isolation, vulnerability and emptiness I often feel when giving a conference paper, although Barthes goes on to explain why this exercise in unnerving might be a good thing:
in accordance with psychoanalytic description (Lacan’s, the perspicacity of which in this respect any speaker can confirm), when the teacher speaks to his audience, the Other is always there, puncturing his discourse… for the teacher, the student audience is still the exemplary Other in that it has an air of not speaking – and thus, from the bosom of its apparent flatness, speaks in you so much the louder: its implicit speech, which is mine, touches me all the more in that I am not encumbered by its discourse.
This sounds like the basis for an ethics of teaching, although I hate how much it seems to take place within the teacher’s own head. I have enough neuroses, thanks! And who’s to say that a self-reflexive speaking position ‘I’ makes any difference - to anyone watching/ listening/ preparing for assessment it remains the voice of authority.
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