October 27, 2006

「惆悵」--a global sensibility


I often wonder what would bring me to update my blog again. This time, teaching brought me back.

This semester I continue to experiment with the graduate seminar on globalization and media, focusing on the affective, alternative, and activist trajectories of public sphere formation. Teaching, like anything, takes practice and experience to get better. The students I met last year have given me the courage to experiment step by step. This year, I am not so against "repeating"-- which I used to think is the monotonous part of teaching. In fact, I often roll my eyes defiantly when I hear people repeating ideas (his/her own or other people's).

But in teaching, repeating allows clarification, sharing, connection, and the emergence of new ideas. That's right, I haven't given up on generating freshness from the teaching/learning experience. After all, if I will be doing this for a long time to come, it's precious living experience too.

So where does the feeling of "newness" come from in the classroom? As far as my teaching philosophy for this class goes, it comes from the students sharing what they see and feel as interesting, impactful, and intense.

What was interesting, impactful, and intense in yesterday's class? Culture jamming, the collusive state-TNC relationship and the livelihood of Taiwan (or small nation) farmers, and the loss of cultural authenticity in the spaces of consumption. The three young men who led the class with these issues all made connections between powerful global structuration (e.g., transnational corporate practices) and relevant experiences, some trans-local, some transnational. For example, one young man identified Taiwan's "modernity complex" which prevents the state officials from identifying with the third-world nations and defending the rights of self-sustenance of farmers. Their effort eased my concern that this class on globalization was turning "inward" or state-centered because our previous discussion had focused on the global marketing of Taiwan through contestable images and symbols.

A young man who brought up many examples of local suffering and contamination brought upon by TNC mentioned culture jamming as a potential way out. But he worries about the stereotype of cultural movement (confused with mob or stigmatized by the media). Holding up his black i-pod nano, he asked ambivalently what if we only get "worked up" about these global injustice in class?

At one point, he apologized for not sounding very "academic" because he was using emotional words to comment on the situation of suffering workers. I told the class it's alright not to sound "academic." (I felt a little sad, though, that "sounding academic" still means "sounding unemotional and acting rational") In fact, I want this class to be more fact-directed and affect-oriented. Last year's class gave me the courage to break the tendency of teaching "globalization" being some kind of big and crushing-down narrative (though I am deinitely not against reading a variety of globalization theories across disciplines, whether it is Appadurai, Held, Harvey, Giddens, Waters, Negri). Yet fundamentally, I also feel to engage with globalization (as discourse, practice, theory, or what have you) one must search and locate a point of entry. It takes time to figure out that point of engagement. It takes repeat self-questioning to figure out what animates me, what gets me worked up, what I desire, and where my care comes from.

So, one thing that I have repeated in class is that no feelings expressed should be excluded or pronounced invalid. This doesn't mean a free ticket to express what a person thinks/feels and leave it as that. It's more like an invitation to work up the tension, to understand the compoents of contradictory feelings and maybe to figure out where those feelings overlap and diverge.

So I am always very excited to hear a student express that he or she is "bothered" by something. Yesterday, one of the three young men (let's call him Bill for now) shared his feeling of 錯亂 (confusion, or I would actually use Walter Benjamin's term, "phantasmagoria") after visiting the much commercialized Great Wall and other sites of consumption in China with historical significance. Bill's classmates--some sharing his feelings, some don't--were all trying to figure out (analyze) his feeling. This very "worked up" discussion may not have "worked out" Bill's feeling that is definitely irreducible. With the help of a freshman graduate student (who wondered about the positive challenges from globalized and corporate space of consumption), the discussion carried on for a while and eventually mapped out different flights of feelings in reaction to the commercialization/corporatization of cultural environment. After I ended the class, Bill clarified during this in-between moment his choice of language and said he wasn't trying so much to express the feeling of "confusing" as the feeling of 「惆悵」 (melancholy).

I didn't have time to dwell on that comment because I had to rush to a meeting. But hearing Bill speak those words, I felt a certain memorybank of emotions had been unpacked. For someone who has breathed the air of cosmopolitanism and relished in postmodern phantasmagoria, this was a new experience.




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Posted by terebikuni at 天空部落 │10:28:00 │ 回應(1) │ 引用(9) │Teaching
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