“The History of Dreams Has Yet to be Written”: Ur-Pedagogy and the Dialectics of Postponed Meetings


Seeing as to how our last couple of reading group meetings continue to get bumped, postponed, and canceled, I’ve decided we’re making the jump online for the discussion of The Dialectics Seeing by Susan Buck-Morss. I’m encouraging all of our members to type up and respond to each other at least a couple of times, and I’m hoping this may be a more lasting way to capture a few fleeting thoughts from anyone else with a passing interest in the reading group’s approach.

I figure I’d offer a few comments and questions and hope others jump in over the next week or so.

That being said, one of the drawbacks of assembling this reading list is not knowing exactly how well each book will fit with one another. And while I’d often imagine the likes of Graeber or Pinker getting into arguments with other authors throughout the process, I wasn’t sure how ol’ Benjamin would play out … and I’m still not sure. Personally, I really like the method that Benjamin took in plotting out the Arcades Project. The notion of gluing together cobbled thoughts and observations into a new realm of reflection really highlights one of the aims I had with regards to this reading group in general. Similarly, I’ve been rather fascinated by “lowbrow culture” and Benjamin’s mining for overarching relevance in the tawdry shops of Paris and in the underbelly’s working class feels rather appropriate. Benjamin would totally love talking about viral youtube videos, Batman, and FNMTV.

There are a ton of places in the text I’d want to tease out as a group, but thought for starters to just offer two questions:

1. Chapter 8 focuses around children and their “capacity for revolutionary transformation” (265). [Question mark placed here after something wise and scholarly is said and everyone nods in total understanding.]?
2. I am interested in the lessons that the city is teaching its inhabitants. Specifically, we see in both the text and the photographs that “Function became visible” (295). Yes, I realize this is a big part of that whole modernism thing that people that wear funny hats like to talk about. This pedagogy of process and use still feels embedded within our current [(post{post})post] post modern society (I get lost and forget which society we’re in every now and then … sorry). How are our current surroundings reflections of where societal pedagogy is progressing?

Lastly, by its very nature, the work described in Buck-Morss’ text is of a very specific time and place (although there is that pesky ur- prefix). I’ve been playing around with the notion of constructing something like a “Manual Arts Project” or an “LAUSD Project” utilizing the architecture of our schools, the social topography of our communities, the sounds of phones and helicopters and bells and laughter. I feel words like montage and pastiche are presently burdened with pejorative connotations – that such a patchwork project wouldn’t gather any kind of academic wings to take flight. But who cares! I digress (ah the digital gluttony of a blog!), I bring this up to ask what would something like the Arcade Project look like if it were to be made manifest here and now? What are our mythic archetypes? Our wish images of today? Do we still saunter beyond the pace of you’re average gangster leanin’, baggy pants wearin’ flâneur?

[Note: image from above is of “Destiny City,” an ecotopia being carried by a few of its creators.]

4 thoughts on ““The History of Dreams Has Yet to be Written”: Ur-Pedagogy and the Dialectics of Postponed Meetings

  1. nemesis

    the first place i would start this project is in airports, as i am stuck in one right now… but anywhere there were more than 50? 100? people. college towns and campuses. i think that benjamin would find fascinating the interaction level between people and their gadgetry… i know i do. especially young people. but everyone plugged in to something.
    (as i frantically try to finish this comment before i possibly board a standby flight… taking myself away from the ever more interesting observations one partakes in at the “Airport Arcades Projects”

    economic interaction would be interesting, to see how much it has changed…
    “traditional life goes on, except now, as a tourist show, everything is done for money.”

    one of my few quotes from the first 60 pages…

    more to come later

  2. pmc

    I find the concept of space intriguing. I’ve been investigating the rhetoric of space, as in roadside memorials, war memorials, classroom arrangements, etc. Andy’s suggestion of engaging in a project centered on space has much possibility. There is an interesting article describing a pedagogy that did something like that in Interactions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 4.2. It’s by Maria Stehle, a visiting professor at a Northeastern University from Germany, I think.

    I’m also very intrigued with the whole flaneur concept. I remember being horrified at a professional development years ago when the leaders told the teachers we would be taking a “walkabout’ to discuss some of the concepts they’d covered. Everyone thought I was overreacting, and that the use of “walkabout” was “cute”. I wish I’d known this term then! It’s so typical for hegemonic mentalities to appropriate terms from cultures they have little or no understanding of and use them in novel ways. It’s so disrespectful!

    Regarding the whole book, which I acknowledge I have not read in its entirety, I am so intrigued by Benjamin’s project. I read a boo review of a ‘response’ to the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which seems to be somewhat in the tradition of this project. Not as grand, not an broad, more personalized, but it seems there are some similarities, such as using a premise (in Benjamin’s case, the arcades) as a mechanism for philosophical pronouncements about culture.

    The concept of fragments that remain is so interesting, as the anarchist archeology was also in fragments. I still want to connect it back to the Romantic movement as an extension of the Enlightenment project for social change. Fragments were a kind of suspension, a way for forms to lead into one another, as a genre were a kind of yearning for the incomplete in that perfection cannot be realized. It is always in a state of creation, and so it comes out of nothing. Therefore, what exists is destroyed so that something can be created again, or in the case of fragments, not finalized but in a constant state of being incomplete – yet in a forward trajectory. Because they’re never complete, they are always looking forward, but cannot be foreshadowed because of their incompleteness. Within the idea of fragments is also the concept of failure as part of process, because no success can ever be realized–there’s a kind of inversion, if succeed, have finalized, and so therefore, have failed to create tension of incompleteness necessary for creation. The spaces between the fragments kind of existing as a dialectic, threading them all together…maybe I need to revisit Romanticism! But Benjamin was emerging from that mind set, as he embarked on his work, wasn’t he? Pushing that work forward? Thus his interest in what was past and how technology was moving things beyond the nostalgia for the past–re-situating and re-conceiving. I loved the bits about fashion and women, and thought how prescient he was to see forward to what is happening with fashion and the pedagogy of beauty today! Not to mention his thoughts on capitalism/commodification!

    Lots to think about – especially his notions of progress, the archaic, and the modern. Because the past is ruined, it’s in fragments, but moves forward with you into future. I think that’s in one of his other works…

  3. antero Post author

    Last week, I was talking with my Black Cloud compatriot, Greg, and the topic of the Arcades Project came up briefly. It was made painfully clear to me that I didn’t address one of the key conceits of Benjamin’s undertaking: throughout, he is looking to the past as it informs this new era and way of being. With this in mind, I still feel there is weight to an LAUSD Project (or the classroom arrangement that Paula points to or Mark’s airport analysis). However, the need to look back is one that is imperative: I am thinking now of Manual Arts’ all too depressing architecture. As one that was slowly built and fortified over the past century, the school’s outward appearance is one that is built by another era and beckons student identity to be associated with it’s menacing metal fence and castle-like impenetrability (really, all it needs is a moat to finish it off)!

    I think Paula’s making an important connection for us between the text, romanticism, and Graeber. However, it being 6 something in the morning, I intend to do nothing more in this paragraph than to point to this fact and offer no further elucidation.

    Lastly, I’m writing this from a hotel in Paris a block away from the Odeon Theater. In a few hours, I’ll get on a subway and go to a different part of the city for a fashion convention (though little will be discussed of the pedagogy of beauty, I bet). Getting off the subway, the block will look nearly identical to the one I’m staying on. And aside from the general variation of landmarks and specific names, I’m fascinated by how Paris – though perhaps foreign cities in general – look exactly the same from block to block. Nearly every building could be a photograph from Buck-Morss’ book. Even the café’s all use the same kinds of chairs. However, I appreciate the slowly creeping emergence of newer fragments of a newer past (smart cars everywhere, vespas and global fast food chains, double decker tour busses on every block), cascading through the city’s identity like twisting vine … or maybe kudzu.

  4. nemesis

    AWSOME comments PMC… lots to think about…

    too much for this hour as ell andy, but i hop you are having fun in Paris. as for me i continued to try and see myself undertaking a project of such observational grander, continuing from my airport daze traveling during labor day… shying away from the real and retreating to my laptop i found a link to work that reminded me of Benjamin’s Project just on scale alone.

    http://www.davidmaisel.com/works/picture.asp?cat=obl&tl=oblivion

    needless to say this artist’s vision made my plane ride more enjoyable… especially because i scored a window seat

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