On the Shores of Education: Urban Bodies, Architectural Repetitions, and the Mythic Space of End Times Chris Moffett Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Chris Moffett All rights reserved ABSTRACT On the Shores of Education: Urban Bodies, Architectural Repetitions, and the Mythic Space of End Times Chris Moffett Education is a space of contestation. It is not that we fight over who should occupy it, be occupied by it, and how—although we do that as well. What can we say about education that won’t be contested? Rather, the space of education is a real and imagined place through which we think contestation itself, learn to enact it as regulated struggle. The more difficult challenge is to recognize the mythic structure of education that we agree to disagree over. More difficult, because its function hides in plain sight, a blinding or banal sun, a toe-hold polished slick by our practiced slipping. The story of education is a story of forgetting: it is the story we tell ourselves in order to remember to forget. It is not that the story does not spin off in so many contested directions, become things that elude these formulations. It does. It is that these variations weave around a deep mythological structure that orients this spinning struggle itself. We can, surprisingly, be quite precise. The distinctive mythic structure of education emerges coextensively with urban formations. Drawing on earlier myths of sacrifice, woven around themes of birth and death, education quickly becomes a privileged way in which the city articulates itself, reaching its formal articulation quite early on with Plato. Plato’s allegory of the cave—serving as one of the most enduring touchstones of educational imagery—will serve as our object, orienting a study that proposes to examine—to borrow the excellent, minimal formulation of the novelist Haruki Murakami—what we talk about when we talk about education.1 Finding ourselves talking about education, what is it that we are talking about? If Plato’s cave allegory will serve to orient us to this question, it will not do so in the traditional manner of an object of inquiry or an example, as if it would illuminate the nature of our discourse, but rather as something that we will approach and recede from as a kind of inverted obelisk, a black hole in the earth itself by which to navigate. In that sense, we take our cue from the allegory itself: to the extent that we talk about education, we talk of confines and horizons, of pathways and turnings, of leading and being led, of light and darkness, and we do so as a journey that unfolds. It is a story of being on the way, but more precisely a story of waiting, of being blinded, unable to go on, unable to return; a story of verges and endless deferrals. When we talk, we talk of where we are and where we might be going, and we do so as if it were something else, the whole of which eludes us. It could be argued whether Plato’s allegory is the primary formulation through which this mythic structure permeates the discourse of education up to the present day, or whether the myth is passed on through more varied historic mechanisms—this allegory thus being a momentary articulation of a larger structural articulation that sweeps it up and carries it forward. However, this is precisely the uncertain moment of education itself. Setting out we will discover ourselves disoriented, perplexed by our surroundings, unable to arrive straight away at our object. Instead we will notice several aspects of how we talk about education: we tend to draw on a whole topology of spaces oriented around images of the city on the shores of 1 Haruki Murakami, What I talk about when I talk about running : a memoir (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). the sea, of stories of sacrifice and ascent, of heroism and mindlessness. Without being sure what to make of these (are they shadowy distractions or blinding truths?) we will simply note their recurrence. They return, as if to haunt our discourse. When we talk about education we seem to talk about cataclysms and hellish spaces below the city—even when we seem to be leaving them behind for good. With this repetition, we can begin to approach the allegory closer, noticing that, rather than being a story told ex nihilo, it repeats earlier stories that the city told itself about itself. In particular we see that the discourse constituted around the city of Athens draws on mythic, geographic, historic, and social accounts that play on a common structure of journeys of downgoing and emergence. In particular we see—both in the mythology surrounding the birth of Athena and in the pre-Socratic beginnings of a philosophical discourse—a way of talking that begins to appear eerily familiar. Having set sail and approached the city of Athens, we will ascend the path to the Acropolis, if only to then find ourselves deep in Plato’s cave. Following along as closely as we can, we will see if we can glean something about what we do when we tell this particular story. In particular, as a way of understanding the strategy at stake, we will keep an ear out for other resonances that are opened up by the sense of repetitions. For example, we will see that for a city, to descend often involved a journey out to another city, before navigating the labyrinth beneath it. The Athenians had their particular version, but a tuned ear will begin to pick up echoes from even earlier narratives told in Mesopotamia. When we talk about education we frequently talk, it would seem, of going out and down, of sacrifice and emergence. Upon closer examination, these epic, mythic structures—far from simply being narrative embellishments or abstractions—drive many of our everyday practices of education. If learning involves escaping from hellish caverns, then in order to enact the ritualized journey we must ensure not just a metaphoric parallel but a practical one. The modern classroom, with its ritualized practices, is a constructed space that allows us to repeat this narrative. Likewise, the urban practices that instantiate and preserve inner cities and other zones become the backdrop for a discourse on Urban Education, asking teachers to journey out and down, so that they can do the work of education. Is Education the answer to these imbalances, or in order to enact the perpetual rituals of education do we ensure that the scene is properly set? No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top, are not just examples of political rhetoric, although they are that. This rhetoric, nevertheless, is also tied to very specific practices by which we enact education. So what we talk about when we talk about education— while seeming to exist in the virtual space that we have created prior to emergence into “the real world,” metaphorically—is in fact inextricable from what we do with ourselves when we do education. It is tied to the physical layout of the classroom, to the school’s presence within a topography and flow of a place and communities, but also to flows of capital as well as political rhetoric, and to the practices of testing, measurement, and assessment that accompany them. These practices, seemingly the opposite of a mythology, are perhaps best understood as the modern, bureaucratic equivalent of the labyrinth, through which we regulate journeys that allow us to make sense of what it means to live together, to be a city. We conclude then, by pausing to reflect on the (re)emergence of the discourse of “occupation.” When we talk these days, we talk about percentages and occupations, of violence and community, of finding homes in public spaces or being ousted from private spaces. Two questions pose themselves. First, what is emerging now that might challenge our sense of the repetitions of these narratives, hinting that we cannot allow the discourse “the city tells itself about itself” in education to wash over us so confidently? If Education is a story of being on the move, what does it mean to pause and resist, perhaps trying to make a home on the path, or in the park, itself? What urgency is there in attempting to come to grips with whether or not the repetitions really can come full circle, whether the stories we tell ourselves will not leave us this time, whether we will be eaten by the Minotaur? The second, related, question is to what extent even this discourse draws from the history of repetitions, of horrors barely averted, or cataclysmic collapses from which we emerge by the thinnest of threads, only to be reborn. If we are witness to something new, we should perhaps reckon with how old it is as well, lest we forget a long history of resistance and occupation. Lest, that is, we forget that Education has always, when we talk about it, been the ambiguous moment when we find ourselves either struggling to open a gap in the relentless cycle, or striving mightily to ensure that we can close it against the storm, averting catastrophe. Contents Figures iv Acknowledging v Epigraph x A Preface on Method xi Two Jokes, more or less… xi Wrappings, Rope Tricks, and Fidelity xxii This Stranger is You: Caricature, Writing, and the About Face xxvi Tragicomedy: Schreber or Abraham xxx Oedipus and the Sea: Swimming, Surfing, Flying, Crawling, Walking, Stumbling xxxvii Hunker Down and Keep Moving: Methodology in End Times xli Rag Tag Methodology: Hyperbolic Fabric, and Using a Tie as a Belt xlv Inventory and Taking Stock lii Chapter I: Educational