Biblical Religion in Context
Notes from Walter Benjamin's ILLUMINATIONS
La condición humana: Emilio Lledó
El cacao de la izquierda traicionera
El cacao de la izquierda traicionera
—(audios de EsRadio)
Melancholy Spring
Retropost: El del blog
martes, 17 de mayo de 2016
Retropost #928 (17 de mayo de 2006): El del blog
Hoy, después de mi clase sobre Jack London y La Peste Escarlata, tenemos manifestación por la supresión de nuestra titulación. Aunque esto no lo entiende muy bien Carlos nuestro administrativo, que dice "pero qué es eso de ’Estudios ingleses ya’? ¿No tenéis estudios ingleses? ¿Igual lo que queréis es que no quiten la Filología Inglesa? ¿Pues entonces por qué no es eso lo que pedís? Es que lo de Estudios Ingleses Ya no se entiende." Pues claro, y qué le voy a decir, que estoy totalmente de acuerdo. Pero los filólogos anglistas no se ven con perspectiva; ni siquiera se ven como filólogos anglistas. "Aquí es que la gente va a sus congresos, y allí se organizan por lingüistas, o de ESP, o de literatura americana, o van al congreso nacional y allí van a su panel, el panel de sintaxis, o el de lingüistica cognitiva, o el de estudios de género... y a la filología inglesa, que le den bola, ya la han perdido de vista, ellos los primeros en olvidarse".
Otra cosa que se ha olvidado en la manifestación de hoy... que venga la prensa. Bueno, al parecer sí se les ha avisado, pero por allí no había ningún periodista ni por despiste. Tampoco se había anunciado debidamente la manifestación, con carteles, etc. Y aun con todo ha habido unas 100-150 personas, poquita cosa pero mejor que los otros días. Y hemos dado una pitada sonora a la puerta de la facultad, alrededor del Rectorado, e incluso cortando un ratillo la entrada al campus. Luego ha subido la pitada hasta el despacho del Rector. En fin, que hoy había más ambiente. A ver si la manifestación del próximo miércoles se organiza mejor y está más lucida todavía, aunque con los exámenes tan cerca no sé, no sé...
Me he dirigido a los manifestantes para hacer notar las carencias de la organización de hoy, y la necesidad de megafonía, carteles y un recorrido organizado para la próxima vez; el Director me ha invitado a que colabore yo con los organizadores (ya se sabe, yo mucho criticar pero poco hacer).
Mientras hablo, le pregunta una chica a mi compañera sentimental, "y ese quien és", y cuando le dice mi nombre; -- "Ah, ya, el del blog..." con un gesto un tanto escéptico.
- Quizá lleve camino de convertirme en un personaje semifolklórico - le digo a mi compa cuando me lo comenta luego, comiendo en un vegetariano. - Pues no era mi intención; de hecho cuando empecé con el blog di por hecho que lejos de ser una originalidad, en muy poco tiempo toda la gente tendría pronto un blog, bueno, toda la gente no, pero sí los intelectuales, estudiantes, etc., vamos, me parecía tan práctico, tan básico eso de poderse autoeditar cosas.
- Pues no; es un atraso. Totalmente contraproducente. En tu trabajo no te va a ayudar nada: más bien, perjudicarte. En cuestión de publicaciones, nada de lo que publiques en el blog puede tener ningún interés académico. Si te haces conocido en la profesión, será por lo que hayas publicado en Language, o la Review of tal y cual, no en un blog. Ahí te puede leer cualquiera, y eso no tiene ningún interés.
- Bueno, cuando tú publicas un libro también lo puede leer cualquiera, ya lo decía Platón; eso no es argumento.
- Ya, pero estar ahí tan expuesto, a que te pongan comentarios, el primero que pase. A mí no me parece manera.
- Lo de los comentarios lo puedes activar o desactivar, depende cómo lo diseñes. También la gente comenta lo que tú publiques por allí.
- Pero es un público seleccionado, restringido, y la discusión no tiene lugar delante de tus narices. Nadie va a leer esas revistas si no está en la profesión. Por eso allí consta lo que tú has dicho, lo que has aportado, y lo que eso vale, para quienes entienden.
- Bueno, tampoco me ponen tantos comentarios, ni malos ni buenos... Y a ver, ¿no se suponía que uno de los defectos de los universitarios era que nos encerrábamos en nuestra burbuja de marfil y que sólo nos leíamos entre nosotros? Pues el darle más cancha a los blogs podía ser una manera de permear ese conocimiento académico hacia afuera, entrar más en diálogo con el resto de la sociedad, ¿no?
- No es eso lo que buscan los universitarios, y si no tú mira alrededor. Hay que restringir la conversación, eso es esencial, y la gente lo tiene asumido. Lo otro no es académico. ¿Quién se dedica a ponerse un blog y a publicar sus ideas por allí? Nadie.
- Bueno, nadie... Menos gente aquí que en América, en todo caso, eso sí. Igual es que estamos más atrasados. A la gente le cuesta reaccionar.
- Es que, aparte, también es cuestión de cultura democrática, y de riqueza intelectual, y de libertad. Aquí falta de todo eso, ahí ya podemos estar de acuerdo.
- Yo creo además que también hay algo de shock; el asunto éste de la autopublicación gratuita, la comunicación universal y el escaparate en la red a la gente le pilla tan de nuevas que no sabe cómo reaccionar, ni cómo hacerlo entrar en los protocolos académicos existentes. La solución más fácil es ignorarlo, hacer como que no existe.
- Y la prudencia. Que la gente es más lista de lo que tú te crees, y sabe por dónde se mueve... Y oye, otra cosa, que la gente no es tan ... chauvinista... no, tan narcisista. Que es un rollo lo del blog, siempre pendiente de una imagen, y proyectándosela a todo el mundo.
- Pero una imagen siempre das, y a todo el mundo, estamos en las mismas.
- No a TODO el mundo, y encima no una imagen que tienes que estar todo el día viendo tú, con repetición y alevosía, y perfilando y remirando y completando, y viviendo pendiente de ella... Que no, a mí déjame de blogs, que es un rollo, hombre, que no me extraña que la gente no se apunte.
- Bueno, entre pitos y flautas, me acabas de escribir el post de hoy.
- Mira qué bien, gratis te sale, y hasta puedes poner eso de final.
- O esto otro que acabas de decir, que también es buena conclusión.
Luego, volviendo a casa, después de mi clase sobre teoría crítica (Freud, Psicopatología de la vida cotidiana), nos encontramos con Pili y Ernesto y María Luisa...
- ¡Vaya, si precisamente hablábamos de vosotros hoy! Es que esta mañana he visto en una página web a la otra María Luisa, tu tía...
(No oía hablar tanto a Marisa desde hacía más de veinte años... - ¡Hola, Marisa! La entrevistaban desde su Perú natal en el periódico de San Jacinto. La red trae conexiones inesperadas, y ese es uno de sus mayores intereses. Only connect, que decía E. M. Forster. Aunque hay tantas fuerzas e inercias que empujan a la desconexión... ).
—oOo—
Otero Novas - Fundamentalismos manifiestos y Fundamentalismos encubiertos
Biographical fragments and narrative smoothing
Biographical fragments and narrative smoothing
From John Shotter's Conversational Realities (Sage, 1993), ch. 7, "In Search of a Past: Therapeutic Re-Authoring"—in which he comments Ronald Fraser's account of his coming to terms with his past through psychoanalyis (in In Search of the Past, 1984). The last section, on "Biographical fragments as a practical corpus", has interesting comments on retrospection and narrativization:
But who was Fraser's new way of being? How did he re-relation himself to his past, if he didn't get rid of it? Well, to grasp the nature of the difficulty he was in, let us return to the hermeneutical approach, but now, to bring out one of hits central dangers, what Donald Spence calls (1986) 'narrative smoothing': it is a danger because a nice coherent, well-organized narrative, with everything in its place, prevents the appearance of alternative circumstantial possibilities, amongst which, if we are to be the authors of our own lives, we must be free to judge. In other words, it diverts our attention away from the fact that in our parctical-moral activities, we are embedded in a context, and quite often our circumstances surround us with possibilities. Our attention is diverted, because, in a hermeneutical construction, all the fragments which have occurred are decontextualized, and made into an orderly or systematic whole —often with, as Freud put it, the insertion of the 'missing portions' which must have 'originally' been there if things are to be orderly. This is the 'finding' of a narrative, and Freud, as we all know, used the archaeological metaphor. Once we have found this correct whole, people's past actions are thought of as taking on their proper meaning within its context.
But this, I think, is absolutely wrong. What their actions take on there is not so much meaning as intelligibility; that is, they becoem capable of being grasped reflectively and intellectually. The order has been constructed and the missing portions supplied, by drawing upon a 'grammar' implicit in our life and language, by drawing upon features implicit in our 'accepted' ways of coordinating our actions with one another—and to the reational intellect, such a grammar gives the appearance of a proper meaning. but it is, I shall say, a 'counterfeit' version. It has been 'minted' wrongly; it has the wrong origins. For it has issued from a desire for a single, particular way of ordering social life—which for Freud, concerned as he was with psychoanalysis as a natural science ('What else can it be?') was in terms of individuals achieving mastery and possession of essentially socially produced resources. This is what it debases: its own proper minting and currency in the 'hurly-burly' or 'bustle' of practical, everyday life events (Wittgenstein), in which there is no order, no one single, complete, proper or true order. 'A faithful account of . . . the context of discovery will very likely have the appearance', says Spence (1986: 231), 'of a disconnected series of fragments strung together. Surprise, bewilderment, and faint glimmers of understanding probably all circle around one another during the average [analytic] hour in much the same way as they appear during a dream state . . .'
But if this is so, the true meanings of the events in the living of our lives cannot be properly understood within the confines of any order, narrative or otherwise. They are only to be found in the not wholly orderly, practical living of our lives. And this was Fraser's discovery: that if he was to be a 'maker' of narratives, the author of his own childhood, the historian of his past, he had to find a new 'position' for himself in relation to his own past. What he needed to do was not just to carry the narrative of his past into the future, as if it were the only proper one, but to be able to draw upon the fragments of his own past as and when he pleased, as a practical-moral resource, to re-colelct from them enablements (and constraints) of moment by moment relevance in judging how at present to best proceed in the realization of who he felt he should be in the future. This is why I emphasized his account of how he now felt about those he had known, that they were 'like people in books you can return to time and again'. No longer imprisoned within a single narrative, he realized he could treat his own biographical fragments as, to use a phrase of Alan Blum's (1971: 301-2), 'a practically conceived corpus of knowledge'.
Conclusions
In other words, to sum up, first for Fraser and then for the therapist: from Fraser's new position, as now the author of himself, his life becomes both a temporally developed and developing event, understood as such in a two-way, back-and-forth process of construction, oscillating in fact between the tasks of formulationg two interlinked narratives: one a retrospective, re-collective, hermeneutically constructed narrative, and the other a prospective, pro-jective, rhetorically formed narrative—two quite different narrative forms, each modifying the other. It is a mistake to think that the kind of understanding we seek is the 'proper' narrative of our past lives, or that we need a well-ordered script to carry us into the future. Each prevents us from being present at that moment of judgment when, in contact with the circumstances around us, we must recollect those aspects of our past relevant for our future. If we are to continually reconstitute our past in terms of the 'lure' of our future projects, we must continually, at least to some extent, reconstitute ourselves (Crites, 1986). Thus the 'I', who at any one moment we are, is poised in that tense bridging position (the 'present' moment) , and must link an indefinite number of remembered episodes from that present point of view, while being oriented toward a future project, while—and it is this which we all forget—also noticing what is made available to us by way of the new opportunities in our current circumstances. Fraser's problem was that he could not live with what he himself had so far made of his biography; it did not make sense to him, or for him; he could not easily use it; it limited rather than liberated him; he did not feel at home in it; it did not enable him clearly to 'see' how to 'project' himself into the future.
This was Fraser's problem: but what was it like for the psychotherapist? If we ask, What practically happened in Fraser's analysis? I think we must reply along the following lines: (1) That first, the analyst discovered the central feeling of insecurity and lack of belongingness at the heart of Fraser's 'dis-ease' with his life, and discovered also the well-formed narrative, and the 'position' within it from which Fraser had tried to collect the fragments of his past together to form them into coherent biography, and how his wanting to be an 'I' for his mother, not only made that task impossible, but made the biography practically unusable. Up until this point, the analyst faced 'finding' the well-made narrative within which Fraser had entrapped himself. (2) Then, the analyst faced the task of finding the biographically engenderesd source feeling which that narrative, indeed accurately, but in fact inadequately, formulated. (3) At this point, his task changed from primarily a hermeneutical to a rhetorical one: he had to 'move' Fraser to a new 'position' from which to make sense of his own biographical data, by first leading him himself to discredit his old position, and by second, helping him to 'make' a new 'position' and thus a new biography for himself.
In all of these activities, narrative instruments are in use in one way or another; hermeneutically and rhetorically. However, because there is no principled way in which we can decide which should have priority over the other, I want to end by emphasizing again the importance of the rhetorical-poetic, the 'doing' rather than 'stating' aspect of language use—for it has not so far been given sufficient prominence in our theories of language. It provides us with the resources we need to 'see' the 'movements' invovlved in 'doing' communicating. It enables us to 'see' the movement between the retrospective and prospective aspects of the process of understanding at towk: the differences between attending to what has already been said and the context to which it gives rise, and attending to the activity of saying something further, in which one persona materilly 'moves' or 'affects' another by their utterances in that context. By 'moving' us to new 'positions' in relation to our own styorytelling, it has enabled us to 'see' how . . . we might 'move' ourselves to new positions by our own storytelling . . . which is, of course, one of the great powers, and one of the great dangers, of all storytelling.
—oOo—