Monday, June 28, 2004
(11:25 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Given Time
No revolt against any discipline, no critique of the academic institution could have silenced what in me will always resemble some last will, the last language of the last word of the last will: speak in good French, in pure French, even at the moment of challenging in a million ways everything that is allied to it, and sometimes everything that inhabits it. -- Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other: Or, The Prosthesis of Origin
I do not inhabit the French language. I am taking a class in how to read it, and though I have a lot of things in my life that take up all my time, I give the rest to French, to which I would give all. I have been preparing, circuitously, to learn to read French since roughly 1995, when I first entered Spanish class. All those little tricks and exceptions to the rules that seemed to cause such stress to high schoolers (who honestly don't feel completely comfortable until there is a written policy on when it is permissible to use the bathroom) -- I thought they were fine. Sometimes I thought they were charming. I could always tell where those de habla Español were coming from, and I think I can even tell where the French are coming from sometimes.
I do all my work, without exception. I do what the teacher tells me to do, because I trust her implicitly. She knows how to teach people to read French. I do not. She knows the necessary level of detail. It is not necessary to ask nit-picky questions. We are not trying to impress David Tracy here, people. We're just picking up some grammar and maybe a little vocab. That's why I haven't put the time I should have into my previous efforts to learn languages other than Spanish -- the necessary lack of "deep thinking," the need to turn that part of one's brain off and allow arbitrary rules to sink as much as possible into the unconscious, through simple mechanical repetition.
I am too proud to do that tedious work on my own, to give up on all my precious and deep thoughts (especially those on why I don't think "depth" is an appropriate category or metaphor for thoughts). I need to have paid someone money. I am starting to understand why it is necessary for psychoanalysis to cost money, unfair as it may seem. The work of analysis is the work of the analysand, but it requires the catalyst of the subject-supposed-to-know. I cannot think of a way to replace the role of money if the subject-supposed-to-know is to be generated -- how else to get the analysand into a position in which she is objectively entitled to the knowledge the analyst is supposed to have? Sacrifice -- understand how much I hate that word at this historical moment -- is necessary.
I translated "La Petit Chaperon Rouge"[1] last night; before long, I will be reading Proust. Although "officially" learning French is a CV maneuver, I do not believe that I will ever have a tenured university position. Everyone tells me that it is imperative that I get a PhD, and I'll probably even blow some money on applications to programs that issue in that degree -- they make you pay to apply, an ungodly amount -- but I am ultimately taking this French class now so that I can have fifty or sixty years to read French. I will read Proust. I will read Baudelaire. I may even read Derrida.
Can you imagine? Some kid off the street, whose father drives a truck for a living, with no roots in this country extending beyond the 20th century, with no money, can take a class to learn something useless like that. That same father is able to start his own band and make recordings, after years of playing guitar in the basement during stolen moments. That kid's mother was able to go to college after he had already started -- and he started, he went to college, for free -- and she has now met all the requirements to be a teacher, except student teaching. She's going to India soon, just because she can.
How does that happen? Partly, it happens because we're oppressing the Third World, etc., but there have been plenty of world powers who treated their citizens like shit. It happens in large part because of good governance, because of conscious decisions to build a society in which good things can happen. The dishonest wealth of the United States is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the existence of, say, the federal student loan program, just as the existence of a federal surplus back around 1800 was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the existence of the land-grant universities.
I'll admit that I have a narrow view in this regard, but when I think of a society that is worth living in, I think of education. It should be rigorous, thorough, and universally available. No matter what the needs of capital may be this decade, I think that the world would be better if everyone had a rigorous liberal-arts education -- if people sat and read Baudelaire, for example, instead of watching TV. I know that there are some who will say that I'm emphasizing the wrong things, but seriously: are food, shelter, and medical attention even a question if we're building the ideal society? Do we really have to sit and think about whether freedom from disease and chronic pain is a right or a privilege? No, absolutely not -- it's a right. I'm ashamed that our constitution does not contain provisions guaranteeing the right to adequate food, shelter, and medical attention to everyone within our borders. But while we're amending the constitution, let's add in the best possible education, because just like with the welfare state, all of it could go away.
At this point, free universal public education through the secondary level seems like an unquestionable thing, but it really is a choice that could be undone. We didn't think that torture would ever be a legitimate topic of national debate, but now it is -- and so who's to say that vouchers will never turn out to have been a segue into a privatization of the nation's education system? Who's to say that our society, in which higher education was widely democratized in a relatively short period of time, can't be reshaped into a society in which education is irrevocably linked to class?
This is why it's important to vote. Maybe we'll never get that referendum on "Should the United States continue to be a brutal hegemon?" but even our degenerate and unsatisfactory form of representative government allows us to make some decisions -- or at least express our disapproval of past decisions -- on what kind of society we want to have. It's important to contribute to making those decisions. It's important not to say "it's all the same," because it's not all the same, and the differences, small though they may seem, can make a huge impact on someone's life. There are schools, public health programs, welfare offices, etc., etc., etc., that help people every day and that are trying to run on a shoestring because George W. Bush is in office. For example. I know there's not a simple one-to-one correspondance between your one vote and the results of the election, but still. It's worth a shot, because school administrators should probably be spending their time on things other than thinking of a scheme to save money by unscrewing every third light bulb.
