From the response, I can see that you are not convinced. Which means that you want me to lead the seminar.
So let me try to convince you why this is a bad idea. To do so, I want us to imagine that there is content in my head somewhere and content in the texts we are reading. I want you then to imagine that the seminar is a provocation to which you then are supposed to react. This means that as I am designing what I am going to say and do I am supposed to think about the ways that other members of the seminar will react to what I am saying.
Now I don’t disagree with this model. I think that it is more or less accurate. We have all read the text and I have prepared an outline of where I think we are and where I would like us to end up after two hours. Into this mix you then will throw up your own interventions in an attempt to deflect, redirect, or perhaps even reinforce the direction I have chosen; which, then, since I do have an agenda, I will try to anticipate in my outline. Yet, at the end of the day this model reinforces the hierarchical model of knowledge dissemination that (1) is either perpetuated in peer-peer relationships within the community of learning, thereby frustrating genuine collaboration; or (2) is so completely different than what might and should take place in peer-peer relationships of learning that the seminar fails to adequately prepare us for healthy and productive peer-peer learning.
But this still only scratches the surface. In the real objectified world, learning is already collaborative. And what I might learn from other collaborators is apparently what Plato’s Gorgias or Pericles learned; that those who might otherwise be independent agents capable of engaging and contributing to the construction of a shared world are instead eager to manipulated into what Noam Chomsky calls “consent.” Now it might seem that the Athenians who follow Pericles are simply duped and therefore that they are not complicit; that they are not responsible for their actions. And we might further ask whether we are right to call them collaborators, which suggests that they are responsible agents, free to respond. However, we might also recognize that their decision, following the spread of the plague, to nevertheless reelect Pericles to another term and to give all of their affairs into his hands, was the very way that they wished to exercise their freedom; that is, to freely relinquish their responsibility.
Now, I have reiterated this story from the first seminar, Gymnasium in a Box, in part to provoke reflection on the everyday relevance of that story; it is a story not only about 5th century Athens. It is also a story about us and about our pedagogy, our learning and our action.
My appeal for presenters for next Wednesday, November 20, is not only purely formal instructional technique. It is also an invitation to reflect critically on the content we are considering in the seminar; an invitation to seize the opportunity to actively live into freedom presented in that seminar. That might entail actively taking responsibility for the text in the seminar, to “own the text” as we say.
So, how might that work? In Berkeley, I sit down for an hour with presenters to see how they are reading the text and to share how I am reading it. This means that before they are put “in the spotlight” they have already had a fairly in-depth conversation with at least one other person – me – about the “problem” or “problems” the author of the text might have believed she or he was attempting to solve. It also helps me because it introduces me to a reading of the text that is different, even though by a hair’s breadth, from my own; and so it expands the community of discourse, the coordinates, that make up the “universe” deployed and recognized or acknowledged in the seminar. Finally, it constitutes a first step in poking holes in the wall that reproduces the hierarchy of learning; it invites and constitutes a culture of genuine citizenship such as Aristotle imagined in contrast to Plato.
So, I am hoping that three of you will take the plunge, that you will own EP Thompson, D Landes, and I Kant, and that we can work with these texts together before next Wednesday evening.