Reflections on our Class Discussion #1

This post is not in response to any particular set of readings or any given writing assignment, but is instead simply a reflection on my experiences in MLS 722 up to this point.  I often leave our meetings with much to consider and much to keep my mind occupied with for the remainder of my Thursday evenings.  I have found that this consideration most often centers on how our discussion evolved that night and why it seems we don't often arrive at any sort of fundamental "truths" or conclusions or even a simple consensus after several hours of dissecting our material.  Not that I'm asserting this as a critique of our classes, but more as an observation about our group dynamic.

This notion has often left me feeling frustrated and unsatisfied as I bike home at the end of the night, but this week it occurred to me that maybe to hope for resolution is just not realistic.  Maybe it doesn't really matter if we "get somewhere" at all and that where I want us to get isn't even where we need or want to be.  I think that thought is at the root of our shared class experience.  MLS is designed to be interdisciplinary; it's designed to draw in a cohort of students with different experiences, different interests and backgrounds.  We might be considering the same readings, films, and images, but we're reading and viewing them through entirely unique lenses.  So it makes sense that in discussing an issue we sometimes go around the group with everyone expressing an opinion that speaks to the ultimate "truth" of their point of view, but doesn't necessarily move us any closer to a more meaningful consensus on the subject matter.  While this merry-go-round of opinion and editorializing may leave us wanting something more, it may also be just the thing that MLS is out to achieve.  

We have filmmakers, parents, artists, environmentalists, cops, and retirees in our group and each of our perspectives holds unquestionable value, the trick lies in working toward some shared vision through all of these lenses.  As graduate students this can sometimes be difficult (given the investment we each have in our specific discipline) but the journey is valuable and the frustration can be illuminative.  Just some thoughts at about the halfway point and in anticipation of where our shared path will take us...

Here's an interesting pod cast entitled "The Human Mule" from the Dirtbag Diaries on a journalist's adventure in re-capturing his youth (cut and paste if you're interested in listening):

http://c3.libsyn.com/media/18739/The_Human_Mule.mp3?nvb=20101031041316&nva=20101101042316&sid=aa69100d6c01ab0b26b446b3c968af03&l_sid=18739&l_eid=&l_mid=1698514&t=0016df019aaaca89ebaf1

Adolescence and Crisis

I have found that considering the “storm and stress” of adolescence is not only eye opening, but an urgent and necessary practice as well.  Parents, educators, theorists and psychoanalysts have spent lifetimes trying to understand this period that has come to be generally accepted as difficult and tumultuous.  While all of the authors we have read this week would agree that there is some biological contribution to these feelings of storm and stress – due to the significance of the physiological changes occurring within the bodies of adolescents – we see other, perhaps more significant, drivers as well.  Jeffrey Arnett and G. Stanley Hall both draw our attention to the significant role that culture and the established process of socialization play in either contributing to, or providing protection from the biological vulnerability of young men and women passing through this time we call adolescence.

In a culture that has developed a seemingly insatiable appetite for the ephemeral and material, I find Hall’s assertion that the storm and stress of adolescence is the by-product of a cultural evolution away from a value system based on the lasting and the directly tangible extremely illuminating.  Hall calls for a re-evaluation of education.  He asserts that due to “missing links and extinct ethnic types, much, perhaps most, soul life has been hopelessly lost” as man marches ever forward toward what we name – or at least hope is – progress.  This leaves our species afloat in the sea of our impermanent fads and phases and this feeling of being detached from our own evolutionary past cries out for a new educational establishment.  When we adopt Hall’s view of adolescence as a unique and necessary part of biologic, social, cultural, and soul-full evolution, we acknowledge the need to address each need directly and naturally through the educational experience.

Furthermore, Arnett skillfully debunks the theory that the difficulty of adolescence lays within deep-seated psychosis or abnormal states of mind left over from traumatic early childhood.  This Freudian point of view does little to advance the dialogue on adolescence.  Arnett also clearly demonstrates that storm and stress is not a universally experienced phenomenon and seems to develop only when a culture grows away from traditional values, beliefs, and social moorings.  With a rigorous academic pursuit as his evidence, Arnett adds immeasurable support to the theory that stress and storm is the result of the cultural dislocation of adolescence.  As I argued earlier, a meaningful cultural identity cannot be built upon ephemeral fads, material acquisition, blind ambition toward individuality, and the other hallmarks of contemporary western culture.

Ultimately, adolescence has become difficult for western youth because, in the words of Hall, we are: conquering nature, achieving magnificent material civilizations…but we are progressively forgetting that for the complete apprenticeship to life, youth needs repose, leisure, art, legends…in a word humanism.”  Instead, we have become a culture devoid of humanism, where interaction takes place at the keyboard, meaning is sought in shopping malls, and experience consists of what we see on TV between continually louder and brighter advertisements.  We are teaching youth that how you appear is significantly more important that what you actually are – simply because we no longer know what we, as human beings, actually are.  And while our youth search honestly and desperately to forge some semblance of an identity out of the wilderness of material, consumer culture, storm and stress seems to be the unfortunate evolutionary result.  Erik Erikson writes, in his essay on identity, that “certainly mere ‘roles’ played interchangeably, mere self-conscience ‘appearances,’ or mere strenuous ‘postures’ cannot possibly be the real thing, although they may be dominant aspects of what today is called the ‘search of identity.’”  I added the emphasis on “the real thing” because in the end, that thought is what lies in the heart of this issue.  We expect our adolescents to develop a sense of permanent and meaningful self out of the fleeting, soulless, cultural detachment that is 20^th and 21^st century society.  We have cut off at the roots our own human heritage leaving the majority of our people lost at sea and our adolescents the most obvious manifestation of that storm and stress.  In the end, we have lost our ability to identify the real thing.

Challenging Innocence

The subject matter for this week is pulled together rather nicely under the title of “challenging innocence” as is it clearly the intent of McCarthy, Gaskell, and Goicolea to shatter our notions of iconic childhood innocence.  As Di Pietrantonio describes it, these artists all embrace the “overlapping of author with reader or viewer.  The acknowledgement that the production of meaning lies with both…” (Di Pietrantonio, pg. 90).  By blurring the line between the teller of the tale and the audience, the work of these three artists allows for our mind to roam and to become a creative force all its own.  This freedom to roam is the intentional consequence of their work.  In fact, it should be noted that McCarthy’s deconstruction of Disney like images such as Heidi, are intentionally vague, or intentionally explicit, in an effort to shake the mind loose of presumptions or comfortable sterility.

 

Di Pietrantonio goes on to write that we are comfortable with Disney imagery that might otherwise be awkward or threatening because of the scrubbed down nature of their story telling and characters.  However, when artists like Anna Gaskell and Paul McCarthy remove that cleanliness and place these characters in situations that allow for implied meaning or disconnected story lines – such as Gaskell’s ambiguous images of Alice – we become uncomfortable with what is left unsaid, or more specifically, what might be said only within our mind.  Likewise, as we search for meaning or causality in the photography of Anthony Goicolea, we find ourselves drawing conclusions that shatter the illusion of innocence within childhood play and pretend, and replace them with storylines and assumptions that leave us confused and perhaps threatened by these devious little boys.

Ultimately though, this could be the very response these artists are hoping to elicit from their audiences.  As we are forced further and further away from our socialized or inherited beliefs about children, the roles they play, and their very innocence, we begin to gain perspective into the human condition and the very way we have come to create, embrace, and perpetuate identity.  Di Pietrantonio is once again on the mark with his assertion that Paul McCarthy’s refiguring of the tale of Pinnochio provides a new and perhaps more illuminating perspective of our culture at the turn of the century, a time when “identity is as fractured as the truth” (pg. 97).  By creating imagery that pushes our minds beyond what is comfortable or predictable, McCarthy, Gaskell and Goicolea force us to answer difficult and threatening questions, while striving to tap some deeper truths about identity, culture and values.  In the end though, we find ourselves with more questions than answers…