Day Fourteen: The rules of what will have been done

In teaching the dissonance class last year I felt like the class peeked with the Fluxus projects. The energy and ideas where there and we were moving forward. Then spring break came and I didn’t feel like we ever recaptured the momentum. So, with this class I decided to slow the pace down a bit and hold off on the Fluxus project until about the three quarter mark of the term. That has meant that a few days felt like we were kind of treading water, but I did feel that this past week after the break it was worth it. Two excellent classes with two completely different trajectories. On Tuesday we started by talking about fixing issues with the class. We discussed more feedback on the portfolios. One thing I tried to make clear is that I have deliberately not commented on projects in class or on the portfolio entries. The point was to do them, get comfortable sharing these ideas, and then build on them. At that point I can offer more specific feedback.

Working toward a discussion of the Lyotard reading I had each student identify one thing that struck them about the article. I find it frustrating that in the first section about 1/3^rd did not complete the 9 page reading. This always puts more of a burden on those that did read it. The second section had nearly 100% of the students doing the reading and more than ready to discuss this. It is almost impossible to describe how different these two sections have become. There is good work going on in both sections – some amazing work actually, but the level of engagement with the ideas and the level of conversation is not the same. It may be a combination of the hour the class is offered, the students, or possibly my approach to one section after having taught another. For classes like this I really need to find a way to only have one section.

So we started the class with an exercise building on Lyotard’s idea of impossible ideas made visible by the avant-garde. So I broke the students up into four groups, told them to decide on an abstract idea or concept and the build that concept in Legos. What I love about Legos is the nostalgia factor – plus they are just incredibly fun to play with. But beyond this students are forced to encounter the limitations of the medium for representing ideas. The solutions need to be clever – there is just no way around it. In assigning this exercise I really hadn’t seen the implications for the Lyotard reading beyond the point made above. As the first section was working on the project it dawned on me that Lyotard faced a similar issue in discussing postmodernism. Here is was trying to articulate a complex, double coded, non-settling down idea with the language of philosophy. A straight forward reading is impossible due to the limitations of the medium. As a number of the students pointed out – his language is dense, confusing, loopy, etc. The project gave us a way to discuss why he would choose to write that way.

What I like about  Lyotard is his point near the end of the essay that “the rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.” This provided ample opportunity to discuss the avant-garde (Duchamp, Cage, Malevich) and to talk about the “rules of art.” On the one hand it is easy to say that there are no rules to art, and yet to say that at an arts conservatory is another thing. What are the students here to learn if not the rules of artmaking? Some of this progressed with a discussion of whether a work of art (or a work of philosophy) should make sense. Sensemaking in and of itself becomes a defining rule-like characteristic. The hard part is what you do when your predecessors have broken all of the rules. This question has become a much larger part of this class than I had intended, but it is a necessary one. We can never understand the postmodern unless we discuss what came before it.

The final gesture of this day was to ask the students to reflect on the ideas generated by their fall term class Self, Society, and Cosmos and to think about what has changed in the modern era and what has remained the same. Generally the response matched the one from last year, that the search for meaning or humanity or whatever has remained the same, but the forms used in that search have changed.  There is still much left to explore with that response.