making hollow men

Educational Theory

Volumn 60, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 189-201

  Harvey, Charles W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77954368741     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2010.00353.x     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Theodor Storm, "At the Desk," from the German "Am Aktentisch," trans. Robert Bly.
2. The term "intravidual" comes from Dalton Conley, Elsewhere, U.S.A. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009). I adapt it somewhat to my own purposes.
3. This essay is composed in part as a personal essay for methodological, "political," and (yes!) personal reasons: Methodologically, because I believe that form is never irrelevant to content; the bland, pallid, "impersonal" façade of the standard philosophical essay suggests a personal neutrality and propositional translucency that I think is neither possible nor (in most cases) desirable. "Politically," it is precisely that ideal of and belief in "objective," impersonal standards of assessment and evaluation in education that I resist and critique here and would like, though impossible at this moment in history, to undermine and thwart. And "personal" because the philosophical traditions to which I appeal in the first and third sections have their significance only because of their contact with and clarification of our lives and our world. To pretend otherwise (in form or in content) is to abet the processes of making meaningless and hollow the existentially rich, dense, and meaningful.
4. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 15.
5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977): 170-228.
6. Robert Makus, "Education in the Grip of Technological Thinking: An Analogical Hermeneutic of Heidegger's 'Question Concerning Technology'," Existentia: An International Journal of Philosophy 11, no. 3-4 (2001): 315-321.
7. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Shelia Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994).
8. Charles W. Harvey and Carol Zibell, "Shrinking Selves and Synthetic Sites: On Personhood in a Walt Disney World," Ethics and Information Technology 2, no. 1 (2000): 19-25
9. Charles W. Harvey, "Epoch, Entertainment and the Hyperreality of Everyday Life," Ethics and Information Technology 6, no. 4 (2004): 261-269.
10. One caveat as I launch into this description. In the initial draft of this essay, this section contained three subsections. The first of these, which remains, is titled "the subject's objectification of itself for itself and for others"; the second was titled "the subject's objectification by others for itself and for others"; and the third was titled "the subject's objectification of others for others and for itself." I have not included the second and third subsections in this final version because the first section makes the central case, and the latter subsections were as long as the first and were necessarily repetitive. I would like to note, however, that a significant part of the case I am trying to make here is precisely the mind-boggling extent of individual assessment that institutionalized citizens endure on a permanent basis. The ad nauseum effect produced by the length and repetition of the latter subsections would make part of that case. I hope, however, that the first subsection standing alone still makes this point felt. In the summary paragraph of this subsection, I indicate how all three of the assessment perspectives would function together.
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 128-131
12. Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974)
13. W.H. Auden, "The Unknown Citizen," in Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (New York: Random House, 1966)
14. T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men," in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967).
15. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 97. This work will be cited within the text as IRS for all subsequent references.
16. For one of Bourdieu's notorious analyses of such a field, see Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988).
17. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). This work will be cited within the text as OTP for all subsequent references.
18. My apologies for the gender-slanted terms in this section and in the title of my essay. But please be assured that all the problems I indicate for "men" accrue to women as well! Given the obvious reference in my title to Eliot's great poem, and the clear importance of the ideas therein to the thesis of my essay, I feel required to maintain the gendered term in some places at least.
19. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000).
20. Alfred North Whitehead called it "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness"; John Dewey, the "philosopher's fallacy," following William James who called it "the psychologist's fallacy"; and Maurice Merleau-Ponty called it "the intellectualist fallacy." In addition, Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work and Heidegger's early work can be globally understood as attempts to reverse the problems and life-vision distortions this "fallacy" has caused.
21. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 72.
22. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett, 1985).
23. Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do (New York: Harper and Row, 1972)
24. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (New York: The Free Press 1986).
25. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, "Kinetic Tactile-Kinesthetic Bodies: Ontogenetical Foundations of Apprenticeship Learning," Human Studies 23, no. 4 (2000): 343-370
26. Evan Selinger and Robert P. Crease, eds., The Philosophy of Expertise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).