Political Science as a discipline
pushes its students to take political thought and political theory—maleist in
their modern constitutions—as indispensible baselines in understanding and
explaining the socio-political happenings.
This is so even though one does not conform to mainstream political science.
This has been the case for me. I always thought that we should not dismiss such
a baseline. On the other hand, rather than talking and explaining politics in
mainstream style in the courses I struggled hard to articulate the knowledge of
everyday into the knowledge of the course, to reveal the eventual connection
between the everyday knowledge and the course knowledge: Holding fast to theory
and abstraction while attending to talk through everyday course of politics;
attending to preserving the fragile connection in between the two. But
according to one form of knowing, these two spheres—sphere of everyday and
sphere of abstraction—have always been intertwined. To put it as it is: Nothing
would become without abstraction as nothing does so without narration. It
exists for sure, but its knowledge does
not. Such a connection is what I am talking about.
Those without abstraction, and
thus without the knowledge through narration are locked into chronological
casting; they exist as technical information, info from within lists. Although
they stand somewhere in and through the life it seems that they do so separate
from our relations. It seems such.
When I had such considerations I
had not yet stepped into teaching graduate courses. I was then trying to find
the ways to invite the students to give up memorizing the reading material in
courses on Introduction to Political Science, History of Political Thought and
Political Theory and opt for approaching the reading material in their everyday
experiences, and looking at their everyday life experiences through the reading
material; actually trying to make them play with the idea that the reading
material is part of their everyday life—in practice. One method that I resorted
most—not that I invented, but one that I learned from those who happened to ask
similar questions—is looking at news in newspapers, weekly and/or monthly
journals and writing reviews that focus on the connections between the news and
the course themes with a view to the reading material. Thus, they felt that it is necessary to read
the course material with an eye on the news. But it was not possible to track
whether they continued from the contemporary
to the everyday.
More precisely, I had to wait to
offer an elective course on Women’s Movement in Turkey in order to focus on the
transition from the contemporary to the everyday. It was a course for third and
fourth grades in the Department of Political Science and International
Relations at a foundation university in Turkey. There were—if I am not
mistaken—seven students enrolled, in the beginning. Then the number dropped
down to four. That was great. And better still was that the course
was—surprisingly—not cancelled. In the course, we searched for the ways to read
the knowledge of the contemporary through the reading material from within
everyday life. And for this we resorted to journals. We carried the difference
in English between ‘journal’ and ‘diary’ to one between ‘journal’ and the
‘contemporary’—It did not fit perfectly; but we continued. As the title and
scope of the course integrated with the connections of the students with
feminism we started to learn how to write the journals so as to enable the
students to ‘come to voice’, without dispensing with the knowledge in the
reading material.
I always learned from the courses
I taught. In some I learned a lot; there have also been some which barely contributed to my knowledge pack. Some
were unique in their teaching. Women’s Movement in Turkey was a turning point
in this respect. Because it helped me to figure out a path that I had been
looking for: It helped me to draw a path that would host the abstraction from
within the moment. This was a path that would unfold to new directions, where
we would retreat from certain forms of writing and collective production, and
where we would change some of the forms in the following year.
The way we form wordly connections with the happenings
in our lives works in different forms. When this difference is multiplied by
diverse styles of writing it becomes harder to find common grounds for writing
as a collaborative process. For me the common ground is the heavily loaded,
rather thick nature of the political science courses—this is a disciplinary
impasse. You cannot eliminate it, you can just mask it. In the Women’s Movement
course as we were trying to turn the knowledge of the everyday into an
experience on the common grounds that we fetched from the reading material we
also attempted to transliterate the reading material into our own words. We did so through journals and daily notes.
We progressed sometimes through long explanations, sharing the intimate,
frustrations with the reading material, outright rejection of the related
everyday happenings. And sometimes we just leaned on a couple of sentences as
notes: Each and every one has her own way of explaining, wording the everyday.
…
As the casting
above—insufficient, because it cannot go beyond my account so long as I do not
identify its hidden subjects—was coming into being I certainly had Roland
Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero on my
side. I kept reading the part on writing politics (‘Political Modes of
Writing). As the students faced with difficulties in wording the everyday
through writing, as they tended to frustration I leaned on that short piece: ‘Writing
… is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed, not
like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the trheat of a secret, it is an
anti-communication, it is intimidating’ (Barthes, p. 20). Overcoming the
threatening, intimidating side of it aside, is it possible to appeal to the
journals, to daily notes and comments that spread through everyday life without
falling into the trap of pouring all the secrets, all that is personal into the
common space? My assumption has so far been positive. The courses that I
offered and taught have never thematized authoring and writing. Thus the ‘anti-communication’
texts have never been subjected to the literary credentials; nor they have been
subjected to the expectations of a supposed audience. Thus they could be
transformed into texts formed essentially with a view to whom the writers wish
to appeal, how they wish to connect with their addressees, and when and for how
long. One way of achieving this might be through collaborative work with due
attention to preserving the space for solitude as an essential part of writing
texts.
But I had not yet met with
(auto-)ethnography; nor could I consider the possibility of collaborative
(auto-)ethnography. Besides, I was yet to read Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen. I was lucky to have met
Paul Freire; but I was too late to bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress. And we have not yet stepped into the period
when it is ever more harder and increasingly futile to write political through
the mediation of everyday; when writing political risks being locked into
chronological accounts. This being the state of affairs today might connote
that we are too late in ‘transgressing.‘
This lateness aside, I could just recently observe the coexistence and
at times mutual exclusion of two forms of writing in one narration in Arendt’s Varnhagen: One that belongs to Arendt,
writing through Varnhagen’s letters and diaries. And the second one that springs
directly from Varnhagen’s writing, that tells the personal but that does not
(wish to) stay personal since there is always someone whom it addresses. In
that process I had not yet recognized the significance of the political grounds
that bonds the two different women’s narrations, intertwoven through the
shuttling between the private and the public, of accounts.
…
In 2017 when I was trying to
forge a similar path in a graduate course I had the conviction that such a
grounds could offer us the means to see the coexitsence of narrations that are
differentiated from each other in historical, institutional, cultural and
rather personal terms. The field notes here, constituted by journal entries and
related everyday notes came into being along this path. Among the items in the
‘contract’ that we made with the students, enrolled in the graduate course
(Feminism, Peace and War: Intersectionalities) that I taught at the Institute
of Political Economy at Carleton University in Fall 2017 was writing journals. Among
the students women considerably outnumbered men. The levels of the students
were significantly different. So were their approaches… This was to do with the
differences in the social science disciplines that they were affiliated. And
certainly, gender difference, ethnic identity difference, and socio-economic
difference were all effective …
Roughly I can offer a threefold
categorization for the way the students wrote the journals: First there is a
form of narration that convey the knowledge of the reading material with a
slight touch on the everyday in an entirely formal style, and mostly in conventional
political science format. Such accounts guarantee a reasonable grade; they can
be located in tactics to tentatively overcome the continuous insecurity that
has been around for some time. Another form of narration runs through
fragmentary connections. Fragmentary examples from the everyday sphere are
combined with interrupted selections from reading material into discontinuous
sentences. In today’s academia where every level academic education is turned
into a matter of labour market and thus where a majority of students are at the
same time actual workers this interruption and discontinuity in writing is not
surprising. The third form is composed of narrations in the form narrating the
everyday through the reading material and the reading material through one’s
everyday experiences. These are the ones that extend the everyday through time,
that offer the space for it to find its own historicity and that get into
dialogue with the reading material through this historicity. Such narrations
contain considerable potential for creative texts. Thus they happened to
contribute to the course with such a potential: The notes that the students
took in their journals on their everyday, and in their everyday encounters with
a view to the reading material were transliterated into field notes for
alternative course structures: They fuelled the ‘excitement … generated through
collective effort’ (hooks, p. 8).
The journals that we share in
this blog are examples of this third category. They contain the narrations that
have the potential to transform the course into a field. Certainly, in terms of
quantity, extent and in terms of the period they are formed, they do not
exemplify such a transformation on their own. But as models for intertwining
the knowledge of everyday with theoretical knowledge, as models for forming an
institutional affiliation individually and collectively through the dynamism of
the everyday sphere, they show that a course on theory need not be restricted
to in-class activity.
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