The Troubling Student/The Troubled Teacher

"For the literary critic M. Bakhtin, lateness is a feature of language. He argued that words are found in other people’s mouths, borrowed, tattered by use, yet they can feel anonymous. ‘Language’, Bakhtin (1981) wrote, ‘is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others’ (341–2). And yet the other’s intentions are also composed of a riotous crowd, subject as they are to the unintended and to language’s tendency towards displacement, substitution, condensation, undoing and reversal of meaning. It is not so much a matter of finding the right words as it is becoming curious about the wrong ones or the slips that permit words their freedom and their desire.""what does the teacher want?""Kristeva’s (2010) view is that psychoanalysis – and I would add education – is a treatment for thought and desire. Both are word clinics, places to make up the mind. It is the handling of things furthest from the mind and the gathering of them into associations that create a story of our autobiographical impulse that can bear the idea that what comes before the impulse is a self-theorizing creature that must borrow language and who, and at the same moment, is capable of turning away from what is incompatible and disturbing, and desire to overturn meaning. But this feat of human relations and its repetition in language involves the interpretation of discontinuity, the discord of experience and the latency of communication."I can relate to Britzman's awkward encounters with her students, especially in the moments when language seems to fail. There's too much but not enough. Britzman refers to the "latency of communication" -- what escapes the "grasp" (to call back Felman) of language. The shortcomings of naming: the disappointment of purely semantic ("what" dentotations) approaches to language that the (meta)pragramtic ("how" sense-making) satsifies (for the most part).