Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries by Joseph Natoli

Author:Joseph Natoli [Natoli, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Literary Criticism, General, Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781438463513
Google: MoOPDQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 32560187
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2016-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

The “Free Exchange of Ideas”: Our New Normal3

I set out to grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and I do this because those who are inserted in these relations of power, who are implicated therein, may, through their actions, their resistance, and their rebellion, escape them, transform them—in short, no longer submit to them.

—Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits

I have been rattled by a video sent to me wherein, according to the Detroit Free Press “a noted professor at a large Midwestern university” was videoed as he railed against “Republicans and closet racists in class last week.” The video found its way to YouTube and will, I suppose, as all viruses do, run its course and then fade from memory. The words, however, of a university spokesman in regard to ‘a free exchange of ideas’ going on in a classroom brought back to me some words by Foucault, quoted above, regarding power’s reach, words I extended to the classroom. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault himself had made a frightening comparison when he asked, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” ([Pantheon, 1977], 228).

On the most obvious level, one that angry responses to this professor’s rant point out in referring to his abuse of power, students are a captured audience, wary of angering those who wield the power of the grade, now more than ever a linchpin in our zero-sum game of winners and losers. But I am also mindful that another sort of power, one not wielded by the professor but already instilled in the societal surround is at play here, unrecognized and therefore unindicted.

This sort of power invades the classroom under the disguise of phrases such as “free exchange of ideas,” a phrase which is now as faddish a credo as “free to choose” but like that phrase conceals dark complexities which can be disturbingly linked to our present asymmetrical arrangement of power. That arrangement, most certainly the product of our zero-sum competitive Monopoly-like game of winners and losers, infects places, such as neighborhoods and classrooms, and practices, such as politics. But minds also, minds which are already subject, not simply to the wielder of the grade, but to the exercise of unequal power that aligns students with the goals and objectives, ejections and destructions that support the preservation of that power.

No manner of free exchange of ideas can go on given this situation because already-existing priorities rearrange all critique into what is palatable to those already-existing priorities. If that initial defense is overcome somehow, one is yet in a classroom in which a clash of ideas and arguments has become no more than a clash of opinions, a clash without resolution as each disputant retreats to the sanctity of “my own opinion.” The task of reaching young minds already ‘friending’ and ‘unfriending’ words in line with powerful overriding societal priorities is a formidable task but one not deterred by disingenuous notions of the free exchange of ideas. Such a

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