February has come and gone, and March made its introduction in the city in the form of snowfall.
I have the sniffles and am sitting on the sofa, trying to decide how to slow down this weekend (at least today) before another hectic week commences. Graduate school for me has been a rollercoaster ride saturated with emotions and filled with uncertainty. There have been good weeks; there have been stressful weeks; there has always been profundity and soul-searching.
Photograph taken in Chelsea, New York City. I love finding art in unexpected spaces around the city.
New Month, New Focus
To mark the start of March, I decided to change some of the banners on my blog. If you’ve been following along, you will notice that I have changed the original motto from “Inspiring you to engage your personal best and to live life to the fullest” to “always wondering and wandering; never done becoming.” After a few months of immersing myself in course readings, I have become disillusioned with the idea of one’s “personal best.” In fact, I find myself a bit repulsed by all kinds of superlatives, especially “best,” for it suggests a kind of destination—something finite, something hierarchical, something to be had. Furthermore, with regard to living life to the fullest, once again, the notion of “fullest” indicates a saturation point with nothing beyond it. It also suggests accumulation, of having, of collecting, but not of giving and sharing. Finally, I wanted to change the motto because the previous one no longer spoke to me in an authentic manner. This blog has become increasingly more personal in nature, with me sharing whatever is on my mind in a given moment, rather than checking off an item on my agenda of what to write about. As such, I wanted a motto to reflect my current perspective on life, school, work, etc. Recently, the words wondering, wandering, and becoming have been staples in my vocabulary chest, so I thought they would be fitting here.
In addition to changing the site motto, I also changed the welcome message on the homepage. I don’t recall the exact sentence I had prior, but it echoed the sentiments of the original motto. What prompted the change was an email from a dear colleague of mine from my previous school. Her words touched me and awakened me a bit. She made me realize I had reacquired some of my bad habits from the time I was a student (undergraduate and high school). Namely, I had become too concerned about what I want my dissertation to be about and what I want to do after graduate school that I had forgotten about living in the present. Here are her exact words:
"As for soul searching, you aren’t alone. Just remember to enjoy the journey and find your balance as it isn’t the final destination where we find the gems of life, but in the small daily moments.”
So for today’s blog entry, I’m sharing some of my becoming process. Specifically, I’m sharing a written reflection from two days ago that I made public to my peers in a course I’m taking this semester.
Photograph taken at Madison Square Park by the Flatiron building. I love the parks scattered across the city, particularly the sight of trees against a cityscape.
My “Thoughts in the Making” Regarding Recent Course Readings
I would like to preface by stating that this reflection is a “thought-in-the-making”—in the words of Manning (2016)—and a state of “becoming”—in the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987)—and that I shall follow-up on my thinking throughout the semester. I realize I am posting this reflection past the recommended time of Monday. The reality is, I struggled with putting my thoughts, my thinking, and my feelings with this week’s readings in words and in a linear manner. Part of this dilemma has likely to do with my non-linear, non-neurotypical approach (Manning, 2016) to this week’s readings. Inspired both by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “ontology of becoming” and “body without organs” and by Manning’s (2016) notion of “neurodiversity” (which, by the way, is not a new concept, but was presented in a way that layered more meaning, evoked more feeling, and provoked more thinking in me), I decided to do some wandering and wondering of my own when exploring the readings.
I skipped around while reading the introduction and chapters 1-4, sometimes reading forward, other times reading backward. I took breaks to listen to Manning speak, and took time to think about what the “minor gesture” (Manning, 2016) means to me, my teaching practice, and what it can do for my own dissertation in the future. As such, much of this reflection is personal in nature, which I think made it a little difficult for me to share publicly, because in the back of my mind, I keep self-monitoring, believing this reflection should be more “academic.” For much of this week, I found myself in a state of confusion, of being lost, of becoming. In many ways, I felt like a “student without organs,” thinking about “what bodies can do” (Manning, 2016). Here I am, a doctoral student pushing on the boundaries (set by my past experiences of schooling) of what it means to be a good student.
Let me clarify what I mean. Much of my understanding of being a student—a good student—has been shaped by the notions of productivity and performance. A good student talks and participates by contributing verbally in class. A good student writes academic papers of a defined structure and gets evaluated by a teacher, who is seen as the expert knower in the space of school. Productivity and performance should be visible, and thus measurable, often by an outsider or someone who possesses knowledge in its final form.
Photograph taken during a stroll down York Avenue in the Upper East Side. There is a gentleman of an owner in this family-run bookstore.
Both the readings from last week and this week interrupt this thinking and understanding. They push on dominant forms of discourse of doing, being, thinking—or “common sense” ways that Manning (2016) calls “neurotypical” or part of the major (grand gestures). Like Deleuze and Guattari (1987) does in their book A Thousand Plateaus, Manning calls for us to pay attention, to slow down, and be more porous to all kinds of openings and potentials. She calls for us (or at least me) to embrace all of our senses, not just the dominant one that relates to spoken language. Her thinking aligns with the work she does; I learned from outside sources that Manning is not only a philosopher in an academic institution, but also a dancer and an artist (who also teaches studio art to a very neurodiverse cohort of students, many of whom are autistic, whose main mode of communication lies outside of the neurotypical). In light of this context, it makes sense to me her interests in movement, in expression that is “artful,” in “thinking in the moving,” in “bodying” (Manning, 2016), in becoming, and in constructive alternative spaces that allow for creative and imaginative ways of connecting, thinking, participating, being, and belonging.
Manning’s (2016) work on the minor gesture (of which she claims she is no expert), reminds me of the other related work in the field of dis/ability studies. My thinking drifted to a video I watched last semester called “In My Own Language” that moved me tremendously, because of how it disrupted the dichotomy of giftedness/disability and made me think of everyone as belonging on some kind of continuum, with both gifts and vulnerabilities. The woman in the video helped me hear the music in “noise,” and experience order in chaos, in a manner that is not unlike Manning’s call for us to be more perceptive of minor gestures that lurk in in-between spaces, between and beneath other spaces, and that have potential that we should not overlook. The woman in the video also conceptualizes language as something that is constantly in conversation and in interaction with the surroundings (both human and non-human). She forces us to question why this form of communication and way of thinking cannot be just as legitimate as neurotypical ways of “languaging.”
Photograph taken during a first trip to East Village. I don’t know anything about this restaurant/cafe, only that it caught my eye as I was making my way back to the subway station.
There was a quote from a later chapter in Manning’s (2016) book that made me stop and think (actually, many one-liners did this for me throughout the book):
It is often said that disability is not what happens to the body—it is not about the state of the body. Disability is about a culture that does not accommodate diversity. So it is not the body (alone) that is disabled; the culture is disabled in its incapacity to create accommodations that allow for difference—different kinds of bodying—to exist.” (p. 193)
This quote connects many of the ideas we discussed last week (rhizome, becoming, bodies without organs, openings, entanglements, etc.). It also relates to the video I watched last semester because of the focus on what bodies are capable of doing, communicating, thinking, and becoming. “What a body can do is change,” says Manning (2016). Among the many takeaways (and many thoughts that remain in my head) is the notion of celebrating diverse was of being in the world. And this includes "being" as a student, as a teacher, as a researcher.
Video for Your Consideration
Two days after I submitted my reflection, I came across this video/lecture given by Erin Manning, the author of The Minor Gesture. I listened to it last night and was happy to hear some of my own voice and thinking communicated by her. I guess this is what we call “resonance.” It is a worthy listen!
Thank you for following along!
Catherine
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). Introduction: Rhizome. In B. Massumi (Trans.), A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (pp. 3–25). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture. North Carolina, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/teacherscollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4528997