In attempting to resolve the staging difficulties in a production of Peer Gynt, I would present it on the radio because, as Ibsen says, he wrote it as a play for voices, never intending it to go on in a theatre.
– Educating Rita
In researching my “go-to” education reference, “Gadfly on the Wall,” I found the essay, “Decolonizing through Dialogue: Authentic Teaching in the Age of Testing and Common Core.”
This essay reminded me of a book I found several years ago – Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. In the following passage that I had quoted in my earlier blog, the authors credit philosopher John Locke with rendering …
… language a perfect vehicle for constructing and naturalizing social inequality. Since linguistic forms were (in theory) stripped of all ties to material and social worlds, how individuals spoke seemed to spring from deep within the self, to depend solely on the way they had disciplined their minds, not on the wealth they possessed; language could thus perfectly embody the liberal ideology that purportedly judges individuals on the basis of their own individual actions.Further research for this entry allows me to add a bit to what I had said in that earlier blog:
First, Locke’s (Arian) Socinianism allowed him – and Anglo-imperialists ever since – to believe himself a champion of the “the rights of man” while enabling genocide and profiting from slavery.
Second, his work on education, if read closely, is a foundation for nationalism. Note his disparagement of humanist studies, studies that facilitate dialogue between people of different nations and types of intelligence. Late capitalist trends in education, with its elimination of the arts in favor of “STEM” courses, bring this work to its logical conclusion
Third, the above points give new weight to what Kim Domenico* had written in her last article, an article I had quoted extensively a couple days ago, though without the following passage:
Due to the law of interdependence, fascism will get stronger and stronger as we decline to stand up for the inherent truth of the creative imagination! The voices we heard in the videos of the Capitol Riot will increase in volume while our reasonable and ethical voices, as they get shouted over, will shrivel. What we rationalists keep in the shadow – by some psychic process that is real though not empirical – finds its negative expression in those others whose otherness we can’t see – white working class people who incomprehensibly live contrarily in a previous century. They stay on the farm or back in the home town, go to church, keep their freezers full of deer, hang Old Glory down at the courthouse, etc. and, though they may or may not be poor, did not achieve the success and status offered on neoliberalism’s generous terms.Finally, Locke’s work seems a recipe for gaslighting (an anachronistic term, I know…) I’ll discuss this aspect in my next entry.
I’ll break for now with another clip from the above-quoted film – a clip that ends with Rita’s Peer Gynt essay:
*Since I noticed the contradictions in Kim Domenico’s writing, I have been reviewing my entries linking to her, from the most recent backwards. I’ve now reached the penultimate one. Up until the last two entries of this process, I had become increasingly convinced that she had been soft-selling classism, white supremacy, and fascism all along under the form of their opposite. However, the article I promoted for these two posts does look heartfelt, so I thought I’d reexamine my reassessment.
I’ve been exploring MBTI personality types from the perspective of the management of pain and fear, a perspective I have been developing for a while. In an early draft of a document (coming soon) which describes this perspective, mostly through fictional characters, I included her as “a real life example.” I had not seen a “Judging” function being used in Domenico’s work until I tried to write in this document a passage that appreciated the personality that came through in her writing. It was when I had just finished expressing this appreciation that the article came up that, as I have been saying, promoted ideas of “God”, “Judgment”, and “soul” in a perfectionistic way. Here, she discusses her “semi-secret … occasional ‘Temenos talks’” she delivers at her artspace. These talks are “damning of middle class, bourgeois life ways, a judgment that spares no one – including me.”
My essay had covered people’s overcoming of trauma, and one of the examples discussed a character who had overcome severe and persistent child abuse. Where it discusses Domenico I wrote that she frequently alludes to unspecified trauma she has endured, and I speculated that it had happened to her before she was old enough to remember the specifics. I appreciated that she overcame the effects of her trauma through the creation of artworks, noting that the “beauty of her writing attests to someone who has creatively overcome her abuse using strong Thinking and Feeling functions.” Her new article changes her description of the practice to “authorship”. She asserts that “the remarkable gift of being born white, gifted and lucky in liberal society brings with it a dark companion, its bottom line the unconscious shame of the rejected soul”, thus requiring courage on her part to even write.
This article then gratuitously repeats a quote used as its epigraph asserting that true art requires a “dance with death.” I noticed this oddity since I had recently written a post (coming soon) centered around a friend with whom I have tried to engage in a discussion of ideas, efforts that always lead to this friend’s “tapdancing around any questions that he finds uncomfortable.” The post is about this friend’s attempt to use the political strategies of my leftist friend to bring us centuries back in time and make any further progress with “baby steps,” steps leading from the Jeffersonian* dream of a country of “small farmers”.
One author whom this Domenico text (and her subsequent articles) often quotes is Boston Brahmin Ralph Waldo Emerson, suggesting that she finds his famous inconsistency inspiring. It also mentions him not long before the “dance with death” quote which precedes Domenico’s claiming the role of a shaman of indigenous societies while existing “as ordinary, in-common with all others.” She ends with the stunning claim that “there are no ‘innocent victims.’”
For these reasons, I infer she is saying that the ruling class is above any judgment itself, but has the right to judge the rest of us. It’s sounding more and more like her call for “localism” is a call for colonialism, without the hope of colonists to become independent of the class rulers who send them to keep others, especially people of color, in line. She wants us to become happy little serfs for the “upper” class under her god’s rule. She won’t come out and say it, but her last few posts make no sense unless her “god” is the Aryan race. The apparent hippie vibe of her earlier work had deceived me – Of all the people whom I have wrongly promoted, I am most ashamed of her. – Viola 8/5/25
*For those unfamiliar with how I view Jefferson’s ideas, I’ll leave an entry discussing his presidency here.
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