Graduate Seminars

How we conceive what it might mean to teach -and the circumstances in which we do so - has changed so much since I started twenty years ago.

AbdouMaliq Simone has one of the most beautiful accounts of how we might think of what a public is (in the cities of the global south that are his field of study): "Instead of people coming together to consensually decide the markers of identity and common rules necessary to recognize common participation, the public is a matter of projecting a way of talking and regarding that goes beyond the specificity of one’s life situation. It is ... an act or speech that is produced with the openness to be translated; it advertises its very existence to be something other than what it may appear to be. It is an appeal to be linked, grouped together with something else.” (City Life from Jakarta to Dakar) 

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I love the combination of tenuousness and generosity with which Simone understands publics. He refuses normative approaches which affirm the public as a matter of consensus, identity and rules. The public is more fragile, more minimal: forms of relation that are barely there, that very well might not be, in the absence, precisely, of common ground. But the figure sketched out here is not negatively-constituted, nor is there despair or bitterness in these words. It is about a stretching or reaching out there that sometimes - sometimes but not always - intersects or finds resonance, and that can be transformed into another kind of speech act in its reception, different insofar as it has now been linked anew.

The best moments in teaching/learning is when something else is happening, something other than a follow-through of the institutional grammar that organizes the transmission of skills valued at a particular historical time and molds ways of common participation. In the small public that is the classroom we in this way, go beyond one's life situation and limitations, and throw our speech acts into an open space, waiting to see if they'll be picked up, translated by others, in a kind of meeting that can lead to thinking for more than one.