Brad, Artists make the mistake of constantly misreading teachers. Teachers take chances as well. If the teacher was a good one then the comment says more about Christopher Alexander's artistic blocks as a student than about the teacher's artistic point of view. Students project off of me all the time. "Transference" was not invented by psycho-therapists and psycho-therapy is in reality simply unteaching bad teaching in the first place.
This looks like a Gestalt psychology multi-reading picture/
Do you honestly think that teacher was thinking anything like what you attribute to him?
I had a sort of similar instance. I had a philosophy teacher who thought I was "puerile". On one assignment -- the only time I ever tried such a think in my whole schooling --, I wrote a paper which I did not believe in at all, but which I thought the teacher would like. The grad asst gave me a 96. The teacher, Sterling Professor of Philosophy Paul Weiss, scratched out the 96 and replaced it with a 97.
No, I think what was going on with Alexander is that the teacher didn't have a clue as to what anything meant, but he was adept at playing the game that had got him his Professorship. So he could not tell a serious spoof (not some fraternity prank!) from something real. To borrow LeCorbusier's words, he had eyes but saw not and ears but did not hear.
I think you give this dude too much credit.
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On the other hand, I think you are onto a very important issue about being the transference object for students. I had one teacher who said to me: "At first I took the way you acted toward me personally. But I can take being used as an intellectual punching bag by students." (He said it better than that, but it's almost 20 years ago not.)
I read artists and art critics misreading the events they describe all the time. I read an article by the art critic Hilton Kramer sometime ago where a prominent French art dealer, who "knew better," used words to make a fool of Kramer for profit. It was so subtle that Kramer didn't get it and later published the conversation as if it meant something else. Kramer couldn't imagine that the son of one of the world's greatest painters would treat him so shabbily so he chose the less obvious interpretation to the event and put it in print making an idiot of himself.
(There is more to the surface than meets the eye, again?)
I'm reminded of one of those anonymous quotes, maybe you even know who anonymous is:
"To admit you were wrong is to declare you are wiser now than before."
I prefer to put it this way: I identify with the factual correctness or lack thereof, of no first-order theories. I identify with the process of critiquing the process of [whatever I am doing].
You succinctly summarized the thesis of Hegel's Phenomenology, the basic principle of which is that to determine the "X is wrong" is not just nothing, but rather it is to make certain substantive claims about what the world is like. To study all the aspects of the experience of finding out that something X is wrong teaches a lot about a lot more things than X. It is the basis of the growth of human cultural life toward comprehensive self-accountability and self-creation (here we connect with Husserl).
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To think that Alexander's teacher had any such thoughts seems to me at best "highly speculative".
But he is only case study material for us. May we get somehing unsful for our lives out of "him"!
Yes, a good teacher is a transference object (if one likes that psychoanalytic term). And he (or she) does not strike back at the student for not being adulated by the student!
\brad mccormick
regards,
REH
----- Original Message ----- From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2003 3:02 PM Subject: [Futurework] And now for something completely different: A recently deceased emperor's new clothes
Of course I -- I don't know about you -- "enjoy" taking pot shots at Postmodernism since I can't capitalize myself enough to be able to just ignore it....
But postmodernists aren't the only pompous -sses in this world. Sokal and Bricemont, with their article on the political correctness property of quarks (or whatever it was), did not discover something new in the world, only new instances of it.
Here's something from yesterday's NYT about Christopher Alexander's architecture education back before pomo:
Asked as part of one assignment [when he was studying architecture at Cambridge University] to design a house, he instead submitted a spoof of the formalist theory he had been taught: a glass box slashed by giant brick walls. "A completely abstract, pointless notion," he said. To his amazement, the head of the department called him into his office to congratulate him. "He said, 'Christopher, my boy, this is exactly what we want,'" Mr. Alexander recalled. "I thought, Oh my God, I've walked into the nut house." (Emily Eakin, "Architecture's Irascible Reformer", NYT, 12Jul03, p.B7,9.)
\brad mccormick
-- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
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--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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