Reference of Frames

I got lucky, once, when teaching a Literature class about point-of-view. My friend Mark Friedlander had made an art installation which showed what I was struggling to tell.

I took my class to the gallery and invited them to engage with Mark’s work. It was plywood, like a packing case, about two meters high and a meter square. On two sides were tiny holes. If you walked up and put your eye to a hole, you saw into a miniature white corridor illuminated from above. It was like looking into the start of a labyrinth; your imagination was invited into the possibilities of a space where your physical body couldn’t go.

Mark Friedlander

You can see some later iterations of Mark’s work here.

It strikes me now that Mark’s box was a lot like the way I think about poetry: it was a space for the viewer/reader to make meaning. Many meanings were possible but all were bounded by Mark’s manipulation of the space - his crafting of the materials and his manipulation of the light source.

Tonight I have been thinking again about Mark’s art as I try to find a way to describe a dance performance I have just seen. The performance was called Impulse and it was extraordinary.

Unique in my experience, this was a “site specific” work, which meant that the performance wasn’t on a stage. Instead, the ticket gave directions to the stage door of Singapore’s Esplanade Theatre with clear instructions that if you were late, you wouldn’t be admitted.

At 7:00 pm sharp, I found myself backstage in the greenroom with 30 other audience members. After an initial safety briefing - “we’ll be moving around a lot, be careful - when you sit or stand for each scene, stay inside the taped areas otherwise you might get hurt by the dancers” - we were led through to the first performance space, a loading bay where we were asked to sit on the ground in the small space designed to be occupied by an off-loading truck.

Da:ns Festival

Load industrial music. Drum beats and sounds like assembly-line machinery. Dancers in blacks and greys and khaki. High energy. Running and jumping off walls. An intimate space with concrete and echoes. But a beginning that was powerfully confronting as a female dancer had her head bounced in slow motion against a wall and then held by her male companion against a railing. And the two of them froze for an uncomfortably long time so that the audience started taking furtive looks around to see if something was meant to be happening somewhere else. When the tension was broken by the four other dancers re-entering the space, the energy kept building. The raw intimacy of the dancing was accentuated by droplets of dancer-sweat hitting my face.

Clearly quite a performance. From the loading bay we moved to an industrial lift for the second movement and then to a workshop and finally a basement corridor between warehoused props.

It was in the workshop space that I started thinking about "framing" and Mark’s artwork. Ordinarily the workshop we were in builds the props which frame the dancers but tonight it became a frame itself. The choreography made extensive use of the fixtures in the space with the dancers plunging over and under tables, sliding on saw-benches and climbing on prop-boxes. The music and choreography was again pulsing and industrial with machine noises and movements that made me think about things being made. Things being shaped and controlled.

I’m struggling to find the words to describe the power and the point, but I think that may be part of the point; dance like music is its own language and not usefully reduced to the banality of words.

As I sat to try to write about it, I found instead that a poem was forming about my ambivalent relationship with cameras. Like Mark’s box, the camera takes the endless possibilities of the world and sucks them through a lens into a box. The world is framed and so often this seems banal. An Eichmann-like repetition of an unreflective act.

What I value about art - poetry, sculpture, dance and photography - is its capacity to reframe our experience - its capacity to invite a different view shaped to unsettle us from what is familiar. Tonight’s dance performance will keep me searching for words for a long time to come.

You can read the poem I wrote here.

A window into the soul

Sunday night in Singapore

Primitive people, so I’m told,

Feared photography because

It stole their soul.

In civilised countries,

Like Singapore and Australia

Kalashnikov cameras

Shoot holes in everything -

Capturing images

Like there’s no tomorrow.

Certainty

The line between
word and world
Is no greater than
A typo.

Tongue tip
To tooth
Touching a

Certainty

I have no
Way to
Verify.
"Guilty"

"Innocent".
Words and
Words and
Words and

Worlds entwined;
Tripping off
The tongue
Like

Lazy mood
Music that
Means
Nothing.

A missing
Letter
Signifying
Everything.

Cultural Archaeology

A photo

Freud, I think, would have been amused by the photo I took outside his house this summer. Across the road from the Viennese apartment where Freud worked and lived is now a 2nd hand shop and in the window of this shop is a display of Barbie Dolls. My photo captures the facade of the Freud Museum reflected above a crowd of used Barbie Dolls.

It's not hard to imagine what Freud might have thought about Barbie. With her impossibly exaggerated proportions, the Barbie Doll represents an intrusion (extrusion?) of adult sexuality into childhood consciousness. Freud claimed that sexuality in various forms is an inherent part of childhood anyway, but I suspect he might have had a lot to say about the way consumer marketing has used the Barbie Doll to exploit the uncertainties of an emerging childhood identity. What I’d be interested to hear is Freud’s thoughts about the focus of this marketing – is Barbie more marketed to children or their parents? Is the attraction of Barbie’s exaggerated proportions grounded more in the insecurities of the children who ask for the doll or the parents who give it to them? Adding layer to layer, what does a 2nd hand Barbie represent (does she feel used?) and why have so many been placed in a shop-front in this affluent Viennese suburb? With my interest piqued, I decided to go inside and explore.

Entering any shop is a little like walking into someone’s mind. What is placed where says something about the priorities and values of the shopkeeper and the kind of relationship they might be hoping to build with you. Like the eye-shadow and red lipstick of a prospective lover, a shop is arranged to attract and entice. But a 2nd hand shop is a little different. None of the fresh, smooth polish of a fashion outlet here; instead there is a kind of aging lack of pretence. A 2nd hand shop represents a version of a vision of what has lasting value – what has enough residual utility to be offered up for a second term in the market without polish or pretence.

Inevitably my browsing was turning from something passive to a more active process of cultural archaeology: an attempt to explore the layers, trying to find the underlying maps that could help me navigate a culture that 100 years ago had produced Freud and now produced a display of barbie dolls looking back at him. 

On one wall, cheap paintings with splashes of fast colour; on another, a shelf of mugs with sayings for the office; in a corner, a rack of suits now perhaps fashionably out-of-date; a back room with bookshelves filled with books in German, tantalisingly indecipherable.

What struck me most was how familiar everything seemed. Language aside, this shop was fundamentally familiar. Add a few wetsuits and board shorts and I could be at home in Melbourne. The sense of an ordered chaos - a mass of mostly related objects piled up more for utility than for appearance - was just like any similar shop in any number of cities around the world.

Except for the Barbie Dolls. And here I was left with a conundrum and a sense of hope. My hope is that the Barbies were placed deliberately to be ironic. Sitting looking as they do at Freud's home, they made me wonder if they might just be a humorous challenge: "look at me Freud" they seemed to say, "can you imagine, from your conservative pre-war world, that children might end up with toys that look like us?" 


And Freud, I think, would have smiled. Sitting in his upstairs living room contemplating the extortionate "emigration tax" required by the nazis as a bribe to escape the impending holocaust, Freud no doubt saw a dark future for his city. 

But Freud, too, was a master of irony. A final condition of leaving Austria was that he sign a document attesting to his good treatment by the German Reich. It read:

 "I Prof. Freud, hereby confirm that after the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich I have been treated by the German authorities and particularly the Gestapo with all the respect and consideration due to my scientific reputation, that I could live and work in full freedom, that I could continue to pursue my activities in every way I desired, that I found full support from all concerned in this respect, and that I have not the slightest reason for any complaint."

 Ernest Jones writes that,  'When the Nazi Commissar brought it along Freud had of course no compunction in signing it, but he asked if he might be allowed to add a sentence, which was: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone".' 1.

From a world wiped of humour and humanity by the scourge of Nazism, I think Freud would have taken a little delight in the idea of this gaggle of Barbie Dolls looking across the street. I have spent the last few months trying to decipher what they mean and I still don't know; there's a lot not to like about Barbie, but in this display in modern Vienna, I couldn't help but see a little humour and hope.




1.Ernest Jones: Sigmund Freud. Life and work. (1957) 

Spinning a Yarn

In the 1980s, when I went to Melbourne University, the Old Arts building had only one renovated lecture theatre. In contrast to the oak panelling and uncomfortable chairs of the other spaces, the "Public Lecture Theatre" had tiered seating upholstered in the pastels of late '80s modernity. It was a place of flickering fluorescent lights and shimmering contrasts. Outside, the sandstone walls spoke of tradition and gravitas; inside, the sound-absorbing roof panels whispered invitations to the future.

Each week I sat in this shimmering space for my "Introduction to Philosophy" lecture. My lecturer was one of the best teachers I have ever had. Frustratingly I don't remember much about him, but I have vivid recollections of his teaching. Lectures would begin with him walking briskly to the lectern, removing his tweed cap and taking a piece of chalk from his pocket. The entire lecture would be structured as a conversation between "Chalky" and "Hatty". Hatty would pose a problem to which Chalky would respond - occasionally using one of the many blackboards to illustrate his point. I don't remember my teacher ever referring to notes nor do I remember him ever standing still; he paced constantly, eye's closed, holding in turn Chalky or Hatty as the dialogue progressed.

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Two particular lectures have stayed deeply rooted in my memory. The first was an introduction to Plato's Theory of Forms. Plato, in responding to the philosophic challenge of how we might know the universal essence of a thing, developed one of the most famous theories in philosophy. Let me try to illustrate the problem and Plato's solution.

Hatty: This morning I drank coffee from my coffee cup. As I drank, I wondered about how I know that a cup is a cup. I know my particular coffee cup is a cup because I have drunk from it before and I recognise it as the cup I drank from yesterday. But if today my housemate accidentally broke this particular cup and bought a new one to replace it and left it on the table for me, how would I know that the new cup was a cup and not, for example, a plate? No two cups are exactly alike and the new cup might be a little shorter or taller or fatter or thinner. It would likely have slightly different characteristics to any other cup I had ever known, but I would still know it to be a cup. How could this be?

Chalky: Well Socrates would tell you that in your head you have a perfect image of "cupness" and when you see the new cup, you compare it to this image and note that it fits the image more nearly than it does that of your image of "plateness" or any other category you hold in your head. Socrates called these categories "Forms" and argued that they are deeply grounded in our minds. They are part of an ideal world which includes also categories like "Good" and "Evil".

In a very simplistic nutshell, that is Plato's Theory of Forms. Hatty would no doubt have a lot of questions to ask about the idea as have philosophers since.

Assessment - from a Platonic perspective

The Theory of Forms has something in common with the challenge we as teachers have in assessing students' writing. Like the "cup" on the table, we must decide whether a student essay is a good approximation of "essayness" or not. But like the cup bought by Hatty's housemate, every student essay will have properties that are unique; there will be combinations of words I have never seen before. So how, when I look at an essay, can I decide if it is a good approximation of the ideal?

A common answer teachers bring to this problem is the rubric. One view of a writing rubric is that it describes the characteristics of an ideal essay and acts as a template for judging individual student approximations of this ideal.

Immediately, of course, we hit a problem. Plato's forms exist only in the abstract (like the idea of a perfect circle) and a rubric that was even close to accurate would need to be so detailed as to be unworkable. Such a rubric might describe some of the elements of an ideal essay, but could never tell us how to combine these elements with originality or creativity and an essay without originality or creativity is surely not an ideal essay at all. In the end what rubrics for writing (such as those used for the GCSE) often end up saying is that an excellent essay demonstrates creativity and flare, which, as a detailed guide to teaching and assessment, isn't much use. In essence, all a rubric of this nature is telling a reader is that a good essay show's "good-essay-ness".

An alternative view

Fortunately Chalky and Hatty had more to say on the matter. Whilst the early lectures focussed on an introduction to Plato, some of the later ones address more modern responses to the same issues. A lecture about Wittgenstein's theory of Family Resemblances is vividly in my memory.

Hatty: Understanding how two objects are related is difficult. One of the problems I am finding with Plato's Theory of Forms is that it seems to require that the ideal forms are present in my head from birth and that doesn't seem to correspond with my understanding of the world. I know that I can learn new things and whilst I can agree that there seem to be some categories that might be in my head from the beginning, that doesn't seem to be the case for many of the things I think I know. Maybe the concept of a circle was always in my mind, but I don't think the concept of a Canadian was. The category "Canadian" seems to be something I have learned and I can even imagine that, had history unfolded differently, this category might never have existed. Plato certainly would not have had an category of "Canadian". 

Chalky: Indeed. The problem of how we can understand two related objects as being connected is very difficult. There is another way of understanding the problem developed by the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

Imagine you have a family with 5 brothers. 

Brother one has blue eyes, long hair, a long nose and big ears. 

Brother two has blue eyes, long hair, a long nose but small ears.

Brother three has blue eyes, long hair but a short nose and small ears.

Brother four has blue eyes but short hair, a short nose and small ears.

Brother five has brown eyes, short hair, a short nose and small ears.

All five brothers belong to the same family but brothers one and five have no characteristics in common. What links them is not their individual characteristics but their relationship through shared characteristics with other members of the family. 

Hatty: Interesting. But how does this help to solve the problems of essential understandings that we found existed in Plato's theory? 

Chalky: Well what Wittgenstein is pointing out is that words and concepts don't have to have meaning in any essential way, but they can point to relationships or connections. What makes our 5 brothers members of the same family is not any particular quality they share, but the connections between them. If we think about the problem of recognising the cup that my housemate has bought, it is not any essential "cupness" that makes the new cup a cup, but some qualities which I recognise it as sharing with some other cups. 

Although this may not sound very profound there is a very important difference in recognising the problem from this perspective of resemblances or, as Wittgenstein described them on other occasions, as language games. "Cupness" becomes not an essence but a set of shared characteristics which I recognise because I have been learning this "game". The rules of "cupness" can change as my culture changes its conventions on what will be seen as a cup. The rules of "Canadianess" are certainly changing constantly both at a formal legal level and also at the more subtle level of cultural identity. 

Another metaphor that Wittgenstein used to explain the nature of concepts is that of a thread. In referring to the concept of "number" here's what he said:

Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a direct relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. (source)

Hatty: So the insight we take from Wittgenstein is that words indicate relationships and we know concepts as being like a set of games, or connections or threads that we are constantly weaving and elaborating and extending. 

Chalky: Exactly.

Some implications for assessment.

As we develop Standards and Benchmarks for our curriculum at UWCSEA and prepare them for use in our teaching and assessment, how should we understand their nature and purpose?

No doubt my thinking will evolve as the yarn spins, but, for the moment, here's what Chalky has lead me to think:

Rubrics are useful because they help to organise and prioritise the fibres that we will focus on in our teaching and students will use to make the threads of their learning. But the threads themselves are beyond the scope of a rubric, and, in the end, it is the threads that matter most, not the fibres.

To put this another way: our curriculum helps us to define specific parts of an essay that are useful to learn because this learning points to characteristics of language games which help students understand the cultural territory of "the essay". But a curriculum (or a rubric) can never provide the kind of complexity needed to understand how a specific essay fits within the category "essayness". This requires the enormous complexity of a well-trained, culturally complex, essay reader - a professional English teacher. The teacher who reads the essay and notices the original organisation of words can look to see how these words fit within the conventions of the game of "essayness" and make a decision about whether this particular essay is playing the game with flair or not.

This suggest two things to me about assessment in English:

1. The role and function of rubrics is limited. Powerful, yes, in focussing in on the crafted fibres of learning that expert teachers hone to point students towards the culturally vast and unstable spaces of understandings. But limited in that they are never an end in themselves.

2. Teachers need to trust their professional knowledge when they make judgements about attainment. In the end, it is the skill of the expert reader that we need to rely on when judgements are to be made about the way a particular essay has engaged in the playful cultural spaces of our language games.

Spinning a yarn

In Australia, my home, the process of storytelling is known vernacularly as "spinning a yarn". Bushmen sit drinking tea around campfires conjuring worlds from their words. For me, one of the great mysteries of the world is how this process works. How is it that a particular combination of words can come together in the hands of a gifted storyteller to build something strong and beautiful?

What Wittgenstein suggests is that spinning a yarn is not a skill we are born with but one we learn through our rich engagement in the complexity of our culture. I thank my wonderful lecturer and Chalky and Hatty for sharing this understanding.

At the most profound level, learning is a conversation; a thread we continue to spin.

Venturer top secret by Ian f. Sime
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Very much a book of its time, this is a rollicking yarn in the spirit of Biggles and the "Boy's Own" collections.

It's of particular interest to those connected to the heritage of Kurt Hahn as the author was a teacher at Gordonstoun School and the plot is loosely based on the voyage of the school's vessel, the "Prince Louis of Wales", during WWII. The archivist at Gordonstoun reports that the Prince Louis was sailed by a crew of boys with 4 professional sailors provided by the Blue Funnel line. She took three weeks to make the voyage from the Moray Firth in Scotland through the Caledonian Canal to Aberdovey in Wales and narrowly missed a ramming when she fell in with a blacked out convoy in the Irish Sea.

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