Notes on improvisation and time in organizations

While educators in the United States are witnessing a reactionary and ultimately fatuous rearguard defense of the alleged transcendent virtues of Western civilization, a neo-corporatist assault on the New Deal welfare state, and what Jim Merod calls the "guiltless counterrevolutionary violence of state power" (1987, p. 191), they are also experiencing a new vitality in the realm of educational theory. The cultural/moral hegemony of mainstream approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and epistemology is being fissured and in some cases torn asunder by new deconstructive postmodern strategies. Largely imported from literary theory and influenced by continental poststructuralism, postmodern strategies (e.g., Derridean grammatology and Foucauldian discourse analysis) have systematically problematized, if not dismantled, the epistemological certainty and transcendent claims to truth that characterize dominant strands of modernist discourse.1 Suffice it to say that there exists a "crisis of representation" and a steady and sometimes vehement erosion of confidence in prevailing conceptualizations of what constitutes knowledge and truth and their pedagogical means of attainment. Keeping in mind the conceptual inflation of the term "postmodernity" and its unwieldy semantic overloadwhich has come to designate a vast array of artistic, architectural, and theoretical practices I want to make clear that I am using it in a severely delimited sense. While postmodernism crisscrosses numerous regions of inquiry, I am using it to refer to the material and semiotic organization of society, primarily with respect to what Stanley Aronowitz calls visual culture and the homogenization of culture (1981, 1983). That is, I am referring to the current tendency toward desubstantialized meaning or "literalness of the visual" in which students seem unable to penetrate beyond the media-bloated surface of things, thereby dismissing concepts such as "society? "capitalism," and "history" which are not immediately present to the senses (Aronowitz, 1983). According to Aronowitz, "in the last half of the twen-

Schooling the Postmodern Body: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Enfleshment:

. This would seem to offer a definitive account of the insurance industry's position on nuclear hazards-that the nuclear is what cannot be insured against, and there is something touching about the company's desire to communicate to its customers the fact that it considers the nuclear threat to be the ultimate one, the one that eludes its capacities to compensate one for one's losses. Yet the starkness of this statement of helplessness gives way to a series of other statements about the chinks in the insurance company's protective armor:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/464754.pdf

The Nuclear Sublime

Marxism and structuralism discourse and power Russian formalism and the concept of literary system for a literary history intertextuality text and system limits - the politics of reading.

Marxism and literary history

La multiplication des usages de la notion « d’informel » dans le champ de l’education contribue a l’opacification de ce qui est designe ou qualifie par ce terme aux connotations diverses, valorisees ou decriees. Cette note de synthese dresse une cartographie des usages de la notion a partir d’une recension des travaux de recherche francophones et anglophones utilisant le terme ou traitant de ce sujet. Ces travaux sont regroupes en trois domaines : les travaux rapportes a l’education dans les pays du Sud ; les approches relevant du domaine de la psychologie culturelle des apprentissages ; les travaux developpes dans le domaine de l’education et de la formation des adultes, tant dans le domaine du travail, que dans ceux du loisir et des pratiques d’autoformation. Chemin faisant, cet etat des lieux conduit a donner de la visibilite a la diversite des formes sociales d’apprentissage, au-dela des formes educatives instituees, et, en consequence a interroger les theories de l’apprentissage a partir de differentes notions telles que celles de forme educative, d’experience ou de participation.

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De l’usage de la notion d’informel dans le champ de l’éducation

Georges Charbonnier : Jean-Pierre Vernant est professeur au Collège de France. En collaboration avec monsieur Marcel Detienne, qui est sous-directeur à l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, il a récemment publié chez Flammarion, « Les ruses de l’intelligence », avec ce sous-titre « La métis des Grecs ». Qu’est-ce que la métis ? Qu’elles sont les ruses de l’intelligence ? Pourquoi l’intelligence doitelle ruser ?

The Metis of Centaurs@@@Les Ruses de L'Intelligence: La Metis des Grecs

Interview: Fredric Jameson

Nuclear Coincidence and the Korean Airline Disaster@@@KAL Flight 007: The Hidden Story@@@Black Box, KAL007 and the Superpowers@@@"KE007, a Conspiracy of Circumstances"

Me-Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of "The Shell and the Kernel" by Nicolas Abraham

There is a moment towards the beginning of "Economimesis" when, in the course of paraphrasing the preliminary argument in section 43 of Kant's third Critique, Derrida draws the reader's attention to the "brief passage" of an acrobat in a "confidential" note that Kant appends to the discussion of the difference between science and art regarded as human skill. Kant confides that in the region he comes from [In meinen Gegenden . .1], the common man has no trouble distinguishing between, say, the science of an illusionist and the art of a rope-dancer [ein Seiltinzer]. The common sense judgment, as it always seems in Kant, conceals a strictly rigorous principle. The first is a science because one can do it, if one knows how; the second is an art, because one many know completely what must be done and yet not possess the skill to do it. Science, says Kant, is a theoretical faculty, like geometry; its knowledge is immediately a capacity or power. Art is a practical, technical faculty, like surveying; knowledge of it is not know how. The principle allows us to imagine, for example, impeccable critics who may know "what ought to be done and are consequently cognizant of the desired effect" but are utterly excluded from art, in this scheme; for "only that which a man, even if he knows it completely, may not have the skill to accomplish belongs to art." But what, according to this principle, should we decide about philosophers? Is their skill a science or an art? Kant does not raise the question but in the footnote invites the opinion of a non-philosopher from his own region regarding the art of rope-dancers. What is a rope-dancer? Derrida notes the brief passage of this "funambule" and without elaboration offers succint hints to the reader who "wishes to take the plunge and insert here something of his own": Pour qui veut faire le saut et y mettre du sien: Kant, Nietzsche, Genet. Derrida cases a veil, creates a little enigma, opens a depth in the surface of the text and invites the reader to let his curiosity plunge, at the risk of breaking his neck-like the rope-dancer in the "Prologue" of Zarathustra. Derrida himself might have risked it. He has already, here and there, suggested how it might be done. In Glas, he proposes that all of Nietzsche can be read from the perspective of the "funambule," who like the acrobat in Genet's text Pour un funambule is not the dancer but the dance of the cord itself. Zarathustra exclaims to the crowd gathered to watch the acrobat; "Man is a cord, stretched between Beast and Superman-a cord above an abyss." And then, "What is great in man is that he is a Bridge and not an End." In the "Introduction" to the Critique of Judgment, Kant displays what he

Richard Klein

Papers

The Metis of Centaurs@@@Les Ruses de L'Intelligence: La Metis des Grecs

Interview: Fredric Jameson

Nuclear Coincidence and the Korean Airline Disaster@@@KAL Flight 007: The Hidden Story@@@Black Box, KAL007 and the Superpowers@@@"KE007, a Conspiracy of Circumstances"

Me-Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of "The Shell and the Kernel" by Nicolas Abraham

Kant's Sunshine