I have been reading William Ayers' collection of essays on Maxine Greene, "A Light in Dark Times." In one of the early essays, Wendy Kohli of Fairfield University writes about Maxine's association with the impostor syndrome. When Maxine first earned her doctorate, there was a great deal of disdain/disregard/noses upturned in the field of philosophy about educational philosophy being inferior to "real" philosophy.
Maxine never bought the doctoral regalia she earned because she never considered herself to be a real professor.
Yet Maxine is also fully conscious in her writing about her status of "becoming." She writes of a constant state of invention and revision, of digging deeper and reaching wider. The line often ascribed to her is "I am not yet."
I'm wondering if there is a connection between the external forces that place many of us under the fear of being an impostor, of not knowing enough, not being good enough and our internal aesthetic process of constant reconsidering. Because we haven't reached a state of conclusion about our ideas and our own self, we take the risk of feeling inferior. It's the difference between aligning with the categorical and working to understand/up-end/re-imagine it. It's imagination as a constant.
Imagination as impostor...
Clifford Geertz from "In Search of North Africa" (1971) collected in Life Among the Anthros (2010), p. 61:
ReplyDelete"Physicists, novelists, logicians, and art historians have recognized for some time that what we call our knowledge of reality consists of images of it that we ourselves have fashioned."
Down the road a bit from the images, we have Wittgenstein: "The boundaries of my languages show me the boundaries of my world."
Which I understand to mean something like the shoulder/margin of the road (as a boundary).
http://wittgensteinforum.wordpress.com/2007/07/28/the-limits-of-my-language-mean-the-limits-of-my-world-tlp-56
It's interesting to fashion knowledge as a set of "images." At first "sight" one might consider this to render knowledge as 2-dimensional in terms of the physical characteristics of a painting or printed photograph. However, the idea of embodiment--which I believe an image to be endowed with--strips away dimensionality. There is a substantive, "lived-through" (to borrow from Merleau-Ponty) quality of the "image" that is, maybe, without defined dimension.
ReplyDeleteAs for "language" it, too, is fashioned from the "lived-through."