A Perfect Contempt for Teaching

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Fifteen
  In Roundtable Session: Issues of Technology, Access, Neoliberal Logic, and School Reform (Table 11)

Abstract

Frustrated with contemporary neoliberal teaching contexts, the purpose of our paper is to wonder how we might reframe our disappointments by channeling them into what the poet Ben Lerner calls “a perfect contempt” for teaching. Building on the onto-epistemological possibilities of “bad” affects and Erin Manning’s “pragmatics of uselessness”, we consider a contempt for teaching as a concerted, collective practice that includes a commitment to unmastery and uncertainty, failure and dissensus. More specifically, it involves tuning in to the “maelstrom” of negative affects and doing so in connection with others. The inquiry challenges neoliberal logics and generates an affective bulwark against the de-formation of the collective and the bureaucratization of curriculum and pedagogy in the academy.

Authors

• Scott Jarvie, San Jose State University
  Presenting Author

• Cori McKenzie, SUNY Cortland
  Presenting Author

• Erica Eva Colmenares, San Jose State University
  Presenting Author