Very, very familiar scenes for me yesterday and very much part of my
Ontology and heuristics of human existence
As you might have gathered I am not an action researcher nor an educator. I
am an Ontologist, a constructing critical psychologist of the human subject
and human existence. I am trying to construct Ontology as an autonomous,
concrete, self-defining, self-evaluating and, self-communicating
self-clarifying science/discipline with its own unit of judgement (me),
epistemological standards of judgement (my Ontological principles of
dignity, well-being, Ontological security, self-gratification and place of
respect in the world) and intention (to live a more fulfilled and developed
existence for myself in and with the world). I am proposing my own
heuristics of human existence.
I (the unit of judgement) was pressurised by friends and colleagues
(in-the-world) to go to a conference in London yesterday in the Kings Cross
area. I have decided to first write my final wrapping up of my heuristics
of human existence and then leave for Central London. I have then learned
of the carnage that I have grown so used to. Very familiar scenes came.
I have lived in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv between 1995 and 2002 as I felt a
need to be next to my grandfather and to make sure he lives the calmest,
most pleasant, most secured and agreeable life/existence feasible that I
thought he deserved. I very much admired my grandfather as a true
philanthropist and a superb doctor who has focused his Ontology on community
medicine as what gives him the most Ontological fulfilment in-the-world and
has done the most incredible altruistic acts during the war, immigrating to
Israel as a result of the Holocaust and carrying out his Ontological mission
there. In 1995 I have turned down interesting offers in the United States
and Europe, where I was raised and educated, and devoted my being to my
above intentionality as my own Ontology that immersed itself in. I have
also attacked the conception of the human subject from a clinical, academic
theoretical and analytical manner whilst doing so.
In these years I have been exposed to such carnages as part of my everyday
life. In August 1995 I had a bus blown up under my flat and pieces of human
beings flown at me, to be scraped by the Hassidic organisation that works
ever so hard at finding and burying every piece of the human remains that
was on its way to work or to meet a loved one five minutes earlier. There
were attacks on practically every cafe, every restaurant and every location
I have ever sat and been in and all the bus lines I have ever taken. This
has been my Ontology, what I have lived. I can merely account for it. I
know and respect that the Palestinians and others have their own Ontology
and narratives and I listen attentively to it, as part of my own Ontology
and the values that I see as important to me.
The thought of my very possible death in Central London, having survived
those years and this horrific time made me look and grin in sickness at the
grotesqueness of the whole thing, the fragility, the absurdity, the irony,
the insanity, the sickness of the human condition and human existence and
ironically laugh at it to the point of tears. The thought of my proposed
heuristics of human existence ending in this manner made me reflect on the
grotesqueness of it and laugh at the sickness and irony of it all to the
point of tears. It would have been some Ontological living theory, written
and published by someone else, maybe one of you. I find it releasing and
soothing to laugh at my possible death. I do it all the time. Macabre can
be healthy at toimes of crises.
But I decided to delay my journey, write and pursue with my tedious,
confusing and exhausting wrapping and completing task. And I am now able to
write these lines and continue to wrap up my thesis. Yet who knows, maybe
someone will decide to blow up any minute the city of Bath, where I am
writing these lines from, in a grotesque scheme to destroy tourism and
aesthetic, historical beauty for whatever reason he/she may have and I will
be dead this way. I grin at this thought in a grotesque, soothing and
macabre pleasure whilst in terror at this idea.
This grotesqueness is part of human existence and Ontology. In my wish to
lead a more fulfilling existence for myself in-the-world I accept it and
know it. I know I can be dead, in a very awkward and ironic circumstances
any second and at any time. I integrate this knowledge in my living and
focus my proposed heuristics around it. I develop my Ontology and my
intention to fulfil it through my awareness of its possible termination
without my planning, at any time.
I think this coincides with the below
Alon
----- Original Message -----
From: "Yaqub Paul Murray" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 3:05 PM
Subject: My Sympathies
Our Sympathies, Our Human Empathy
As Jack was writing the first part of the note below I e-mailed him to
suggest that we make a joint contribution to the e-seminar. He agreed, so
the first part of the note is from Jack, the second part is from me, and
the third part is from both of us:
From Jack
Yesterday was full of complex emotions. My son Jonathan works in the
centre of London and uses the tube to go to work. I'd taken Joan, his
wife, down to Bath station for the 7.40 Paddington train and knew that
she would be crossing London when I saw the news of the bombings at 10.00.
The family network of phones helped to check that they were OK. My
thoughts turned to the families and friends of the bereaved and injured
and of the injured themselves. Pat, your signature of Love in Mindfulness,
and Jane your thoughts and question: "there must be a better way to
communicate than through the destruction of life - it is our collective
failure to do sothat results in events such as this - how on earth can we
improve things?", resonate with me.
In the afternoon I showed Moira, the letter and three video clips from
Branko's posting of the 3rd July on Evidence of my educational influence
at:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0507&L=bera-practitioner-
researcher&T=0&F=&S=&X=58C7CF59007C613544&Y=edsajw%40bath.ac.uk&P=1225
The contrast between the hope and admiration we both felt in seeing the
quality of education that carries hope for the future of humanity, and our
own, and the distress on seeing the injured being cared for, from the bomb
sites, can be imagined. With the stark contrasts between these images and
understandings of both their implications for the future of humanity, I
wondered how they might be connected in our seminar in a way that could
enhance the flow of values and insights from the video-clips and note from
Branko.
Here is my first attempt to connect them, bearing in mind Peter's notes
about the start of the review process - a start that will hopefully help
us to inform our enquiries after the 23 July.
I think that similar points can be made about the creativity and
understanding of action research being shown by Vesna Smic, Marica Zovko,
Branko and the students and the creative and understandings being shown by
Kathryn Yeaman in her account of Creating Educative Dialogue in an Infant
Classroom at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/module/kathy.htm
What the video-clips together with the commentary that forms the visual
narrative show me is a living understanding of inclusionality in which
everyone is working to improve their own learning and to help others
improve theirs. There is also the artistry of the educators in helping the
expression of freedom to create and co-create, together with the
importance of checking the validity of one's own beliefs. I feel certain -
this surprises me because I am not certain about very much in life - that
if we could help to enhance the flow of these values and understandings
into the world, the world would be a better place. Yet, given the
conditions of globalization and terror with which we are living, these
values and understandings appear to me to be necessary but not sufficient
to move the world to a better place.
From Yaqub
I share Jack's thoughts for the bereaved and injured and their loved ones.
I am a Muslim and not a terrorist. One of the names of God (Allah)
is 'love'. I have more than 100 dissertation supervisions since 1995 that
are joint human productions of an educational peace (salaam) and love
carried in my supervision in a multiracial, multifaith's Britain. I like
to share my students' work on my web-site at:
http://www.rac.ac.uk/~paul_murray/default.htm
In listening to ex-New York Mayor Giuliani yesterday I could understand
the sentiment of , 'We can't let the terrorists wreck our lives - we must
go on', even if I could not empathise with it. I found myself wondering if
there was space in his response for the kind of inclusive human standard
of judgement I propose for a postcolonial critical pedagogy. Of course, we
can 'go on' after this, as we did before, without growth in our
understandings of the nature of the ideology and humiliation that is
driving the bombers and those who advocate terrorism. 'Going on' will
achieve inclusion. The particular syntax of 'we can't let the terrorists
wreck our lives' locks us into a permanent 'war footing' with Islam and
the Arab world. Instead we need democratic colloquia for human growth.
Together we could find ways to 'grow on', not merely 'go on', in ways that
express our loyalty to humanity. Don't we need to continue to find
dialogue like Dan Bar On and Sami Adwan are doing with bereaved
Palestinian and Israeli parents? In this BERA e-seminar I am wondering if
we could explore educational standards of judgement that encourage us to
use a language of verbs and nouns. Critical theory requires critical
language, and a critical syntax is one of action and description. Does
anyone already have, or could we develop, a pedagogy and theorising that
includes a 'doing' language that helps us to 'see' what the world does to
us, and what we (can) do in the world, rather than reinforcing an
exhausted language of nouns that describe the 'new world order' but do not
stimulate growth inherent in talking about how to teach against global
capitalism and the new world order?
I am worried by rhetoric, such as that I heard from Blair, Bush and
Giuliani yesterday, that does not satisfy what I call 'convivencia
validity'. There is no hope in the language of 'us and them' that comes
straight out of the logic of the excluded middle, as Alan reminds us. As
Jack was worrying about Joan travelling across London because of her
exposure to the life-threatening bombing, so my mind was turning to the
dangers for Asma, my wife, and Hassan and Hussam, my sons, as they walk in
the West at a time when to be black and Muslim is shorthand
for 'terrorist'. Jane's wisdom that we are collectively responsible, to be
held to account collectively in our loyalty to humanity, and our failures
of imagination in this regard, truly resonates. Jane's words migrate
across all borders.
From Yaqub and Jack
As we look at the above contributions to this letter we are conscious that
the (postmodern) conditions we are living with include globalisation and
terrorism, and that we must take these into account by avoiding naïve and
simplistic analyses in our work. The way we are trying to do this is by
combining insights from my (Yaqub's) understandings of postcolonial
critical pedagogy and scarification, Boudrillard's ideas of symbolic
exchange, obligation and humiliation, and Rayner's idea of inclusionality.
The gradual transformation of our early naïve and simplistic
understandings of years ago hasn't been easy. We have both coped with
feelings of intimidation that accompanied our feelings of non-
understanding as we faced a complex text. We are pleased we persevered in
understanding these complex ideas because they have contributed to the
growth of our educational knowledge. In analysing the conditions in which
we are living and working we are using Baudrillard's insight:
"Only an analysis that emphasizes the logic of symbolic obligation can
make sense of this confrontation between the global and the singular. To
understand the hatred of the rest of the world against the West,
perspectives must be reversed. The hatred of non-Western people is not
based on the fact that the West stole everything from them and never gave
anything back. Rather, it is based on the fact that they received
everything, but were never allowed to give anything back. This hatred is
not caused by dispossession or exploitation, but rather by humiliation.
And this is precisely the kind of hatred that explains the September 11
terrorist attacks. These were acts of humiliation responding to another
humiliation."
Baudrillard, J. (2003) The Violence of the Global. Translated by Francois
Debrix. Retrieved 21 June 2005 from http:/;
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=385Initially published as "La
Violence du Mondial," in Jean Baudrillard, Power Inferno (Paris: Galilée,
2002), pp. 63-83.
We are integrating Baudrillard's insight in our use of Yaqub's
understandings that a postcolonial critical pedagogy is vital to the
expression of a loyalty to humanity (after Ignatiev, N. (1997), The Point
Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To Abolish It. Retrieved 17 May 2005
from http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html
So, in making our contribution to this review process, our judgements on
our explanations of our own educational influences in our own learning, in
the learning of others and in the education of social formations, will
include these insights in a way that we hope you experience as inclusional.
Love Yaqub and Jack.
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