owe the discovery of this IltlclCje to

the convergence of a

student and a photocopier

The culture of reproduction has meant that

for most of t hese s tudents of the

Renaissance a copy of the Arnolfini portrait was the Arnolfini portrait.

The concepts of Eco, Baudrillard. Jameson are clearly of use here, as

is the work of Greenblatt, Montrose. So too the work of Foucault:

i n s t i t u t i o n a l space(academy, l i b r a r y ) , tech-

nology (photocopier , s l ide-projector) , and de Certeau: pragmatics oft h e e v e r y d a y (1 .45pm d e n t i s t . 3 .30pm What d i s t i n g u i s h e s o i l p a i n t i n g f romRena issance s e m i n a r . 5.15pm t r a i n . 6.30pm any other form of p a i n t i n g is i ts spec ia lTVTV). The man is Giovanni di Arrigo ab i l i ty to render the tang ib i l i ty , theArnolfini, a merchant from Lucca who t ex ture , the lus t re , the s o l i d i t y of whatlived a great deal at Bruges and was it depicts . It def ines the rea l as thatburied there in 1472. The lady is wh ich you can put your hands on.Giovanna Cenami, the daughter of A l t h o u g h its p a i n t e d images are two-another Lucchese merchant who lived d i m e n s i o n a l , its potent ia l of i l l u s i o n i s mat Paris. The picture would have been is far greater than that of scu lp tu re , forpainted at Bruges where Van Eyck, who it can suggest objects possessing co lour ,played an important part in the t ex ture and tempera tu re , f i l l i n g a spacediscovery of oil-painting technique, was and , by i m p l i c a t i o n , f i l l i n g the ent i reworking in the service of the Duke of World. (John Berger, 89).Burgundy from 1425. (Homan Potterton, 51). Pedagogy, in itsm o d e r n , i n s t r u c t i o n a l mode , i s e q u i v a l e n t to the rea l i s t nove l , thef o u r t h w a l l o f n a t u r a l i s t t h e a t r e , t h e e p i c p o e m . A n y a l t e r n a t i v ep e d a g o g y m u s t a l i g n i t s e l f w i t h t h e a v a n t - g a r d e c r i t i q u e o fr e p r e s e n t a t i o n ; more t han an engagement w i t h a subject , i t m u s ti m p l i c i t l y be an engagement w i t h engagement. Artaud's theater ofcruelty or Mallarme's The a u t o c r i t i q u e is i t s e l f an i m p l o d e dMime are not to be concept: the act of e n u n c i a t i o n e x p l o r i n gcarried over directly its o r i g i n s , r e f l e c t i n g on its p resence ininto the classroom, of t ime and space. The paratactic text workscourse, but represent in a s i m i l a r way, commit t ing the reader to aanalogies for thinking d i s j u n c t i v e , d i a c h r o n i c act of r e a d i n g ,through the relation- By m a k i n g u n e x p e c t e d j u x t a p o s i t i o n s , i t s h a k e sship of idea to theater where c o h e r e n c e b e t w e e n d i s p a r a t ein the new pedagogy, elements, the systematic collation of detail(Gregory Ulmer, 183). i n t o m o t i f s , e n f r a m e s the t e x t u a l

Text & design by c o n t r a c t in a h i g h l y i n t e r a c t i v e way. The manipulation ofDarren Tofts, c^ance fry f^e intervention of choice provided the image with

Ray Kinnane & 'Andrew Haig heuretic force. Quotations, like titles, provide signposts; not

to the centre (what it means), but to possible ways in. Textuality, like

orienteering, requires the active formation of a guide on how to

"read" the terrain. What I look for rather is a confrontat ional teaching of the

h u m a n i t i e s t h a t w o u l d q u e s t i o n t h eSouthern Review, 27 (September 1994) s t u d e n t s ' received d i s c i p l i n a r y ideo logy

(model of legitimate cultural expectations)

even as it pushed into indefiniteness

« i o u t o f c

I Owe the Discovery...

the most powerful ideology of theteaching of the humanities: theunquestioned explicating power ofthe theorizing mind and class, theneed for intelligibility and therule of the law.( G a y a t r i Chakravorty S p i v a k ) .

il

s h a k e s

"Hyperrealism is the limit of art, and ofthe real by respective exchange, on the

The c h o i c e of a level of the simulacrum." (Jean Baud r i l l a rd ) .quotation is a kind of grafting, and it involves a

• s out of c o m p l a c e n t h a b i t s of a p p r e h e n s i o n . . . by f a c i l i t a t i n g d i v e r s i t y , i t

p e r c e p t i o n of r e l a t i o n w h i c h can be suggest ive ,resonant of many others. The making of relations iswhat makes such activity empowering to the student,not necessarily the re la t ion. A pa r t i cu la r re la t ion mayturn out to be axiomat ic , but the conceptual processis d i s t i n c t i v e , e p i p h a n i c . The map is open and

connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable,reversible, susceptible to constant modification... A maphas multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing,ivhich always comes back 'to the same.' The map has todo with performance, whereas the tracing alwaysinvolves an alleged 'competence' (Deleuze & Guattari, 12-13).

254 Toffs, Kinnanc &

Postmodern thinking makes us acutely aware of

what the texts are that we deal wi th when

studying Renaissance culture, and the impor-

tant (usually prohibitive) social and economic

factors which prevent a different order of text

to be available for consideration. The field-trip,

•p rox im i t y to the authentic, is usual ly

[ the privilege of academic minor i t ies.

Apart from revisionary attitudes within

j R e n a i s s a n c e s c h o l a r s h i p , f o r most

s tuden t s the v e r y n o t i o n o f wha t

constitutes the cultural material of the

Renaissance is a product of copies.

Despite possible anxieties over such a

' rea l i za t ion , the fac t rema ins that

without the intervention of technology, the

cr i t i ca l discourse on the Renaissance would

simply not be possible. Teaching something

c o n t r i b u t e s t o t h e t e x t u r a l i m p a c t o f t h e m a n y s i d e d w o r k , t u r n i n g l a n g u a g e i n t clike the Renaissance from the point of view of a

heuretic pedagogy means calling into question

available categories, such as disciplinary

framing (what do we mean by the Renaissance,

I chronologically as well as substan-

\tively), hierarchies within source

material (can we sustain divisions

between primary and secondary

I material), and contemporaneity (who are

"we," and what ideologies, political,

I cultural and intellectual, have informed

our reading and interpretive habits). The

imetonymic drive of such a pedagogy

means that the classroom situation is never

static, nor an end point. It is merely one node

within an ongoing play of dynamic The trick of col lage consists also

links. The shift from literate to of never entirely suppressing the

e l e c t r o n i c e p i s t e m o l o g i e s , of alterity of these elements reunited in a

course, means that the ac t ive temporary composition. Thus the art ofpursuit and formation of know- col lage proves to be one of the most

ledge of Renaissance l i terature effective strategies in the putting into

may be replaced by the relatively question of all the il lusions of

sedentary accessing (rather than representation. (Group Ma).

reading) of information (rather than texts) from

the data-base.

Above: detail* from "Wadding Portrait oj' Giovanni Arnolf'ini" by Jan Van Evt-k

I Owe the Discovery... 255

Interactive technologies, though, promise a high degree of intervention

and involvement in knowledge production: the student/user of new

writing and electronic cultural technologies is a self-directed learner,

the locus of a network of directed graphs, nodes, links, and cybernetic

runs. The electronic toolkit complements the pen. hyperspace the page.

Pedagogy, like hypertext, becomes a non-sequential process, a network

of intersecting paths, some established (prescribed reading) some

implied (suggested reading), others improvised (chance associations.

initiative, idiosyncratic links), (Serendipity is where youfind it, Greil Marcus). This ... involuntary memory is an unruly magician and will not be

perception of the overlying of importuned. It chooses its own time and place for the perfor-

d i s c u r s i v e modes means mance of its miracle. I do not know how often this miracle

that far f r om being out- recurs in Proust. I think twelve or thirteen times. But the

moded, print wil l continue to first - the famous episode of the madeleine steeped in tea -

be reconfigured, reformed to Would justify the assert ion that his entire book is a monument

simulate electronic modes of to involuntary memory and the epic of its action. The whole of

del ivery. Typographic hyper- Proust's world comes out of a teacup... (Samuel Beckett, 34).text . / would like to imagine an entirely improvised curriculum,

i n to *ne p r i m e s o u r c e o f a d v e n t u r e a n d m a k i n g s t y l e o n e o f t h e p r i n c i p a l s o u r c e s o f

focussed around this image and the narrative of its making. The

image would be the only set text, its formation narrative the only

secondary source. A dynamic exchange would be set up around it

(moderator/students), and would be driven by a chosen context ("'How

do we understand Renaissance culture." for example). The image wouldbe a kind of graphic incipi t , the commencement of an unrehearsed

profusion of paths to be pursued. Specific topics would be generated

speculatively (as opposed to input from given, expert sources),

concepts, practices, historical events would be incorporated by

accretion, and in appropriate contexts of relation, as opposed to the

requisite inventory of received formulations on the topic. Onepossibly gets better at manipulating the marks that

have been made by chance, which are the marks that

one made quite outside reason. As one conditions

oneself by time and by working to what happens, one

becomes more alive to what the accident has proposed i

for one. (Francis Bacon, 53). The chal lenge of a heuretic

approach to teaching the Renaissance involves, first,

helping students to overcome their anxiety over notbeing told the story, given the answer; secondly,

empowering students to feel confident wi th, and

stimulated by the idea of knowledge as production -

the answer, if that is indeed important, has in no way I

been previously establ ished; th i rd ly , encouraging

students to cross boundaries of specialization, to I

follow trains of thought that synthesize disparate texts and ideas; inthis sense, even the questions/areas of interest are entirely open to

invention. Teaching as a transitive act ("teaching the Renaissance"):

» teaching as an intransitive process ("teaching the Renaissance").

Implode both practices ("teaching the Renaissance").

256 Tofts, Kinnniic & Haig

It was clear during the course of A style has evolvedthat discussion that the breakdown jn fhe c|assroom/ more

of hierarchies should be a guidingfeature of a heuretic text, as wed i a l°9 l c ' more

conceived it. The co l lapse of exploratory, less given toh ie ra rchy (academic /popu la r /pseudo-object iv i ty , thanpersonal) is, after all, a defining .. . . .feature of the postmodern, alongthe traditional mode.with significant paradigm shifts in A couple of examples ofth inking ( l i near i t y - la te ra l i t y ) , the fernjnjst approachstructuration (syntax-parataxis) . , .authority (readerly-writerly), andare 1uoted below>

signification (sign~signifier). The (Adrienne Rich).rise of Capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism

And the individual is dominant until the close of the nineteenth

century. In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge

the personality By ignoring it, which has caused it instead to

branch out in all directions... (John Ashbery). Samp l i ng : the ub iqu i ty of

example, the denial of surrogacy. The post-critical essay incorporates its

object of study, as w e l l as demonst ra tes ( enac t s ) i ts theore t i ca l

principles. Despite its example (exempl i f icat ion of a dif ferent order)

pedagogy remains a predominantly diegetic mode of communication,

founded on instruct ion (an economy of the signif ied). A postmodern

pedagogy should be staged as a mimetic performance: an instantiationi n t e r e s t and a c t i o n . In adap t i ng to c o n s t a n t c h a n g e , the r e a d e r b e c o m e s a q u e s t e -

of/encounter with postmodern concepts, not an instructional narrative

about them. The formation of this image was aleatoric; the use to which it

could be put (the conception that it could be put to use) was

circumstantial, generated by association. The sequence of formation

(design, motivation), accident (chance overlap), association (perception of

relevance, establishment of link) is an instance of a new attitude to the

production of knowledge. What made this chance occurrence so exciting

was, first, its serendipity, the pleasure of the unexpected; secondly, the

assoc ia t ions it sparked, the rap id and energised percept ion of its

potential use across subjects, contexts. ...the OT'lTi^lTL^

together of things that wouldn't jbe together unless you broughtthem lOether9 (John Cage, 52).

I Owe the Discovery. • • 257

nS "

p e s t e r

The post-cri t ical essay, e spec i a l ly ini t s h e u r e t i c f o r m , i s u s e f u l o n l yinsofa r as it dramat izes a process ofe n g a g e m e n t w i t h concep t s , t ex t s ,practices, contexts. As an exemplar ofa p o s t m o d e r n i z e d pedagogy it canalso have b e n e f i t s . The Flemish

cities where the new style of paintingflourished - Tournai, Ghent, Bruges -rivalled those of Italy as centers ofinternational banking and trade. Theirforeign residents included many Italianbusinessman. For one of theseJan van Eyck producedwhat is not only his mostremarkable portrait but amajor masterpiece of theperiod... (H.W. Janson, 286).

Theo r i zed f rom a

postmodern point of

view, this new image

said a lot of things Heuretic: adj., neologism:- a modeabout the nature of of discourse, style of presentationimages, in particular which conceives of knowledge asabout their relation inventive, creative (euretic);to r e a l i t y and to focusses reader/spectator as

other images, their productive locus through empowering

reproducibi l i ty and of discovery, of abductive negotiationthei r r e l a t i o n s h i p of text via provision of guides toto technologies of self-directed learning (heuristic).

'•r w h o m k n o w l e d g e o f the t e x t b e c o m e s a n e e d to k n o w and e x p e r i e n c e

abundance. To write "about" teaching

as a postmodern practice would only

re-enforce the uncritical difference

between teaching and "postmodern-

ism;" the reassuring anteriority of

academic discourse. To demonstrate

the notion that teaching was itself

discursive, in the form of a criticalessay, was the challenge we faced.

Somehow a method had to be

devised that placed the reader in the

position of the student pursuing

conditions. Above all, a superior constructionof postmodernism would be one that satisfied thecriterion of interest. If as literary historians we

lo re of

Mi, 8 4 ) .

•0,

3

• th

1:

I Owe the Discovery...

because, as I see it, it must not be 'looked at' in theaesthetic sense of the word. One must consult the bookand see the two together. The conjunction of the twothings entirely removes the retinal aspect that I don'tlike. (Marcel DucHamp discussing the BoTte V e r t e ) .

Pedagogy still observes an ostensibly metaphoric logic,the play of difference within the spatial/temporal hereand now; the centralization of peripheral research intodecidability, nexus. A metonymic pedagogy dislocatesand relativizes, posits that the here and is only part of alarger whole, the now an instant in an ongoing process.The classroom situation/the scene of teaching signifiesequivalences elsewhere, to be pursued at another time.Classroom activity is provisional, the proverbial tip of theiceberg; unf in ished, synecdoch ic . This analogy

between possessing and the way of seeing which is incorporated inoil painting, is a factor usually ignored by art experts andhistorians. Significantly enough it is an anthropologist who hascome closest to recognizing it. Levi-Strauss writes: It is this avidand ambitious desire to take possession of And then, blank pages, gaps, borders, spacesthe object for the benefit of the owner or and silence, holes in discourse: these women emphasizeeven of the spectator which seems to me to the aspect of feminine writing which is the mostconstitute one of the outstandingly difficult to verbalize because it becomes compromised,

original features of the rationalized, masculinized as it explains itself... If theart of Western civil- reader feels a bit disoriented in this new space, oneization. (John Berger, 83- wh i ch is o b s c u r e and silent, it proves perhaps, that84). Its very formation, and it is women's space. (Xaviere Gauthier).the associative force it engendered, was pleasurable,useful in itself. Of course, to use it in a teacherly way isout of the question: anecdote is the most appropriatediscursive mode here. The anecdote locates its form-ation within the subjective context of its d iscovery.

How to teach the Renaissance in the light ofpostmodern theory? Clearly there is more at stakethan simply co-opting postmodern concepts, orframing "the Renaissance" in terms of the formationof modernity and its fragmentation in the postmodernsituation. The textuality of history, the historicity ofreading, the anxiety of influence, the unpopularity ofcanonical literature, the contexture of subjectpositions - all inform an approach to such anendeavour. New historicism, cultural poetics,materialist feminism, women's history, provideideologies, conceptual frameworks. What of themode of discourse? 'Can you read my mind, Finn?' He

grimaced. 'Wintermute, I mean.' 'Mindsaren' t read. See, y o u ' v e s t i l l got theparadigms print gave you, and you ' r ebarely pr int- l i terate. I can access yourmemory, but that's not the same as yourmind.' (William Gibson, 204).

Even if predominant themes

are assembled, it is theinteractive process that is

important, and the creative

freedom of bricolage:

Van Eyck

\yHumanism

Modernity

The logic of appearance

:

Baudrillard: The discursiveconstruction of knowledge

260 Tofts, Kinnane & Haig

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