Leadership in the 21st Century

Photographs as Data (1)

Here is a partial list of the ideas and terms that would be worth thinking about with respect to the role of data, information and visualization in our culture.

Mind/Brain/Memory/Vision/Body/Thought/Sensation/Knowledge

Information/Screens/3D Worlds/Virtual Reality/Images/Artifacts/

Meaning/Messages/Representation/Technology/Visualization/Models

All of the above is an inventory of ideas and terms and is also a potential index. Can all of the above be easily classified?

Lets start with a map that might also be an illustration.

If you are a reader of texts and articles on the digital world as well as books on business in the Internet era, you will be familiar with this type of diagrammatic guide. It is supposed to reflect the impact of new digital technologies and lead you to a better understanding and visualization of ideas that may otherwise be difficult to explain in words alone. The mapping process is also meant to take raw data, ideas and terminology and allow you to visualize greater and greater levels of complexity — to, in effect, produce a taxonomy. The taxonomy is both a reflection of reality and a representation of active material practices. It is a way for ideas to become concrete, for phenomena to be linked and for the visualization of networks of ideas to be given some concreteness.

Classification is an important aspect of trying to comprehend digital environments. How can large databases and blocks of information be explored? What are some of the categories that we normally use to classify data and knowledge? How can we link taxonomies to real life experiences?

For example, the challenge of trying to search through a database of images is an enormous one. Since images can represent, document, and be metaphors of information and ideas, the search parameters would have to be very large to accomplish even minimal search tasks. In addition, can information of this complexity be organized around interfaces that respond to the intuitive needs of users so as to facilitate often times subtle types of searching? Can the serendipity of exploring images match the pressure to classify them within digital environments? 

At the core of these issues are the developing nature of computers and mobile devices and their evolution from desktop environments into everyday appliances with phones, for example, functioning effectively as replacements for cameras. The ubiquitous presence of these devices suggests that they can perform every function that is demanded of them. There is also a cultural sense that smart technologies have an infinite capacity to engage with any number of different problems, which is why apps have become the software language of mobility.

Consequently, software is being pushed into realms of greater and greater complexity. The underlying impact of all of this activity is quite ironic: as machines take on more and more tasks, it becomes less and less clear how intentionality (who did what and why) actually comes into play at both the hardware and software level. For a computer or a phone or a tablet to be powerful enough to do what we expect of them, millions of lines of code have to be written. In effect, this is another level of data construction and visualization (however abstract).

All of this effort will inevitably be opaque to the user. Therefore, the issue of visualization is even more complex than what a list, diagram or taxonomy could ever offer. For example, how do we visualize the programming process? What do you make of this programming script in one of the dominant languages used for the web, JavaScript?

<!--  Begin

function MakeIt(form){

var txt='<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="'+form.description.value+'">\r\n';

txt+='<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="';

if (form.keywords.value)

txt+=form.keywords.value+'">\r\n';

form.source.value=txt;

}

function AddText(form, Action){

var AddTxt="";

var txt="";

form.keywords.value+=AddTxt;

}

function ResetPage(form){

if(confirm("Do you want to clear all and start a new META-tag Creation?")){  

form.description.value="";     

form.source.value="";  

form.keywords.value="";       

   }

}

// End -->

This script is designed to add a meta-tag to a web page in order to facilitate categorization by search engines. It is one of the most important ways of making sure that pages are recognized and classified in order for users to have access to the information that Web programmers and content providers have placed on the web. The JavaScript facilitates searching and is a way of envisioning or anticipating usage. At one level, the opaqueness of this script is a good thing because it allows processes to happen without the need to understand the underlying logic. On the other hand, does this lack of knowledge hinder what users do as they search for information? 

As we know, images are full of information. Digital images are carefully designed representations of complex coding. We don't explore photographs in order to explore their code. Rather, we want images to visualize what we have seen.

More on this in the next part of this series.

Amanda Palmer and The Art of Asking

3D Printing

MOOCS (Part Three)

I have begun and not completed a couple of MOOC-type courses. I have also looked into and closely examined many others. I have spent some time on the Khan Academy site, explored his approach and been generally enchanted by his naïve assumption that when something is explained with clarity, it will be understood. I regularly watch a variety of other “teaching” videos through iTunes University and related sites. There is a common thread in all of the presentations and lessons. What matters most is content and most certainly not form or aesthetics. Outcomes drive the process. Learn, learn quickly, interact through forums and chat spaces, complete exercises, let a robot correct your tests and make tests simple because if the tests are not simple, already astronomical dropout rates will rise even further. Avoid essays. 

From: My E-Learning Journey

Now, if this sounds like I am being negative, I am not. I understand the benefits, even the necessity of engaging with online learning. I support the role online learning can play in providing access to education to thousands of students. Athabasca University in Canada is a leader in this field as is the Open University in England and both organizations can claim many successes.

Part one of this series showed the intimate links between today’s online course material and correspondence courses given over the last hundred years. Millions of people have benefited from learning at a distance through the mail, radio and television. But, the exponential growth in numbers within the context of MOOCS raises some very important issues that have been glossed over in much of the commentary to date. Fundamentally, learning is neither simple nor just driven by the way we shape and transform information into different media. Good information that is well presented may not result in learning. For better or for worse, learning remains a deeply subjective experience, more often than not judged by standards that appear to be objective and driven by the need for results.

MOOCS and online learning in general seem to operate outside of the conventional concerns that most media have about communications. This will change with time and experience. The idea that teaching is just about content or outcomes is of course at the centre of many of the pedagogical challenges faced by instructors in conventional classrooms. The best teachers struggle with the shape and form of their language, the examples they use and the modes of communications that best suit certain subject areas.

The aesthetics of presentation are an integral part of the challenge. A talking head loses his/her audience very quickly. PowerPoint slides that show words without being framed by pictures and some modicum of design, rarely succeed in holding their audience. Yes, design is important. The design of information and the ways in which information can be communicated will have as profound an influence on the content as the medium being used.

The key question is, can learning online be turned into more of an aesthetic experience? Stay tuned.   

MOOCS (Part Two)

Professor Josie Taylor, Director of the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in England, says: “If you think the target audience for the MOOC you are about to launch could include a lot of inexperienced learners, then as a teacher, you have the obligation to provide for them ways in which they can be supported. If you don’t, you are abdicating your responsibility to the people you are encouraging — and ethically, that is not a good thing to do.” (Times Higher Education, 14 Feb. 2013, p. 13) Taylor was speaking at the Online and Open Access Learning in Higher Education conference in London in early February. 

Taylor also suggested in her presentation that the pedagogical methods used in MOOCS are talking heads based on old styles of presentation that many lecturers no longer believe in and more advanced forms of online learning are reworking.

Phil Hill at e-Literate

There is a great deal of truth in what Taylor is saying. The problem with MOOCS is that the technology and its potential have excited universities and the public, with little examination of the learning framework that needs to be developed for MOOCS to work well. For example, how do contextual factors affect the interaction between learners and screen based environments? See Constructivism in Practical and Historical Context.  There is no easy answer to this question. Learning is both a very private and a very public activity. Learning is driven by exchanges and conversations. Most learning is unpredictable, as it should be because why would you be interested if you already know the outcomes of the activities you engage in? Yes, chat rooms and social media expand the base of conversation. And, of course, the Web is an amazing tool for learning all sorts of new things. But, how deep does that learning go? How can we judge?

When over 100,000 people take a course, can context be understood at all? Perhaps, through the stories learners tell others as they learn? It is possible to make all the feeds from Twitter to Facebook unveil more about the individuals in the course. Clearly, the instructor(s) can only engage with a small percentage of his/her learners irrespective of efforts to engage. However, it is likely that a large number of interactions will provide at least some sort of data based measure to think about use and context. It might be possible to aggregate all sorts of information about learners, based on their answers to questions, and the kinds of conversations they decide to participate in.  

Let me step back for a moment from the argument I have been pursuing. The University of British Columbia is offering courses via Coursera (https://www.coursera.org) that enrolled 134,000 students. Even if 5 percent of those students gained something from the course, (7 thousand students) would it not be fair to say that learning has happened? Seven thousand students is the size of a small university or college. What are we talking about here? Let’s hypothesize that most of the learners find something in the course, an idea or an image or even a broad concept that excites them. That detail about their reaction may come available to the teachers through comments and interactions, essays or any other pedagogical techniques the teacher feels will aid the process. Even if students are just interested in information gathering, they may still learn a great deal.

If we agree that dialogue and conversation are crucial to the success of learning, then do chat rooms, Facebook pages and live discussions via Skype add to the quality of conversation? The answer is obviously yes, but to some degree the lack of an embodied interaction must also be examined and, with great care. In the US over half of middle school students use their smartphones to record lectures or take pictures of notes. Over a third of the students use Facebook to collaborate with their peers on projects and papers. These statistics are constantly changing, but they point toward a merging of off-line and on-line experiences and to a smooth continuum of relationships among virtual and real pedagogical experiences.

MOOCS fit into this flow with all of the constraints and challenges these courses have in going beyond information into criticism, analysis and intellectual engagement.

The next entry in this series will look more closely at a specific course.

The following comment was sent via email by Lya Visser, who is a specialist in distance education.

I liked your reflection on MOOCs, especially as it coincides with a course I am currently teaching for George Washington University and where we have discussed RLO (reusable learning objects) and MOOCs extensively.

I just want to mention that I think it is important that we should not only discuss the business model of MOOCs (so often the topic of reflections), but as you argue, discuss whether they improve education, or better still learning. I also want to emphasize that these MOOCs may offer important opportunities to students from developing countries – it considerably increases accessibility to get an affordable quality education not often available to learners in these countries. It seems to me, but has to be researched, that offering instructor-assisted MOOCs  to students in developing countries may be an effective and efficient way of using the current (free) learning opportunities.

Armando Fox, who leads the UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer sciences department,  told the San Francisco Business Times (1 February, 2013) that fewer than 10 percent of enrolled students have finished the class, but let’s not forget that only 25 percent of students enrolled in the class are from North America. Although the percentage seems to be low, it is only a good decade ago that I did research with one of the external MA programs of the University of London, and discovered that only 32% of the enrolled students finished the very expensive and sponsor supported program. 

Lastly, I saw your reference to Brent Wilson, who is a great scholar and one of the contributors to the Second Edition of Trends and Issues in Distance Education: International Perspectives, edited by Lya Visser, Yusra Laila Visser, Ray Amirault, and Michael Simonson (published by IAP in 2012).

MOOCS

MOOCS are an exciting development in the story of distance learning. However, massive open online courses are part of a long tradition in the history of learning technologies.  

For example, during the 1950’s and 1960’s, International Correspondence Schools delivered hundreds of thousands of learning modules/books/pamphlets to home learners using the post office and small delivery trucks. The courses were sold by salesmen who worked in a variety of cities throughout North America. International Correspondence Schools as it was known was founded the 1880’s as the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania and over a short period of time became the learning method of choice for hundreds of thousands of people. (Over a million people had enrolled early in the 20th century, mostly in the US but also in Europe.) Most of the learners were adults from varying backgrounds, although men dominated and their overall goal was to increase their chances of developing skills for new professions. Many of the courses were vocational in nature. The courses ranged from “ornamental design” to “electrical engineering.” There was a course in “show-card writing” (which was a mixture of training in typography, drawing and illustration for posters, placards and store signage.)

In the 1920’s, radio was used as a vehicle of learning for hundreds of thousands of listeners accompanied by material that was sent through the mail. In the 1970’s video was used around the world to teach nearly any subject that could be translated into the medium. Film was used in the 1930’s in particular with some cinemas having audiences attend in the mornings to learn about current affairs. Television has been an important medium to teach learners in their homes almost since the technology became widespread in the 1950’s. In 1926, the BBC explored a ‘wireless university.’ In 1971, Open University, a University of the Air, began teaching thousands of students in Britain with a focus on late night TV broadcasts, which over time became an important part of the lives of many students. To this day, radio is an important part of learning in most of Africa and some parts of Asia. Mobile technologies now play an increasing and important role in learning since they are cheap and easily learned.  

All of these phenomena point to an important set of activities that connect the desire of the public to learn with a variety of media, some more effective than others. MOOCS extend and expand on the already existing networks that have been built to accommodate a seemingly insatiable desire for information and knowledge. They are also opening learning up to groups who couldn't gain access via traditional means either because of cost or because the time needed to go to university.

But, how do you teach 125,000 students? For that matter, how do you teach 125 or 50? I once taught a class with 600 students attending on a regular basis and it was an incredible challenge. I will have more to say about this in another blog entry, but what is missing in many of the discussions of MOOCS is what is new about the pedagogy being used. Tony Bates says the following about Coursera which is a consortium of major universities: “…the teaching methods used by most of the Coursera courses so far are based on a very old and outdated behaviourist pedagogy, relying primarily on information transmission, computer marked assignments and peer assessment.  Behaviourist pedagogy has its value, especially where there are right and wrong answers, facts or procedures that must be learned, or students lack higher-level cognitive processing skills. In other words it works reasonably well for certain levels of training. But it is extremely difficult if not impossible to teach higher order skills of critical thinking, creative thinking, and original thinking using behaviourist pedagogy, the very skills that are needed in a knowledge-based society.” (Tony Bates Website last accessed on February 11, 2013.)

Bates is a bit extreme because some of the courses that are available really do open up a variety of different knowledge portals and even with the constraints, these do lead to some form of experiential learning that may not be dominated by a behviourist approach. He is however quite right to question the teaching methods being used.

Most of the literature on MOOCS tends towards utopian claims of a new age of learning. It is as if the struggles of institutional and non-institutional learning will be solved by MOOCS. The beauty of MOOCS is that they aggregate a large number of interested learners into a community of shared interests. It is however challenging to know whether that community is learning. There is simply no way in which the huge scale of MOOCS can be evaluated but at the same time, as Stephen Downes (a founder of MOOCS) says: “I never had any doubt that the model itself would be successful. Though we hear a great deal about the quality of learning resources and the need for credentials, the demand from people without access to any university resources has been consistent and strong. There is a large following throughout the world for all this work in open online education, because it eliminates one of the great advantages the wealthy have always enjoyed over the poor. And with open access, we can work on things like quality, assessment and credentials on an ongoing basis.” (Stephen Downes Website last accessed on Feb. 11, 2013)

I will explore my own contradictory feelings about MOOCS in another post although for a much less ambivalent view see MIT Technology Review.  

International Correspondence Schools, Scranton, Penn

Revisiting and Reviewing Moulin Rouge by Baz Luhrmann

In the first few minutes of Moulin Rouge, the film by director Baz Luhrmann, two major references are made to the history of the cinema. The first is to Auguste Lumière and his 1895 film about a train arriving in the main Paris train station. For many, this film was one of the first documentaries, and the film plays on the stark realism of trains, travelling and everyday life. In a shot reminiscent of that early and important moment in film history, Ewan MacGregor arrives in Paris in 1899 in search of love, liberty and bohemian culture. The use of Lumière is as much of a statement about the cinema as it is an exploration of how we tell stories through films. Moreover, this is one of the central themes of Moulin Rouge — does narrative still work in a postmodern age that often relies on cynicism and overstated irony?

From the film, Moulin Rouge

The other reference in Moulin Rouge comes from Meliès whose early films were seen as fantasies because he used sets and had little interest in shooting images from “real” life. After a brilliant sequence of singing and dancing from Nicole Kidman and McGregor and when it has become clear that they are falling in love, they march out into the night and stand on the rooftops of Montmartre. Shooting stars appear (much like Peter Pan and other Disney movies), and as they sing we see the moon smiling in the distance. The moon is drawn exactly as Meliès drew it in the 1890’s film, Man on the Moon.

The question is why would Luhrmann make such explicit use of these references? Why in fact does he make use of hundreds such references throughout the film? Why create this wonderful phantasmagoria of popular culture quotes? Luhrmann not only uses the history of the cinema but also the history of rock music and of musicals in general. No line in this film is spoken, delivered or framed without alluding to or explicitly invoking prior forms, genres and styles from other forms of popular cultural expression. At no point do the actors depart from their highly stylized representation of a world dominated by romanticism and the desire for pure love.

The only director of equal stature, who has come close to this depth and playfulness, is Dennis Potter. It is clear that Luhrmann has watched Potter’s work. It is also clear that what we have with Moulin Rouge is a film that explores the very essence of the narratives that dominate the cinema and music. “The Singing Detective” which is Potter’s most famous work and which to me is one of the most powerful television series ever made, does not use song in the same way. (Although Potter’s “Pennies from Heaven” is very similar to Moulin Rouge in the manner in which the characters break out into song — Steve Bochko tried to imitate this on American TV and it didn’t work). But, Potter continuously referenced not only popular culture but literature and theatre as well. Moreover, Ewan McGregor acted in a Potter production, “Lipstick on Your Collar,” which is about the British army.

Luhrmann playfully explores popular culture’s obsession not only with love, but also with the love song. At the same time, he examines the power of loss in all the genres of our culture. For, at one and the same time, Moulin Rouge celebrates the romance and beauty of innocent love with the pathos of love lost. The simultaneity of loss and love is such a powerful metaphor that one would be hard put not to find this metaphor circulating through most of cultural production in North American society.

Early in the film, McGregor breaks out into a song from The Sound of Music (“The hills are alive with the sound of music”) and the same words are repeated numerous times throughout the film. It is as if The Sound of Music stands for all musicals that the cinema has ever produced. More importantly, it is the audience’s familiarity with the music and the score that is so crucial. It shows, at the same time, the connectedness of culture and the universality of music as the crucial link between different periods of time and radically different narratives.

Mouin Rouge deserves to be studied repeatedly. Luhrmann has taken the music hall, cabaret, the circus, opera, and the grand tradition of popular theater exemplified by productions like Cats and melded them together. Although this kind of self-reflexivity often leads nowhere, in Mouin Rouge, Luhrmann has unveiled a wonderful strategy for examining the images and sounds that surround us. Take stories that we are familiar with and redesign them. Recontextualize how the stories are told in order to foreground their role and impact on the social context in which we live. Mouin Rouge is a beautiful movie not the least because it also uses digital effects to create the sense that we are in Monmartre — although at the same time, it is clear from the start that we are watching a set.

Teaching, Learning and Making in Design Education

One of the major assumptions in design education and pedagogy is that students have to “make” or “produce” objects, from for example, web pages to bicycles to books in order to prove that they have learned to become designers. This philosophy is further amplified in popular journals like Applied Arts, which features the work of designers (much as photographic magazines feature the works of photographers) as examples both of production and professional capacity as if the works themselves have enough presence and force to stand for the creative process.

KickerStudio

This outcomes based strategy is pervasive in disciplines that frame learning through the products or objects students create. The assumption is that students become more active learners if they transform information and knowledge into something tangible. To varying degrees, this approach has immense value. However, my sense is that the focus on outcomes often reduces the students need to engage in wide-ranging and critical analyses and therefore to make possible the kind of self-reflection that is essential to learning. In other words interpretation, discourse and critique become less important largely because the object is meant to stand not only for function but also for meaning, process and aesthetics. There is in this approach a thin border between 19th century vocational learning and teaching and the depth that should be required of university students in the 21st century who wish to become designers.    

The tradition of making that dominates contemporary art and design educational organizations is often portrayed as one of the essential differences that design schools have with more traditional institutions. Making is given a higher value than just thinking or research that may have no pragmatic or immediate outcome.  I would like to argue in this short article that the underlying philosophy of “making” to show progress in skills acquisition is fraught with dangers, among the most important of which is rampant anti-intellectualism. Furthermore, from my perspective, the learning process both within design and generally, is by its very nature so interdisciplinary that the focus on outcomes (most fully exemplified by the fourth year graduation project that comes to stand not only for years of learning but for the general capacity and competence of the student) tends to distort if not undermine creative process as well as innovative and speculative thinking. Of course, I am not suggesting that making is an end in itself, nor that the fabrication of prototypes or objects is harmful or without merit. Rather, one of the most important elements of any creative discipline, in my opinion is that learners become creative problem solvers. In order to achieve that goal many different pedagogical approaches are needed, not the least of which is an awareness of the differences among skills, learning and research. Gaining that understanding means that design students (and for that matter design teachers) cannot approach learning in a linear fashion. There is no easy or simple road to creative and innovative thought or production, unless the purpose of the educational process is framed by a limited understanding of the vocation or discipline within which both learners and teachers are engaged.

In contrast, experience design is part of an effort to recast design process so that at a minimum fabrication can meet creativity in a middle zone, a space where designers can reach out to potential audiences or users, a space that is both highly contingent and not entirely framed by use. The challenge for successful experience designers then centres on communication, language and quality of interaction, that is, how to fabricate a relational environment that may or may not have objects as their focus. Experience design suggests something about the challenges that now face all designers as the ground upon which creative engagement shifts from makers to users, inverting the creative process so that the latter is often more responsible for their experiences than the former.

Ironically, this is the same problem that artists face. The fabrication of something from nothing and the translation of ideas into artifacts cannot be reduced to a series of mechanical decisions, but requires a combination of self-reflection and self-appraisal as well as external evaluation and critique. Concepts don’t become aesthetic objects just because the craft needed to make or create something has been well learned or even well executed. If creativity were a simple matter of craft or even technique, then there would be little aesthetic or technical difference among artists or designers or users. Self-reflection can be learned. At the same time, learning to work beyond the limitations suggested by any craft or technique is the foundation upon which both innovative and critical articulation rests. The challenge both for learners and teachers is how to open up an increasingly narrow and narrowing set of assumptions about the pragmatic outcomes of the learning process. This is one of the key challenges both for the discipline and the institutions that teach design. (This article first appeared in Applied Arts)  

A New Campus and a New Era for Emily Carr University

A rendering (not the design!!) of Emily Carr's new campus at Great Northern Way

Yesterday, a historic announcement! The BC government will be contributing 113 million dollars to the construction of a new campus for Emily Carr. The total cost of the campus is 134 million. Our hope is that it will be a model of 21st century learning in the arts and design. We want the campus to tell a story about the impact, importance and need for the arts. Our vision is to create and support the development of a new cultural precinct for Vancouver and to bring industry, non-profit art organizations and cultural activities onto the campus. We also want to bring the eastern and western parts of the city together, and support the many communities that surround the site. Please check out some of these links. Vancouver Sun...CBC...and....see video below.

Aaron Swartz

Cory Doctorow has a wonderful series of articles on the death of the great internet pioneer Aaron Swartz. I have followed his career for ten years. Swartz was not only an extraordinary thinker, but an avid reader and his blog has numerous book recommendations which reveal the range and depth of his intellect. His belief in an open internet, one in which knowledge and information are freely available was guided by a deeper understanding and vision about networks and how they can be used for the common good. More than most, he understood that the circulation of information should never be constrained by narrow choices, policies or politics. He was an amazing man and will be missed. Click here for his analysis of Dark Knight. Here is his analysis of change both personal and through activist actions. Also, a wonderful tribute from Cyrus Farivar at the Ars Technica Blog and another from Tim Berners-Lee on the same site. Emily Bazelon at Slate has an excellent article as well. Another article from Verge can be found here.

The Craft of Quantum Learning

Learning both in the classroom and outside the classroom is generally approached in a linear fashion. The assumption is that if you make enough elements available to learners, they will learn at least part of what they listen to, read or watch. This is why teachers and classrooms have remained central to the learning process, even though there are now so many different ways students can find and appreciate and learn from any number of varied sources.

But, what if learning is very similar to the principles behind Quantum Theory? What if learning experiences, creativity and innovative thinking cannot be boxed into inputs and outputs? What if learning is defined by probability, chance and accident? And, what if there is only a slight chance that even the best-organized ideas, presented in the clearest possible way, do not lead to equivalent responses? What if the relationship between listening and learning is profoundly indirect?

If there is a fundamental asymmetry between what teachers teach and what learners learn, then should we continue to have tests? The principle that we examine the  memory of learners to see what they have learned, is the principle behind so much of contemporary education and yet memory is notoriously unpredictable. The irony is that it is difficult to observe learning when it is happening. The internal state of the learner is deeply subjective and it is often difficult to gain access to that internal set of thoughts, reflections and observations. 

The exception to this is creative process, learning through making and doing. When children, teenagers or mature students engage with the crafts that shape and form creative engagement, they produce objects, artifacts or prototypes that express the complexity of their thinking. They shape their ideas into “something” and this allows them to examine the relationships between what they know and what they have learned.

Learning is about probabilities and there are an infinite number of ways in which students learn. Ironically, our school systems and our learning systems have been designed to reduce complexity to simple equations. Everyday experiences tell much more complex stories about the unpredictable nature of engaging with events, information and knowledge. We need a transformational change in our assumptions about learning that accounts for contradictory trends and puts constant innovation at the core of what we do as learners, educators and citizens.

Newtown, Connecticut

On this day, December, 14 2012, we mourn the victims of a senseless and despicable murder. The killing of 28 people including 20 children is incomprehensible. As someone who has been an educator for over 40 years, the pain of this event will never leave me. My heart goes out to the families of the victims. President Obama's words ring true:

“The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old,” a visibly distraught President Obama said in remarks televised nationally.

After pausing to compose himself for 12 long seconds, Mr. Obama said, “They had their entire lives ahead of them: birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.” (Both quotes are from the New York Times)

Interface Realities

A superstorm hits Brisbane, Australia

The interface between reality and human perception has shifted from our eyes to eyes/screens/events/experiences/screens.

I am not sure where memories fit into this process/flow, but whereas in the past, reality was mediated by language and on occasion images, we now need screens to visualize not only what we are doing, but what we have done. This is a vast and expanding process of human annotation and visualization which now defines experiences according to the strength with which they have been recorded. Iphoneographers and Androidographers collate all these images into albums, folders and files. The management of all of this data requires more and more time and all of this time is spent within screenworlds. It is not that reality disappears, just that experiences become so layered that we become archeologists, constantly searching for meaning amidst all of the detritus left over from the many thousands of images we take over the course of a few months. 

Comment and response from Felix de Mendelssohn

Dear Ron,

I came back in September from a conference in Sendai, Japan about working with survivor families from Fukushima and the tsunami-affected region. Here the reverse had been true - only privileged people and foreigners had at the time been able see what was happening on CNN etc. The Japanese TV for the local population brought no news, no pictures, no-one knew what was going on. Then Hurricane Sandy hit the East coast of USA and I heard later from locals that at the time they knew nothing, they had only the unfathomable reality, but because the power was down there was no radio, no TV, no phone and no gas to get to somewhere to find out what was going on. So there is perhaps a flip side to your comment - when we lose the images and their interpretations we can be plunged into the terrifying Real.

Notes on Experience and the Tacit

Over the course of a year, I receive many proposals from consultants to talk to me about the services they have and how my organization will benefit from using their knowledge to better run the organization of which I am the President. I am also constantly involved with policy makers in government who seem to know as much as I do, both about my job and about my institution. 

Consultants are brilliant at proposals, but only a few ever produce reports that have real value and can be applied to the challenging problems of being a leader. Very few policy makers in government have actually had the experience of managing the educational institutions they control. 

This is because most of these people live in a theoretical world. I have nothing against theory, but there is a substantial difference between the lived experience of leading and the rather hypothetical nature of the advice offered by external parties. 

Why is this such an important issue? 

Organizations are defined by their cultures and as anyone who has ever been part of an institution for longer than a few years, knows, it takes a very long time to adjust to those cultures, to learn from them and about them. The adjustment period varies and is sometimes arduous, because so much of the knowledge about organizations is embedded and tacit.

This is even more the case in educational institutions. Aside from the fact that a significant number of professors and middle managers will have been employed for a long time, the curriculum contains within it a whole set of assumptions about values, learning and outcomes that are often more implicit than explicit. This is because the curriculum has been built up over many years and in some cases decades. It is layered by so many assumptions and points of view, that a great deal of experience is required to disengage its underlying rules and processes.

Tacit knowledge is deeply buried inside the lived experiences of individuals and communities. The best example of this are craftsmen and people who work in the trades. They learn on the job and since there are so many variables in everything they do, that learning has to be quick and effective. This is also why the apprenticeship programs that accompany trades training are generally among the most effective ways of learning. It is also why there are so many more co-op and internship programs in graduate and undergraduate programs in today's universities and colleges.

Learning while doing is often looked down upon because it appears to be decidedly less intellectual than working on problems and ideas through discussions and texts. Learning while doing is often more demanding and sometimes narrow in orientation. It is not a panacea and I am in no way trying to romanticize it's importance. 

But, tacit learning points to something even more interesting. Learning by its very nature is dominated by less than explicit factors. Teachers know that the mood of their students or even one of their students will affect the quality of the classroom experience. Students also know that one of their biggest challenges is to maintain focus while also dealing with the complex evolution of their lives. Personal experiences and the demands of institutional life are as important as the contents of curricula. 

It is not an accident that it takes four years for students to learn how to navigate the system of a school. This is on the job training that is of great significance to their potential success. Yet, it is rare for anyone on the outside to fully understand the complex layers of knowledge that students have internalized as they evolve into learners because so much of it is not visible or even that clear.

Ironically, nearly every aspect of human interaction and communication is built on tacit learning and knowledge. These range from eye contact through to hand gestures and assumptions about the meanings of words and the physical signals that humans exchange with each other, which often determine the effectiveness of the words that they use.

I am not suggesting that external analysis of institutions is impossible. In some cases, it may well be desirable and advisable. I am suggesting that the training needed to do that work requires far more time than is often assumed and that the skills required will not be developed in conventional ways. 

The challenge is to understand what is not always visible and to have the intellectual as well as practical tools needed to bring the assumptions that guide embedded cultures into the foreground. This has to be done with enough skill to credibly engage not only with institutions as a whole, but also with the people who inhabit them. The routines that define everyday life in institutions and the structures that have been created to support those routines, cannot be disengaged from their roots. A more profound recognition is needed of the lived experiences of employees and learners. 

The usual response to this challenge is to have focus groups or interviews with key members of the community. Some of the information gathered this way can be useful. But, most of it will not strip away the underlying rituals that are so important to the successes and failures of institutional life. 

The problem and the challenge is that understanding institutional life with depth requires an understanding of ethnography and the methods needed to explore and examine complex systems that are in constant evolution. 

Ron Burnett in Conversation with Doug Coupland

Art Schools, Learning and Modernity - Ron Burnett in conversation with Douglas Coupland from Emily Carr University on Vimeo.

To Learn and to Be Taught (© Ron Burnett)

Leacock 132, McGill University

In the early 1990’s, I taught a course entitled, Introduction to Film at McGill University, that had six hundred registered students in it. This was well before MOOCS and Coursera and other massive online courses. It was also before the Internet transformed learning and education and the way we understand the flow of information in digital cultures.

I would like you to imagine six hundred students as a small community of people with a variety of differing interests, proclivities and identities. The students divided themselves into groups of varying sizes. There were the “guys” from the football team, who sat far away from the podium so that they could talk to each other. There were students from at least twenty different countries and they clustered into different groups. Generally, these clusters sat in the same place, from week to week during the yearlong course. There were Trotskyists in one corner and Maoists in another. There were gays, studious types, loudmouths and the ones who insisted on eating during my lectures. The course was evenly divided between men and women, which is now a rarity. I showed films, lectured, held seminars with the assistance of a group of terrific teaching assistants and generally spent many hours meeting students in my office. In fact, the Dean of Arts at the time had his office not too far away from mine and remarked that I seemed to have a lineup outside my office on a continual basis, everyday.

The purpose of this piece, however is not to reminisce about my extraordinary experiences in the teaching of that class. Rather, my own thoughts about the course have over the years profoundly affected my feelings about the nature and flow of information and how we learn new ideas.

Let me take one specific example of the issues I am exploring. When I stood in front of the class, I could only see a few of the faces among the sea of bodies in Leacock 132. I was simultaneously an observer, an actor, a participant and a teacher. Someone observing me would have seen how challenging it was to struggle with all of these roles and still stay connected to the students. By connected, I mean aware of the dynamics of interaction between them and me, sensitive to the difficulties they were having focusing on my words and manner of speaking, and conscious of the likelihood that a significant minority were essentially in a daydream. The latter group would hear my words through the haze of individual thoughts, and personal reflections that define what it means to be a listener.

In addition, the entire environment was social, defined as much by the content of the class, as by the interactions people were having with each other, both in the class and outside of it. This combination of experiences has an aggregated impact enlarging the ‘field’ of communications. It is challenging to map this multi-layered set of conditions. It is however clear that the simple notion of communicating information and ideas to a group of that size, through the format of one to many and with the force of words, is naïve if not misinformed.

I loved the class and I believe we had a great year together, but there was nothing linear or even clear about the experiences. At best, the link between the students and me was fragile. At its worst, there was a great deal of misunderstanding. This is inevitable in any situation of interaction between individuals in large groups. I was in a unique position as an observer, who was constantly being observed, and as a result I had to think about information and how to enlarge the potential points of contact between my students and me.

We generally think that the same event or set of ideas shared between two participants or observers will be described in similar ways. But, we never know exactly when the process of interchange has begun, how it is maintained and whether both parties are able to concentrate on the same things. Clarity of speech may not lead to clarity of understanding. In fact, all we can do is approximate our general assessment of what has been exchanged.

The process of information exchange is filled with static noise and is consequently very indirect. Ironically, new ideas grow from this conflict. The clash between expectations, failure and success leads to more and often richer efforts to find common ground. And, there is no way of developing a simple formula that will magically overcome these challenges.

This article is excerpted from my new book and is copyright ©Ron Burnett 2012

Leadership and Learning in the 21st Century

The following speech was given at the recent European League of Institutes of Art Leadership Conference at Emily Carr University in December of 2011.

The Frontiers of our Dreams are no Longer the Same (Part Three)

Aquin develops a stringent critique of the Patriote rebellion. He analyses the weakness of the leadership, the lack of battlefield strategy, the sense he has that the Patriotes were looking for defeat — a masochistic response to both the possibility and potential for victory.

“What pains me about this rebellion is precisely the passivity of the loser — the noble and desperate passivity of someone who will never be surprised to lose, but who will be all at sea should he happen to win. What pains me even more is that their carefully botched adventure perpetuates, from  generation to generation, the image of a conquered hero. Some countries remember an unknown soldier, but we have no choice: the soldier we commemorate is famous in defeat, a soldier whose incredible sadness goes on working within us like a force of inertia.”12

*****

I have tried to share this sadness. But I cannot share it with the same intensity as people whose experience of history has been forged from generation to generation. I cannot expect myself, nor should others expect me, to internalize the history of Quebec as have the descendents of the original 30,000 French settlers. Mine is an abstract (though profoundly emotional) reading, born of a desire to know and understand. Similarly, there must be reciprocity, for if one national culture is to assert itself, with all of the contradictions which that entails, then it too must recognize other memories and other histories.

I am not one of those who believes that the national question can be obliterated. The struggle for identity can go in many different directions. At the root of this struggle, however, are the different strategies which we must all take to understanding, in a very personal sense, the role which we can play at the present time. Whether we are part of Québecois culture or not, we are still the recipients of the contradictions of memory, the idealizations and the errors of history and the ways in which history has been understood and acted upon.

One can talk, as many Québecois do, about a collective state of mind, which operates in most modern societies (zeitgeist ). This state of mind cannot be legislated. It can't be created exclusively through political activity. It cannot be constructed through the idealizations of the nationalist perspective. All of these elements, taken together, constitute a fragment of what it means to build up and recognize one's own subjectivity. But the space for subjective growth must not be narrowed to suit the exigencies of the moment. It is precisely this lack of historical perspective which worries me and which characterizes the almost evangelical quality of present-day nationalists. The debate which we have entered into in Quebec seems to be codified along very constricted lines. It is increasingly monological and deferential (e.g., witness the August 1991 Young Liberal Convention in which anybody who was not a nationalist was shouted down). It is a debate in which the future is only being discussed in the most abstract of ways. This is as much a result of an impoverished Canadian understanding of the present and the past, as of an insensitive nationalist movement which does not want to look at the complexity of what it is proposing.

*****

At one point in the book which Andrée Yanacopoulo wrote about her husband's death she describes how she and Aquin had read a book by Umberto Eco entitled, L'œuvre ouverte . Yanacopoulo says, and this is my translation: “What was so important to me about the book was the idea that all works of art, every kind of creative activity, is a transformation of the world and this implies the ability to be critical and distant at the same time. Eco tried to show that the success of a written text is dependent on how open it is. No work should try and explain itself completely. It should leave the possibilities for interpretation open to the reader while remaining structured.”13

It is this notion of openess which has to be introduced into the nationalist discourse. For it is clear that Aquin remained as sensitive to his desires for the independence of Quebec, as he did to his knowledge that it could not be achieved without a heightened appreciation of the complexities of historical knowledge. Among the many lessons which must drawn from his death, one of the most important is that no private act is ever less important than the public context into which it is finally placed. The future of Quebec has to be wrested from the politicians who have taken center stage in defining the rhetoric of change and returned to the people who will have to live with the consequences.

Postscript

This article was written in the 1990's. In September of 2012, the Parti Québecois again came to power and this time with a radical separatist agenda. The ideals of a separate country remain as vaguely articulated as they were in 1980 and 1995. The longing for identity and exclusivity is covered with the same rhetoric of the past as if the world has not changed. The simple equation of language and identity has in fact been reinforced. The Parti Québecois remains caught between a secular world and its roots as a party in the Québec of the 1960's.

13 Yanacopoulo and Sheppard, p. 247.

12  Aquin, The Art of Defeat, in Writing Quebec, p. 71.

Part One…

Part Two…

“The Frontiers Of Our Dreams Are No Longer The Same” Quebec Nationalism From An Anglophone Perspective

Part Two

Part One can be found here

Aquin wanted a total ‘national revolution’. He wanted to rebuild Quebec society from the bottom up. He wanted to start anew and this led him to analyse both the strengths and weaknesses of his own culture. He saw himself as a representative of the collective will of his people with all of the contradictions which that entails. This is an attractive formulation, a somewhat religious one in fact. It may explain the dark paradox of Aquin's suicide. He offered himself to the Quebec people as myth and this is inevitably the site of a death. No one individual can ever be the nation just as the nation can never be understood or experienced through one person, although we have witnessed many efforts to create and sustain the possibility of that myth (from Lenin and Stalin through to Mao, Thatcher, Reagan, and so forth). In death all of these ambiguities are frozen. In life they undergo neverending change which alters the myth, perhaps fundamentally.

Aquin experienced this gap in a very personal way. He grew frustrated with the slowness of change, with the time it takes for any community to alter its norms and values. His death was premature and a profound loss but its ambiguity may be at the heart of the dilemma which many people face in Quebec right now. The simple terms within which national identity is presently being laid out means that any considerations about the future have to be deferred. It will suffice, the modern nationalist argument goes, to regain what has been lost, to live in our own country.

In a time when the very concept of the nation is undergoing complete change, when the ideals of the market economy have triumphed over all other ideologies, when Quebeckers voted for a trans-national system of free trade, no border is secure, no identity untouched. Nationalism in Quebec will prosper if its discourse remains frozen and resistent to the shifts of history, if it engages with the myths of its own ideology as if they have become real. As Eduardo Galeano has so brillantly argued: “What it all comes down is that we are the sum of our efforts to change who we are. Identity is no museum piece sitting stock-still in a display case, but rather the endlessly astonishing synthesis of the contradictions of everyday life.”3 

*****

My voice is white, male, middle class, immigrant. I have spent most of my life in Quebec. I have married here and my children go to school in this province. However, beyond the stridency and simplicity of labels like anglophone or francophone the question of my identity cannot be reduced to the superficial boundaries of the nationalist debate and this applies as much to Quebec as to Canada. To say that I am either Québecois or Canadian is a caricature of the complexity of my daily life, a rather inept and derivative approach to the quandries of self and other. But I also recognize that the terms of the debate have been set, though the agenda remains uncertain. It is just not enough to respond to the national question in Quebec with an air of complacency, to retreat and then deal with all of the contradictions as if they have come from an elsewhere  beyond intellectual reasoning or control.

To me the history of Quebec is full of extraordinary ambiguity, ranging from a long tradition of social justice to crass anti-semitism, from democratic practices to extreme forms of authoritarianism, from an exemplary openess to other cultures to narrowness and intolerance. This is not the place to examine all of these shifts, suffice to say that nationalists are rewriting this past in order to imagine a  radically different future. Yet there is something troubling about the strategy of post-referendum (1980) nationalists, something which Aquin anticipated in the 1970's. There is a desire to downplay the heterogeneity of identity, to eliminate the contradictions of historical change, to freeze perceptions of Quebec's situation as if it has not evolved or undergone some fundamental shifts over the past thirty years.

It is one of the errors of the nationalist movement to presume that all of this complexity can be magically excised through the political process. On the other hand, I would also say that the national imaginary cannot be rejected as irrational. The desire to find some coherence in the maelstrom of activities, thoughts and hopes which any community experiences at an individual and collective level must not be dismissed. To do so would be to deny the role of the community in building an image for itself — to deny the necessity of identity as a cultural, social and political process. Yet even as I say this, I am aware that the terms themselves (the social, for example) have been depleted in meaning by the very activities which should be enriching them. The polarities at work here, most fully symbolised by the terror which has been unleashed in the former Yugoslavia, cannot be resolved within the framework of nationalist ideologies. The nation then, must be seen as a contingent formation and this inevitably creates serious problems for those beholden to its mythic underpinnings.

“When we look at ideas about national identity, we need to ask, not whether they are true or false, but what their function is, whose creation they are, and whose interests they serve.”4 White's point is central and it is at the heart of many of the criticisms which have been made of nationalists in Quebec, but it leaves out the crucial need which the community of men and women in this province feel for some kind of place which they can truly call their own. This is perhaps the biggest illusion of them all, but it is also the most powerful. Ownership of place is bound up with an imagined sense of community beyond the more direct relationship of self to the immediate environment in which one lives.

People living in the Montreal suburb of Outremont do not call themselves Outremontais. We don't identify ourselves, in the sense of nationhood, with the street which we live on, or the highrise we occupy, or even the suburb we inhabit. It would be absurd to do so and yet these are a few of the most direct instances of attachment to community.

Concretely, we co-exist with small groups of people in relatively small social and economic configurations. Yet there is a longing to extend that into something greater, a sovereign realm beyond our immediate control. The only way in which that can be done is through an imagining, through a fantasy of place and then through a conferral of identity from self to an-other. Concretely this means giving over one's identity to politicians who are meant to incarnate what we ourselves lack, or cultural figures who are supposedly more in tune with what we share, than what differentiates us. But this conferral also produces a sense of loss, an almost inescapable feeling that place  is not enough. The national imaginary is rarely satisfied with the geographic and psychological boundaries it finally creates, which may explain its link to expansionism and violence.

*****

The “eternal” search for Quebec, for a sovereign nation somehow above and beyond the contradictions of class interest or gender or ethnic background, reflects a desire to create a homogeneity which the social, economic and cultural practices of Quebec have long ago left behind. But a crisis of identity, of self and community is characterized precisely by this kind of contradiction. Ambiguity is the motor force, is what impells the nationalist tide to be caught in the past and to long for a utopian future, is what allows projections into the past and future to effectively deny the present.

“Finally it [the nation] is imagined as community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices?”5

Hubert Aquin asked himself the same question in his very important essay entitled, “The Cultural Fatigue of French Canada,”6 in which he responded to Pierre Elliot Trudeau's (Prime Minister of Canada in the 1970’s and early 1980’s) critiques of Quebec nationalism in the early 1960's.

“I agree with him that nationalism has often been a detestable, even unspeakable thing: the crimes committed in its name are perhaps even worse than the atrocities perpetuated in the name of liberty. In the nineteenth century, the resurgence of nationalistic feeling was marked by wars which gravely tarnished every possible form of nationalism and any system of thought stemming from it…”7

At the same time, Aquin asserts that there is no necessary causal relationship between war and nationalism and that the concept of a national culture cannot be reduced, in a functional sense, to an anticipated future based on a sordid past. If nationalism is unpredictable, it is precisely because it unleashes forces of history which are already in place and which cannot be eradicated by an act of will or by legislation.

This is a crucial argument because it suggests that the errors of looking to the political arena for a solution to the national question are being replicated in the federal sphere as well. It makes little sense to argue against the nationalist use of the state as a vehicle for independence, when the federal state is asserting its right to proceed in the same manner, albeit with a different concept of the national heritage.

Aquin is also very clear about the heterogeneity of Quebec culture and how immigration has changed the national character. The specificity of Quebec culture long ago dissolved into pastiche, into a hybrid of cultures derived from many parts of the world. It took well into the 1960's before all of the historically embedded institutional practices of the state, the educational system, and the church recognized the characteristics of the shifts which had taken place. Quebec reinvented itself during the post-war period and as it became more cosmopolitan, less xenophobic, more distinctively modern than any part of Canada, nationalists who were partially responsible for the changes grew fearful of the consequences.

Continuity and discontinuity can co-exist. It is possible to be a nationalist and still long for the heterogeneity of many cultures. Simultaneously it is possible to deny the results of the mix, to deny difference, to be frightened by the new images of self, negate the reinventions and transform the perception of change into a harbinger of danger.

Continuity and discontinuity. Part of what is so attractive about nationalism is the way in which it preserves the past, the way it transforms complex questions of identity into simple answers about community and self. Although, as Benedict Anderson has so cogently argued, adherence to a community larger than one's immediate circle is only possible at a mythic level, this doesn't prevent or inhibit large numbers of people from believing that the interests of the community at large are also their own.

Self and identity — these are fluid, ambiguous, often contradictory concepts yet they are bandied about by present-day nationalists as a currency of exchange, a political lexicon utilized to gain votes. But identity can no longer be talked about in the singular, for what is driving this nation-state-province forward at the moment are the many conflicting identities which are at its very heart. The desire to purify these conflicts, to rid the present of the differences which constitute it, to protect a culture which no longer carries the same messages it did even fifteen years ago, is rooted in a nostalgia for a past seen as simpler and more manageable.

The difficulty is that there is no turning back. As the environment deteriorates, as urban life becomes less and less amenable, as the complexity of modern life accelerates and solutions seem ever more distant, nationalist ideology seems to suggest the possibility, if not the probability, of control.  No better evidence of this than the recent speech by Lorraine Pagé, head of the Quebec Teacher`s Federation, in which she extolled the virtues of a Quebec somehow free of all the restrictions which now prevent it from realising itself — a kind of pastoral myth of togetherness and harmony in a new Quebec produced by the magic of independence. Many of the submissions to a recent Quebec government commission on the constitution echoed this concern, this need to create a new territory (both geographical and psychological) in which the sacred characteristics of the Québecois identity could be enshrined in a political form and in which a measure of authority could be regained over social and economic processes which have become increasingly fragile.

The paradox is that there is a vast gap between the way individuals create their own identity and the way political institutions respond. The structural differences between community, family, the individual and the state are vast and usually fraught with contradiction and conflict.

What makes the nationalist movement think that these contradictions can be overcome? This, it seems to me is a crucial question which cannot be evaded, because it deals with power and the relationship between the state and the individual. Would a uniquely Québecois territory be different from the present? Are there political models being discussed which point the way to new social and economic configurations which would fundamentally transform existing power relations?

These questions mesh with another. What are the conditions upon which, through which the new self can be constructed? In other  words is the state, in its present form, a vehicle for genuine transformation? The tendency is to see this process as inevitable. Change will occur because the identification of the individual with the state will be so strong in an independent Quebec, it will overcome hitherto serious problems of an economic, cultural and linguistic nature. This leads to an even more complex irony. The state, now sovereign, will cease to be instrumental and manipulative and instead will work for the betterment of the social whole. Presumably these conditions are not in place at the moment, but this is a projection which can only be tested  by the experience of independence.

*****

Nationalists turn to language as the unifying force upon which a new and more culturally homogeneous nation can be built. This assertion has been a consistent feature of the nationalist argument. I am by no means suggesting that language is not the focal point for a community's perceptions of itself and of others. But it is not the simple bulwark which nationalists have made it out to be. In fact language is a contradictory site of identity because there is no simple, transparent link between the rhetoric of the day and its interpretation by the community at large. More often than not language acts as a support for the community but at an abstract level. The lived relations which make up everyday life have a specificity of which language is a part, but not the whole. For example, the power relations in a factory will not change radically if the workers are encouraged to speak in their mother tongue. As the new global economy suggests, it is not language at a simple level which empowers. The problem is far deeper than that and is centred on the political economy of capitalism and the market economy. Gender relations are not solely dependent on language. Language does not exist in a sovereign realm and this is confirmed by the endless debates in the courts about the interpretation of laws or the circular arguments around the meaning of national identity.

The power of language resides with its practicioners. Language is an expression of identity and laws can be enacted to protect a language, but the law cannot reach into all the spheres which a community uses to define itself.

*****

As I have said Aquin described a profound sense of fatigue among the Québecois, an ambivalence which simultaneously seeks both independence and dependence. “…they [Québecois] want simultaneously to give in to cultural fatigue and to overcome it, calling for renunciation and determination in the same breath. If anyone needs to be convinced of this, he need only read the articles our great nationalists have written — profoundly ambiguous speeches in which one can scarcely distinguish exhortations to revolt from appeals for constitutionality, revolutionary ardour from willed obedience. French-Canadian culture shows all of the symptoms of extreme fatigue, wanting both rest and strength at the same time, desiring both existential intensity and suicide, seeking both independence and dependency.”9

At the centre of this malaise and ambivalence, lies a concern for linguistic sovereignty — language as the people — the identity of the people through their language. But any language is alive with paradoxes, not the least of which is that it cannot protect a culture against change, nor against a variety of evolutionary forces. The Québecois have always assumed that they live on a continent awash in English, but in fact there are hundreds of languages spoken in North America, and this is reflected not only at the level of dialect, but in the history of rural and urban settlement. English is dominant, but to what degree would independence change the defensive structures already in place in Quebec? 

Crucially, language may be that which unites a diverse grouping of people into a sense of completeness, but it is also that which imprisons its practicioners. For language is never simply the site of a possession — language is not like private property. Language is not a ‘natural’ characteristic of a community, it is the product of social practices which survive, of necessity, through consensus and conflict. There is no perfect moment of language as both the motor force and protector of a culture. And what must be understood here is that most languages develop through their relationship to other languages. This lack of isolation is creative and without it many languages would long ago have died out. The tension here is between that which is perceived to be foreign and that which is not, and the struggle to keep these elements separate and yet somehow contingently related, is at the heart of the fatigue which Aquin talks about.

There is a lack of stability to the relationship between identity and language and this produces a profound sense of dispossession . It is as if there is a built-in limitation to what appears to be an almost natural linkage. Since identity is never stable and needs to be worked on in a continuous way, it becomes clear that the question of identity will never be solved. This may explain the repetitive and cyclical nature of the independence movement. But it does not explain it away. Nor should it.

“I myself am one of these ‘typical’ men, lost, unsettled, tired of my atavistic identity and yet condemmed to it. How many times have I rejected the immediate reality of my own culture? I wanted total expatriation without suffering, I wanted to be a stranger to myself, I used to reject the very surroundings I have finally come to affirm. Today I tend to think that our cultural existence can be something other than a perpetual challenge, and that the fatigue can come to an end. This cultural fatigue is a fact, a disquieting, painful reality, but it also may be the path to immanence. One day we will emerge from the struggle, victorious or vanquished. One thing is certain: the inner struggle goes on, like a personal civil war, and it is impossible to be either indifferent or serene about it. The struggle, though not its outcome, is fatal.”10

*****

I am aware that I am treading very carefully through a minefield of complex issues here. I want to avoid the strategically chosen ahistoricism of many Canadian federalists. The pain which Aquin expressed has its roots in a set of memories which I do not share but with which I must co-exist. In this context it is just not enough to simply acknowledge  that the British conquered Quebec in 1759. It is not enough to dismiss a crucial moment in the history of Quebec as if that dismissal will, in a simple sense, rid us of the memory. 

In 1759 there was a war here, run by a General who had learned his tactics from the Duke of Cumberland. Wolfe served under Cumberland at Culloden in 1746 during which thousands of Scottish highlanders were brutally killed. It was a Catholic revolt led by Bonnie Prince Charlie and it provoked the British not only to fight, but to practice a form of genocide, and this, on their own fair island. It is not surprising that Wolfe described the French settlers in Quebec as so much vermin, that he pillaged their farms and burnt them down. (One estimate suggests that nearly 1500 farms were burned to the ground, an enormous number for such a small population.)

The memory of Culloden is etched into Scottish identity, inscribed in their sense of history and self. Why is it so inconceivable to the non-Québecois or to the anglophone living here for the conquest to be remembered in the same way?

Or what of the Patriote rebellion in 1837 and 1838? It is true that the convulsions of that period have been romanticized. It is also true that this was not exclusively or solely a French rebellion. Americans, Scots, Irish and Aboriginal peoples were involved. But this was a war of liberation, an attempt to take possession of Quebec, an attempt by an indigenous peoples to achieve, with violence, what they had not been able to achieve through peaceful means. Listen to Lord Durham in 1839 — the famous report:

“Is this French Canadian nationality one which, for the good merely of that people, we ought to strive to perpetuate, even if it were possible? I know of no national distinctions marking and continuing a more hopeless inferiority…. It is to elevate them from that inferiority that I desire to give to the Canadians our English character….”11

Durham clearly states that he wants to obliterate the minority . Why should these events be erased from the memories of the Québecois? This is a question which cannot be answered by those who do not share a similar sense of the past. The point here is that no one has the right to expect that the Québecois will simply eradicate that past to suit the present, in the same way that we would not want to eliminate the fact that in 1867 Canada was formed as a country. Certain historical moments take on a foundational character and it is rather superficial to suggest that some should be eliminated while others are retained.

Aquin develops a stringent critique of the Patriote rebellion. He analyses the weakness of the leadership, the lack of battlefield strategy, the sense he has that the Patriotes were looking for defeat — a masochistic response to both the possibility and potential for victory.

“What pains me about this rebellion is precisely the passivity of the loser — the noble and desperate passivity of someone who will never be surprised to lose, but who will be all at sea should he happen to win. What pains me even more is that their carefully botched adventure perpetuates, from  generation to generation, the image of a conquered hero. Some countries remember an unknown soldier, but we have no choice: the soldier we commemorate is famous in defeat, a soldier whose incredible sadness goes on working within us like a force of inertia.”12

3 Eduardo Galeano, “Celebration of Contradictions” in The Book of Embraces , (New York: Norton, 1991), p.125.

4 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980, (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p.viii

5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1983), p. 16.

6 Hubert Aquin, Writing Quebec: Selected Essays by Hubert Aquin, ed. by Anthony Purdy, (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1988), pp. 19-48.

7 Aquin, p. 21.

9 Aquin, p.42

10 Aquin, p.42

11 Lord Durham's Report, quoted in The Imaginary Canadian, by Tony Wilden, (Vancouver: Pulp Press, 1980), p. 71. This little known book deserves a larger audience. It was written by one of Canada's most brillant social theorists, whose texts in Communications theory and Psychoanalysis have become classics and been recognized in most countries except Canada.

12  Aquin, The Art of Defeat, in Writing Quebec, p. 71.