EDUCATIONAL THEORY Summer 1989. Vol. 39, No. 3 0 1989 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Beauty Full Curriculum By Madeleine R. Grumet

I taught a really beautiful class the other night. It was one of those nights when everything came together. This is a course in theatre in education. The students are graduate students at the University of Rochester. Many of them are teachers. We have been working with a method of developing improvisational scores that invite readers to interpret a piece of literature and to perform their understanding of its problems. The scores are difficult to shape. They require a firm and clear set of rules if participants are going to know what to do and if the action is to be pointed toward specific values in the text. They also must leave space for individual and collective action and choice. We have been reading Langer, Sartre, Heidegger, and Vygotsky as well as working with poetry that the students brought in as the texts for their scores. At our preceding meeting we had worked for the full three hours with Kathy Button’s score for “The Ghost-Eye Tree,” designing, performing, and redesigning it, until it captured the terror, contingencies, and relationships that filled the world of this poem. But on the night that was really beautiful, it was clear that finally, after seven weeks of false tries and my cheerful but relentless criticism and murky instruction, they got it. The scores came quickly. When they weren’t adequate, the students, not I, were the ones to come up with solutions. When we performed their scores, they carried us into the texts like an express train, and when we looked across the room at each other at the end of class, we were astonished and moved by the power of the performances we had shared and with our achievement. It was complete.

Unfortunately, the academic term does not dance to the rhythms of aesthetic pedagogy. The course felt finished for me. How could I follow an act like that? Well, that is a queston that I will return to later, but at the outset it seemed important to confess my own use of the “beautiful” as standard for my own pedagogical practice before I proceed to wriggle out of its false comfort.

Of course any definition of an aesthetic standard is going to make us feel uncomfortable. My narrative of this beautiful class is here because it provides at least token testimony to the immediacy and specificity of aesthetic experience. We face a constant dilemma in aesthetic education. We are educators. And because we have chosen to be teachers, researchers, curriculum theorists and not painters, musicians, and directors, we deliberately submit our practice and our production to general, cultural interpretations that provide standards for the good, the wise, the competent. I am an educator; the world I want to change is here now. Doubting posterity, and dodging death, I do not have the patience to shape virtual forms that will achieve existential reference one hundred years from now. As educators we are constantly mediating the space between the individual and the collective, the specific and the general, the cohesive community and rebellious subjectivity. But the events and relations that constitute pedagogy are always specific, and any general language that we generate for them will always diminish them.

Although I may find Elliot Eisner’s standard of connoiseurship vulnerable to an elitist interpretation and application, my resistance to it is also rooted in my suspicion of its generalization. Nevertheless, I am grateful for this gift from him that I never quite receive, for without some categorical language for the processes and purposes of aesthetic education we cannot negotiate with the other interests in the curriculum, and we lose ground by default, as he well understands. In this meditation on the meaning

Correspondence: Office of the Dean, School of Education, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY 11210.

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and significance of beauty in curriculum theory and practice, I join him in the search for words with the double reference that addresses both what is particular about aesthetic practice and general about educational policy.

The beautiful. Commenting on its Latin roots, Shipley addresses its bond to goodness:

Those that see a connection between beauty and goodness (good was once spelt God) may go beyond the usual dictionary, which traces the word through ME, bealte, beute to L. bellus, beautiful. For bellus is from benelus, dim, of benus, from bonus, good. Hence the beautiful and the beneficial are etymo- logically linked. On the other hand, it should be remembered that L. bellum means war.’

It is troubling to follow the history of this word that frames our ideals and aspirations back into a past that links the beautiful and the good to the violence and destruction of war. But such contradictions should not surprise us, for the beautiful confers value on things, value that pulses with emotion and may be grabbed if not given. The beautiful is ideology incarnate, for it is when ideology saturates the material aspects of our existence that it is most persuasive and intransigent. Ideology that saturates the body organizes the unconscious, where it prevails. Etymology can rarely reveal the exact historical moment when the word splits from the deed, when form sets the rhythm and direction on intentionality, but it can give us a sense of their dance through time. This brief history names the aesthetic and moral themes that meet in the beautiful as the good gathers up eidetic form from its isolation in reflection and places it right in the middle of human relations. This is the junction of curriculum theory, this place where form and feeling and politics meet, and so like the old clock at the Biltmore, it is a good place for us to get together.

Nevertheless, roots can be misleading, suggesting stronger family ties than common parentage warrants. The family history gets more complicated when Shipley traces beautiful back to its Indo-European root, deu. This ancestor fosters both process and product when it is extended into words extolling human action, as well as the social consequences of endeavor. It leads to the Greek root dyna. Dynamic, dynamite, and dynamo provide the action, and dynasty marks the material power and wealth that is its reward. In the Latin version this story of human action is granted divine compensation as power slips from this earthy province to a more heavenly one. Shipley traces the Latin beare, beaturn, present in our words bless and beatify, to the root deu as well. Beatrice, whose divine beauty inspired Dante, incorporated divine power with female pulchritude. Her being encodes a power that she does not create nor deploy, a power inscribed in her loveliness that, nevertheless, points her to its source. Italian and French uses of the word belle extend the contradiction of this sign which marks a power it does not have. The pretty ladies who bear its designation are not the authors of their text. If their appearance is a front for someone else’s power, deity, or dynasty, their femininity is, as well, constituted by their contingency.

The beau is an attendant to such a woman, but the happy coincidence of femininity with beauty is not so happy when beauty is linked to masculinity. Neither father nor husband, the “beau” is taken in by her appearance, so much so that he collapses into it, becoming appearance himself; he is the “fop” or “dandy” whose appearance testifies to the absence of power: hence the beau geste, the act without profit, the epitome of the eloquent but false gesture.

I suggest that the suffix “ful” does not merely extend beauty’s amplitude, but that instead it contradicts its emptiness. Beautiful is a paradox, a battle of root and suffix, idea and world that is mediated in its realization to our deep relief and satisfaction.

This slide from act to appearance leaves us with an idea of the beautiful that is a

1. Joseph Shipley, Dictionary of World Origins (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945). 44. Also see his The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

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memorial to human agency. The beautiful is our attempt to recover action for thought by bonding the sensuous, the material, the dynamic to form. What is so compelling about the beautiful is not what is present, but its evocation of what is absent.'

Psychoanalytic theory is postulated on absence. It portrays infants and mothers as engaged in an undifferentiated fusion that they must abandon and, ultimately, mourn. This somewhat sticky bonding misrepresents the complex interactions and reciprocities that current research ascribes to the infant/mother r-elati~n.~ This putative symbiosis is used to simultaneously denigrate and sentimentalize maternity and mother love. From Freud to Lacan, fusion is both exaggerated and depracated, and the politics of differentiation which mark relations to the father are valori~ed.~

Object relations theory suggests that the project of reclamation, or integration, yearns to recapitulate the preoedipal intimacies, figurelground fusions, and synaethesias of infancy, that time before speech, before form, before law.5 The deep comfort of the beautiful is the promise that we can get back what we gave up, so that we can keep form and reclaim that buzzing confusion that it replaced in our cognition. That is the poignancy of Fitzgerald's final paragraphs in The Great Gatsby:

As the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

As Fitzgerald imagines the shores of Long Island as it may have appeared to those who saw it before colonization, the new world becomes the preoedipal mother, the world before culture, before history, before form. The sadness of this story is bonded to romance, the home of the beautiful. It is Gatsby's beau geste. It is his fruitless attempt to outflank history, culture, technology, capitalism, and law as he pursues beauty:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And one fine morning-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Here is Fitzgerald's sad discovery. The myth of innocence, of reunion with the preoedipal mother has collapsed into the histories of a mature adult and a decadent

2. This is Herbert Marcuse's defense of beauty in The Aesthetic Dimension (New York: Beacon Press, 1978), where he attributes the capacity to criticize contemporary culture and politics to remembrance of another possibility: "The authentic utopia is grounded in recollection" (p. 73).

3. Daniel N. Stern, The interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 4. Madeleine R. Grumet, Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching (Amherst: University of Massachu-

setts Press, 1988). 5. Although we are grateful to psychoanalytic theory for showing us how the relations of the

infant to those who care for him shape ego, cognition, and gender, we must recognize the romanticism that pervaded early accounts of the relations between the preoedipal infant and its mother.

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culture. Not only is reclamation thwarted, but the romance of unity, this myth of integration blinds us, as it did Gatsby, to the world we have.

Whereas the aesthetics of modernity, impressionism and expressionism, had reclaimed the specificity and vitality of an immediate consciousness, Fitzgerald’s despair acknowledges the material and cultural nature of that which is other to consciousness; it grants history to objectivity as well as subjectivity. Even though curriculum theory is drawn to phenomenology’s acknowledgment of consciousness in the constitution of the object world, phenomenology too flirts with the preoedipal mother, whom it imagines to be innocent and available, exempt from history.

Merleau-Ponty celebrates the “body-subject,’’ a knower who is not mesmerized by appearance but situated in her body in a material, sensual world that becomes meaningful as it is transformed into a ground of possible activity. Objectivity is not an appearance but the object of a robust, embodied intentionality. But phenomenology ultimately succumbs to the romance of the beautiful, in the assumption that we can return to things in themselves:

To return to things in themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learned beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.6

I have always loved that passage, probably because growing up in Brooklyn I never did learn beforehand what a forest, a prairie, or a river was and hoped they would still be around to discover after I had mastered the geography that would take me to them.

Despite John Dewey’s suspicion of beauty, even he, embodied, flung toward the future, focused on the here and now, could not escape its lure. Dewey did not trust beauty to integrate matter and form. He recognized that it contained a battle of idealism and materialism and expected that as an analytic category it would tumble into one of its ends.’ Dewey’s contextualism celebrates the “situation” of the body subject. Like Gatsby, Dewey thought he could get around it, could ignore the corruption of form, seeking an aesthetic in the intensified quality of situations which achieve a sense of wholeness and integration that is spontaneous, immediate, and bonded to the actor’s relations and perceptions. Barred from Dewey’s aesthetic by his vigilant suspicion of form, beauty slipped right through his defenses to the heart of his theory, disguised as unity and wholeness, otherwise known as the “beautiful”:

There is an old formula for beauty in nature and art: Unity in variety. . . . There is unity only when the resistances create a suspense that is resolved through cooperative interaction of the opposed energies. The “one” of the formula is the realization through interacting parts of their respective energies. The “many” is the manifestation of the defined individualizations due to opposed forces that finally sustain a balance. . . . For the unity in variety that charac- terizes a work of art is dynamic.8

By subordinating form to process in this contexualist aesthetic, the pragmatist hopes to trick history, slide right out from under it to situation, an existential unity that embraces art work, world, and interpreter; its quality obtains for its existential duration and develops in a stream of successive situations, each defined by its vividness, intensity,

6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962).

7. Stephen Pepper’s The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945) is the wonderfully concise and insightful source of these categories for this discussion. His concept of “formism” parallels Dewey’s sense of idealism, his concept of “mechanism,” Dewey’s sense of materialism.

8. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934), 161.

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and wholeness. His celebrations of harmonious, integrated situations recapitulate the sentimentalities of symbiosis in psychoanalytic theory. It is as if the preoedipal mother, that accessible sensuous, polymorphous other, has survived the child’s maturation, ready and waiting for reunion in an aesthetic situation. This epistemology imputes history and change to a body subject but hypostasizes its intentional object in an idealistic reverie. The knower may be embodied, contextual, historical, but the object is the unknown, the amorphous being, virgin land waiting to receive form from dynamic actors. Here again we find fantasies of infancy providing the template for adult aspirations and standards.

There never did exist a PREOEDIPAL MOTHER, “the fresh green breast of the new world” was eighteen or twenty-two or thirty-three years old. Maybe she was practicing her English as she nursed her newborn, or worrying about her older child’s chronic cough, or watching the soap operas to break the isolation and loneliness of child care. Maybe she was caring for the kids of the lady next door to meet the rent, or waiting for a letter from somewhere in the Pacific, or writing a biography of Queen Elizabeth. But those histories disappear when the world is collapsed into fantasies of fusion with the preoedipal mother. She is the other, the material, the sensuous, and so the object world is also stripped of history, motive, purpose. The romance of reunification is a fantasy of imposing the subject’s desire on a placid, impressionable other (mother, woman, world.)

Contextualism and its idealistic neighbor, organicism, share this yearning for unity and integration. A structuralist conception of meaning dominates each aesthetic. Structuralism recognizes only those elements whose relations are necessary to the characteristic form of the whole. In Dewey’s sense of dynamism, variety is pulled into opposites that balance each other and organize the whole. According to Pepper the organicist aesthetic is even more ambitious, for it aspires to draw all matter into a system of coherence, the more complex the matter, the more intricate the coherence, the better the work. “No detail can be removed or altered without marring or even destroying the value of the ~ h o l e . ” ~

This sense of the beautiful is present in conservative, liberal, and even radical curriculum discourse. The project of integration is articulated as we attempt to bring fullness to beauty. Student-centered instruction aims for integration when we turn to the matter of students’ daily experience to instantiate, legitimate, and inculcate the forms that constitute our culture and our knowledge. Ironically, a conservative curriculum, one that is comfortable within the confines of a particular tradition and admits its partiality, may come closer to the avant-garde’s challenge to beauty than the more liberal curriculum that aspires to draw diversity into coherence.

It will all come together, it will all come together. That’s how we reassure them. It all came together. It all came together. That’s how they reassure us.

Curricular models of integration and cohesion are numerous and persistent. General education and interdisciplinary studies are our most ambitious projects, as we admit a piebald, motley, heterogenous mess of matter and then labor to find the form that will integrate it all. Cognitive processing takes another tack. A cuisinart for curriculum, it emulsifies all matter so that it may be quickly appropriated and cheaply marketed under a generic label. The hermeneutic circle, for all its humanistic recursiveness, is obsessed with the beautiful, fusing those horizons, running back and forth between the parts and the whole, and the whole and the parts.

But most breathtakingly beautiful of all is hegemony, a totality that wipes out all action and difference at one sweep, reducing them to the appearance of particular interests, who like the blessed, like the belle, point to a power that does not reside with them.

In The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger’O attributes two properties to the

9. Pepper, The Basis of Criticism in the Arts, 79. 10. Peter Burger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1984).

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aesthetic of classical bourgeois romanticism that we can also identify as present in our concepts of curriculum. The very coherence and integration that bring the deep sigh, the tears to our eyes, are the consequence of an aesthetic conceived as distant from its society. Adorned in coherence, the beautiful achieves the illusion, critical theorists argue, that permits the beautiful to function as a compensation for the alienation of daily experience in a commodified chaos of blurbs, spots, sperms, and surrogates. Its exterior expresses its interior, its totality embraces its specificity, no matter how various; it is a coherent set of relations, a world unto itself. And so it is also drenched in sadness and nostalgia. It is always in this other world, remembered, imagined, intuited, but always lost to us.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory, Burger makes this distinction between classicists and the avant-garde:

Artists who produce an organic work treat their material as something living.They respect its significance as so thing that has grown from concrete life situations. For avant-gardistes, on the other hand, material is just that, material. Their activity initially consists in nothing other than killing the "life" of the material, that is, in tearing it out of its functional context that gives it meaning. Whereas the classicist recognizes and respects in the material the carrier of meaning, the avant-gardistes see only the empty sign, to which only they can impart significance. The classicist correspondingly treats the material as a whole, whereas the avant-gardiste tears it out of the life totality, isolates it, and turns it into a fragment.

The classicist produces work with the intent of giving a living picture of the totality. And the classicist pursues this intention even while limiting the represented reality segment to the rendition of an ephemeral mood. The avant- gardiste, on the other hand, joins fragments with the intent of positing meaning (where the meaning may well be the message that the meaning has ceased to exist)."

The avant-garde aesthetic that emerges is the montage, a collection of fragments that challenges the recipient to discern the principle of their contiguity. What are we after, it asks us. If these relations are not necessary, what is their justification?

Well, that may be fine, for them, the avant-garde artists, you say, but what about educators obligated to the good as well as the beautiful? This collection of fragments collapses into the ugly, the grotesque. Burger, too, acknowledges the possibility that the shock and terror that escort the response to a work that repudiates coherence, that fails to integrate its matter, your slip is showing, your food is dripping, your paper is too long, you lesson too short - will lead to disgust and a reaction that reinforces the most narrow and constricting schema for coherence, back to the Bible, the basics, back to beauty. But once the illusion of a natural coherence is shattered, even the Bible, even the Basics, even Beauty must make its case.

I may not have made mine. I initially intended to get back to that class, close the circle, finish the argument. But this is not a beautiful world. This is not a beautiful story, and this is not a beautiful paper.

11. Ibid., 70.

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