parry 2

“The children of Mississippi need teachers who have high expectations and who actually believe in them.”

before i pick up margaret from the jackson int'l airport (up an running even with some of the roof missing) - a moment on "expectation" (we'll worry about belief later, i guess).

i have a serious problem with what expectation purports to effect, as well as the underbelly of the well-meaning mantra of "high expectation." as with my hair-splitting on the concept of encouragement, my worry is a worry about reality. and, to the extend that a mouthfull of postructuralists will parade in with statements like "all worries are worries of reality," or "there may not be anything real or non-imaginatory about the reality that you're trying to face up to, so let us have our balloons": my worry is that the projections of reality that i'm critical of are ones that are highly dissonant with a probability of functional actualization. that is: these myths of reality are different than those myths of reality on the grounds that these myths are observed to be true in the sense that they offer a more or less consistent explanation of the world, and those myths are observed to be false on the sense that they fail to match up with lived experience or even a plausible trajectory of lived experience. in other words: how does expectation negotiate the real? how does it re-emphasize the non-real? or, how sure are we of the playing field upon which we’re drawing our expectations?

expectation goes hand in hand with structures of power. in fact, the profession of an expectation is a projection of a power-relation (most of these are innoccuous, of course: "i expect you to wear pants"). however, this is exactly the space where i'm afraid of expectation (especially the wonders of high expectation) getting a bit too heavy-handed. for, in a world articulated by expectation, the terms of success are controlled and managed specifically by he or she who expects, and underdetermined by he or she who performs. this becomes a problem in many instances, but i'm particularly interested in the case where a separate, internally consistent articulation of performance, or utterance of subtance, is nevertheless brought forward by an individual or a culture, and disregarded due to its failure to reciprocate with the predetermined scope of expectation or high-expectation. at the end of the day, an overemphasis on expectation may curtail an individual’s ability to observe performance, especially the type of performance that is relevant to the performer but cannot be expressed in the expectation language of the expecting individual.

response 1: so we’re not supposed to have expectations?

i haven’t said this at all. i’ve said that i’m skeptical of expectation. i’m more worried about understanding the terms of success and performed success as articulated by a group itself, before i begin to have any confidence in what i can reasonably expect and how i can reasonably expect these things from them. however, even though i’m going to most definitely develop expectation systems as a reaction to my experiences – we are creatures of pattern – i’m more or less determined/committed to try my best to not put too much weight on expectation, and rather focus on observing and responding to things as they are, and not merely in reference to how i expect them to be.

with expectation, a performance by an individual or group is ontologically bound to either (1) fail expectation, (2) meet expectation, or (3) exceed expectation. with (1), the person doing the expecting is more worried about the absence of his or her own terms rather than the presence of what has actually been performed – and in the event that his or her own terms are irrelevant, he or she is at a huge risk of eclipsing substance with petty frustration. with (2), the person doing the expecting is more or less complacent about the success of the expectation model, and there’s a risk of not analyzing or being critical of its terms because the exchange is smooth (which may allow a long obsolete expectation system to go overlooked, because – while it fails to produce anything worthwhile for relations outside of its boundaries, or fails to distinguish those things being produced from the arbitrariness of its own scaffolding – it still gets the results that it wants). with (3) you run the risk of patronizing a group or individual by again measuring the performance with your own terms; again, the person doing the expecting may be vastly under-evaluating what does exist by being more or less surprised that there are performances that may exceed his or her pre-analysis of a group.

response 2: that’s not what that person meant; you’re just force-fitting it into some rehashed academic (or, gasp, post-academic) jargon.

often, there’s a huge disjoint between what a person intends to say, and what is actually expressed by the words used to convey that intent. i find the space between these two linguistic forces to be rather important. while i apologize that i’m more or less over-writing my way into this space, that does not mean that it does not exist. that what i wrote about at length above about the word "expectation" is not what a person meant by using the word "expecatation" is exactly my problem with the fact that words like “expectation” have been watered down to the afterthought of rhetorical reflex. it is a word of powerful consequence that translates into large scale behavioral trends that are hardly analyzed enough – which is why we’re saying words but not meaning that we’re saying them, or at least not worried about the effect of their meaning.

i’d go on – i’m sure – but it’s my bedtime. anyway: how's that for second-rate cultural theory?