The Teacher as Bag Lady

Abstract

At the end of what Walker Percy (1983) calls the Century of the Self, we are painfully aware of a diminishment, what Wesley Kort has called the shriven self and Christopher Lasch has called the minimal self.1 dominant emotion of such a being is dis appointment. For Percy, we are in the Cosmos because of our fundamental predicament as self-conscious sign-mak ers who are unintelligible to ourselves. He writes, The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally (107). Indeed, in a postmodern world, there may not even be any self left?only an empty self to be filled by the endless con sumption of the products of the culture industry. Accordingly, we occupy sub ject positions rather than maintain a coherent self. In some discourses, we are described as linguistically constituted and disseminated human subjects. Is that reassuring? I am not sure. In any event, here are one lost and homeless teacher's meditations upon teaching and learning, a quester for helpful images or metaphors for teaching in a time of bewilderment and challenge. Joyful melancholy indeed!