Performance of Affect: American Style

I apologize that my vision has shrunk. At this point in the middle of the workweek, my gaze has shifted downward, so I can find nothing to write or think about except my place of employment, and the goings on there. I sometimes hope as an expatriate/exile from the empire living in a foreign land I am, in some ways, more in the center of things than I would be at home....

Yesterday we suffered through another magnificent "Staff Meeting" here at the Pretty Good International School.

Meetings come at the end of a long workday, so my patience is not exactly overflowing.

In some ways our meeting was a perfect illustration of one of the theses of Michael Alpert, he of PARECON fame, that in our capitalist world, the managerial class always comes to meetings better prepared than the workers.

Certainly, I felt that way when I was hit with a badly written so-called "mission statement" written by the ruler of an empire of international schools. The document was so over-written that it couldn't passEnglish 101 without a re-write. Excessive, puffy language--filled with pompous self-importance.

Our fearless leader, the local answer to Maggie Thatcher, called on class members (actually teachers) to suggest what they'd change to make the document more human. Plainly, she'd prepared her own re-write in advance.... My colleagues enthusiastically took advantage of a chance to participate in immortality.

Oddities in the text included the assertion that "group interaction" and "independent endeavor" were universally recognized virtues. As if there were not intense debates in the social sciences about what might be universal, and how you might prove such a proposition... As if there were no such data as that reported in "Schooling in Capitalist America", data suggesting that teachers and bosses in the US care more about whether workers follows orders than whether he or she has any capacity for independent thought or creativity . ..

But then, the whole meeting was the demonstration of a certain fascistic American groupthink: teachers enthusiastically acted out the roles dictated to them (implicitly at times) by our version of Maggie Thatcher. Public emotion displays--on demand.

Footnote: Aneta Pavlenko has some interesting things to say about this in her Emotions and Multilingualism--the first chapter of which is available for free at the CAmbridge University Press's web site. She points out that as English spreads, so too do Anglo-Saxon ways of performing affect....and she is judicious enough not to spend too much time asking if that's a good thing....(Though I would like to....)