feeling theory

I’m preparing to teach an undergraduate seminar that I run every year called “What is theory and why should it matter to photographers?” I’ve been reading what bell hooks has to say about teaching theory, and am moved by her suggestion that it can be not just useful, or even transformative, but healing:

 

I came to theory because I was hurting… I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend – to grasp what was happening around and within me… When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes evident is the bond between the two – that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other.

(‘Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom,’ pp.59&61.)

 

Language is power, and what I try to get across to students is that finding words (sometimes necessarily difficult, obscure, complicated words) to articulate the known but unsaid or unacknowledged can be part of a process of positive self-actualizion for photographers (and anyone else) in their practice.

The very first time I taught this particular session, I was dumbfounded when a student responded with genuine tears of relief, there in the seminar, to the suggestion that there was a theoretical (ie. political) discourse that affirmed and articulated the extreme tension he often felt when assigned to photograph people living with poverty, sickness or exclusion. That this ethical unease – the struggle to negotiate responsibly the power relationship between photographer and subject – had a name (broadly, the ‘politics of representation’), was for him a source of freedom. It equipped him to be a better photographer.

At the other end of the spectrum, the last time I taught this seminar, I asked students to talk to me about their experience of reading a (particularly obscure) Roland Barthes essay. One student responded with anger, saying it “made me feel stupid.” Our task as a group was then to discuss how we could negotiate a position in relation to texts like this that would be productive and empowered instead of paralyzing and frustrating (we’re still working on it).

Both of these simple examples show that theory is powerful – emotionally as well as politically. It’s no exaggeration to say that, depending on how it is handled, it can either be part of what hooks calls the ‘practice of freedom,’ or a totally alienating obstacle. Both examples also show me that her determination to resist the false dichotomy between intellect and emotion in the pursuit of knowledge is brave and essential.

 

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