A Jeanne Site
A Jeanne Site
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: January 26, 2000
Faculty on the Site.
In response to a call for articles by the International Journal of Humanities and Peace, description of Love 1A, how and why it came into existence, and the role we would like to see for it in peace education.
Course came into existence as a natural response to students' discussions in a sociology of law class. The students were perplexed as to how to structure non-violent responses to structural violence. (The course emphasized structural violence, as illustrated in a broad variety of critical theory responses to Arrigo's Criminal Justice, Social Justice.) Curran, who had been at USC, working on her doctorate, when Leo Buscaglia taught Love 1A, responded to the confusion by recognizing a need for Buscaglia's course from the 1970s. She asked if the students wanted the course. They said yes. The College of Arts and Sciences agreed to offer it.
Like Buscaglia, Curran offered the course as an overload. But Dominguez Hills students in 2000 had less discretionary time than USC students of the 1970s. So Curran fit the course in love and peace together with a contemporary theory component that addressed directly the issue of non-violent responses to structural violence of institutions in the 21st Century. Buscaglia's work provided the practical component. Theory provided the critical distance necessary to understand the praxis and transfer the non-violent responses to other contexts.
After much experimenting, CSUDH settled on the title, Love 1A. (give Buscaglia's reasoning; bring in other sources, including classical) Reminded us of the "Make Love Not War" slogans of the 60s, especially when the Undergraduate Advisement Center called to ask if we were really teaching a course on "love making." We decided we were.
At this point we'd like to introduce a general overview of the theoretical topics covered in Love 1A, the links to structural violence and non-violent responses, and illustrate the conceptual ties between the theory and Buscaglia's treatment in his 1970s Love 1A. We could make this very brief or give more detail. In any event, we would like to include links that would provide most of this material to readers on the Internet who might have a similar interest in education for peace and a bibliography.
This interpretation is based on Jonathan Lear's Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, Harvard University Press, 1998. Lear offers an "Interpretation of Transference," p. 56 ff. At first glance this would seem to have little to do with discovering non-violent responses to the structural violence of institutions. But one of the advantages of Lear's writing is his ability to make psychoanalytic concepts clear to the non-psychiatrist.
According to Lear our culture lends particular emphasis to "knowingness." Movements like rational choice theory indicate the near sacred value we place on "knowledge" and "knowing," concepts that have a strongly positivistic connotation. Lear suggests that a tolerance of ambiguity, a tolerance and acceptance of "not knowing," "not rational," might more effectively guide us.
Although this position echoes a postmodernist perspective, it does not require a choice of postmodernism over positivism. It demands, instead, a tolerance for there being both rational and not rational stimuli to behavior. As we "steal" this concept for application to a sociological explanation of the structural violence of institutions, we come to see that Lear's understanding of transference allows us to see structural violence in a different light. Instead of an intent to harm, or a refusal to listen in good faith to a validity claim that highlights the harm, we can see structural violence as non-rational institutional behavior. That would bring us much more willingly to the discourse table to discuss non-violent responses to such institutional violence, for we would be able to separate the behavior from the intent.
The point of Lear's analysis is that the mind is restless, continually seeks out new permutations, new perspectives, and that there are non-rational expressions of such restless investigation of our world. Lear's conclusion is that we should acknowledge the importance of the non-rational and cease demanding that everything has a rational explanation.
We should like to apply that conclusion to the understanding of structural violence within our institutions:
When we superimpose requirements of rationality on this double set of acting out transference behaviors, that of those harmed by the regulations, and that of those enforcing them, we begin to sense the extent to which non-rational behavior permeates our institutions as clients and clerks interact in the normal institutional context.
One of Lear's conclusions is that awareness of the "knowingness" need our Western civilization cultivates will help psychoanalysts to refrain from too rapid interpretations of transference. But that conclusion also applies to the structural violence of institutions. Awareness of the extent to which "knowingness" infiltrates our need to rationalize could help those in positions of authority dispel some of the violence which results from the collective belief that somehow the "institution" is free from such obsessive irrationality. Through the transference Lear describes, we translate the non-rational obsession to the institution itself, creating structural violence.