Memorial for a Student

“The elements do not answer in the place where they are interrogated, or more exactly, as soon as they are interrogated somewhere, it is impossible to grasp them in their totality” –Jacques Lacan quoted by Shoshana Felman


I don’t feel as though I knew Scott very well, but there are sometimes paths of relationship between teachers and students that neither side understands completely.

I didn’t know him until his senior year, when I worked with him in a tiny seminar in the first semester and as advisor for his senior thesis project in the second. We spent a lot of time in my office, because the seminar was small enough to meet there and then we held our thesis meetings there. When he got to my office he usually seemed to be holding himself in, restraining an onslaught of thoughts and ideas that would soon overflow after a perfunctory period of listening to me try to frame the issues for our class discussion or conference. When I think of Scott he’s always in motion—striding into my office, yes, usually barefoot, rocking a bit in his chair as he stared at some point unseeable to the rest of us, or at least to me, and unleashed a pack of ideas about sound, music, identity, politics, identity politics, hip hop, Beck, M. I. A., Brittany Spears, Plato’s Phaedrus. Some Buddhists talk about imagining the self not as a container of thoughts, but as a point through which thoughts pass. For some reason when I think about Scott I think of my office as a point through which he passed, through which some, probably not all that many, of his thoughts passed. But it’s an image of movement, of direction, of energy. Of coming from and going to places that I had no access to, before and after glancing and invigorating points of contact.

Here’s something else that thinking about Scott helps me to see. Students recognize their incompleteness. Indeed, ideally, it energizes them. Some teachers teach because of the fantasy that they can offer their students some kind of completion. Others, like me, teach because of an equally phantasmatic identification with the students’ sense of incompletion, and their comfort with it. For me, Scott became a special embodiment of this capacity for being moved and motivated by things one doesn’t completely understand. Everytime Scott came into talk it was about something different. His continually palpable excitement and intelligence were in some ways the only continuous things about his intellectual life, for generally he’d show up wanting to talk--effusively, wondrously, skeptically, angrily--about something new.

As teachers, we have to set assignments for students, with due dates. Working with them on their senior theses, we sometimes have to cajole them into developing their ideas, staying focused, getting their drafts and final version in on time. This didn’t always work so well with Scott. Even as the final deadline approach, each week tended to bring in a new overall argument, a wholly new take on various facets of the phenomenon called pop music, as embodied in a frequently shifting set of figures and texts. He was one of those challenging students who can’t stop—can’t stop thinking, reading, writing, listening, feeling, talking. And here’s the thing: Scott threatened to blow my cover, reveal my secret—that I’m not that interested in making them stop. He knew so well that completion is a convenient fiction. He knew so well that minds don’t stop working because a week’s reading on the syllabus is done, because a page limit has been reached, because a due date has arrived. He probably knew, however unconsciously, how uncomfortable I was with the part of my job that demands that I be an officer of the law, that I impose limits and insist that certain conventions be followed.

And I probably knew that he knew. But at the time, we silently agreed to perform ignorance about all this knowledge. And I’m glad to have shared in this performance, and to have experienced the kind of pedagogical and personal relationship that it enabled.