"He seemed to be in the centre 1": Barry McKinnon's "The Centre" as postmodern document

by

Don Precosky

 

he Centre"(1995) is an account in poetry of Barry McKinnon's year in the Developmental Studies Centre of the College of New Caledonia, PrinceGeorge, B.C.2 In this telling, the reader finds McKinnon living out some key aspects of postmodernist theory, in particular the "event" explored by Derrida in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" and Foucault's notion of the objectification of the individual under the gaze of the expert.
cKinnon's title contains a double reference. Factually, the poem is about his year working in the Developmental Studies Centre. More broadly, it is also a consideration of the concept of "the center"-the place of meaning and focus in any human endeavour. Tied to this second reference is the issue of power. Who is allowed to declare the existence of a center? Does a center generate its own authority or is authority conferred upon it? If conferred, by whom? And, most importantly, when is a center a force for good; when is it a vehicle for the punitive exertion of power? I have attempted to use spelling to help sort out the duplicity of the poet's intent. When I write "Centre" I mean the physical space in which McKinnon worked. I use "center" to mean the larger concept. 3

n "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" Jacques Derrida painstakingly argues that at some recent moment thinkers have discovered the non existence of the "center":

up to the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure-or rather the structurality of structure-although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure-but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself. (278-79)


McKinnon's students are required to work in a "Centre" created with the intent of "orienting and organizing" their "Developmental Studies". Success4 at the Centre will prove that they have overcome their "developmental" difficulties (i.e grammar errors, poor spelling, etc.) and are fit for reintroduction into mainstream courses. It is intended to be the site of a kind of redemption. Ironically, the redemption which the poem reveals was entirely unanticipated by the Centre's planners.

The "event" to which Derrida refers did not, in fact, happen just once, nor can any one event be pointed to as the event, since to do so would be to create yet another false "center". The "event" has happened, and still happens, countless Arial as individuals discover that what has been presented to them as "an invariable presence" (279) is not really there and that the force which "was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure...but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure" (278) was merely illusory. McKinnon cryptically assigns himself "the task: to make visible" (46) the truth about "the Centre" and about centers in general. The difficulty is how to make visible what is, yet is not, there. The "Centre" does exist-it occupies a room and people come and go, doing work. But, it does not exist in the way it claims to exist. Observing students and faculty who are supposed to be working according to a "self paced" educational program, but who are, in fact, goofing off, McKinnon comments

human talk - sex and grammar, a happy lovely

world, an invention - a psycho/pathology - when someone's been

and been dreaming and when you wake, the center is there (48)

The center is "there" in the play and in the slippage of the original plan and structure. Some, generalizing about the state of the world, might see the disappearance of the center as tragic, a loss of meaning and focus which leads to chaos. As McKinnon observes it in this particular instance, the disappearance is an antidote for the gloom a close up analysis of the situation yields. In its small way this slippage shows the indomitability of the human spirit. "The Centre" is filled with observations of the "play," in both senses of the word, in this particular center. McKinnon comments that "the centre is fluid" (50). He records the "experts," all with advanced degrees in educational theory, as they "poke/at phones, recommend the proper tests, tape their clapper bells" (51) to stop them from ringing too loudly and disturbing the students writing their tests-a hazard in an "open concept" space. Though schooled in educational technology, these individuals did not think to simply unplug their modular phones or to adjust their volume controls. That their first response was to silence or at least stifle an irritant is a significant revelation of their mindset.

Most significantly, McKinnon realizes that "there is a point where authority must cheat its rules, get you through" (52). This realization shows that it is not merely the students and faculty who are not up to the skills demanded by the Centre. It is the Centre itself which is inadequate and must cheat to get by. It is an individual example of the Derridean event, which necessitates a shift in one's view of the center, a liberating shift:

Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely. (289)


Or, as McKinnon puts it, "real lessons are elsewhere of your own finding" (52). Experience replaces the pre-existent power of the Centre. The play in the Centre becomes a source of great insight. Ironically, it is by failing and, in a way, evaporating to nothingness, that the Centre reveals its real value:

No centre to teach, but becomes excuse that unbelievably

yields a value: the soft, human - the voices, a

result of that which contains them - a mask, a body, the centre-

a centre of the arbitrary unknown

(55)

nd this "arbitrary unknown" is preferable to the smug, abusive pseudo-certainty of "the Centre" because it offers endless possibility: "The movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there is always more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified" (Derrida 288).

Michel Foucault's analysis of the birth and evolution of modern institutions such as the mental hospital and the prison has done much to disarm those and other such institutions of the claim to inevitability and to neutral scientific logic. What were once seen to be solid and useful institutions created to serve a real human need have been unmasked as flawed and inconsistent. As Foucault has said,

a certain fragility has been discovered in the very bedrock of existence-even and perhaps above all in those aspects of it that are most familiar, most solid and most intimately related to our bodies and to our everyday behaviour (Foucault, "Two Lectures." Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977 . 80)

Again, McKinnon's poem shows a specific instance which illustrates the accuracy of postmodern analysis. More specifically, it shows that institutions take on an agenda of their own, separate from their stated goals and objectives. The poem also shows how people working within institutions are inevitably co-opted by them, at least temporarily, and feel themselves pressured to take on rules which they find repugnant.

In his job in the Centre, McKinnon becomes a part of the institution's authoritarian structure while he is at the same time a victim of it. Foucault says that "discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space" ( Discipline & Punish 141). McKinnon is in charge of a space, overseeing the activities of a certain number of students while he himself is in the Centre for much the same reason as the students. McKinnon and the students have both participated in what Foucault calls "transgressive" discourses. In "What is an Author?" he claims that "texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors...to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive" (Rabinow 108). The students' "transgressive" discourses are the placement tests in which they "broke" the rules of proper English and were subsequently sent to the Centre for help with their "developmental" problems. As Foucault puts it, "the examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them" ( Discipline & Punish 46). McKinnon says: "the test will place them - a diagnosis, a hopelessness - the defeat they already know" (50). To escape the Centre, students must go through a series of modules, answer quizzes, and write paragraphs and essays. They truly become situated "in a network of writing".

Ironically, what makes the situation most like Foucault's analysis of prisons and asylums is the Centre's emphasis upon the individuality of the writer. All learning in the Centre was to be self paced and individualized, making each student, in Foucault's terms, a "case": "the examination, surrounded by all its documentary techniques, makes each individual a 'case': a case which at one and the same time constitutes an object or a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power" ( Discipline & Punish 191). McKinnon, who has also been sent to the Centre because of his "transgressive" discourse, is put in the position of being co-opted by the system. He too has become a case, he too is subjected to observation and assessment. Strangely enough, it is McKinnon who must read and evaluate, according to criteria predetermined by the creators of the Centre, the tests, paragraphs, and essays of the students. At Arial he becomes, in their eyes, the hated ringmaster, directing and observing them as they jump through the hoops. He senses their hostility as he goes about his job of enforcing the rules: "staple, include, submit, use: commands to make me, They" (50) . In other parts of the poem, he talks of the administrators attached to the Centre as "them," but in the lines just quoted he realizes that in the eyes of the students, despite his conscious separation of himself from the Centre in the poem's opening where he describes himself as "in the centre" rather than "at" it5, he is of and at the Centre because, ironically, he is the students' sole human contact.

he issue of authority, co-optation, rules, and arbitrariness is examined with complexity and considerable honesty. For McKinnon, who has been thrust into unknown and hostile territory, the artificial order imposed by arbitrary rules is a temptation. It is, at least, something. The rules provide an authority he feels is lacking in himself. He says he finds "the rules a gift, could you be sure/the value of a rule" (46). This reference to an unidentified "you," possibly the reader, suggests McKinnon's awareness that he could be denounced as a collaborator, one who readily accepts implication in the system. He is asking for understanding, asking us to put ourselves in his position and imagine if we could survive without reference to "the rules". He admits to giving in to the temptation to use the system and recognizes the wrongness of his actions: "I blew up and use the test to punish/became the centre/myself" (61). He becomes what Foucault calls a "subsidiary judge" ( Discipline & Punish 21): an individual with discretionary power over someone who has been convicted and sentenced at a higher level, in this case the placement test. Foucault condemns this situation, saying that "one is handing over to them mechanism of legal punishment to be used at their discretion: subsidiary judges they may be, but they are judges all the same." (Foucault, Discipline & Punish 21)

The perfect disciplinary apparatus," Foucault writes, "would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly" (Discipline & Punish 173). The apparatus would be "perfect," of course, only if it were loyal to the goals and objectives of the thing it was meant to serve. But what if the "panopticon" were a subversive element which somehow found its way into the system? This is what McKinnon becomes in "The Centre": an ironic and, from the point of view of the system, dysfunctional panopticon6 who is placed at the center of "the Centre" in order to make sure that the students are moving through their "development" in the properly defined steps, according to the "timetables, collective training, exercises, total and detailed surveillance" (Rabinow 208). But McKinnon as panopticon is not loyal to the system. Unlike a true technocrat of education, who would see beauty in the smooth operation of the facility, the poet finds beauty and joy in its breaking down. McKinnon implicates himself in a transgression--an active disloyalty to the system--which redeems him from the guilt of his punitive use of the authority which the system has given him.

Foucault has said that "discipline 'makes' individuals" ( Discipline & Punish 170). His observation carries a fair amount of black humour, since the individual rises to prominence merely for the purpose of receiving punishment. McKinnon observes a similar effect coming from the Centre: the emergence of a previously latent or hidden individualism, but it is a more positive thing which emerges out of the resistance in the students and faculty to the Centre as they collectively laugh at the weirdness and absurdity of their situation: "yet the centre makes/human/- a laughter, a boredom, a joke to know who we are, what we do" (47). McKinnon finds himself at the center of the Centre. "I watch from the centre desk," (47) he says. He sees the subversive laughter and he joins in it. Not, like a good minion of the Centre, taking steps to eliminate this literal play, he takes comfort in it. "To find yourself here" he muses " - sent to the centre: it could be an/obscure paradise - no experience/necessary - and what/ we want, found" (48). The ambiguities and ironies are numerous. "To find yourself here" could refer to victimization or to self discovery. "No experience/necessary" could be merely a phrase from a help wanted ad or it could be saying that the nullity of the Centre ("no experience") is something that is "necessary" if one is to discover one's self. Once the center's nothingness is revealed-and its powerlessness-then one finds the power of the self.

s he observes the warm, informal relationships that are developing-the center was designed for individualized, self paced education, but the students and faculty are spontaneously creating a community-McKinnon comments that "the centre is there" (48). Ironically, much of the cordiality is a result of a shared dislike of the Centre. McKinnon realizes that the reason for the Centre's failure is that it was never designed to help anyone. "If it were only a matter of grammar/a list of numbers" (57) he suggests, the Centre could have some worth. But it is about something else, "the spirit, gone in a lie" (57). It is an arbitrary assertion of will in the guise of rationality and modern education. It is "a lie/it begins to seem normal like talk of death for the dying" (58). But the mere realization that it is not normal or inevitable or logical has a liberating effect. He can move past feeling threatened and weak to a clear eyed observation of the Centre's nullity. Now he is free to make more recorded observations of the Centre's hollowness-turning its own methods against it. That knowledge feeds him: "what is missing, that drives me" (66). The Centre, he concludes has no educational value-"real lessons are elsewhere of your own finding" (52)-other than the lessons that it teaches with its failure.

 

 

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