The haze

Darian M. Parker

pp. 85-89

in: Sarah Travis, Amelia M. Kraehe, Emily J. Hood, Tyson E. Lewis (eds), Pedagogies in the flesh, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

"The Haze" recounts a moment in which a learning-disabled student's racist comments prompted the author to instinctually evoke various mechanisms of dissociation. In attempting to prevent the moment from gaining momentum—and thus evolve into more than a half-formed assemblage of words and associations—his own consciousness recorded the instance as nothing more than a haze of impressions and half-remembered, half-dismembered fragments. Parker's analysis utilizes his theory, existential psychoanalytic anthropology, which understands experience as an intricate, intersubjective play of symbols—a play that reverberates through mind, emotion, and culture.