Naively acting out the hallway's claim to be more real than the classroom

[koganbot]

Over on Freaky Trigger I posted a long entry in regard to the hallway-classroom split in the comments to Tom's commentary on Thesis 15 of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Here's what I wrote:

Tom, some quick thoughts about whether my idea of the hallway-classroom split is relevant either to the Cluetrain Manifesto or to the French court and salons. Of course, my idea definitely came from my experience growing up in post-WWII United States (I'm guessing that the average Cluetrainer is ten to twenty years younger than I am, and the average saloner a couple of centuries older).

I'd thought of the hallway-classroom split as behavioral and psychological, the behavioral split being that in the classroom you talk about a subject matter and in the hallway you talk to and about each other; the psychological split being that, if you buy into the division, you buy into the idea that these are the behaviors that are expected and appropriate in actual classrooms and hallways. But I wasn't saying that actual classrooms and hallways were always and only homes to the expected/appropriate behavior. (And of course I was saying that one could reject the split, which is mutually impoverishing to both hallway and classroom, and I was claiming that good rock critics did indeed reject the split.) By calling the split "psychological" I was implying that people take it with them wherever they go; that for people whose psyche is under the split's sway, the whole world outside of selected official venues is a hallway (even if they call the hallway "real life" or "the street" or such), which is to say that for them the whole world is a response to the classroom, even if they'd like to pretend that "real life" is prior to and more real and basic than the classroom. But also, classrooms - real classrooms - are an attempt to keep the hallway at bay. In the hallway, you're working out who you are in relation to others (e.g., social differentiation, romance, gang warfare, etc.), whereas the classroom wants to at least go through the motions of setting that quest (or battle) aside for the length of the class period, instead making the main issue the study of a subject matter - though of course what you do in the classroom will have an impact on your social relations.

In any event, there's not obviously a one-to-one parallel between hallway-classroom and "human speech"-"corporate speech," or "salon"-"court," etc. (Presumably the court has official and less official speech. And what would count as "subject matter" in corporate as opposed to noncorporate speech?) The reasons hallway-classroom jumped to mind, though, are that the salon is an entity that in some way may be rejecting the behavioral splits of its day (it's not official but it's about the official) and that the Cluetrainers themselves, while perhaps in a similar role, seem to be rather naively acting out the hallway's claim to be more real than the classroom.

Comments

[koganbot]

When I was working out the idea of the hallway-classroom split (actually, several years before I'd come up with the metaphor), I had the idea of "off-topic" conversation in the classroom as being a kind of underground in the classroom, though it wasn't necessarily out of sight. I wasn't too worried about whether to classify it as part of the classroom or part of the hallway (I'd have leaned towards the hallway, but again, I'm not assuming that everyone - or every teacher - buys into the hallway-classroom split, or that actual hallways and classrooms are pure representations of the split). Back in '86 I'd developed the phrase "The Roots Of The Underground In Everyday Life," to be a chapter in a projected book about punk rock. The idea was that the fact that you had behavior that wasn't expected/appropriate for the classroom that was nonetheless going on in the classroom helps to plant in our minds the sense that there is what's officially being done and that there's another realm of behavior beneath the official behavior - just as the hallway itself isn't conceived in terms of its contribution to education. It's just there, something you traverse from one classroom to another.

But in a sense, intellectual conversations in the hallway are "off-topic" too, for the hallway. Rock critics have to face responses from the guy who objects to their bringing classroom insights to bear on a topic that some people want treated in hallway fashion (i.e., as source material for flirting, fighting, gossiping, joking).

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Not hallway/classroom (necessarily) but salon/court: watching a Chinese historical TV drama out of the corner of my eye today, and was struck by the public and performative aspect of court discourse - you have information being presented to the ruler, various ministers reacting, debating solutions, etc., but the real decision is never made at court; a lot of work is being done via informal groups both before and after the court session to figure out 1) who the stakeholders really are 2) what the stuff that is said at court really means 3) what is not said at court and should be 4) what is not said at court and shouldn't be and 5) what the decision arrived at in court ought to be. The ruler himself takes part in these informal groups. (In biz school this is presented as a cross-cultural studies thing: North American companies see meetings as a space for debates and decision making, East Asian companies see them as a space where orderly consensus is enacted, the debates and decision making having taken place earlier and privately/informally. However my impression is that 18th-century France was, well, more like 18th-century China in this sense... I would guess, commonsensically, that the more prohibitions and articles of etiquette there are surrounding the "court" situ, the more the actual nexus of information exchange and decision making shifts elsewhere/underground.)

I also copied down some stuff today about "community scripts" I found interesting but will post that to my own LJ. XD