Today in Textiles: The Ass-Hat

Mood for the Article: Nirvana Unplugged NYC: Dumb.

For me, dunce caps were always the butt of antiquated jokes. The tool of the fabulist, their reference is used to say more about the idiocy of historical discipline than the disobedience of kids and their tasty wildness. I don’t know if I even considered them to have ever been REAL in fact, let alone think about the possibility of their cultural variation in classroom discipline. However, while wandering through the Musee de Christi, I found myself severely “educated”. The museum is on Rue De La Grotte in downtown Lourdes and consists of two curated floors above a textile, faience and tin goods shop. It’s a thoughtful labor of love by the shop-owner, and showcases antique lithography, printing machinery, chromotypes, vintage inkwells, manual typewriters and paper reliquaries among other cherished ephemera from his private collection. A conversation I had with him regarding the industrialization of crafts processes primed my visit, which was heady with my preconceived expectations for the collection. Perhaps I’d find some copper textile rollers, a photograph of the old Moulin, some regional patents for calico prints for my research? Stumbling onto the second floor however, things took a very different turn.

Directly to my left was a room outfitted like an early 20th century classroom. Arranged to face a raised pallet, rows of wooden childrens desks bleakley started--the walls covered in historical educational informatics, quill-pen labels, and a poster of mollusk biology. Musing over the concentrated charm of objects in this little room, my eyes fell to the platform where the desks were “looking” and stopped. Stared. Gawked. Bulged. I couldn’t believe it. There, on their own pedestal, were two ass-hats.

The tradition of “Le Âne” caps seems to be uniquely French, but follows the same principle as the Dunce. Disorderly children are forced to wear the hat as a form of discipline in the classroom, and were sometimes compelled to “sit on a stool in the corner as a form of humiliating punishment for misbehaving or for failing to demonstrate that they had properly performed their studies.“ (wiki) By this description, not only was the cap an appropriate punishment for stubborn or defiant kids, but for those who couldn’t perform their scholastic duties correctly--leading to the rise of “dunce” as a term used to describe dumb people. Nonetheless, there seems to be some conjecture that the British dunce cap was a derivation of a “thinking cap” which had a similar silhouette, and was donned as a metaphysical tool to “focus energies” into the brain. This would mean that somewhere, deep in the historical intention of this discipline, that there was the attempt to “help” the child think. Instead of a tool solely created for punishment, there may have been some sentiment of encouragement folded into the seams.

In the French case however, the conical paper dunce cap is exchanged for something much more allegorical to the landscape of 20th century peasant culture: the donkey. Very crudely fashioned out of cotton and cardboard, the museum examples consist of a headband with two long ears stitched to the top, giving the appearance of a horrific gingham rabbit. Nonetheless, there is no mistaking the species of this punishment, as each band is carefully inscribed with “Âne” across the forehead: one in bleeding ball-point pen ink, another in tiny red and white stitches that resemble scattered rice. It is beyond chilling that the scrawlings appear to have been made by children themselves: marking their own discipline in the loose, tender script of a kid learning to write.

Âne, the word for donkey en Francais, conjures its own set of stereotypes. For me growing up, donkeys carried an outdated notion of stubbornness, only understood through 19th century fairy-tales and parables. They had some type of moralistic warning, referenced in the unforgivably gruesome scene at Pleasure Island that is seared into my psyche from the Disney version of Pinocchio--I would be lying if I said that my consciousness doesn’t still threaten me with growing a tail when I misbehave. Despite this caution, as a kid raised in Southern California during the early 90’s, the actual Donkey wasn’t a particularly common animal to reference--let alone see. Beasts of burden were vacant from my landscape of domestic labor. Yet, this wouldn’t have been the case for rural children of the 20th century Pyrenees. The donkey would have been a more intimate figure in their lives, as most villages relied on a few to supplement the work of cattle. These were inextricable animals for “peasant” culture, which coincidentally experienced challenges to its own authority with the rise of public education. I wonder if the stereotype of stubborness translates, and if so, where the resistance is directed?

Did the will of the donkey-through-child carry disparaging undertones for rural kids, particularly for those who were encountering the classroom for the first time? Was the epistemological reality of a farm child read as disobedience, when in fact, it stemmed from confusion about being enculturated in a home that didn’t have a familiarity to formalized education? Was the donkey-will associated with brutish behavior, or a type of underclass ignorance that would hinder children from “demonstrat[ing]” that they had “properly performed their studies”? If this is the case, a particularly sinister implication is raised: that if different ways of knowing are viewed as disobedience, that children who are unaware of WHY they’re being disobedient, are being punished. Not to project, but as a person who “came back home” for school, (I was unschooled from the age of 8), the discrepancies between forms of legitimate knowledge can cause unique tensions and shame. I wonder what these kids had to address regarding their own worth and capability, especially when embedded in a century where traditional ways of living were challenged by an educational model that ultimately strove to “take” the children from the village/farm/home. If a child’s body becomes the battlefield for wars of intellectual supremacy, they’re bound to be scarred from the shrapnel of adult ego. I suspect most of us are carrying unique wounds from these social battles.

Conversely, was the will-of-the-donkey a stereotype promoted by those who had to wrestle with the animals themselves? Was this characterization coming from the peasant class who couldn’t break the stubbornness of the animal, pouring their frustration into their defamation? Was the tenuous relationship with an animal that labored for you--but on its own terms--cause for these tongue in cheek renderings? There always seems to be a little humor regarding the recalcitrance of the Donkey in domestic fables, because, after all, they’re still being fed and cared for despite their stubbornness. If this is the allegorical connection between children and animals, I may be a little more sympathetic.

If the “truth” lies in either, or, or somewhere entirely different, the judgments applied to the animal always seem to index its will against the expectation of their surrounding culture. How appropriate, really, when considering the processes of enculturation that are coded in learning social normality. It’s important to note that in the classroom or the home, the will-of-the-donkey through child can never satisfy the normality of the institution, priming acts of discipline that highlight this resistance. However, considering the will as “the faculty of consciousness and especially of deliberate action; the power the mind has over its own actions” (websters), then the act of crowning a resistant child’s head with a pair of donkey ears may symbolize a celebration rather than humiliation.

Later, I asked the shopkeeper about these ears. “The.. Âne...chapeau? Hat? What are those!?” We both began to laugh, and he confirmed they were tools of discipline. He acquired them by antiquing, but knew their provenance was from municipal schools in the area. I learned that the tradition stopped in the 1960’s-1970’s as more progressive educational ideals seeped into public schools, leaving these macabre crowns on the “wrong side of history”. The general narrative conveyed through his exhibition was that of encountering the past as a well-spring of knowledge that we can compare our contemporary lives. By cherishing the objects of the past, we have a much richer scope for understanding the present: our privileges, our progress, our pities. And often, we can leave these museums with a cozy righteousness that confirms the “progress” that we’ve achieved in the face of histories cruelty.

Yet, I found myself scrolling through snapshots of them in bed that night. The exhibition had left a tang in my mouth. A dread. A suspicion. There was something lingering here, something that persists through time. The past 15 years of my life have been about the classroom, a deeply contrasted space to the unschoolers space of learning that I knew until I was 18. In these years, I’ve assisted in Waldorf classrooms teaching embroidery and dyeing wool with 4th graders, I’ve watched over nap-times and massaged lavender oil onto the backs of restless kindergartners (seriously). I’ve worked in classrooms at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, teaching assemblage to public youth and overseeing art-camps. I’ve spent many revolutionary years in community college classrooms, where I was introduced to the potentials of higher formalized education--inspired by the exceptional grace and transparency of my mentors. I’ve worked as a TA in these classrooms, attempting to foster a sense of safety in students who feel lost, confused, combative. I received my bachelors at an enormous, exceptionally diverse teaching university in the Valley, where the “normal” classroom consisted of students who were juggling any combination of family tension, debt, commute, language issues, immigration/deporation status, racial profiling, economic disparity, full-time work, teen pregnancy, LGBTQ prejudice, first generation tension and learning disability along with their educational burden. Today, I spend my time in the graduate classrooms of a prestigious R1 University in the midwest, where I’ll be starting my GSI-ship next semester.

Aside from being loosely grouped by the classification “classroom”, these spaces have had very little in common with one another. As much as I’d love to claim a through-line of mutual respect or even rapport in these places, I can only confidently share one responding consistency: fear. Not a fear of outward violence or unchecked punishment by those in power, but of something I find to be far more corrosive and difficult to contain. I find fear in the specter of humiliation present in all these classrooms. This is a complex spirit, because its ever intersubjective--in a sense it’s self imposed, but through the imagined vision of self with others. We imagine ourselves in futurity, looking stupid, looking inadequate, looking like frauds, to those watching. We also imagine ourselves in the past, carrying vignettes of wounding that still ache and beg to be protected when we have the chance to be vulnerable in knowledge.

Even in my charmed education, I still recall a memory of being 7 years old in Spanish class, spending the period watching the morning light play across a grove of sycamore trees outside. I didn’t intend to ignore the authority of Seniora Lin, but had instead followed the power of where my own thought was taking me: to observe/wonder about the world I lived. Jolted from the sun, Seniora called on me to rise and state the spanish word for Grandfather which I didn’t know. Standing, I stuttered something incoherent and sat down to a mild ripple of giggles. She kindly corrected me, and continued on with the lesson--but I had been changed by it. I not only felt humiliation, but I felt that what I trusted to be important (the sycamores), was not. I felt guilt and shame. I felt a creeping insularity. And I felt afraid of being called on again, even among my peers who had already forgotten about my mistake.

I often think of this moment, especially in consideration to all the fabulous humiliations I’ve endured since. Why this moment? Why did this moment breed my nascent shame? And was this the birth of the shame I still battle with today? I suspect that these moments are threads that we lace our sensitivities together through time with--individually quite weak--but I still wonder about their potency. As I’m currently writing this missive from my fieldwork in France, I pause to consider shame with my relationship to languages. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a little part of me that references that moment to substantiate that “I'm not good with languages”, even in the wake of various professors, native speakers, strangers, telling me otherwise. The level of paralysis I feel when trying to memorize French feels old. It feels like an insurmountable void. And sometimes, it feels like sycamores. If we’re considering the donkey-will in this situation, it seems to me that there is an irony in classroom humiliation: shame itself can be quite stubborn.

I believe a good amount of this has to do with being removed from one’s own power. When I encounter the fear of humiliation in my classrooms, it’s often stemming from these types of tender memories that seem benign. At the root of mine, I feel this was one of the first times that my own knowing was framed as inconsequential: that my experience, and my place as authority of that, didn’t matter. It is far easier to compartmentalize the politics of when an authoritarian harmed me, than it is to discern the shape of my own, self-imposed shame. The steps to disassociation are indeed “baby” ones (in every sense of the word), and I’ve encountered this frequently in my own classrooms. While working as a tutor, the most paralyzed I ever saw students was when they were assigned to write ethnographically. There was such a distrust of their own observational power and capacity to be reflexive, that many would melt-down confronting the authority of their own writing. There is something criminal about situations where one’s own perspective is made poison to them.

Still, it is not this type of normalized shame that kept me scrolling through the photos of these hats. There was something else disturbing about them, something almost sinister that I was searching to clarify. It wasn’t until I zoomed in on one image to see the detail of naive stitches, that the realization came: these are handmade. These aren’t the product of a nebulous shame that arises from sociality, but are products of design. These were FASHIONED. They had to be planned and articulated, they had to be given time for instruction to make them a reality. Making things takes time: time that can be used to reconsider a position. Making things takes time: time that can be used to enlighten. Making things takes time: time that can be used to know better. These weren’t a heat-of-the-moment response to disobedience, but rather, a calculated long-term testament to the anticipation of it. These hats were made with the expectation to punish. And horrifically, they appear to have been made by children themselves.

Who was sewing this shame? Who oversaw this? Who taught children to make an object of mockery, in the same way they might teach them to make something beautiful, something that adorned their worth and harnessed their skill as a form of positive transformation? Did these get passed down through generations? Did the child who was being punished make their own hat? Was another child subject to constructing it, forever having an association with the object of a classmates pain? As someone who came to higher education as a means to care for handcraft, I find this to be unspeakably cruel. The intimacy that can arise when we’re working with our hands has the potential to yield profound healing. It has the potential to literally “make” our representation, to fashion an outside world that meets our internal ones, to speak to something beyond words. It has the potential to convey a hyper-truth, it has the potential to channel power and the sacred. As a maker, it has the potential to create intersubjective neural pathways that change the way we see the world, it has the potential to reveal knowledge just as any valued meditation can. In my view, to force this potential away from its agentive creativity and into a skill-set of cruelty is the act that warrants shame. And is nothing new. While musing about the development of specialized crafts of humiliation, an immediate correlation comes to mind: torture.

From 2012-2016, the Museum of Man in San Diego, CA, held a special exhibition. Entitled “Instruments Of Torture”, the exhibition focused on materiality that was designed for the explicit purpose of causing physical and emotional suffering for people. The central theme for the show was to consider if “people were the real instruments of torture”, and was predicated on an inpermanent collection resulting from a partnership with the Museo Della Tortura in Italy. I recall how stupefied I was when touring the museum: the daring amount of craftsmanship and beauty imparted in these tools of horror was staggering. Not only was the genius of engineering a shock, but the level of aesthetic care. Many of the objects designed to split human beings in half, to collapse their rectums, to peel off their flesh, were carefully--possibly even lovingly--adorned with unnecessary adornment. They were made beautiful. They were made with extraordinary awareness, and conscious attention to detail. They were laborious works of art, executed with precision. They were semiotic extensions of institutional powers, powers of aristocratic supremacy, powers of religious superiority. Their grandeur mirrored the ego of the institutions they served. They acted as consciously crafted tools of domination, they were constructed to be truly awesome. To see the intentional mastery of “beautiful” things applied to objects of harm has stayed with me, and continues to challenge my own vision of where legitime and moralistic beauty can exist.

However, these exceptional masterworks of pain are not what I associate with Le Âne. The aesthetic of the iron maiden or guillotine post carry a specific patina that indexes institutional power at national levels. A pair of cotton ears does not in the same way. It was the work of “folk” torture that resonates so deeply in this case. At the end of the exhibition was a special room full of “soft” torture devices. Instead of objects designed to crush bones for political leverage, these were objects designed for one to be humiliated among their own. They were crudely made masks composed of papier mache or cornhusks, they were straw-wigs and portable stocks. They were often made roughly, not unlike the Âne hats themselves. However, these objects of humiliation were made by adult hands. They were not “forced” to make these tools in the same way children were. They were objects designed to expose someone publically: not objects that impose physical pain, but emotional. Like the Âne, these are designed to discipline the internal self in the sight of others. But in this instance, there are no teachers instructing the adult how to make the object: they’re compelled to “make” tools of humiliation of their own design. This is a choice for the community.

Although it’s foggy, I recall an example where the disobedient subject was dressed like a peasant woman. It’s unclear if this was a punishment leveraged against men, or against women of another class, but the implications for emotional violence are kaleidoscopic here. Not only is there shame applied to the privileges of the person being humiliated, but for those who resemble that which is applied as a form of shame. So many of these forms of soft torture are insular, almost incestuous in the way they reference other community members: they intensify the village optic to a point of near cruelty. It’s this type of optic that shadows Le Âne to me, while shedding light on the kinds of “teaching” that connect craftsmanship with cruelty. This kind of cruelty has been able to persist because it’s couched in the handmade. It’s couched in a lie that calls itself satire. It’s couched in micro-cruelties that are passed down through generations in folklore. It’s couched in the domain of textile arts and children, which are both seen as illegitimate subjects. It’s couched as a joke, when it’s really not fucking funny. And it is within this landscape of papier mache pig masks, grass braids and cardboard donkey ears that I deeply realize: it is the adults in power who are truly the Ass-Hats.

https://open.spotify.com/track/725QAOexNLmGZiFMN7U8pF?si=Ilyg6wfOTEG713iALt00wA