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so since you're working this semester w/ a lit prof (and this question is likely to drive you back into the arms of the poli sci department!) i want to push back on the valorization of transparency, and the assumption that it is ever possible...maybe even to claim that sometimes the "slippage" is the place where possibility lies?

i take my keynote from educational theorist Elizabeth Ellsworth, who says (and whom I quote saying multiple times on Serendip) that the “self” capable of the kind of rational performance most often sought in classrooms is itself illusory: “The fact of the unconscious ‘explodes the very idea of a complete or achieved identity’—with oneself through consciousness, or with others through understanding.” Using the film studies notion of “mode of address” to talk about who the teacher and the curriculum “think students are,” Ellsworth describes the “eruptive, unruly space between a curriculum’s address and a student’s response (as) populated by the difference between conscious and unconscious knowledge, conscious and unconscious desires.” Rather than suggesting ways to bridge this gap, Ellsworth argues that it is to be preserved as the space of agency and of learning. If such a thing as a “perfect fit” were possible, it would in fact guarantee that no learning would happen. Complete, honest self-representation may well not be possible—but, Ellsworth argues, it's in that impossibility that growth may occur

and so...is any of this of relevance to political theory and practice? is an exact mapping between theory and praxis, between law and application, actually possible, do you think?