Radical Political Praxis within the Late Capitalist Academy

In this alternative newspaper we shall strive to present not only a ruthless criticism of all that exists but also a radical re-understanding of the connections among what otherwise may seem to be an endless series of fragmented and unrelated events.

Our perspective represents the broad political left. This includes all who believe that it is necessary to seek substantial transformation and not mere reformation of the fundamental structures of human society in order to create a truly democratic and egalitarian society in which ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’

As I see it, this means that the Alternative Orange is committed towards engagement in radical political praxis and is particularly concerned to address others who are not only interested in but also likewise committed towards such engagement.

What does it mean to engage in “radical political praxis” as a student and as a teacher working within the late capitalist academy? Let us begin by defining some key terms. First, “the academy” is the principal institution of “higher education” in contemporary late capitalist society and comprises the totality of colleges and universities established for this purpose. Second, “late capitalism” is capitalism since the end of World War II, and refers to the stage of capitalism in which the routine workings of the market are no longer sufficient to insure the stable reproduction of the necessary preconditions for the continuation of profitable capitalist production, and, therefore, regular and routine intervention in the capitalist economy by the state and other social institutions becomes necessary. Third, by “praxis” I mean all the ways in which human beings engage, individually or collectively, as subjects — in grasping, holding, shaping, and forming the world in which they live. Fourth, by “political” I mean the entire province of human social life concerned with conflict and struggle — and with the regulation and adjudication of this conflict and struggle — among individuals and social groups over right of access and opportunity to exercise natural and cultural resources, powers, and capacities. Fifth, by “radical” I mean that which “strikes at the root,” that which strives to bring about change in that which is “basic” or “fundamental,” and to an extent which is “sweeping” and “extreme.”

“Radical political praxis” is praxis designed to contribute towards the fundamental transformation of existing society so as to inaugurate a substantially different kind of political order. To be more precise, the aim of radical political praxis is to contribute to the emergence and development of a new social system (one that is governed by a new essential logic) that will provide the most radically progressive possible resolution of the principal contradictions (and thereby the most radically progressive possible solution of the most egregious problems and the most radically progressive possible supersession of the most egregious limitations) of capitalism; as I see it, this means working towards the destruction of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. How is it possible to contribute usefully to this end by working from within the academy? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to understand what makes the academy a significant location from within which to engage in radical political praxis.

American college students and teachers work at a central and indeed crucial location within the current global capitalist order. The academy has become the predominant site of three interlinked processes of production: 1. the production of knowledge (particularly that most useful for maintaining and expanding sources of profit and accumulation — including kinds of knowledge supported by and supporting of U.S. military interests such as that conducted within the Science and Technology Center and the prospective future high-tech “smart park” here at Syracuse University); 2. the production of the skills and credentials necessary for those who will accept and fulfill positions at the highest level and as the most immediate servants of capital (the managers, politicians, professionals, scientists, and technicians, and these from and for all different locations in the global capitalist order — n.b. what a huge business is involved in training elite strata of third world, especially neo-colonial, nations at first world, particularly American, academies, with Syracuse University one of the largest of these institutions); 3. and the production of ideology (particularly those ways of thinking which involve an unquestioning acceptance of capitalist relations of alienation, oppression, and exploitation as natural, desirable, inevitable and unalterable conditions of existence — including those ways of thinking taught through schools such as Newhouse here at Syracuse University which result in the predominance of a reductive, simplistic, and trivializing combination of semi-official cheerleading, celebrity gossip, and empty posing as substitute for “news” within the contemporary mainstream American “news” — especially television — media).

These kinds of production processes are further interlinked with a host of many other kinds of production processes which take place at, immediately around, and for American colleges and universities. These colleges and universities not only are often among the largest employers in their area (even in this period of “downsizing,” Syracuse University remains the second largest employer in Onondaga County — and significantly is still largely non-union), but also exercise a substantial — and many times dominating — influence over much of the economic as well as the cultural life of the surrounding community. This is perhaps especially true in a city the size of Syracuse and a county the size of Onondaga County with a university the size of Syracuse University — e.g. Syracuse University has frequently been able to exercise its monopoly power to blackmail and intimidate (if not ignore altogether) potentially competing merchants and the city administration. Syracuse University is also, of course, able to use its far greater “market power” to force a “downsizing program” upon students, faculty, and staff which emphasizes preserving and even expanding Syracuse University’s sleek, elite, high-tech image by means of an ever- increasing investment in its physical (and an ever-increasingly elite and specialized physical) “infrastructure,” at the expense of its investment in maintaining and improving its “human infrastructure,” the “human capital” which constitutes the necessary heart of any academic institution that purports to aspire to intellectual excellence. Syracuse University is, of course, not unusual here: investment in expensive buildings and highly specialized equipment is increasing at the same time as investment in wages and salaries, texts and library resources, student financial aid and support for innovative faculty and student research, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is decreasing at many comparable and even at many “higher-rank” colleges and universities during this time of protracted economic “recession” and “fiscal crisis.” At the same time, the intimidation of the left-baiting “political correctness” scare and the cooptative and reformist promulgation of “multiculturalist” curricula as constituting the limits to an “acceptable academic radicalism” have joined forces with a national movement towards formal — and extremely repressive, exclusive, and reactionary — standardization of both courses and curricula as well as pedagogical principle and method from elementary school through college. All of this has led — and will continue to lead — to tighter and much more repressive control over what is allowed — and not — to be taught and learned, even studied and investigated at all, within American academic institutions. This right-ward movement has already begun to succeed in squeezing out the possibility of students encountering any kind of genuinely radical educational alternative — that which poses an intellectually and politically radical challenge to students and scholars, challenging these students and scholars to conceive of themselves as potential agents in the transformation of the fundamental structures of the total system of institutions and relations in which they live and work, in particular to transform and eradicate the institutionalized predominance of relations of private property in the ownership and control of the means, processes, and ends of the — social — production and reproduction of — social — resources, powers, and capacities.

With the increasing shift, since the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, of large industrial manufacturing operations from the first to the third world (in an initial “restructuring” of the global capitalist order, ultimately in response to the crisis of profitability encountered by capital as late capitalism moved from its initial long wave of expansion and growth to its subsequent — and still current — long wave of stagnation and decline, that resulted in the full emergence of “global,” or trans- and multi- national, capital as the predominant and the most powerful form of the concentration of capital in the “later” late capitalism of today), the economic power of colleges and universities has greatly increased in American towns and cities which were not long ago large “blue-collar” manufacturing communities (including Syracuse). Moreover, not only are colleges replete with their own internal “class structures” — in which different “workers” maintain very different kinds of control over their own and others’ productive activity — but also a college education and degree has become a virtual necessity for minimal “success” in contemporary American society — separating those who will perform “skilled labor” jobs from those who will perform “semi-skilled” and “un-skilled” labor, and thus determining who will live at what different levels of income and wealth, social status, and political power. This indicates, all the more clearly, why international capital in crisis must seek — through its political and ideological agents — to exercise tight (and ever tighter) control over what takes place within American colleges and universities.

College education — and in particular the acquisition of a college degree — has traditionally been one of the means by which those who live in capitalist society have sought to secure the credentials that would enable them to advance from working as manual to working as mental laborers, and, ultimately, either to maintain their position within the petit-bourgeoisie or to advance from the proletariat to the petit-bourgeoisie. Of course not all mental labor is performed by the petit-bourgeoisie; in fact, much mental labor is highly mechanical and thoroughly proletarianized — in circumstances where the mental laborer exercises little if any control over what she is to think about, how so, and for what purpose in fulfilling the requirements of her job. The petit-bourgeoisie is distinguished from the proletariat in that the former class maintains a relative monopoly on valuable skills and/or knowledge — including the means of validation and accreditation which supply and confirm this relative monopoly — such that the petit-bourgeoisie is able to extract itself from the workings of the law of value in the determination of its wages. The petit-bourgeoisie is compensated in pay at a rate in excess of the socially necessary labor it produces. The petit-bourgeoisie is able to exercise at least some real effective control over the means, processes, and ends of its own and others’ productive activity. Within advanced capitalist society, college is therefore a significant means of dividing and separating people (as well as maintaining and reinforcing already existing divisions and separations) into different classes and class strata. This begins with the division between those who are able to attend college and those who are not able to do so. Beyond this initial division, different colleges equip different students with different kinds of credentials — credentials which enable students to perform different kinds of work as part of different classes and class strata. The end result of this credentializing process varies according both to the kind of college (vocational and technical, community, small four- year liberal arts, state college, state university, private research institution, etc.) and the rank (status and prestige) of colleges of each of these different kinds (Syracuse University has been identified, by representatives of its own administration, as a “good” “second” rank institution — although at the same time, in an (in)famously outlandish claim by former Chancellor Melvin Eggers, as an “avant-garde” institution).

College students are able to obtain different kinds of access to and make different kinds of use of different kinds of knowledge than those who do not (or cannot) attend college. They also are able to obtain different kinds of access to and make different kinds of use of different kinds of knowledge according to the kind and rank of the college they attend and according to what kind of degree they pursue — undergraduate, graduate, or advanced graduate. In addition to this, faculty and administrators are able to obtain different kinds of access to and make different kinds of use of different kinds of knowledges than students — and staff. This differential right of access and opportunity to exercise knowledge contributes to the reproduction of differential right of access and opportunity to exercise other social and cultural resources, powers, and capacities. This in turn ultimately contributes to the reproduction of existing class relations in which relatively privileged classes enjoy their privilege at the direct expense of relatively un- or dis- privileged classes. Increasing concentration within the academy of the production of knowledge that results from serious, sustained intellectual inquiry (and the development of hierarchies within and among academies in terms of what kinds of knowledges are produced and disseminated, how, when, where, to and for whom, and why) maintains and extends inequality in access to and exercise of knowledge. In doing so it contributes towards the reproduction and expansion of inequality in society at large.

The academy is therefore not an “ivory tower” disconnected from “the real world.” The academy is, on the contrary, an urgent site for radical political intervention. The academy performs two especially indispensable functions in its contribution to the reproduction and maintenance of capitalism: 1. it is responsible for transforming simple labor power into complex labor power by training and equipping laborers with technically advanced and highly specialized kinds of labor skills so that these workers can perform the tasks required to facilitate the continuation of profitable capitalist production in the aftermath of the technological revolution that has resulted in the dominance of computer and electronic technology, while also enabling these “higher level” workers to manage and police the work of those in “lower level” positions within the hierarchical division of labor that comprises the capitalist mode of production; and 2. it is responsible for producing the ways of making sense of capitalist society — including its contradictions, conflicts, and crises, as well as its injustices, inequities, and brutalities — that render its perpetuation seemingly natural, desirable, inevitable, and unalterable, and for interpellating subjects into social subject positions that will cause them to identify with, accept, and conform to these ways of making sense.

Because the academy has come to exercise an increasingly centralized (virtually monopoly) control over the production of knowledge and information, ideology and subjectivity, and advanced technical skills and capacities in advanced capitalist society, and, moreover, does so in order to secure and preserve bourgeois hegemony, its impact in determining the ways in which men and women think, feel, act, and interact is not only profound but also profoundly insidious. It exercises an especially powerfully determinate impact upon the form and content not only of the dominant cultural “mainstream,” but also of the sub-dominant “sub-cultures” and counter-dominant “counter- cultures” of the oppressed and exploited and of their allies and supporters. This impact cannot be neglected and ignored if struggle for progressive social change — and ultimately for socialism — is to have any chance of success; it must be engaged, head-on, extensively and unrelentingly. This is no part-time task and no light-weight responsibility; it requires the dedication of intellectual activists who are willing to commit themselves to this struggle over the long haul, for the course of their whole lives as necessary, and with everything they can give — in time, energy, diligence, concentration, resourcefulness, and initiative. These activists must work, from within the academy and/or at the edges — the margins — of its connection with extra-academic institutions and enterprises so as to contest and critique the dominant modes of studying, teaching, and of conducting intellectual work from within this institution, and likewise to intervene in opposition to the ways in which the products of these dominant modes are put to use and brought into effect. These activists must engage the academy as their workplace, as the equivalent of the “industry” within which they are skilled and credentialed to do work, and they must in turn engage in various particular colleges and universities, departments and programs as the equivalent of the particular “factories” in which this work is carried out. The aim of these activists must be to contribute towards the ultimate destruction of the academy as a distinct institution and towards the liberation of the production of knowledge and information, subjectivity and ideology, and advanced technical skills and capacities from its exclusive and oppressive control.

Socialist struggle needs the contribution of this work — and of these workers. It needs the work they can do in imagining and inventing alternatives as well as in analyzing and critiquing existing states of affairs, and it needs the work they can do in contributing towards securing the conditions of possibility for this intellectual work to be expanded and further radicalized, and for radically oppositional critical-theoretical knowledges to inform and sustain all forms of counter-hegemonic practical activism. This of course is not the only kind of work which is by any means “necessary” today, and yet is vitally necessary — and even equally necessary — to other forms of radical practical activism (and these include more traditional — organizational, agitational, and advocacy — forms of activism). It is no substitution for the self-emancipation of the oppressed and exploited and never should pretend to be; yet it is a critical contribution to these efforts, and it is an assistance in carrying forward this (class) struggle in areas/on terrain to which these groups have by and large been barred — so as to work towards the destruction of these barriers.

In developing strategic perspectives for radical political action which take adequate account of what such action can and should mean within the concrete reality of late capitalist America today, it is particularly important that radicals take adequate account of the extent to which the American working class has been integrated culturally into late capitalism, has been transformed into a bourgeois subject, and has developed a vital stake in the effective functioning of (and thereby the successful maintenance and perpetuation) of late capitalism, even at the very same time as working class men and women continue to be severely exploited, oppressed, and alienated in order to maintain and perpetuate this system. This means avoiding workerist illusions, including those which tend towards a largely uncritically appreciative position in relation to “working class culture” — a “culture” which is forged both within and in subordination to the dominant culture of late capitalist society. Cultural intervention — cultural theory and cultural activism — is a crucial arena of radical struggle in late capitalism today, and yet in order for this intervention to be effectively enabling of revolutionary socialist ends and interests it must be ruthlessly critical rather than uncritically appreciative of all productions within late capitalist culture, including the productions of proletarian — and other — subcultures.

It is therefore also crucial, in developing these strategic perspectives for radical political action within the advanced capitalist societies of late capitalism today, to take account of the necessity both sharply to differentiate, and carefully to combine institutional politics and mass politics. This means that it is particularly important not to ignore or denigrate the importance of struggles conducted from within principal late capitalist institutions such as the academy. The academy is a powerful part of the real world; radical students and intellectuals cannot afford to ignore this and pretend that political struggle within the academy is only a testing (a play)ground for the really important political work that must proceed outside of and beyond the academy in “the real world.” Institutional struggles can make a crucial — and indeed unique — contribution to the future success of socialist transformation by contributing towards the development of counter-public spaces from within which it will become possible to forge the constituent elements of effectively critical-oppositional, revolutionary, and proto-socialist modes of subjectivity. Such subjects can in turn develop counter-practices within counter-institutions that can provide the basis for the development of a counter-hegemonic critical-oppositional, revolutionary, and proto-socialist culture. Such new modes of subjectivity can, moreover, also provide the constituent elements for the new modes of cooperation, the new forms of individuality, and the new forms of collectivity that will be necessary in the struggle to construct a new — socialist — society, a society which can only be realized as the result of work and struggle that will extend far beyond usurpation of state power and destruction of the current (old) capitalist society and which must begin with that which has been developed prior to this usurpation and destruction.

The task of transforming capitalism into socialism must be seen as a realistic and not as a romantic end, and this means that a political orientation directed merely towards resistance, opposition, and destruction can never be sufficient. In order to forestall tendencies towards rapid counterrevolutionary co-optation and bureaucratic degeneration of a (post)revolutionary (and proto-socialist) regime, it is necessary to begin the work of transformation of institutions and relations, subjects and practices within capitalism today, drawing upon and working with those tendencies within the logic of capitalist development that prepare and point the way towards socialism. Revolutionary socialist opposition within late capitalism today must take advantage of and build upon possibilities that derive from the contradictions inherent within the essential workings of late capitalism itself, and this means, most importantly, pushing forward, expanding, enriching, and working towards the full realization of the tendencies already inherent within late capitalism towards collectivization — and these are tendencies towards collectivization not only of relations within production but also towards collectivization of relations which precede and follow from production and which extend out of and beyond production. Revolutionary socialists must support and develop tendencies within late capitalism that work towards the supersession of predominantly private with predominantly collective modes of subjectivity. In general, it is important for revolutionary socialists everywhere to support collectivization against privatization (especially of right of access and opportunity to exercise social and cultural resources, powers, and capacities) and to push for the socialist democratization of collective relations begun under capitalism (and which, as such, often involve partial, limited, distorted, and even despotic forms of collectivization).

As capital struggles to redefine and resecure a new capitalist economic, political, social, and cultural world order out of the current global crisis of late capitalism and in the wake of the collapse of stalinism it is urgently necessary that a real revolutionary socialist alternative be forged to combat the resurgent appeal of liberal reformism (including in the guise of renewed support either for libertarian populism or for social democracy) among broad sections of the radical left — and even far worse kinds of appeals among other and far larger segments of the population. This means that we cannot be complicitous with but instead must contest and critique all tendencies within the American left towards celebrations of the “radicality” of proposals for a “new” “popular front” or “rainbow” or “multiculturalist” politics of loosely affiliated and broadly differentiated networks, coalitions or alliances among eclectically diverse organizations and movements with extremely diverse — and often competing — interests, and it means that we must likewise oppose all efforts to replace socialist politics with a “new politics” of “radical democracy” or “radical pluralism.” These tendencies must be recognized and shown for what they are: instances of the powerful and debilitating ideological hegemony of a “new” postmodern liberalism among the broad American left. This is an especially dangerous form of liberalism as it leads not only towards the legitimation of but also helps carry out the actual work entailed in the currently ongoing post-collectivist re-privatization of social welfare that has proven so useful and indeed necessary for the profitable restructuring — and resuscitation — of American and global capitalism. (This is “post-collectivist” re-privatization in the sense of movement towards re-privatization both “after” and “against” the establishment of a minimal welfare state as a “norm” within “modern,” “advanced” capitalist society.)

Despite the increasing squeezing out of radical opposition, the academy is still a site of intense — and in fact it may well prove to be a site of potentially increasingly intensified — contradiction. It still remains one of the principal locations in advanced capitalist society for the production and dissemination of radically oppositional knowledge and for the development of means of education and action for radical social change, even if taking advantage of this possibility requires that students must learn to become highly critical — to make highly critical use — of the information and skills, knowledges and abilities they are taught in the vast majority of their classes. American college and university students still encounter the opportunity, working from within the academy — at least with a great deal of diligence and perseverance, commitment and courage — to develop an accurate understanding not only of the global order in which they are situated and of their own particular place and implication in this order, but also to learn what are real possibilities for doing more with their lives than merely accepting and conforming to positions within a social order dependent at its heart upon exploitation and alienation of labor and the oppression and subjugation of freedom and creativity.

The late capitalist academy is marked by contradiction, in particular, between 1. the “universal” and “independent” dimensions of technical and intellectual production — between those dimensions which express the progressive development of the general forces of social production and those dimensions which express the maintenance of private control of this social production; and 2. between the individual/short-term capitalist interest of turning this technical and intellectual production immediately to use in securing (super-)profits and the general/long- term capitalist interest of reproducing the necessary pre-conditions for continued realization of (super-)profits and for continued maintenance of capitalist hegemony — and this last includes the need to grant limited concessions and to allow limited autonomy to subordinant classes so as to reproduce their consent to their subordination. It also centrally includes two additional and crucial contradictions: 3. contradiction within the objective position, and therefore the objective interest, of the class which not only performs but also manages the bulk of the intellectual and technical work that proceeds within the academy, the petit-bourgeoisie — and this is a contradiction between tendencies which lead the petit-bourgeoisie to work for and serve capital versus tendencies which lead it to rebel and to seek spaces of liberation from this subordination; and 4. contradiction between technical and intellectual production representative of the objective interests and needs — and the subjective desires and demands — of the proletariat and other exploited and oppressed social groups versus production which serves to maintain and reproduce this exploitation and oppression. The academy, in fact, not only cannot escape reflecting and refracting but also is centrally involved in the work of — formally, partially, and temporarily — attempting to resolve (or dissolve) the fundamental contradictions of capitalism: 1. the contradiction between the ever-increasing objective socialization of the forces of social production and the continuing (and, in fact, ever-narrowing) privatization of the relations of ownership and control of (the means, processes, and ends of) this social production, and 2. the contradiction between the increasingly expanded extent of capitalist production and the increasing difficulty of reproducing the necessary preconditions for profitable capitalist production — including not only the increasing investment in and the increasing difficulty of realization of surplus value as well as continuing struggle against the unavoidable tendency towards decline in the long-term average rate of capitalist profit, but also the increasing exhaustion both of the pre-capitalist sources for super-exploitation necessary to support a renewed wave of long-term expansion in the profitability of capitalist production in general and of the cheap supply of natural resources necessary to sustain this level and direction of production.

It is certainly true, as I and my comrades in the Marxist Collective at Syracuse University argue in “Capitalism and Your University Education,” (p. 10, this issue) that radical students must engage in all of their classes by raising the kinds of disturbing questions and advancing the kinds of threatening challenges which most courses and most modes of pedagogy are assiduously designed to avoid — and exclude. At the same time, however, in order to do this, radical students need the support and assistance — and indeed even to a certain degree, at least initially, depend upon the impetus and inspiration — of the work carried out by radical teachers, and it is towards what does and does not constitute effectively radical pedagogy within the late capitalist academy that I turn for the remainder of this article. In doing so, I will draw upon and extend the work of my comrade, Adam Katz, who I believe has laid the foundation for a useful analysis of this issue in his (as of yet) unpublished essay, “Radical Pedagogy In the Neoliberal Academy.”

According to Katz, it is necessary first to recognize “the difficulty” of developing such a radical pedagogy, and to understand what constitutes this difficulty:

For radical intellectuals, who wish to intervene in the production of knowledge and of ‘knowing’ subjects, this raises the problem of how to reverse the effects of institutions established for very specific purposes, purposes diametrically opposed to one’s own. Furthermore, it raises the problem of how to do so as an [often] isolated individual, without any institutional backing, without the direct support of a mass movement, almost invariably in the face of the hostility of one’s ‘colleagues’, and, even more important[ly], in opposition to the very standards of what passes for ‘useful’ or ‘legitimate’ knowledge (usually, in bourgeois institutions, defined in terms either of its ‘neutrality’, ‘efficiency’, or, revealingly, its efficacy in integrating individuals to national ‘goals’ or ‘values’.

What is particularly useful about Katz’s analysis is the way in which he shows how these difficulties lead radical pedagogues to turn in four seriously problematic and ultimately ineffective directions, to adopt four models for radical pedagogy which Katz — and I — reject: the “segregationist” model, the “rationalist” model, the “formalist” model, and the “populist” model.

First, the “segregationist” approach involves, as Katz puts it, “abandonment of attempts to make use of educational institutions for those political purposes to which one is committed.” Segregationists in effect accept the traditional liberal depiction of the academy as a neutral zone for disinterested inquiry, by concentrating whatever political work they do in non-academic forms of and spaces for practical activism. Segregationists include all of those radicals working as teachers within the academy who segregate their political commitment and activity from their pedagogical practice and responsibility. This includes 1. those who do so because they despair — and this often leads quickly to cynicism — about the prospect of making any kind of difference through their teaching, 2. those who do so because they fear (often quite reasonably) that they will be repressed and punished for “bringing their politics to bear” in their teaching, 3. those who claim they do so because they want (in good liberal fashion) to be “fair” to their students and to give them the “freedom” to “make up their own minds” (as if their students’ “minds” have not already been shaped, and are not continually being reshaped according to the dictates of powerful forces and partisan interests outside of the students’ own singular control), and 4. those who really have no justifiable (that is, other than cynical and opportunistic) reason for working in the academy at all because they contend that they do their “real political work” in “the rest of their life,” in the only place where they claim such real political work can really happen — i.e. in “the real world” outside of the academy.

Second, the “rationalist” approach does involve the attempt to bring oppositional knowledges into the classroom, but it does so, as Katz puts it, “without any critique of the forms which mediate that knowledge and present it to students.” As Katz indicates, these “forms” include “conventional disciplinary distinctions which segregate knowledges, institutionalized testing procedures, traditional modes of lecturing and managing classroom discussions, among others.” If “Marxism,” for instance, is taught as if it were just another form of knowledge among many (even if it is taught as “oppositional knowledge” and even if the teacher represents herself as “preferring” and/or identifying herself with this opposition), if it is taught as a kind of knowledge that can be categorized within the same disciplinary boundaries as all other forms of knowledge, and if it is taught as if it can be grasped and measured in the same way that any other subject is learned, then students are in effect encouraged to take an at best temporary ethical and/or cognitive interest in the material, and at worst to approach this material as merely the eccentric “taste” of their teacher to which they must learn to cater (to dissemble) so as to get a good grade. The reason why Katz calls this approach “rationalist” is that it in effect presupposes not only that students can be persuaded to agree with an oppositional position strictly on the basis of its abstract “reasonableness,” but also that students decide to commit themselves in support of the particular kinds of political positions they do based entirely upon a “rational” weighing of the merits of these positions versus various alternatives. This kind of pedagogy addresses an abstract student, a student who is abstracted from the real pressures and the real imperatives of the particular subject positions he occupies within particular kinds of social relations — and into which he has been interpellated and re-interpellated over the course of his previous life; it falsely assumes that simply presenting what the radical pedagogue sees to be “the truth” as “the truth” will be enough to convince all of her students to agree with her and accept this to be the case, regardless of the ways in which her students are continually exposed to other narratives that oppose this rendering of the truth, and regardless of whether or not it conflicts with the objective (at least with the immediately objective) interests of these students openly and actively to “identify” with this position.

Third, the “formalist” approach is that which, according to Katz, “places the main emphasis on precisely these forms of knowledge transmission [neglected by the rationalist] and views any disruption of them as inherently oppositional and emancipatory.” As Katz indicates, this gives rise to “changes as varied as introducing ‘theatrical’ methods and ‘surprises’, or adjusting conventional seating arrangements (for example, having the teacher’s authority ‘decentered’ by having her sit with the students rather than standing at the front of the room).” Advocates of the “radical” potential of a poststructuralist pedagogy of “decentering” and “problematizing” fit into this category. These pedagogues attempt to set up the class so as to demonstrate in the way in which the class is conducted that supposedly stable “certainties” such as “self,” “authority,” and “meaning” are in fact uncertain, indeterminate, and ever-changing. In this classroom the effects of a superficial decentering are valued for the “change” they bring in this very limited space, and the effect they have beyond is greatly exaggerated. Moreover, this kind of “radical” classroom quickly collapses into a familiar kind of liberal pluralist space as students are now taught that they are not one unitary self, but many “selves,” and, as such, have every “right” not to accept and identify with only one way of looking at things, but instead have the “right” simultaneously to embrace a variety of different perspectives and to “feel free” to shift from one to another of these as often and as rapidly as they “feel” they want to do — or as they feel they are compelled to do because they are “themselves” simply “carried away” by forces supposedly entirely outside of and beyond their deliberate and conscious control, including in particular the dictates of “pleasure,” “desire,” and “the body,” or the slippery subterfuges of “language,” which supposedly always by itself undermines and destabilizes any and all relations between “intention” and “effect.” In this kind of classroom students are supposedly liberated from an oppressive “centering” of their subjectivity by means of exposure to new and unfamiliar possibilities without being pressured to commit themselves to identify with, support and defend any one position as necessarily “their own.” In “decentering” the subject within the self-liberating space of the classroom, this kind of pedagogy reproduces the logic of the consumer marketplace with its smorgasbord of choices from which the consumer/student can “freely” partake whatever she pleases. This “formalist” brand of “radical” pedagogy thus becomes a pedagogy of pleasure, the pleasure which caters to (rather than contests) “youthful” “boredom” which demands constant “stimulation” and ceaseless “novelty.” This catering tends to take the form, in the formalist classroom, of, on the one hand, creating “entertaining” and “spectacular” performances to “amuse” and “divert” students’ “limited attention spans,” and, on the other hand, of teaching so as to allow and enable students continually to “see things differently,” and thus simply to accumulate more points of view from which to see more things. In this kind of classroom the pursuit of pleasure is never made uncomfortable by sustained inquiry into the politics of pleasure, since the right to pleasure is implicitly justified in ethical terms as a mark of individual freedom, and, in a full recuperation of a liberal humanist conception of the subject, as a right of “free choice” that follows from “free will.”

The formalist, postmodern, decentered(ing) classroom is in fact merely an updated, “high-tech” version of the traditional liberal humanist classroom. The changes seen in this decentered classroom are indications of the need for the academy to retool itself by developing and appropriating from contemporary theories in such a way as to protect itself from the threat of any significant, substantial restructuring of the academy and of the social relations it sustains. This decentered classroom addresses the crisis of the liberal humanist subject in contemporary late capitalist culture by problematizing subjectivity, problematizing the subject’s positioning in culture, but its pedagogic aim is only to problematize, to suspend the closure of answering the question of what is the place of this subject as a totalitarian attempt to fix the “naturally” fluid and mobile subject. Such a pedagogy of “questions,” although valorizing “change,” is committed to a conservative political agenda: the deferral of social change by means of an endless “postponement” of the need to “make up one’s mind.” This pedagogy can therefore exist quite happily within the existing pluralist academy since it stops at the level of questioning and refuses to engage with answers. It thus becomes virtually identical with the quintessential mode of liberal pluralist pedagogy since it claims to include all positions and exclude none. Of course, it does exclude because, in excluding “answers,” it draws strict boundaries around what sort of questions it permits. Those questions which can easily be entertained within the existing configuration of knowledges without pressuring it to be changed are accepted, while those questions which pressure the entire configuration by insisting on examining the ends and effectivities of knowledge are not allowed.

Although the decentering classroom emphasizes “changing the subject,” in its demystification of centered subjectivity it not only engages in a merely formal show of change that often does not in effect change much of anything of substance, but it also begs the most important question of “change for what” (or “change towards what”). Decentering the subject merely in order to offer students a new way to “see themselves,” and merely the “freedom” to choose among a seemingly open-ended range of “new” subject positions is based on a liberal pluralist notion of difference that purports to “respect” “all” positions as equally valuable. Such an assumption mystifies the conflict and struggle among objectively opposed interests to advance different positions not only from which to “look” at that which exists, but also different positions from which to “act” within that which exists. The decentering classroom becomes a site in which students and teacher “play” at continually “deconstructing” “the real” so as to allow for a seemingly continual fluidity of existence from one cluster of subject positions to the next. The discourses of the decentering classroom are in fact similar to those of self-help pop psychology therapies now no longer concerned with helping “patients” to find “the real me” but instead with demystifying the “real me” and so finding and accumulating more and more kinds of me as a way of avoiding the crisis of “guilt” and “responsibility.” This understanding of the decentered subject elides the historical and material production of subjectivity within a systemic structure of interdeterminate social relations, and therefore, elides the ways in which not every subject position is in fact equally available to all; in fact, it is only from the most culturally privileged set of positions that it is even at all possible to approach such a state of perpetual self-transformation. That this kind of poststructuralist pedagogy, although “theoretical,” “rigorous,” and “unfamiliar,” can become quite popular among teachers and students working within the most culturally and economically privileged institutions (like Syracuse University) is not surprising, since it allows participants to feel cognitively “sophisticated” and “up-to-date,” reassuring them of their “superior” position as cultured and educated. And since it constructs the decentering classroom as a privileged site in which pleasures of postmodern culture can be “freely” and “safely” indulged, it works to reinforce existing divisions between public and private which prevent any pressure or inquiry that may arise in one space from contaminating other spaces. A postmodern male can even enjoy the subversive pleasure of instability via l’ecriture feminine in class and then return to his apartment to then enjoy the pleasure of stability afforded him by traditional kinds of emotional, physical, and economic support from his “girlfriend” and his female relatives.

Fourth, the “populist” approach is one that attempts to turn the classroom into a direct space of emancipation, often by means of the teacher “renouncing” her authority and “giving” students the authority to determine the shape and direction of the course. As Katz indicates, this includes turning the classroom into a space where students are allowed to “advance their own initiatives” and “voice their own opinions” without presenting any challenge to these by means of contestation and critique — which is equated with “domination” and “suppression.” This classroom, once again, recuperates liberal ideals by fetishizing the classroom as a space of empowering transcendence in abstraction from its place and its function within larger institutional and cultural arrangements and within the larger social totality, by addressing students as autonomously self-determining agents of their own destiny who think and feel as they simply choose and/or will (or as if they are in the “natural” process of discovering their “true” “selves” or “voices” and this process should not be “artificially” disturbed), and by substituting what “feels” or “looks” good for what is capable of contributing towards lasting social change. Uncritical appropriations of Freirean “radical pedagogy” which simply transport Freirean methods to very different kinds of North American social and cultural contexts often fall into this category of pedagogy — and the same is true of pedagogies which are strongly reliant upon, either implicitly or explicitly, one or another notion of developmental psychology, as these latter approaches often support the idea that the college classroom should be the location for extended nurturing of the still very fragile “egos” of the still very “young people” who comprise the vast majority of the students in these classes.

As Katz indicates, all four of these approaches, “however well-intentioned, are limited and reformist (or worse) since they are based upon an inadequate understanding of the structure and function of capitalist pedagogical institutions”:

The first two approaches ignore the specificity of these institutions, and therefore fail to realize that a very different mode of pedagogy is required than, say, within a mass political party. The second two approaches assume, incorrectly, that the desired changes can take place completely within the institution itself, forgetting that social change is a combined and ultimately practical project extending throughout society — a project in which pedagogical institutions play an essential but strictly limited part.

In order to teach in ways which are potentially effective in making genuine radical interventions from within the academy, it is necessary to teach in a way which addresses the students’ subjectivities themselves as texts to be read and reread, written and rewritten in class and throughout the work of the course. It is not enough simply to equip these students with new knowledges and skills, or simply to encourage them to approach radical ideas with an open mind and to think critically, as all of this is readily acceptable within the liberal classroom and does not challenge the stake of student involvement in the three-fold processes of production I described as the function of the academy at the beginning of this essay. In fact, late capitalism today itself requires “flexible” managers and bureaucrats who can “think globally,” who can engage in “multicultural” and “transnational” relations (as negotiations and transactions), and who can keep up with all of the latest “fashions” and “trends” in the evolution of cultural “tastes” (without being embarrassed, surprised, or shocked) — and even take charge of bringing about the profitable commercialization of subcultural forms of “resistance.”

Addressing students’ subjectivities as among the principal texts of the course does not mean that these are by any means the only texts to be used, and yet it does mean that students will be addressed as representatives of social positions which they will be called upon to “own” and “occupy,” to argue for and against, to explain and defend in contestation with opposing positions represented by the teacher, by other students, and by texts included in the course reading. As Katz explains, this mode of radical teaching understands students as historically formed individuals, constituted by concrete sets of interests, practices and interrelations with their social environment. They therefore have specific investments in certain ideological formations, certain types of relations with others, certain kinds of pleasures, etc.

According to Katz, a radical pedagogy “must interrupt” the specific investments which predominate among a given set of students, and which, by and large, represent a largely “mainstream” cultural position and ideological orientation, in order to put these “on trial.” This means that the teacher addresses these investments with “a system of narratives, categories, and values which are compelling in relation to these investments” and yet which are also, simultaneously, “directly incompatible with them,” which expose the contradictions of everyday bourgeois existence that are usually so effectively concealed by means of ideological (mis-)representations: such as the frequent real contradiction between professed support for libertarian values and active engagement in authoritarian solutions to social problems that undermine the possibility of giving any real substance to these libertarian commitments (using police and soldiers to enforce and protect “democracy” against those who “refuse” its “enlightened” “promise” is of course a long-standing and continuing tradition of imperialist politics).

A radical pedagogy therefore seeks, as Katz puts it, to introduce “a crisis” into the subjectivity of students, to force students to have to confront the logical contradictions and the real incompatibilities between the various sets of social-political values they support and the various sets of social-political investments they maintain. Radical pedagogy forces students to inquire into 1. what social-political forces give rise to and what social-political conditions make possible their own most precious ways of thinking, feeling, understanding, communicating, acting, behaving, and interacting, and 2. what social-political ends are advanced and what social-political interests are served by means of their identification with, acceptance of, and conformity to the dictates of these kinds of social subject positions. It further forces students to provide reasons for their support of these positions, and to attempt to make a case capable of compelling others who do not already agree with them — to force these others in turn to have to rethink, reformulate, and rearticulate their (other) positions in response to the pressure the students’ positions exert upon these (other) positions. At the same time, the radical teacher not only makes available representations of diverse ideological positions of significance but also represents an openly partisan commitment to a set of positions from which the teacher engages in contestation and critique of the positions represented by the students, pressuring these to their furthest possible limits — and, necessarily therefore, to where maintenance of continued commitment to these positions is most uncomfortable.

If anything, the radical pedagogue must teach students to recognize that their “opinions” are not simply opinions, purely individual and without consequence; instead, students must be taught to understand that these “opinions” represent social-political positions and work to advance social-political ends and to serve social-political interests, and that, furthermore, these positions, these ends, and these interests always both challenge and are challenged by other, opposing positions, ends, and interests. This means that the radical teacher aims — actively and deliberately — to challenge her students to “own” (up to) the positions they already occupy, and to be able to account for what working from and for such positions means — in particular in terms of what ends these positions advance and what interests these positions serve. Students represent these positions, these ends, and these interests in their individual articulations and in their individual actions in and out of class, and it is important that they be taught to recognize this state of affairs for what it is, not only so that they can participate consciously in this process, having to think about what positions, what ends, and what interests they are actually supporting and opposing so as to be able to advance these as effectively as possible in what they say and do, but also, and more importantly, so that student engagement with fundamental questions of social-political conflict and struggle cannot help but be made to feel very direct, very immediate, and very relevant to the “lived experiences” of their “everyday lives.”

The aim of “making visible” ideological interpellations of students within the space of the radical classroom is not to “fix” students in positions already (previously) taken, but, as Katz puts it, “to enable them to explain and characterize in theoretical terms the developments and transformations in their positions”:

Students must be enabled to recognize the urgency of seeing ideas not as disembodied and irrelevant, but rather as loaded with consequences and ramifications for which students, insofar as they are to become intellectuals, must learn how to be responsible.

The goal of the radical teacher’s intervention in her class must not be (at least not immediately) to persuade her students to change from the positions they initially support so as instead to support the positions the teachers does. This would be a foolish thing for her to try to accomplish, as it would be completely impossible in the space of one course (or, most often, in the space of even several courses), and, furthermore, even if it were possible, it could not make an effective contribution, in and of itself, towards the advancement of the ends or the service of the interests the radical teacher supports. Her aim should instead be to compel her students to rethink, reformulate, and rearticulate their positions in relation to the pressure exerted upon these positions by her interventions, by the texts she selects for students to read, write about, and discuss; and by the contestation she inspires and encourages students to engage in relation to each other. At minimum, she aims to help her students discover what their positions actually already are on/in relation to contemporary issues of serious importance, and to teach them how to argue for (and against) these positions rather than ending up content simply to indicate that this is how they think or feel. In addition, a further minimum accomplishment is to teach her students to recognize cultural clichés for what they are and not simply to (re)iterate these uncritically, but instead to present thoughtful articulations which indicate that students do know how to look carefully — and critically — into the whys and wherefores of the ideas and convictions they have been produced to hold (and uphold).

The radical teacher must organize the units of the course, the reading and writing and other assignments to be pursued in the course, and the conduct of activity in class and out as part of the course so as to reflect — and to dramatize — the most significant and urgent “nodes of contestation” within not only the province of the issues addressed by the course or the “discipline” in which the course is taught but also within the general culture and society at large at that specific historical moment. This means including texts with which the radical teacher will fundamentally disagree and vehemently oppose: inclusion of these texts is necessary so as to provoke and sustain students into actively representing — owning, occupying, arguing for and defending — the positions which they do in actual practice support (even if unconsciously, passively, and largely indifferently). The radical teacher, however, will also work very diligently to represent radical alternatives and to teach from this position, contesting and critiquing texts which are opposed to (which oppose) radical ways of making sense (including the “texts” represented by students’ subjectivities). This means that the radical teacher will include a disproportionate share of texts in the course from a radical left perspective. She will not do this because she thinks simply reading these texts can “convert” her students, as she does not have the same kind of faith in the rational powers of “education” versus “ignorance” that many of these (well-trained, liberal-thinking) students will profess, and, in fact, she thinks on the contrary that people can only make radical changes in their own positions if the material conditions that make it possible for this to happen exist in their own life — or are in the process of being created — and one course (or again, even several courses) is rarely, in and of itself, enough for students who have entered into these course as “good subjects” of late capitalism. No, the reason why she selects texts from a common and consistent range of positions which she can, by and large, support and amplify with her own statements and interventions, and from a range of positions which are not only different from but critical of and opposed to the current mainstream consensus on the issues taken up in class is that these kinds of texts will enact a sharper challenge to students’ positions than selecting texts which merely reproduce a typical liberal- pluralist panoply of positions, one which supposedly constitutes the full range of the existing ideological spectrum and yet inevitably does so in ways which invite the majority “naturally” to converge upon the moderate middle ground, and always to support moderate “compromises” between “extremes” as the naturally “sensible” and “just” thing to do. The radical teacher does not want her students to come away from her class thinking that the position “in the middle” is simply and naturally always right and always true (not by any means); nor does she want her students to come away thinking that principles always can or should always be “compromised” or that differences between “extremes” can be easily “accommodated” through following a course of mutual “concessions” (again, not by any means). Simply to reproduce for her students what she thinks is a deceptively constructed way of understanding the real range of ideas and convictions on the issues taken up in class (as if it were a natural and neutral representation when it is not) can very easily make students feel (all-too-)comfortable that this “radical” classroom is simply business as usual and that it is only teaching them once again what they always thought was true is true — without forcing them to have to think very much or hard about what makes this “truth” “true.” The radical teacher must, moreover, show her students that the courses she teaches are, in and of themselves, far less likely to — and far less directed towards — “turning” her students into “radicals” than most other courses they have taken, are taking, or will take in college, including courses in the physical sciences and in vocational skills, are likely to — and are directed towards — training these students to become “good subjects” within the existing — capitalist — social order, and, furthermore, predominantly good moderates for that matter (whether moderate liberals or moderate conservatives is ultimately beside the point since the real ideological difference between these two positions is so minimal).

Intervention in student subjectivity cannot be assumed to happen according to some kind of automatic process and therefore cannot be pursued according to a singular, rote method. In order to provide the conditions of possibility for the most effective intervention, however, it is always crucially important that the radical teacher not treat the classroom, the course, the department, the discipline, the college, the university as if it were a natural or a familiar space — the equivalent of a house or home, a bar or club, a living room or lounge — and not treat work within and outside of the class as just like what goes on routinely among family and/or friends. The radical teacher is not and should not pretend to be the students’ friend (in the bourgeois commonsense of what friendship includes — and, especially excludes), and is certainly not the students’ (surrogate) father, mother, sister, or brother. The radical pedagogue must practice a pedagogy of denaturalization, and defamiliarization, of the course and the classroom, a denaturalization and defamiliarization of these natural and familiar assumptions and associations about the nature of what a course and a classroom is and is not (to be like).

A radical pedagogue can transform the familiar classroom into a defamiliarizing classroom by drawing upon the Brechtian conception of theatrical defamiliarization. In his theoretical writings explaining his “revolutionary theater,” Brecht distinguishes his practices from a familiarizing kind of drama which proposes to make the walls of the theater vanish so that the audience can believe they are watching life itself unfold on stage. In “forgetting” that the play is a construction, the audience can also “forget” they too are constructed as an audience watching a particular kind of play and consequentially experience the feeling of having been “liberated” from their social roles, from the drudgery of their everyday lives, while they “escape” into the pleasures of the drama. Brecht proposes a deliberately defamiliarizing, and as he more often labels it, “alienating” drama as an intervention into this naturalization of the social, a drama which disallows the fundamental logical organization of existing social reality to be taken for granted as if it were simply natural (and thereby seemingly virtually eternal), but rather makes this organization of existing social reality something which demands explanation, something which can be shown to have been “artificially” created, something which is already being recreated, and something which can be fundamentally transformed.

The defamiliarizing classroom, like the Brechtian drama, calls attention to itself as a “stage” where life does not just happen spontaneously but rather according to the “directions” of contesting social interests, needs, and desires. The defamiliarizing classroom calls attention to itself as always thoroughly inscribed within culture, and its participants as therefore always occupying culturally inscribed roles. This classroom is not a natural or familiar place; it is designed to seem a very “unnatural” and “unfamiliar” place, one which is made visible as constructed within the crucible of institutionally and culturally specific sets of arrangements that are not at all eternal but rather have been created, are being recreated, and are open to contest, to conflict, to struggle, to transformation. The purpose of this kind of defamiliarizing classroom, like Brecht’s theater of alienation, is to produce critically engaged participants who are politically enabled rather than momentarily “liberated” — in other words, subjects who are able to intervene actively, deliberately, consciously, and purposefully in relations between existing forms of knowledge and dominant arenas of political struggle.

Within the defamiliarizing classroom students are called upon to account for themselves as social subjects. In this classroom, it is insisted that in writing and in speaking students and teachers do not merely express the “personal opinions” of their unique, autonomous, and sovereign “selves” but rather speak from positions within the discourses of culture, positions which have politically interested implications and consequences. Thus, it is insisted from the very beginning of class that to say a position is one’s “own” opinion is merely to say the obvious — that it is the one who is speaking or writing who is the one representing the position in that particular place and time — and that, therefore, such a remark is — by itself alone — trivial and inconsequential. Rather than holding student opinion sacred as is the case in “respectful” brands of liberal humanist pedagogy — and thereby placing it beyond contestation, beyond critique, seemingly beyond location in relation to the real positions and interests it represents in real social relations — radical pedagogy always interrogates and critiques such an understanding of “opinion” as bourgeois ideology.

In such a defamiliarizing classroom it is not assumed that students “really” “know” what they say they know, that they unproblematically “mean” what they “say.” In order to make visible the ideological construction of meaning, radical pedagogy is concerned with inquiring into how students “know” what they “know,” why they seem to “know” some things in particular and not others, and what interests are served and supported by this unquestioned “knowing.” Such an understanding of the politics of knowledge does not assume that students naturally “know” what they “know,” or that they are transparently “experts” on their experience. Radical pedagogy therefore rejects the Socratic paradigm where the function of the teacher is to help the student naturally discover and articulate the meaning that he already knows/has within him. In order to enable students to critique the ideological “interestedness” of meaning, the ways various culturally dominant meanings serve to support and reproduce existing social relations, the defamiliarizing classroom includes oppositional discourses, discourses which understand reality differently from the culturally hegemonic commonsense, discourses which by their very status as counter-hegemonic the student does not already possess. Rather than assuming that the student possesses his “own” knowledge, the defamiliarizing classroom is designed as a space for inquiring into whose knowledge this “own” consists of, and what the consequences of “owning” various knowledges are.

In the defamiliarizing classroom the teacher calls attention to himself as teacher, impelling recognition of the institutionally and culturally prescribed authority of that role. Unlike the teacher in the familiarizing classroom, the teacher in the defamiliarizing classroom does not deny or “disown” his institutionally mandated authority or attempt to conceal the ways in which he is positioned differently from his students. The teacher instead makes visible how the position “teacher” is constructed by institutional and cultural practices and argues for his particular authority according to how he makes use of it: for what ends his authority is used. By making authority, and the power relations that circumscribe the classroom (like any other social location) visible, the teacher allows authoritative discourses to be contested, rather than pretending that he has no authority, is positioned just like the student, and equally shares their knowledge. The classroom in which authority is “disowned” in this fashion is in fact the classroom which is authoritarian since it functions to keep the discourses of authority protectively hidden and unquestioned. As Katz indicates,

To not “impose” upon our students is equivalent to allowing this entire organization and coordination of institutional and social resources to go uncontested; it is to allow students to continue to ‘speak’ as the representatives of this (capitalist) social form… [A] liberal approach identifies ‘freedom’ with the absence of any immediate and direct control over one’s activities — the fact that one’s activities are precisely and often brutally limited by the operations of the market, the class structure of society, institutionalized racism, sexism, and heterosexism, does not register with the liberal as a systematic curtailment of people’s ‘freedoms’. A more correct and profound understanding of freedom, though, would identify freedom with actual control over social institutions and the knowledges required to manage them. A radical pedagogy, then, must recognize the need to restrict apparent and local modes of freedom (like, for example, the ‘freedom’ of the conservative student not to be ‘interested’ in the ideological consequences of his/her favorite literary text) in order to produce subjects capable of struggling for more global modes of freedom (collective control over the means of production)… The refusal of authority on the part of the instructor, then, rather than simply freeing the students, simply reproduces in the classroom space the modes of authority prevalent in society as a whole.

It might seem to some critics that such a mode of pedagogy is “too harsh” or even “too mean” for advocates of the necessity of revolutionary social transformation in order to achieve human emancipation, collective equality, and social justice to adopt — or even contrary to advocacy of these goals. And yet, this presupposes a “liberal” rather than a “radical” understanding of social problems, that they are rooted either in collective ignorance and underdevelopment or in individual corruption and degeneracy: that “we” are “all” positioned together to share the same fundamental interests, and that the society in which we live is thus “basically” sound, “basically” “fair” and “just.” It presupposes further that students are oppressed and exploited, and oppress and exploit others merely as “individuals” rather than as representatives of social classes, class fractions and class strata, and cross-class social categories which maintain objectively opposed interests, and which therefore necessarily must engage in conflict and struggle over the shape and direction of the general mode of organization of the production and distribution of natural and cultural resources, powers, and capacities. A liberal pedagogy which seeks to “empower” students by simply being “nice” to them confuses “personal liberation” with “social emancipation” and forgets that the classroom is a site of real class struggle within what amounts to an ongoing war over social ownership, social control, social power, and social freedom. Beyond this, however, a radical pedagogy of the kind I have outlined is neither designed nor does it need to engage in “emotionally” or “physically” “harsh” or “mean” kinds of relations with students; on the contrary, these are likely to prove counterproductive — and this is why a genuinely radical pedagogy altogether eschews the moralistically judgmental and the cynically snide and sarcastic kinds of approaches to student “resistance” so prevalent among so many other kinds of teachers from more “mainstream” positions. The radical pedagogue takes what his students represent very seriously, and because of this the pressure the radical pedagogue places upon his students is — and must be — intellectual and political, not emotional and moral. The radical teacher in fact not only welcomes but also encourages his students to exert strong counter-pressure upon what he has to say and how he has organized and engaged in the course, treating all articulations which represent an intellectually serious and politically engaged commitment with respect — including those which represent positions to which he is fundamentally opposed. He is not at all interested in silencing liberal, moderate, or even conservative and reactionary positions in his classes; on the contrary, he seeks to provoke these so that students will “feel free” — and, in fact, be compelled — to represent these positions very forcefully (as forcefully as they can). Of course, he contests and critiques these positions rigorously, yet he will assist and encourage all students who engage in intellectually serious and politically committed fashion as far as he possibly can in further advancing and strengthening their arguments and critiques. The radical pedagogue, moreover, will strive to create the kind of class atmosphere where students are able and willing extensively to contest and critique each other, and will work especially hard to take advantage of and to support the efforts of students who already represent marginal positions (and not only those who are already in some way or to some degree radically critical and oppositional but also all of those who are members of oppressed and exploited social groups) to speak from these positions forcefully and extensively so as to contest students who represent “mainstream” — dominant and ultimately conservative — positions.

In the defamiliarizing classroom students are addressed as occupying institutionally and culturally prescribed positions as students and as engaging in processes of learning which have social and political consequences. Instead of allowing the classroom to contribute to the status quo by suspending the pressures of the real conflict among opposed social interests, the defamiliarizing classroom forces students to confront the consequences of their participation, through their education, in the reproduction and maintenance of capitalist society and of oppressive and exploitative social relations along lines of class, gender, race, sexuality and nationality. By assuming a strong position in the classroom, the teacher makes it possible for students to become aware of their positions within systems of relations between knowledge and power. In the contestatory classroom the teacher often adopts an adversarial role in relation to the student: he puts pressure on, critiquing rather than nurturing, the presuppositions of the positions from which the student speaks. This interrogation allows the student to recognize himself as a social subject, showing him how his ideas and opinions are the effects of his social positioning. The outcome of such efforts is in part to “put students in their place,” revealing the assumptions and consequences of their positions, but it is also to reveal that this “place” is a contradictory and as such ultimately incoherent one. By stressing student subjectivity as contradictory, and by showing the individual student to occupy contradictory positions which have been ideologically produced to seem seamlessly “coherent,” the teacher pressures her students not only to “own” the consequences of their positions but also to see their particular “positionedness” as serving interests that are very likely not always entirely (if at all) “their own.”

By making visible the construction of student subjectivity, and by producing positions from which students can explain, rather than merely describe, the ideological construction of their “identities,” “orientations,” “investments,” and “affiliations,” radical pedagogy puts pressure on the student to recognize himself as implicated in the reproduction and maintenance of the existing, late capitalist social totality, and to render problematic and uncomfortable his continued reinterpellation into the same “good subject” positions by dominant ideologies. In this sense, radical pedagogy is a pedagogy of political enablement rather than a pedagogy of “self-liberation.” Radical pedagogy critiques the liberal humanist conception and practice of a “private mode of individuality” in order to contribute towards the production of a radical conception and practice of “public individuality” within a system of social relations dependent upon genuinely free and voluntary association of individuals within collectivities that they will both manage and control — collectively — themselves. Radical pedagogy thus works to impress upon students the recognition that “their subjectivity” is an ensemble of subject positions in social relations that is therefore always not only multiple and contradictory, but also over-determined and inter-connected with the “subjectivities of others.” Thus the student is enabled to see that he is not excluded from social forces and thereby incapable of effecting change, but is rather already implicated in political struggles, is already committed, and does already intervene within the making and remaking of existing social reality, albeit most often largely unconsciously and largely conservatively.

Radical pedagogy, taken seriously as committed political practice, is often met with skepticism about its ability to “really change anything.” Such arguments usually question the “success” of such pedagogy in terms of “how much” student’s minds have been “changed,” or “how many” student minds have been affected. This understanding of success as linked to a definable quantity judges success in purely accumulationist terms — more is better — and reifies the historically contingent and contradictory production of learning and subjectivity. Arguments which question the effects of radical pedagogy in these terms express hesitancy over how much success the radical teacher can ever have. Committed intellectuals and teachers refuse such political fatalism. Radical pedagogy as an intervention into the reproduction of the political and cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie understands and accepts its historical contingency and its historical limitations: in other words, to be so committed is to be committed to risks and failures as well as “successes.”

In addition, radical pedagogy is not simply a project of “mind-changing” as if a student possesses one mind which the teacher, almost physically, replaces with another. Radical pedagogy is not the recruitment of individuals, but rather an intervention into dominant discourses and practices, into the ideological production of the cultural commonsense, which locates individuals in relation to particular ways of making sense of their place within, and in relation to what they accept as the “proper” modes of their engagement within, late capitalist society. Radical pedagogues cannot predict exactly how or how much change their pedagogical practices produce, or even entirely where their practices contribute towards change, since they do not in fact accept the traditional limits placed on pedagogy: that it exists only in the physical spaces of the classroom, and ends when the class is, as marked by institutional practices, over. Since radical pedagogues take seriously historical contingencies and historical limitations, they fully understand the possibilities — indeed the often great likelihood and even inevitability — of recuperation and indifference. Radical intellectuals intervene within dominant educational practices in ways which put pressure on the easy recuperation or dismissal of radical ideas (and all “different,” “unfamiliar,” or “unpopular” ideas that are dismissed by such labeling because of the radical potential they represent). Radical pedagogy makes its critique of dominant practices visible in all spaces in which such practices are located: in the writing of syllabi, in the length of reading lists, in the writing of course descriptions, in the kinds and costs of books ordered for purchase at the bookstore, in understandings of and practices of (dis)participation in departmental service, in curriculum decisions, in professional research and publishing, in career choices, in professional friendships and personal relations, in extra- academic political involvements, in all spaces — in and beyond the classroom — in which radical pedagogues lead their lives. The radical pedagogue’s aim is constantly to challenge the reproduction and maintenance of conservative and recuperative practices and of the social arrangements they depend on and reinforce. The commitment of the committed radical intellectual is not a commitment simply to empirical “success,” but rather to constant challenge, constant critique toward the production of conditions of possibility for revolutionary socialist transformation.