Part Two: Pedagogy of Pleasure: The Me-In-Crisis

and you have requested that I “comment” on your “text.” I have, of course, commented on your “final paper” or rather, the one-page paper you have turned in for your final paper. But, I assume that by “comment” you mean my commenting on your accompanying “Letter” in which you provide the narrative of a “crisis” in your subject relations that has effectively made it impossible for you to write the required third paper (a 10-12 page paper dealing with six different texts from the course reading list). It is this narrative, I take it, that you wish me to address.

However, increasingly I have found that making such comments—which often go beyond the immediate issues raised in the course to deal with larger theoretical/social issues—are largely seen as irrelevant by the majority of students. Instead they seem more interested in protecting their right to “feel” in-crisis (as the most authentic response to their own contradictory relations to the relations of production) than in pursuing a disciplined understanding of the historical conditions of such “crises.” I have, therefore, stopped making such “comments” because students tend to use their various local narratives to effectively shield themselves from the reach of any critique.

My decision to no longer initiate “comments”/“critiques” (beyond the specific issues of a course) is intimately related to the prevailing social practices… for instance, to point to one specific subject formation: the historical emergence of the “cynical subject” in the moment of pragmatism. Recently a student who had presented him/herself as a politically interested and committed person, devoted to social change, to transformative pedagogy, etc. etc… gave me at the end of the semester—in a most cynical act—as his/her final paper, a paper which was more or less identical with the one she/he had turned in for another class. The question for me became: how do you engage such a cynical subject? It was quite clear that “critique” was irrelevant to the cynical subject… the only way to engage him/her was therefore to provide her/him with a speculum: to “reflect” his/her opportunistic narratives and pragmatic practices; let him/her repeat these narratives without any critique; let them spin on and on… maybe they will be exhausted by their sheer repetition and by the stubbornness of history, which is cruelly uninterpretable by such mock-explanations. The cynical subject cannot understand critique because he/she is “pragmatic”… it seems as if the only way to “deal” with such a subject is by “humoring” her/him… by accepting his/her narratives of crisis at face value… by affirming her/him… indeed… by being affirmative, mimetic, and, following the code of the pedagogy of pleasure, “supportive” and non-critique-al… that is to say pragmatic….

Although, as I said, I no longer initiate “comments” (beyond the ones that I write on the papers/assignments, as I have done on the end comments attached to your own one-page paper), I still respond to the requests of those who actively seek such “comments”—perhaps as an act of resistance to cynical subjectivity. My response, in other words, is a resistance to the prevailing cynicism which is engulfing pedagogical practices at this moment of the postmodern. Soon, I may find this useless as well. I have not yet. Therefore, in response to your request, I have “commented” on your text.

I hope it is clear by now why I started with these remarks: whatever I say here is said in a specific historical context…. I cannot “comment” on your text as if I have not already been a listener to the narratives and practices of cynical subjects…. I “comment” by/through mediations…. I “comment” with the history of these narratives around me, which is part of my history as a pedagogue here. My discourses are, in short, limited, and I want you to know that…. Taking this history into account (as well as the history of my comments/ lectures/ discourses in class), I assume that in requesting my comments you were not asking me to offer “affirmative” comments (in the expected manner of bourgeois pedagogy which regards critique-al comments to be unsupportive attacks and accusations… you know the stories)…. I do not have “affirmative” comments…. I cannot affirm existing things/practices (except, of course, in a parody that might exhaust the existing by infinite reflections: Yes, Speculum), for affirmation of the existing does not lead to social transformation… but (fortunately?) “affirmation peddling” is a popular practice here, and I am sure what you miss in my “comments” you can easily find elsewhere….

I write these “comments” therefore very reluctantly… reluctantly for the reasons I have already mentioned and also because, as a pedagogue, I am not learning anything new from them—this is just another repetition… another rehearsal…. I am also reluctant because (as your text clearly shows) you are so thoroughly situated in your narratives of the subject-in-crisis that, I suspect, as you read these comments, your main interest will be to show how “wrong” they are in understanding you… how they do not explain you, your own very different crisis…. But I am not writing with the claim of being right about your-very-own-difference…. I am writing to locate this difference in some broader frame of historical understanding and to show that it is, after all, not so much a “difference” as it is a “difference-effect” produced to protect the privileges of the bourgeois subject to feel in-crisis (whenever it encounters its contradictory practices and the pseudo-explanations for those contradictions)… and to hint at what makes such recurring crises so necessary. Of course, I write in the “hope” (that idealist residue without which no pedagogue can act) of providing frames of new understanding aimed at changing what is, in effect, a very reactionary form of self-explanation: a detour for self-affirmation—you-as-you-are, in-crisis….

I am deeply disappointed that after a whole semester of intensive reading, discussing and critiquing (not to mention the hours I spent reading and commenting on your first two papers), you have not written an essay engaging knowledges productive for social change but have chosen instead to repeat some of the most familiar clichés about subjectivity so popular at the present time among a group of students here. These students—who regard themselves to be “progressive”—deploy these banalities of bourgeois self-fashioning almost as a matter of routine in order to shield themselves from a rigorous critique of their situationality in history and their (non-reading and anti-intellectual) practices. I believe commitment to “radical” social change is, above all, a commitment to an untiring reading, thinking and writing—seeking, in short, knowledges which might provide a theoretical and reliable guide for action (what Marx calls “science”). However, instead of such rigorous conceptual practices, they have concluded—like all members of their (middle, upper) class—that it is more urgent for them to probe their “experiences”: after all to have “experience” (rather than abstract concepts/science) is a more readily recognizable mark of social concern. In fact, in some narratives of non-reading, “progressiveness” is deployed as a justification for non-reading. The “progressive” declares him/her/self opposed to a set of books he/she is to read, a course she/he is taking, an idea… and then concludes: because he/she is opposed to this book/idea… (an act which, it is implied, affirms her/his radicalism), he/she is not going to engage it…. This provides the cynical subject with an ideological alibi through which she/he is able to avoid the intellectual labor necessary in the production of rigorous knowledge and to substitute for it another narrative of “I”… As Marx has taught, radicalism is characterized by rigorous intellectual work, by producing scientific knowledge, not by spinning anecdotes, narratives and tales of self-affirmation (through performed crises) in the name of “progressiveness.” There is nothing radical about ignorance…. It is the most reactionary stance one can possibly take… it is the fetishization of the irrational….

Experiential activism (which is ultimately a reformist mode of dealing with the social) thrives on such anti-intellectual and experiential (localizing) practices. Instead of reading, writing and thinking in order to provide transformative (scientific) explanations and to help develop guidelines for praxis, such experientialists incessantly “talk” about what they call “subjectivity.” In their discourses, “subjectivity” is deployed in a parodic and cynical manner since all it actually signifies is what is understood as “individualism” by which they mean, in practice, “me”… “me-here-and-now” experiencing the fullness of the tangible and the plenitude of the concrete… and, of course, nothing is more concrete than me-in-crisis: me-with-difference: me-with-my-glorious-distinction-from-others…. This reactionary move is fully supported and protected by various forms of experiential activism, whether they are modes of feminism, (post)modernism, anti-colonialism… Green-ism…. They all have one, and only one, ideological function in the regime of wage-labor and capital: to commodify “difference”… which is finally the “difference” of the experience of the subject-in-crisis… a crisis whose main political outcome is to mystify the historicity and class-founded nature of subjectivity….

In your text there are strong echoes of this popular mode of “talking” (i.e. non-knowing, anti-intellectual experientialism) about subjectivity with all its reactionary and counter-revolutionary consequences. Your discourse mimics the themes of me-in-crisis (in which “I” am authentically experiencing the real) and thus commodifies experiential “difference”… i.e. focuses on the me. These reactionary discourses have found it beneficial to confuse an objective, scientific, rigorous historical inquiry into “subjectivity” (the construction of knowledges of the subject-in-history which could lead to change) with chatting about “individuality” that is to say the “experiences” of me-in-crisis (which is a pernicious form of naturalizing the dominant forms of knowing in order to keep the dominant dominating).

The goal of a such reactionary and anti-intellectual move is to substitute “experience” for “concept,” “me” for “history,” the “singular” for the “collective”… This is a move which is consistently legitimated and supported in the dominant academy. Instead of, for instance, theorizing power and thus producing historical knowledges about its formations and operation with an aim toward changing it, this shift from concept to experience simply declares that it is more important to “talk” about the “experience” of power (in the daily life of the “individual”) and thus particularize it. Theorizing power in a rigorous and historically objective manner is regarded by anti-intellectual activist discourses to be abstract and remote, but me in the process of experiencing (power) is thought to be the “real” thing. By subscribing to such a position, this reactionary activism (whose discourses saturate your text) participates in the classic idealist privileging of the effects of social practices, thereby blurring their causes: whereas “effects” are experienced, causes have to be known through concepts. (Remember Marx: “In the analysis of economic forms [i.e. producing knowledges of social practices], moreover, neither microscope nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both,” [my emphasis]). Your text is exemplary in this respect: you continually foreground the effect (crisis) rather than the “cause.” When you do attempt to provide a “cause,” you offer what is basically a pseudo-cause—it is actually more an act of “blaming” i.e. another “experience” (they did it to me by forcing me to have “bad” habits), than an analysis. It is a move which simply postpones scientific and objective inquiry into the real causes that you avoid…. You may wish to put more pressure on your own contradictory social practices which are located in the space of “talking” (experiencing) rather than “reading” (knowing).

I am using these two terms, “talking” and “reading” (as I have already hinted in my references to Marx), as two opposing structures of knowledge. By “talking,” I mean the practice of “relating” to the social through pleasure/immediate feelings/experience. By “reading,” I mean conceptuality/history/ abstraction—science. For experientialists, it is more “real” to “experience” crisis than to know the conditions that lead to such a crisis. Some feminist theories have, in fact, acquired their authority by substituting experience for conceptuality, thus setting in motion diverse forms of anti-intellectualism which are celebrated as a mark of the distance of the authentic woman-subject-in-crisis from the authority of abstract masculinity…. Reading, thinking, writing and the production of transformative concepts are, therefore, systematically discouraged in these discourses… instead an endless self-narration, anecdotes, autobiographical accounts… of the experience of power-by-the-subject-of-femininity (i.e. the “effect” of power not its “causes”) are foregrounded as marks of the authenticity of the subject in its “real”-ity… this is, of course, the “real”-ity of ideology, and its self-evidence is the “natural”-ness effect of the ideological.

“Talking,” I might add, is the privileged strategy of what I will call, the “pedagogy of pleasure,” while “writing” is the major conceptual means of intervention in the “pedagogy of critique.” Let me explain.

When pedagogy violates the all too familiar code of “learning is fun” or “knowledge is neutral” (as I am doing in this letter), and instead proposes that education is an interventionary act for social change, it is automatically branded strict and authoritarian. This belief is based on the assumptions of a mode of teaching that I marked as the “pedagogy of pleasure.” In the pedagogy of pleasure, the subject of knowledge is assumed to be a “unique,” “independent” and “sovereign” person, who reads according to his individual imagination, experience, vision and originality, and all pedagogy has to do is to help him “discover” these “natural” and “given” qualities in himself more fully. In other words, the purpose of liberal education is to make the student a “singular” well-rounded, free person. However, what is regarded as the “freedom” of the individual subject is not “natural” but is an ideology effect: the dominant ideology posits the individual as free in order that he/she may freely consent to the ruling relations of production which, through the social division of labor, produce and maintain (economic) inequality. The pedagogy of critique, in contrast to the pedagogy of pleasure, works not to enhance the pleasure of learning and the “freedom” of the individual, but to produce knowledges that are effective in transforming the existing society into a society of genuine (economic and not simply discursive) equality. The focus of such a pedagogy is therefore on “collectivity” not “individuality,” on “knowledge” not “pleasure,” on “critique” not “experience,” on “social emancipation” not “private freedom”… its goal, in short, is to transform the culturally produced, reified consciousness which prevents the subject of pedagogy from realizing other social and political possibilities. Pedagogy is part of class struggle.

This, among other things, means that the subject of knowledge/student in the pedagogy of critique is regarded to be a socially constructed subject and not a “naturally” given free individual (as traditionalist humanists assume) or a subject produced by the libidinal force of ahistorical desires (as poststructuralists propose). The pedagogy of critique argues that what is regarded to be the free self or differential subject in the pedagogy of pleasure is in fact an imaginary identity produced by the dominant ideology. It is part of the operation of ideology to place people in positions where they think of themselves as self-constituting and free so that they “freely” conclude that the way things are is how they ought to be and thus preserve the status quo. The pedagogy of critique seeks to make the student aware (through ideology critique) of the working of ideology and to place him in the position of a critical (not pleasureful) reader of texts—one who can then recognize (by producing historical knowledge of the social totality) the different ways social relations are organized in order to act on them. The pedagogy of critique is, of course, also an act of pleasure: the pleasure of emancipation from established views and of participation in the construction of a new world free from class, gender, and race exploitation.

In your text you (unconsciously?) identify the project of pedagogy with the pedagogy of pleasure. Consequently, rather than engaging concepts and producing transformative knowledges, what you actually “talk” about, when you begin to talk about something you call “pedagogy,” is an account of your own experience in a pedagogical situation… me-in-Crisis-in-the-classroom… this is not a theoretical account of pedagogy, this is autobiography and, like all autobiographies, it acquires its authority by positing the subject of experience as the object of knowledge. The goal of such autobiographical accounts (me-in-crisis-in-the-classroom) is to justify the me in its present form, immunize it from history, and say, in effect, this is not my pedagogy, I want another form of learning… concluding that there are other forms of pedagogy. This pedagogy is producing crisis in me… I cannot write… I need affirmation of me-in-crisis…. You repeat all these topoi of the subject-in-crisis… as if any of this was a new revelation…. Pedagogy (and the shift in the topic of your paper from abstract knowledge to the experience of knowledge in the name of pedagogy is quite telling here) is a structure of abstract concepts not simply a memoir of me-in-crisis-in-the-classroom (as you seem to think)… it is this substitution of memoir for knowledge that eventually trivializes radical pedagogy (as a critique-al science of knowing) and reduces it to a mere game of “changing the furniture in the classroom” in order to make the experience of power (in the classroom) more democratic, more tolerable—in short, invisible—for the bourgeois subject….

These series of substitutions (experience/concept: talking/reading: letter/formal paper) are the “common sense” of the pedagogy of pleasure. They are among the most popular pedagogical practices because they are so necessary for the naturalization of existing social relations. They are the most effective form of resistance to concepts. Conceptual knowledge (revolutionary science) is the knowledge of social totality. Experience is the ultimate form of feeling locality and individuality. “Crisis” in the discourses of bourgeois subjectivity is the site for the manifestation of self in its most “authentic” local moment. Such shifts—from concept to experience from knowing to crisis (ignorance)—give the person an ideological alibi to evade confronting the historical and socio-economic structures of the subject in history and instead produce anecdotes of the “experience” of the subject-in-crisis…. You share the assumptions of the reactionary discourses on subjectivity that “crisis” makes all practices impossible—thus one who is in crisis cannot write a formal paper (cannot produce historical/conceptual knowledge). However, she/he can easily compose a “letter” narrating his/her crisis). To be in-crisis, you seem to say, one suddenly discovers one’s difference; a difference that puts an end to all activities such as conceptualizing/writing/knowing… in these moments one can only experience… but if you read (as I do) the letters of the subjects-in-crisis that I get every semester around the time final papers are due, you will realize how all these differences are similar, and how they are, in their predictable similarities, even stereotypical. These differences are all versions of sameness… they are all alike which, among other things, means they are constructed to fulfill certain ideological effects… above all, as I said, the effect of the priority and firstness of experience and an attack on the concept (knowledge of totality)… they are, in short, a particular historical form of keeping the existing social relations intact, and their current particular manifestation is a form of bourgeois anti-intellectualism that you see among the students I referred to. The irony, however, is that these reactionary discourses are put forth as authentic, activist and progressive practices. This is the formation of what I have called the cynical subject: the subject who puts itself forth as “radical” but deploys the discourses of activism/radicalism only to achieve pragmatic goals (“pragmatic”: successful within the existing frames and structures), the subject who knows what he/she is acting on is a convenient belief (not the truth), but he/she acts on it as if he/she did not know that the convenient belief is the effect of ideology (and thus an alienated reality; a non-truth)… she/he knows and yet does it anyway…. This is what Sloterdijk and, following him, Zizek call, “enlightened false consciousness”: “one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it” (Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, New York: Verso, 1989, p.29).

But only when crisis is staged for the benefit of ME does it lead to the erasure of praxis. Crisis, as a historical process—the eruptions of social contradictions—produces new possibilities… it is always inaugurating novel modes of engagement with the social. Crisis, as historical process, is always enabling… it is the necessary precondition of revolutionary transformations… but such an oppositional understanding of crisis is not legitimate in the pedagogy of pleasure since it foregrounds contradictions and forces a resolution of contradictions—not by narrating them (“talking”) but by praxis, by recognizing that CRISIS is always the mark of an “excess” that cannot be solved/absorbed within the existing frames of class relations, by recognizing (in the case of all these subjects-in-crisis-performances) that one’s subjectivity is, after all, NOT one’s own… this is, of course, the last thing that the subject-in-crisis wishes to do… such a recognition re-situates the subject and annuls all its protective narratives… it brings back the concept… knowledge-as-social, as-historical.

The letter you have sent me (with some changes here and there) is identical with other letters I have received on the subject-in-crisis. If I had the time to put into my computer and mix the most recent letter I have received of a subject-in-crisis with your own, I am not sure you will be able to tell the difference between the two. This similarity does not mean that what you say is not real… it means that the reality of what you say is the reality of ideology and you should resist it and not make it the basis of your (non)praxis as you have done in this instance. Had you encountered the crisis as the effect of the historicity of your subjectivity and not as the naturality of your being-as-such you could have deployed it to reunderstand the contradictions that have brought it about rather than indulge in the pseudo-explanations (blame games), anecdotes, autobiographical meditations—that are the luxury of the leisured class—etc. etc. You could have, for instance, re-understood your social practices to explain the crisis, not use the crisis to explain you (away) and thus erase your historicity, the absence of autonomy in your subjectivity. After all, the most ideologically important role that crisis plays in such moments is that it implies the autonomy of the subject: crisis, in bourgeois theory, is seen as the fissure that testifies to the everlasting gap between the self and history.

But you need to deploy the crisis in order to mystify the social “causes” of the actions of the subject (-in-crisis). You seem to say, for instance, that you are in such crisis that you sit in front of your computer without being able to write the paper. The reason for being unable to write the paper is a rather simple social (non)practice of yours: you do not read… you have not read the books which were the focus of our discussions and critiques during the semester. You, in other words, have not labored to acquire the knowledges which are necessary for writing the paper. Knowledges which are the enabling conditions for praxis. This is such a simple re-understanding of crisis as the effect of your social practices (and not as their cause) that the dominant frames of intelligibility inhibit even uttering it. The ruling academy has privileged the pedagogy of pleasure to such an extent that a materialist explanation such as the one I have hinted at looks quite out of place, looks, in fact, quite “crude.”

Why have you not read the books? Because the social practice of reading, the intellectual labor involved in producing concepts… is disruptive of the pleasures of “talking.” Reading/writing/ thinking require discipline—the other of pleasure…. pleasure is the last privilege that the white middle class person would give up; it is the mark of its autonomy; the excessive (i.e. the crisis-y)…. By the way, why is it that all the letters I receive on the crisis of subjectivity are from white (upper) middle class students? I have never encountered a person of color who allowed her/himself the luxury of being in-crisis… these luxuries are all part of the class privileges of the white (upper) middle class; something you may wish to think about….

I am, of course, not denying the relevance of the subject…. What I am opposing is the use of the subject (especially the subject-in-crisis) as an alibi for reducing the subject to a me and then deploying me as the limit text: nobody can critique me because unless you are me (which you obviously are not) how could you even know what me means… etc. etc. I am, however, aware how difficult such a shift in explaining the subject is and how unpopular advocating it is in the moment of the (post)modern. The pedagogue who refuses to found her/his practices on the notion of the subject-of-knowledge as an autonomous origin of reality-as-experience or even enunciates his/her refusal and argues for the pedagogy of critique is quickly turned into the “other” of humanity itself. Such a pedagogue is the monster, the master, the totalitarian, the dogmatist… you know the epithets….

These comments, as I have already hinted, will be read by the pedagogues of pleasure (of the humanist right as well as the poststructuralist center) as hostile, unhelpful and, above all, as “crude.” I understand pedagogy in a rather “crude” way: as an intervention in the dominant subtleties of bourgeois pedagogy. It is too late in the century, and there are too many urgencies to be anything but “crude”…. Fortunately (?) there is no dearth of “subtle” pedagogies around… pedagogies that have “complex,” “nuanced” and “flexible” discourses on the subject-in-crisis and affiliated matters. “Crude” pedagogy is a post-subtle inquiry into how knowledges are produced and disseminated as the effect of the social contradictions of historical societies that deploy the subject-as-träger in order to “change” the world. This is the limit question: what is the function of pedagogy in late 20th century? To change the world or to give pleasure to the subject. Please do not be subtle; do not say: both! Let us be unsubtle and start “with taking sides” (Marx, Karl, “Letter to Ruge,” September 1843)… let us forget “both” and begin the task of a transformative pedagogy….