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Although the "crisis" in the English Department at SUNY-Albany is “located” in a particular institution, it is symptomatic of the (re)emergence — in the moment of transnational capitalism—of the ideologies of the subject(ion) that are disseminated through various discursive strategies, including what I shall call “retrohumanities." Retrohumanities are marked in their practices by their violent assault on what they regard to be “theory”: a violence that is concealed as a populist valorization of “experience." “Experience”—which is regarded to be “spontaneous” and thus “natural” and “nonideological” — is celebrated in many contradictory forms. What is at stake in these diverse valorizations, however, is not “experience” itself; rather “experience” is a stand-in for something else. We might get a glimpse of this “something else” if we consider, for example, that traditional cultural feminists celebrate “experience” as an immediate testimony to “life” itself. Consequently, they advocate opening up the “canon” to represent more of the “experience” of women since for them woman is her “experience," and the only way to “liberate” her is to open up space for the “self expression” of her experience. Their supposed opponents, who believe in the sanctity of the “canon," also deploy the same logic: the “canon” is significant, they argue, because it is the site of the quintessential human “experience” where the particularity and uniqueness of “experience” and, at the same time and quite paradoxically, the “universality” of that “uniqueness” is expressed with unsurpassable mastery. What, on the surface, seem to be opposing modes of readings are, in actuality, simply varieties of the same ideology of the subject. It is this ideology of the subject(ivity) that is the “something else” of experience. The core of this ideology of the subject — which is concealed as celebration of the unique experience — is “individualism." “Experience”, in short is the name of that capitalist arche-strategy that marginalizes collectivity and protects the “individual” as the foundation of entrepreneurial capitalism. Experience, in short, is a stand-in for the “individual” who is a stand-in for global capital.
In place of “theory," retrohumanities puts the “aesthetic”: the “expression” of “experience” that is assumed to transcend the ideological and thus transparently capture the “life” contained in “experience." The “aesthetic” in the retrohumanities is used, however, not (as in the work of Nietzsche, de Man, Derrida, and Nancy, for example) as the space of difference, the heterogeneous and the undecidable but as their opposite: the logocentric site of a “natural” harmony and spontaneity that are obtained by obliterating “difference” — the difference of “language” and “experience." The “aesthetic," in retrohumanities, is constructed as a nonideological, panhistorical space across the ages. But, in actuality, it is a political allegory for consensus and the repression of dissent in social practices—a performance of the political act Chomsky calls “manufacturing consent." All acts of dissent from the ruling order are thus seen as instances of discord ("ugliness"), “ill feeling," “obstructionism," and pathological animosity, and the absence of “civility” — as the “other” of “harmony” and “beauty."
Through the assault on theory and by positing “beauty” and “pleasure” as ends in themselves, retrohumanities (whether opening the canon or protecting it) brings back the ideologies of “individualism” and relegitimates the cult of the “spontaneity of experience” and the curriculum of (personal) “skills." The “aesthetic” is a strategy, in the retrohumanities, for making the entrepreneur (the individual-as-venturer) the source of social practices: by conceiving of the “aesthetic” as an “impressionistic” response, a “passionate," “spontaneous," “unique (individual) affect, practices are seen as non-theoretical and beyond the reach of history. To insist on the historicity of “experience," — its non-spontaneity — and to situate the “aesthetic” in its material conditions of possibility is assumed to be nothing short of reducing the humanities to what Norman Fruman, in his column in the newsletter of the “The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics," calls a “morally compromised and degraded branch of politics and social sciences” ("A Short History of the ALSC” 1). The focus of literary studies, according to Fruman, “should be on literature as literature and not as something else” (5). Struggle in the domain of culture over “knowledge” ("theory," “pedagogy," “curriculum”...) is always an “ideological form” in which, as Marx explains, people become “conscious” of their conflicts over their material relations ("class") and "fight it out." Retrohumanities are the terrain of ideology in the post cold-war academy and knowledge industry in which through “individualism” (as aesthetic experience) the “free market” is re-legitimated. In retrohumanities the “free market” is represented—in the allegory of “experience” and the “individual” — as the natural arena of social practices and the free zone of the “expression” of singularity and the “voice" of desire.
The resistance to theory in the contemporary academy, of course, takes many forms, but by one maneuver or another, they all reveal themselves to be resisting theory in order to negate “history” (as mode of production). The resistance to theory ranges from the theoretically rigorous and subtle “high theory” arguments of Derrida and de Man to a commonsensical anti-theory, which represents itself as “post-theory” in the middle-academy (such as the writings of Michael Bérubé and Bruce Robbins, at one level, and Barbara Christian's “The Race for Theory," on another), as well as simplistic, right-wing diatribes (such as Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals and John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction) and the populist pedagogies of “critical literacy." In spite of their surface differences, these diverse “resistances to theory” all end up displacing collectivity by individualism (as "rhetoric," “voice," “aesthetic"), which is the linchpin of transnational capitalism. To be more precise, the resistance to theory can take a trivial form, which is the attack on theory from “without," or it can have a more philosophically interesting one: the resistance to theory from “within” theory itself. As Paul de Man has argued in a series of essays, such as “Resistance to Theory” (The Resistance to Theory), “Signs and Symbols in Hegel's Aesthetics," and “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” (The Aesthetic Ideology), this is the resistance to theory by its own textual materiality.
Theory, de Man argues, is, like all texts, a reversible, double-sided and undecidable discourse that resists conceptual closure—that is, it refuses to be reduced by a metalanguage and, in defiance of all totalizations, inscribes itself as a series of specific problematizations. However, these “problematizations," contrary to de Man's representation, are all formal and discursive. Despite the radical materiality attributed to them (Warminski, “Ending Up” 11-44), they are strategies for negating “historical materialism” as the unfolding of “class struggle” and for rearticulating it as a rhetorical thickness that constitutes different forms of blockage obstructing any straightforward/transparent “reference." In this de Manian narrative, “historical materialism” is nothing more than a “tropological system," that is, in Warminski's words, “a system of tropological transformations and substitutions” (Introduction: Allegories of Reference” 10). Warminski's claim that a de Manian “reading” is an instance of radical “materiality” is founded upon the idea that de Man's readings show how any attempt at demystifying the work of ideology in transnational capitalism (such as Classical Marxist ideology critique) is simply the substitution of one trope (the “real," “true,"...) for another (10-11). De Man's radical materiality, in short, resists “concepts” (e.g. “class," “use-value”, “social division of labor") and textualizes them. This lesson is, in fact, one given by Derrida who, in his “reading” of Marx, follows the tradition of the “situationists” and produces “revolution” as the spectral (Specters of Marx). A revolutionary act, in Warminski's narrative of de Man, is always a “hasty” one and thus should be delayed and deferred and never treated as an “outside," rather it is caught in the circuits of dissemination and substitutions in the same economy that it critiques to overthrow.
The move that Warminski makes in order to protect de Man from the
critique that I have just made—de Manian reading as an instance
of post-al dematerializations and rhetorical reductionism—is
itself symptomatic of the strategies that mainstream post-al theory is
now deploying to give a political radicality and thus legitimacy to
reactionary theories of history. He writes that de Man's reading is
not reducible to rhetoric (12) because in de Man's notion of rhetoric
“factors and functions of language” lie at the
“bottom of the tropological systems” and leave
marks and traces 'within' (or 'without'?) these tropological
systems, marks and traces that may not be accessible to the
knowing, consciousness, or science of 'critical critics' but that
nevertheless remain legible in the texts of these systems: in
their inability to close themselves off, for instance, which
always produces an excess (or lack) of tropology, a residue or
remainder of trope and figure irreducible to them (11).
Warminski's idea of the “material” as an
“excess” that is unabsorbable by tropes repeats the move
that, as I have discussed in my “The (O)Cult of the
Post-al” (Rethinking Marxism), Zizek makes
in producing the material as the “real” which is the
excess(ive) "trauma” that cannot be subsumed into the Lacanian
order of the “symbolic” (The Metastases of
Enjoyment 199-200). To call de Man's rhetorical reading a
“materialist” reading is itself
an instance of idealism: in Warminski (and Zizek), the
“material” is not the property of an “object"(ive)
world but a resistance to conceptuality—a relaying of
“meaning” and thus a refusal of closure. This is a
repetition of some of the strategies of the Young Hegelians (in spite
of Warminski's rather opportunistic appropriation of Althusser) in
their own displacing of historical materialism with “material
inscriptions." Materialism is a structure of class conflict and an
effect of the social division of labor—the antagonism in
property relations in the social relations of production—and not
simply a rhetorical blockage and a spectral retracing of marks. But my
interest here is not so much in a critique of de Man's idealism
as (the source of his resistance to
theory) as is in showing the
convergence of all bourgeois discourses against theory on the basis of
their shared class interests.
The “resistance to theory” in de Man is the effect of slippages and ludic plays of the signifier — even though in his rhetorical semiology he formally opposes the binaries of signifier and signified. The theoretical sophistication of de Man's argument against theory separates it from both the diatribes of the cultural right-wing and the liberal central-left of posttheory: it is a rigorously argued theory at odds with theory. De Man's “resistance” to theory is not, at least not in the first instance, a naive retreat to a spontaneous “experience” and the curriculum of “skills” that constitute the populist forms of the resistance to theory in the academy and knowledge industry now.
Like Derrida and other poststructuralists, de Man textualizes “experience” and represents it as a series of discursive blockages which are the effects of “rhetoric” (which is, itself, at odds with the “explanation” of “grammar"). The popular denial of the textuality of “experience," in fact, provides de Man with the space to make one of his most effective theoretical moves. This move, as I have already hinted, seems to some of his later readers, such as Andrezj Warminski, to go beyond classic “deconstruction” and become so thoroughly transgressive that it is “far more radical and far more precise than those who still use the 'd-word' are ready for” ("Introduction: Allegories of Resistance” 6). Panexperientialism, de Man argues, is the outcome of a refusal to “distinguish between experience and the representation of experience” (Blindness and Insight, 188). This confusion of the “phenomenal” (experience) and the “linguistic” (textuality), which is the foundation of the dominant humanities, he names aesthetic ideology. “Aesthetic ideology” represents the experience of the subject as the defining frame and the core of “meaning” of all texts of culture. In other words, “aesthetic ideology” is that reading of “literature” that treats literary texts as if they were translucent reflections of “life” and not moments of textuality — as if, that is, problems posed by the materiality of language can be absorbed by living experiences, feelings and emotions. “Aesthetic ideology” — the reading of “literature” as a mimetic narrative of the spontaneous, the referential and the transtextual — is the foundation of retrohumanities and its “resistance to theory” in the name of “experience," “vision," and “sympathy." The assumptions of retrohumanities, as the prefix ("retro") marks are not “new” but a (re)emergence (necessitated by the recurring contradictions in the triumph of the market in the post cold-war era) of some historically entrenched practices that have formed the commonsense of the conventional culture industry since the rise of capitalism and its culture of sentimentality, which has always acted as a compensatory mechanism to conceal capitalism's lack: the reification of all human social practices.
Retrohumanities are founded upon the cultural commonplace that through the “genius” of the writer, the “contingencies” of time and space ("history") are transcended and permanent monuments of imagination and beauty are “created." “Aesthetic ideology," in short, is a cultural apparatus of capitalism for manufacturing the social congruity and communal harmony that have disappeared from daily life under capitalism and from the culture of the free market. The imaginary unity and consonance produced by “metaphor” (the privileged trope in “aesthetic ideology") substitutes for the cultural fragmentation and social alienation that capitalist exploitation (the extraction of surplus value) brings about. By privileging “metaphor," retrohumanities represent human consciousness as determining people's being. Through metaphoric substitutions, in other words, retrohumanities mystify the actuality that the “social being” of people “determines their consciousness." The effect of such mystification is that imagination itself is posited as the primary force in human history — a force that moves beyond limiting social laws and achieves true individuality purged of all social traces.
The privileging of “individualism” is the main reason for the dominance of “aesthetic ideology” in the “genius” industry and its consequent institutionalization in the academy. The greatness of (literary) "genius" is measured in “aesthetic ideology” by its ability to “create” striking “metaphors” that bring together fragmentary “experiences." The valorization of “metaphor” — the figure of fusion — makes retrohumanities a necessary ally for capitalism since the figure of the “genius” (metaphor maker) in retrohumanities is only ostensibly that of the “writer." The “person” behind that “figure” is, in fact, the capitalist entrepreneur: the singular individual who by the power of his ingenuity ("imagination") invents new ways for making “profit” and in doing so transcends the limits of all social laws and norms. The entrepreneur, in short, is an “artist” whose new ways of increasing “profits” are similar to creating new metaphors — connecting paths that were not connected before and fusing elements that we were taught were different and incompatible.
Reactionary pedagogues, like their conservative political allies in the culture industry (The Weekly Standard, New Criterion, American Scholar, Critical Inquiry), in think-tanks such as the “Heritage Foundation," in university outfits like the Hoover Institute at Stanford, in professional associations (e.g. the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics) and in Congress, have deployed a reductive and retrograde populism in defense of human experiences and “cultural values." They are putting forth the cult of the individual and his “experience” as the norm of all cultural conduct through codes such as “family values," “individual responsibility” (as in the debates over “Welfare") and personal “stories” — like those that represent the rise of reactionary figures, such as Clarence Thomas, who come to power by the force of the ruling elite, as simply the effects of individual hard work.
The return of right-wing politics to U.S. campuses in the name of “aesthetics” (human experience, beauty,... ) valorizes the individual by resurrecting “the author” whose “death” (the end of the bourgeois subject) was argued in such texts of classic poststructuralism as those by Barthes and Foucault. The figure of “writer” as a person-in-the-flesh, an actual person who simply “writes," is at the heart of all retrograde pedagogies. At SUNY-Albany, for example, the conservative Group that has ruled the Department of English for years is “resisting theory” through the figure of the writer-as-individual. It is using the “writer” as its founding concept for partitioning the English Department (which, it is said, has become too theoretical). In his text of 25 June 1996, for example, David Schwalm, who has published texts from the SUNY-Albany writing faculty on the WPA (Writing Program Administrators) Listserver, elaborates on their ideas by saying: “the 'writer' that Iser, Fish, etc. attempt to dislodge was the writer created by readers by inference from the text — writer as imagined through text. Steve is actually talking about real physical writers, people who write, sort of a supply side guy."[1] Such a physicalist understanding of the writer (writer as a person and not as a subject constructed by the political economy of signs and practices) is, of course, an allegory of the “autonomy” of the individual entrepreneur and an attempt to give new ideological support to capitalist individualism.
The theory wars in the academy are always fought on behalf of the two contesting classes: the owners and the workers. In its fight against theory (critique) on behalf of the ruling elite, retrohumanities, like the owners themselves, act with deep cynicism. They advocate, as owners do, “democracy," “freedom," “equality," openness," inclusion," and “free choice," but in their actual practice, they block all attempts to put into practice these ideas and make them part of daily life. It is clear to owners and their ideologues that these values are in direct opposition to the unlimited and unconstrained rule of profit. “Democracy," “free choice," “openness,"...are thus more a part of a sustained, cynical public relations campaign by the owners than a part of people's everyday lives.
The cynicism of retrohumanists is shown, among other sites, in the gap between what they say as pedagogues in their classes — or write as scholars in their texts — and what they actually do when it comes to putting those beliefs into practice. Without a correspondence between what a pedagogue-scholar says and what she/he does, what emerges is not so much pedagogy or pubic [sic.] policy in education, but an opportunism that cynically deploys “ideas” in order to open the right path for his/her career and acquisition of institutional power. The incoherence in contemporary public practices is caused by these acts of cynicism. Retrohumanities justify these acts as pragmatism—what it takes to get things done. But in actuality these are retrograde moves aimed at preserving the status quo within which cynicism is rewarded. Thus the very foundation of public citizenship is put in jeopardy. There is no task more urgent for the critique-al humanities than to critique — as part of its inquiry into the construction of citizen subjectivities and the politics of representation—such public acts of opportunism and cynicism that have turned the public sphere into a private site of power and careerism. It is not just Lynne Cheney or William Bennet [sic.] or Newt Gingrich — all “teachers” of the humanities — who advocate “democracy” and an “open society” (to take literally Karl Popper's phrase, which is really a thinly disguised slogan) in their formal teachings and statements but then manipulate all the available institutional apparatuses to block those practices that put “democracy” into action to build a truly “open society." Theirs is only the most visible form of this retrograde opportunism. On the local level, such cynicism is now the unwritten laws of institutions.
To be more precise: C.H. Knoblauch, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Albany (at the time of “crisis” in the English department), is an English professor of writing who has co-written, with L. Brannon, a book Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy. From beginning to end, the book repeats over and over again its belief in democracy and the need for teachers to reach out to people in the community (153). The book asserts throughout its commitment to an open classroom. However, in affirming its open-ness, Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, attacks all radical pedagogues as dogmatic brainwashers. For example, it criticizes Ira Shor (who is a liberal and by no means an “extremist” pedagogue) as doctrinaire (48-73). Knoblauch's goal, as co-writer of the book, is thus to foster anti-fundamentalist, “free” thinking and to deploy “critical teaching” to “transform” existing realities (5). This transformation is necessary because, “social equality," according to the book, “always entails struggle for change” (23).
There is a gap of cynicism, however, between Knoblauch's "saying” that social equality requires progressive change and then, as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, blocking actual progressive changes that are taking place in the English Department to bring about equality. As the Dean of the College, not only has he helped to block the appointment of a new reformist chair (by delaying tactics), but he has also supported in secret a plan for partitioning the English Department without open public debate about the use of public funds or the role of the humanities (as opposed to mere "skills") in the public education of citizens in a democracy. In the book, Knoblauch writes that "critical teaching” is based on the idea that “American citizens" should “understand, accept and live amicably amidst the realities of cultural diversity” (6). His teaching, he elaborates, is based on the notion that “people are entitled to fairness in their social and economic lives” (6). But his actual practices as Dean prevent diversity: they attempt to keep power in the hands of one Group and, thereby, deny “fairness” in the daily lives of faculty in the English Department by not allowing power to be shared equally and labor to be assigned in an egalitarian manner. The only thing tolerated by the Dean, it seems, is monolithic power, and if the rule of the monolithic is questioned (as it was in the election of a new chair in the English Department), the questioners are deprived of the very right of what he calls “negotiating the terms of free and fair collective existence” (6). How “free” and “fair” are terms that take away from a collectivity of people — who have clearly voted (by a vote of 25 to 14) and chosen a new path — their “free choice” of a new chair to reform their workplace? To advocate democracy and fairness as a pedagogue in discourse and then block it in practice is to privatize the public space through cynical acts.
Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy is part of the retrohumanities attempt, couched in a populist rhetoric of the “reasonable” and “fairness," to erase critique (as an uncivil and unreasonable practice) from the university under the guise of the “aesthetic." The “aesthetic," in this deployment, is the practice of rhetoric by which class struggle for transformation of the existing social relations of production is marked as uncivil, and, in its place, a zone of tranquillity — a suspension of history by the institution of the sensually pleasing—is established. Critical Teaching is an instance of how this “aesthetic of crisis management” works: it is not a book that “argues” on the basis of the “concepts” constituting a “theory” (that would be a rationalist fallacy), instead it is a book of “stories." The “stories” are themselves about other “stories, and about the critical ways in which we should all be rewriting them, this one included” (vii). The focus of the book is on vision, fantasy, narration and invention which are thought to be the means of “empowerment” and the reasonable and nurturing “other” of “critique." Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy posits the social as rhetorical and non-material: the only “materiality” recognized is that of representation (discourse). In other words, the social world is not made out of labor relations in history — and structured in conflicts through the social division of labor — but out of “representations” ("stories"), and the only way one can change the world is through “rewriting” representations (viii, 1-24).
When Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy engages the “material," it is in terms of the physicality of the object: “For starters, we asked students to explore in some way the material and intellectual conditions of their work.... We suggested that they describe...why their classroom or the building in which they taught was constructed physically in the way it was (who decided this shape rather than another and why?" (69). The substitution of the “physical” for the “material” is a displacement of “materialism” by “matterism”: a ruse to substitute power relations ("who decided") for the social relations of production. This is a Foucauldian notion of “power” as a diffused flow of discourses. It is this post-al notion of power that is, in fact, the matrix of all the “stories” in the book: “teachers” have “power” and so do the “architects," the “students," the “superintendent of education” as well as the “owners” of the means of production—all are “powerful”. This representation of all citizens as powerful is, of course, a discursive ploy to prevent from surfacing the fact that the source of power is not discourse but control of the means of production. It conceals, in short, the fact that social “class” not discursive “power” shapes pedagogy. Thus Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy declares that “The 'prose of the school'" (emphasis added), “defines who speaks and who is silent, who governs and who is governed, who knows and who is ignorant, who wins and who loses: the deploying and engaging of these subject positions comprise the power arrangements of school reality” (167-68). Any explanation of these “subject positions” as having been the structural effects not of “prose” but of labor relations (class) is treated as sign of a masculinist confidence mired in “certainty” (68) and rooted in the positivism of a benighted Marxist ideology critique (165-66). The same book that at one point (69) uses a very positivist view of reality by substituting a physical object ("building") for “materiality," at another point (165) rejects Marxism as “positivist"! The “theory” of pedagogy in the book—it seems — is improvised as the occasion of a particular presentation demands and lacks any conceptual coherence. I leave aside here how in various stories of the book, the woman-pedagogue is constructed as unable (for the most part) to occupy any subject position other than that ridden by “anxiety” (68-69), and how any subject position of confidence and knowledge is dismissed as “heroic” and attributed to the man-teacher (68).
The classroom of “aesthetic ideology” is the classroom of the pedagogy of the depressed, and teaching becomes an act of relieving oneself of “anxiety” — pedagogy is therapy for both teacher and student.[2] The only “knowledge” allowed here is a therapeutic self-knowing. But the “knowing” of self in these stories has very little to do with knowledge as a grasping of the subject in a world-historical frame (within specific social relations of production). Such a notion of knowledge is dismissed as “positivistic." “Knowing” here is an alibi for self-caressing, a post-al narcissism that reduces history to stories of personal anxieties and desires. In this pedagogy of the depressed, knowledge is suspect; history is an imposition; materiality (other than that of discourse) a vulgar distraction from the theater of anxiety that goes by the name of “teaching”. The purpose of the survey of theories in Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, it soon becomes clear, is in order to cull a new rhetoric by which the naturalization of “skill," as the goal of pedagogy, can be given a new sound and texture. The pedagogy of techne (skill) always substitutes conforming to the status quo (teaching what "works") for transformation of the existing social relations.
This conservative view, which leaves the material relations (labor practices) intact and simply, to use Richard Rorty's word, “redescribes” the world, is one of the main contributions of retrohumanities to relegitimating the status quo and the regime of profit (wage-labor capital). This pedagogy, in short, embraces the right-wing theory that has gained dominance in the academy now.
Although Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy discusses "representation” and “language” in order to give its concern a “material” look in the post-al manner, its actual focus follows “aesthetic ideology” and emphasizes the psychological meaning/content: “What motives underlie the uses of secular signs..." (3). In other words, there is a transparency about signs, a non-materiality (even in post-al terms). The frame of “aesthetic ideology” posits a relation of adequation between the signifier and the signified: a relation that makes the fusion of the linguistic and experience inevitable. “Motives” can be seen through signs because they determine the meanings of signs. The errancy of the sign—its relays and slippages in the chain of signification and its relation to ideology and class struggle — is “pragmatically” marginalized.
This “pragmatism” is the reason for the book's opportunistic reservations about postmodernism (166-169). Knoblauch and Brannon, for instance, (mis)read postmodern theories of language as asserting “language...is a joker" (167, emphasis added). Their trope of the “joker” trivializes the “playfulness” in postmodern theories by treating the “playful” in a commonsensical rather than philosophical sense. They deploy this commonsensical notion of “play” to justify their own pragmatic opportunism: they reduce the philosophical issues raised by postmodern theories to a set of “strategies” and avoid the political and intellectual questions that postmodernism poses for their brand of pedagogy. In expressing their reservations about postmodernism, they adopt a populist (quasi-activist) tone and bring back various elements of such theories as Marxism that they have already rejected as positivistic. In short, they are neither opposed to anything nor do they stand for anything: theirs is the vague entrepreneurial libertarian position that “Oppression from the left is not preferable to oppression from the right” (166). Theirs is a Fukuyama-esque pedagogy beyond “left” and “right” that seeks an apolitical zone: one not of intervention in the status quo but of maintaining and renewing it by opportunistically evoking various theories. “If Marxism takes its project too seriously, postmodernism can't recover from its bawdy laughter” (168). The only sane, reasonable and wise pedagogue is the one who has transcended the “serious” and the "bawdy," the “left” and the “right” and is in a transsocial, transhistorical, balanced space, practicing “skills” — which also are beyond ideology and integral to the world of the pragmatic. The pragmatic is, in short, an alibi for actually existing capitalism.
In privileging “stories” (narratives of pragmatics), Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy suppresses “critique” and all modes of rigorous conceptual thinking and philosophical analysis from cultural contestations. This is because, within its frame of intelligibility, “aesthetic ideology” declares that everything (including critique) is a “story” — an “experience” of the autonomous “subject” of “imagination” told in a “pleasing” way to “persuade." There is no “argument” here since all “arguments," it is assumed, are basically rhetorical acts: to think otherwise is to commit a rationalist fallacy and become a “fundamentalist." “Theory” and “critiques," in this pragmatic scheme of things, are considered “stories” and, as such, without foundation in truth so we might just as well enjoy our “stories." Freire's theory, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is a “story” (Knoblauch and Brannon, 22), and so are other theories of knowing and teaching. The differences of these stories are subjective and determined not by their truth but by the pleasure of the subject. We simply “sympathize” (22) with some and are indifferent to others. It is not the differentiating truth (of owners or workers—and their power) that shape the state of knowing but our autonomous, subjective affects. Pedagogy is about “affect”—the “affect” of teacher and the “affect” of student, and the classroom is a theater of “affect-ing” (68-73). It is our “desires” (affect) that make some stories important and others irrelevant. There is no place for contestation here since we know what we know, not because we have been “convinced” by any “argument," but because we have been persuaded by pleasing “stories” that appeal to our desires — stories that are transhistorically seductive.
This collapse into pragmatism and pragmatic problem solving trivializes truth as what is “good in the way of belief." Truth, in short, is “what works” (the pedagogy of skill). This pragmatic view of truth, justice and knowledge constitutes the basis of the Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy's attack on “revolutionary” transformation: to think of change in revolutionary terms, according to the book is simply not pragmatic; it is “melodrama” (23). The real “drama” is a pragmatic upholding of the status quo: doing “what works." This pragmatism is itself "functionalism” with a vengeance—even though the book formally questions functionalism (74-98) and formally opposes the pedagogy of skill. Pragmatism rejects “theory," as a rationalist fallacy that cannot justify its own foundation, in order to legitimate “skill” — working within the existing system ("what works") — as the only “reasonable” and “viable” pedagogy beyond “left” and “right." The book is not “sympathetic” to the “functionalist” story. It cannot be: its pragmatism, which collapses all theories into “stories," will not allow it to “reject” or “accept." All the book can advise is to work within what exists (be practical). This, however, results in a more subtle functionalism, what I would call “performative functionalism." This “performative functionalism” pervades the book, and its ideological effects produce a pedagogy hardly different from more overt forms of functionalism. It is yet another objectivist pedagogy that stands for “what works” and holds itself beyond contestations. Performative functionalism is what right-wing writers such as Francis Fukuyama posit as post-ideological, as the mark of the “end of history” and the arrival of a regime of truth marked not by class conflicts but by consensus and pragmatism. This pragmatism, as Fukuyama's work (The End of History and the Last Man, 39-51; Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, 3-57) demonstrates, posits an ethnocentric view of history and pedagogy. It places the principles of skills and efficiency — the values of a triumphalist western capitalism—at the center of the social.
Such post-ideological pragmatic pedagogy embodies the ideology of instrumental reason of capitalism — the aim of which is to train what Sartre calls “technicians of practical knowledge." The pedagogy of skill, in short, is the pedagogy of “technicians of practical knowledge”: it provides lessons on how to become adjusted to a system that is founded upon the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few — act practically; go along to get along. This is the essential (pragmatic) lesson of “aesthetic ideology." Within its frame, it does not make any difference what story we tell as long as we are self-reflexive and aware that there is no rationalist foundation to our story: the story of the German neo-Nazi skinhead is as good a story “epistemologically” as the story of the German socialist who fights the skinheads. Both are stories without foundations and, as such, equal in their claims to truth — if one can still use that “rationalist” concept. Reason has no place in this pedagogy of skill. All that matters is what works and works NOW! Effectivity is measured in terms of an immediate pay-off.
It is the same pragmatic “story” and cynicism about the relation between what is said and what is done in the public practices of the Vice-President for Academic Affairs. In her radio show, “The Best of Our Knowledge," she is all for openness, democracy and debate, but when the faculty of the English Department at SUNY-Albany “democratically” decided, by a vote of 25-14, to abandon the status quo and begin reforms, she stepped in and took over control of the Department by putting it in “receivership." “The Best of Our Knowledge," like Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, is a performance in “aesthetic ideology”: the “show” is simply a series of populist “stories” told by different narrators. There is no serious awareness that these stories are framed “theoretically” and have histories in the institution. The show so avoids engaging the assumptions of these “stories," it would seem to regard this as a violation against “our knowledge." The Vice-President justifies her repressive practices in the university not by “principle” (a rationalist fallacy) but, like all repressive acts, by practicality: there was too much difference; the members of the faculty could not rule themselves, so we will rule them! Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy criticizes the administration at Texas University (Austin) for “back[ing] away” from and repressing a project that was approved and “recommended in its own governance committees” (23). But one of the book's authors, C.H. Knoblauch, as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Albany, undermines the approval by the majority of the English Department of a new Chair for the English Department. The Texas Administration is benighted but SUNY-Albany's actions (duplicating those of Texas) are somehow enlightened — repressing people for their own good! These cynical acts are justified by pragmatism: the dismantling of “theory” (reasoned acts) by “stories” (opportunistic moves).
| [1] | To read the entire dossier of exchanges on the subject see: http://web.syr.edu./~dmorton/petition. |
| [2] | This therapeutic pedagogy of the “depressed," of the relief from (release of) anxiety put forth in Critical Teaching is a widespread practice, especially among forms of feminism. Also see, for example, Jane Tompkins, “Pedagogy of the Distressed” and my critique of this pedagogy in my “For a Red Pedagogy: Feminism, Desire and Need." |