Professor Bob Nowlan
Radical Political Praxis within the Late Capitalist Academy
Bob Nowlan
Reprinted from
Red Orange: a Marxist Journal of Theory, Politics, and the Everyday,
Volume 1, Issue 1, May 1996: 289-326
WHAT DOES IT MEAN to engage as a “radical” from within
the late capitalist academy? Critics of “academic radicalism” often denigrate
our radical authenticity, while many of us are often skeptical and uncertain
about whether or not the academy itself constitutes a viable site of radical
intervention, and even if and when we do maintain the conviction that such
intervention is possible—and even necessary—we are still often unsure about
what can and cannot—as well as what should and should not—be done as “radicals”
working “radically” within the institution of the late capitalist academy.
Taking on the risk of an increasingly unpopular programmatism I will attempt
to outline precisely what the title of my essay suggests: a positive theory
of what can and should constitute radical political praxis within the late
capitalist academy today.
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 what 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 progressive possible resolution of the principal contradictions
(and thereby the most progressive possible solution of the most egregious
problems and the most progressive possible supersession of the most egregious
limitations) of capitalism; as I see it, this can only ultimately mean working
towards the revolutionary socialist transformation of capitalism into communism.
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,
for example, the kinds of knowledge supported by and supporting of U.S. military,
“security,” and “intelligence” interests); 2. the production of the skills
and credentials necessary for those who will accept and fulfill positions
as the highest level and most immediate servants of capital (the managers,
politicians, professionals, scientists, and technicians, and these both 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);
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 ways of thinking taught at most schools
of journalism and communications 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,” and especially television news, media).
These kinds of production 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 extensive “downsizing” at many private as well as public colleges
and universities, academic institutions are increasingly among the largest
employers in many U.S. cities and counties—and, significantly, as the extent
of their employment grows, the extent of unionization within these institutions
simultaneously declines), but they also exercise a substantial—and many times,
especially in smaller municipalities, dominating—influence over much of the
economic as well as the cultural life of the surrounding community. As a
result of this substantial “market power,” colleges and universities have
been generally successful in forcing “restructuring programs” upon students,
faculty, and staff
which tend to emphasize preserving and even at times expanding these institutions’
investment in their “physical infrastructure” (and this is also an ever-increasingly
elite and specialized physical infrastructure) at the expense of investment
in maintaining and improving their “human infrastructure,” the “human capital”
which constitutes the necessary heart of any academic institution that pretends
to aspire to intellectual excellence. Investment in expensive buildings and
highly specialized equipment thus often continues to increase even at the
same time as investment in wages and salaries, text and library resources,
student financial aid, and support for innovative faculty and student research,
especially in the humanities and social sciences, is generally decreasing
during a time of protracted “fiscal crisis.” At the same time, the intimidation
of the left-baiting “political correctness” scare and the cooptive 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 already lead—and,
unfortunately, seems likely to 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.
(Any of you, such as myself, who have taught as adjunct instructors know
how difficult it is in most places to preserve your superexploited position
and at the same time introduce anything which might be perceived to be threateningly
“different” and “new”—let alone substantially “radical”—into the content
and form of your teaching of “standard,” “introductory” courses). 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, resulting 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. 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 principal
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.
College students are able to obtain different kinds of
access and to 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 and to 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 and to 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 subdominant “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
cooptation 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 (re)new(ed) 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,
and 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, a “norm” which of course is now
on the way towards being abolished, at least in the U.S.)
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 subordinate 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 frequently in the past exhorted (see our
article “Capitalism and Your University Education” in the March 1995 issue
of Bulletin in Defense of Marxism), 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
essay.
•••
Before turning directly to my theory of radical pedagogy,
I would like to make three prefatory comments. First, it is important to
recognize that this theorization is concerned with how to work within the
academy. It is not concerned with how to bridge the gap between the academy
and other sites of social and political struggle, nor is it concerned with
how to “bring” radical academic work into “other communities”—if anything,
it is concerned with how to “bring” what takes place within these other sites
to bear upon what is done by radicals in the work they do within the academy.
This is not to imply that the question of radical political praxis which
“moves between” the academy and other cultural locations is unimportant;
on the contrary, it is of such importance that it deserves extensive theoretical
attention, and should not be simply ”squeezed into” an essay which is not
directly focused on this question. In addition, as already written, one of
my principal aims in this essay is to contest the notion that the academy
is an “unreal world” wherein nothing of great political significance happens,
and especially wherein no genuinely radical political work can transpire.
Second, this theorization was forged in the content of
specific institutional struggles, and its polemical cast is a reflection
of that fact. Because this was—and continues to be—a collective struggle,
I would like to credit Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Adam Katz, and Minette
Marcroft for a particularly substantial contribution to “my theorization,”
and, beyond these four, all of the (approximately 30) men and women (a diverse
group that includes many people of color as well as whites, gays and lesbians
as well as straights, representatives of “The Third World” as well as “The
First World,” and people from “working class” as well as “middle class” origins
and backgrounds) who have participated within the last nine years as collective
contributors to what Minnesota Review editor Jeffrey Williams has
referred to as “The Syracuse Left.” (This tag is in fact reductive and limited,
and can easily give rise to false conclusions, because Syracuse University
has only been one significant point of concentration of this particular “Left”
among a considerable variety of others, from large private research universities
to community colleges to state colleges to state universities to small private
liberal arts colleges to urban extension colleges to community free universities
and even to high schools across fifteen states and five countries—for more
on this see the October 1994 issue of College Literature Symposium
on the Politics of Pedagogy and Publishing).
Third and finally, I will not apologize for my “tone”:
what might strike some liberals as the “violence” of this text is a reflection
of and a response to the general social and historical conditions of violence
in which radical pedagogical praxis must, of necessity, be conducted today.
The pedagogy of critique I advocate is, I contend, actually the pedagogy
which “respects” and “cares” by far the most for its students, because it
refuses to accept students as nothing but simply “what they are,” but instead
focuses upon what they might—and can, and should—become. The pedagogy of
critique offers the most powerfully enabling kind of support for the production
of students as potential agents of radical social and political change, as
revolutionary fighters for the advancement of the ends of human emancipation,
social justice, collective equality, and ecological sustainability. A pedagogy
which merely helps students cope with who and what they are, from where they
at present are, by seeking to nurture and protect these students from the
harsh truths of the world in which they actually live, providing them false
comfort and patronizing them with false praise, is not a radical pedagogy:
it is a liberal pedagogy. It is liberal because it works according to the
characteristic pattern of all liberal thinking: the positing of a homogenous
(static and non-contradictory) relation—“pedagogical empowerment as and through
protective nurturing”—between an abstract subject—“the supportive teacher
as nurturer”—and an abstract object—“the fragile student as nurturee” (and
by “abstract” I mean abstracted from real social and historical conditions).
Liberal pedagogy forgets that the academy is not an ivory tower, divorced
from the rest of (late capitalist) society: it is a powerful institution
which performs vital and necessary functions in contributing towards insuring
the successful reproduction and maintenance of the existing (late capitalist)
social order. The radical pedagogue must therefore, if he is to act as a
genuinely radical pedagogue, work to challenge, contest, critique, disrupt,
subvert, and transform his students’ uncritical and unproblematical acceptance
of and conformity with the prerequisites of subject positions which enable
the reproduction
and maintenance of this (late capitalist) status quo. “Feminist” positions
which reject this charge as “masculinist” are, furthermore, not radical,
as they have identified feminism with little more than an acceptance of and
a conformity with traditional—patriarchal sexist—subject positions for women,
“celebrating” rather than contesting these, and exalting immediate forms
of interpersonal intercommunication within existing society above and against
the organized struggle to create a new society in which women are liberated
from positions of subordination and subjection and in which gender as an
inescapably oppressive category of hierarchical social differentiation is
itself superseded and eliminated. A genuinely radical feminist position is
one that is able to contribute effectively towards women’s full emancipation
and the supersession and elimination of gender by fighting against and defeating
patriarchal sexism in all of its forms. Because patriarchal sexism is not
by any means a mere atavistic aberration but rather a material and historical
system which continues to persist and even expand, it responds to and satisfies
real interests and needs. Therefore, feminist struggle cannot succeed merely
through peaceful “persuasion”; those who
derive benefits from the existence and persistence of patriarchal sexism
will fight to maintain these, and they must be defeated and the basis for
the derivation of these benefits destroyed.
It is necessary to begin my focus on pedagogy first by
recognizing the difficulty of developing such a radical pedagogy, and by
understanding what constitutes this difficulty. To begin, radical intellectuals
who wish to intervene in the production of knowledge and of “knowing” subjects
confront the problem of having to work contrary to the “educational” objectives
these institutions have been expressly designed to accomplish, and for which
they have been credentialed and employed. Furthermore, this daunting
task must often be carried out as an isolated individual, at best without
institutional backing and at worst with considerable institutional hostility,
without the direct support of a mass movement, almost invariably in the face
of the hostility of one’s “colleagues,” and, even more importantly, in opposition
to the dominant standards of what passes for “useful” or “legitimate” knowledge
(which in the academy as in other bourgeois institutions, is usually defined
in terms of its “neutrality,” its “efficiency,” and, revealingly, its efficacy
in integrating individuals into an acceptance of and a conformity with what
is described as a “social consensus” of ”necessary goals” and “fundamental
values”).
These difficulties often lead radical pedagogues to turn
in four seriously problematic and ultimately ineffective directions, to adopt
four models for radical pedagogy which I contend we must reject and with
which we must work to break: the ”segregationist” model, the “rationalist”
model, the “formalist” model, and the “populist” model. Before describing
and explaining each of these models, I want to make it clear that my aim
here is not to indulge in moral criticism of (other) radical pedagogues for
simply willfully “refusing” to do what is “right” and instead willfully ”choosing”
to do what is “wrong”; these models are in fact representative of the predominant
paths followed by most, if not indeed all, who attempt to work today as radical
teachers intervening from within the higher educational academy. Moreover,
these problematic and limited models for radical pedagogy exist and persist
as they do for very good (material) reasons: they are the paths which have
to date been rendered most readily intelligible and which have been maintained
as most readily allowable, however grudgingly and however much due to and
dependent upon continual “radical” pressure and struggle to keep open even
these limited and problematic spaces for “allowable opposition.” In addition,
it certainly is extremely difficult for many radical pedagogues, at least
by themselves alone, to do a great deal to depart from these (barely) allowed
models in the oppressive circumstances under which they work, even if they
wish to do so, and certainly it is much more difficult for adjunct instructors
and teaching assistants to do so than it is for assistant professors and
“full-time”/ “(semi-)permanent” instructors. At the same time, it also still
remains considerably more difficult for assistant professors and “full-time”/”(semi-)permanent”
instructors to engage in innovative and aggressive initiatives in radical
pedagogical intervention than it does for tenured associate and full professors
to do so, while the latter are often so worn down by the time they reach
this position of relative security; that they are no longer able or interested
in conceiving of innovative and aggressive effort at radical pedagogical
intervention as either desirable or possible (to say nothing of the frequency
of the gradual cooptation of many of these erstwhile radical academics into
an identification of the interests they support and for which they struggle
with the dominant interests of the academic institution itself). Although
it is true that genuine “radicals” must be ready and willing to risk comfort
and security when it is politically necessary to do so, the problem I am
addressing in this essay is not by any means one of a simply or purely individual
responsibility/complicity or authenticity/inauthenticity in the achievement
and the maintenance of a “personal radical identity” or a “personal radical
commitment”; it is a problem of how to produce a collective effort that will
solve the problems and overcome the limitations of current (radical) pedagogical
practices. One essential initial contribution to this end is to understand
the problems and limitations for what they are and to point out the beginnings
of a way forward beyond these problems and limitations. That is the aim of
this essay. At the same time, moreover, I do not deny that various
uses of “segregation” as opposed to “segregationism,” “rationality” as opposed
to “rationalism,” “formality” as opposed to “formalism,” and “popularity”
as opposed to “populism” in radical pedagogy need to be encouraged and supported—and
expanded and strengthened. Some aspects of the specific practices pertaining
to each of the four models indeed do offer valuable contributions to radical
struggle; it is therefore through the critical supersession of these models
and not the mere refusal or rejection of them that progress in the effectivity
of radical pedagogy can and will be made.
Let us now turn to discuss, in order, each of the four
models I have earlier identified: the segregationist, the rationalist, the
formalist, and the populist. First, the ”segregationist” approach involves
an abandonment of efforts to intervene within the academic institutions in
support of the political objectives 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 radical 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 can often quickly lead 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 all of 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 without
critiquing the forms which mediate this knowledge and through which it is
presented to students. These "forms" include conventional disciplinary divisions
which separate and compartmentalize knowledges, normative schedules for the
length of semesters and class periods, routinized testing and evaluation
procedures (both of students and teachers), traditional modes of lecturing
and managing classroom discussions, among many 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 I call 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 places its
main emphasis on precisely these forms of knowledge transmission (neglected
by the rationalist) and views virtually any—formal or (in)formal—disruption
of them as inherently oppositional and emancipatory. This gives rise to changes
as varied as introducing "theatrical" methods and "surprises" on a regular
basis into the "mundane classroom routine," making abundant use of "up-to-date"
and "fun" visual and aural technologies as a substitute for "old-fashioned"
and "boring" approaches, requiring lots of "group work" and the formation
of "teams" of students so as to make sure that students are always "working
together," and adjusting conventional seating arrangements—by, 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 formalist category
of radical pedagogy. 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" and its demand for 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 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 —or decentering—classroom
is in fact merely an updated, "high-tech" version of the traditional liberal
humanist classroom. The changes seen in this decentering 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 decentering 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 post-structuralist pedagogy, although "theoretical," "rigorous," and "unfamiliar,"
can become quite popular among teachers and students working within the most
culturally and economically privileged institutions 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 pub lie 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 enjoy the pleasure of stability afforded him by traditional kinds of emotional,
physical, and economic support from his "girlfriend" or his female friends
and 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. 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—because the latter are 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. It does
so 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.
All four of these approaches, however well-intentioned,
are ultimately, in effect, limited and reformist (or worse) since they are
based upon an inadequate understanding of the structure and function of the
(late) capitalist academy. The first two approaches ignore the specificity
of the academy, 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 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 reproduction and maintenance of late capitalism.
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 who can 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. 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
always already maintain specific investments in certain ideological formations,
certain types of relations with others, certain kinds of pleasures, etc.
A radical pedagogy must disrupt 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 investments "on trial." This means that the teacher addresses these
investments from the vantage point of a system of principles and values,
categories and concepts, narratives and theories which are compelling in
relation to these investments and yet which are also, simultaneously, directly
incompatible with them, insofar as the teacher's critical discourse exposes
the contradictions of everyday bourgeois existence that are usually so effectively
concealed by means of ideological (mis-)representations. This includes, for
example, exposing the frequent real contradiction between, on the one hand,
students' professed support for libertarian values with, on the other hand,
students' simultaneous support for authoritarian solutions to social
problems that undermine the possibility of giving any real substance to 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 genuinely radical pedagogy therefore seeks 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. Such a radical pedagogy
presses 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 identifying with,
accepting of, and conforming to the dictates of these kinds of social subject
positions. It further presses students to pro vide 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 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" the ideological interpellations
of students within the space of the radical classroom is not to "fix" students
in positions already (previously) taken, but, to assist them in progressing
to the point where they can begin to explain in rigorously theoretical (as
opposed to everyday commonsensical) 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 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 teacher does. This would be a foolish thing for her to
try to accomplish, as it would be very rarely possible in the space of one
course (or, most often, in the space of even several courses). Furthermore,
even if and when this is possible, it can lead teachers to concentrate all
of their attention and energy and interest on their "best," their most "progressive"
students, at the expense of working to create a significant impact on the
rest of her students—even when this impact on these "others" is likely to
be far different from "persuading" them that they "should become radicals
like their teacher." Thus, focusing primarily on "recruiting" sympathetic
and like-minded students to become her "disciples," while it can be personally
satisfying to the teacher, at the same time very often does not, when pursued
as a principal goal of radical pedagogical praxis, make the most effective
possible contribution towards the advancement of the ends and 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 their relations 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 herself to represent radical alternatives and to
teach from these positions, 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 often
include a disproportionate share of texts in the course reading 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 courses 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 in the physical
sciences and in vocational skills, are likely to—and are in fact 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,
and what is "moderate"—in "the center"—itself shifts according to the changing
interests and needs of the ruling capitalist class).
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 simple 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, and informally,
among family and/or friends. The radical teacher should not aim to be first
or last simply the students' friend (in the bourgeois commonsense of what
friendship includes—and, especially excludes; although she certainly can
develop new and very different kinds of "friendship"—and at times should
even aggressively pursue and encourage this development—with those of her
students who are willing and able to accept theoretical critique, political
commitment, and real and difficult struggle for radical social and political
change over the long haul as a central dimension in the bond of "friendship"
that she develops with these students), and she certainly should not aim
to act as her students' surrogate father, mother, sister, or brother (as
if this is in essence what a teacher is and should be). 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 everyday social roles and 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 or 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, 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.
Moreover, to not "impose" upon our students is, in fact,
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, write, and act—albeit largely unproblematically, unconsciously,
and uncritically—as representatives of the currently dominant (late capitalist)
social system. A liberal approach identifies "freedom" "negatively," with
the absence of any immediate and direct control over one's activities, and
the fact that one's activities are precisely and often brutally limited by
the operations of the market, by the class structure of society, and by institutionalized
racism, sexism, and heterosexism, does not register with the liberal as indicative
of the existence of a systematic curtailment of people's "freedoms" within
this current (late capitalist) status quo. In contrast, a more correct and
indeed profound understanding of freedom would define it "positively," identifying
it with actual control over social institutions and the knowledges required
to manage them. A radical pedagogy, then, must recognize the need at times
to restrict immediately apparent and local modes of freedom (like, for example,
the "freedom" of the conservative student not to be "interested" in the political
and ideological consequences of his favorite literary text) in order to produce
subjects capable of struggling for more global modes of freedom (e.g. for
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 late capitalist 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 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. It ignores the necessity
of revolutionary social transformation in order to establish the conditions
of possibility and to provide for the forces of generation required to achieve
human emancipation, collective equality, and social justice. 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. He will work especially hard to support
and indeed to amplify the efforts of students who already represent marginal
positions, because of the importance of what these students represent, and
the ways in which these representations make visible what is fundamentally
at stake in the real conflict and struggle that takes place to maintain and
reproduce late capitalism as a globally systemic social order rooted in the
alienation, exploitation, oppression, and dehumanization of the vast majority
of humanity. These latter students, moreover, include 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,
and who often enter the classroom either frustrated, agonized, and victimized
or fatalistic, despairing, and cynical in relation to the prospect of overcoming
this oppression and exploitation. The radical teacher's aim should be to
enable "marginal(ized)" students to speak from these marginal(ized) positions
forcefully and extensively back against the "center" by contesting students
who represent "mainstream"—dominant and ultimately conservative— positions.
The radical teacher will thus necessarily often openly ally her own positions
with those of the marginal(ized) students, while at the same time not protecting
them from the pressure of direct contestation nor sparing them in any way
from necessary critique (not pretending, in other words, that students' "subjective
interests" necessarily correspond to their "objective interests" or that
students' understanding of their experience is unmediated, is outside and
independent of ideology).
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 (always already) an ensemble of subject positions
in social relations, and is therefore 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 radical 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 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
and constant critique toward the production of conditions of possibility
for revolutionary socialist transformation.
This material is copyrighted (©)
Professor Bob Nowlan
Last Update: June 15, 2003