Wading in the Deep: Supporting Emergent Anarchies [1]
Naeem InayatullahIthaca College
[in Grant Reeher and Joseph Cammarano (eds) Education for Citizenship. (Rowan and Littlefield, 1997), pp. 171-188.]
“I have long been of the opinion that you can’t teach anybody anything. It is possible, however, to create opportunities…to learn.”
(Ralph Pettman 1992, 140)
“Whatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something however small from the other to make you whole and save you from the mortal sin of righteousness.”
(Chinua Achebe 1987, 142)
On those rare occasions when we reflect on our past miscalculations we may conclude that we do not always recognize our own best interests. We may even concede that our mistakes occur while others seem to detect our interests with clarity. Such concessions occur infrequently because, in the course of modern life, they feel like betrayals of individual autonomy. Normally, we embrace a more well-versed if implicit notion, that no one can know nor represent our interests better than we ourselves do.
Contrasting the rare and normal in this way creates a rich tension. Can others know, represent, and act on, our interests better than we ourselves can? Or, can only we comprehend, authorize, and realize our own interests? It may be worth lingering within this tension. I wish to suggest that engendering in ourselves and others a sense of citizenship requires learning how to appreciate the tension between others’ understanding and command of our interests and our desire to claim and represent our interests as our own. The problem is that lingering within this tension may feel less like strolling on firm ground and more like plunging into tricky waters.
Consider the following two seemingly opposite situations. First, students and citizens know exactly their interests while educators and state representatives perfectly reflect those interests both in the classroom and in politics. Here educators and state persons merely facilitate the unfolding of easily discerned individual interests. Alternatively, and second, students and citizens do not know their interests which must be unearthed, articulated, and promoted by educators and state representatives. These educators and statespersons have great confidence that they can speak for, and act on behalf of, students and citizens. Students and citizens respond by fully appreciating and mirroring back this confidence. The apparent difference between these two hypothetical situations hides their similarity. In both, the transparency of interests - in the first case to students and citizens, in the second to educators and statespersons - precludes a substantive need for either education or politics. In both, an agreement on the facile and unmistakable nature of interests immediately fuses the two necessary elements of citizenship - the granting of allegiance with and for the entitlement of rights. By starting with this exercise, I hope to suggest that strengthening education and citizenship requires a deeper and richer understanding of interests.
I assume that the immediate activation of the sentiment of allegiance falls short of our ambitions. Instead, we aim to advance a citizenry that deliberates upon, debates, and criticizes the multiple meanings and determinations of interest, the skewed processes through which interests become represented, and the asymmetric relationship between subjects and their representatives. In short, we aim to cultivate a critical allegiance. If so, we may wish to hesitate before making commitments to either the idea that students and citizens easily know their interests, or, the idea that such interests are best acted upon and known only by others.
Such deliberative hesitancy may allow us to consider processes where the discovery of our interests occurs neither independently of others nor under their subordination. Instead, we can uncover and constitute our interests through dialogue with others who themselves are engaged in a similar process. The potential benefit of considering and constructing such processes of discovery is easy to imagine. Students and citizens extend their critical allegiance to activities and institutions that express and realize their own work. I take this expression and realization to be the heart of democratic process as well as the key to invigorating both education and meaningful citizenship.
Reasonable and well intentioned people may, nevertheless, balk at the implications of promoting such other involved processes in the discovery of interests. Many, if not most, are likely to determine the costs of this vision as excessively dear. Such processes appear too complex, disorderly, and capricious. They seem to undermine traditions of order, efficiency, and control. They require a perhaps unsubstantiated faith and comfort in what I like to call anarchic forms of participation. Under the pressure of this doubt, rather than hesitate and thereby engage the difficulty over the role of others in the construction of interest, we tend to want to escape this tension. We resolve that our actions promote others’ best interests. We rationalize that we must carry out the burden of acting on their behalf - especially when they resist. With such a commitment to order we cut short the pains of deliberation. However, we also alienate the potential profit that comes from the labor of critical participation.
For the purposes of this essay, I wish to label acting on behalf of others without their vigorous participation as the ‘teaching drive.’ I have come to accept that in most aspects of life, the teaching drive creates alienation by subordinating and assimilating others. The teaching drive is a source of the contemporary crisis in education and politics.
The reason for this is not difficult to see. In contrast to the “learning opportunities” mentioned in the first epigram, the teaching motive conceptualizes learning as a fixed form indifferent to time, space, and the participation of others. Teaching orders space and time while assimilating others to its predetermined blueprint. This commitment bubbles up from two related sources: a mistrust of the diversity represented by external and internal others and a misplaced fear of anarchic social forms. Rather than appreciating anarchy as a precondition for pluralist democratic processes, political and pedagogical practices misunderstand it as an intrinsically asocial condition. Akin to the “state of nature,” anarchy’s natural barbarism and savagery must be remade to create both an educated citizen and a ‘civil’ society. Accordingly, advanced segments of society instruct internal and external others on the techniques of citizenship, democracy, and civilizational advance. Likewise we license professors to authoritatively intervene in, adjust, and regulate students’ lives. In both the classroom and in society the mandatory burden of teaching must be borne in the midst of protest, resistance, and ingratitude offered up by the uncivilized and uneducated. Under the cover of a civilizing mission teaching agents violate vital democratic processes for the ‘higher purpose’ of converting anarchy to order.
Despite the usually assumed unidirectional flow of fixed form teaching we should not think that it affects only students. The conversionary drive also has import for the teaching agent (Nandy 1984, 32-35). It helps silence and conquer the inner voices that doubt the efficacy and justice of teaching. Thus the internal purging of ambiguity and the external cleansing of the uncivil constitute the same violent purification. Thus it is that teaching violates seeking and seekers.
The reader is perhaps aware that the polemical tone of my prose does not fit well with it message. I admit this contradiction. My introduction so far consists of provocative assertions that themselves seem to be a species teaching violence. Will this essay, then, vie to provide “learning opportunities” or will it thrust forward another authoritative intervention? My response to this potentially debilitating question first considers how learning occurs.
Taught otherwise, I experience understanding not linearly, progressively, or cumulatively, but in sudden unpredictable shifts of awareness. I assume this to be typical of how learning occurs. Further, being impressed with the idea that form and content need to cohere, I try to arrange space, time, and instruction in the classroom according to this relatively enigmatic conception of learning. The flow and purpose of the course emerge from the interaction of students, materials, and instructor rather than merely from a prior blueprint. This results in seemingly unconnected blocks of ideas appearing, retreating, and reappearing. Participants learn but it is impossible to know when (although students say it often does not occur within the span of a semester). Nor is it possible to target a disciplinary domain. Students claim their learning often has little or nothing to do with the designated subject matter. Admittedly, such a course seems relatively undesigned, undirected, and disorderly. Nevertheless, with the appropriate attitude it is possible to thrive within such an anarchic form. As we move from one theme to another seemingly disconnected theme, I try to become remain comfortable with the discomfort of anarchy while reveling in the sometime serendipitous recognition of insightful connections. I hope such a posture suggests to students that we might together create a connective tissue between, or perhaps uncover a holistic pattern among, seemingly haphazard events. They tend to bracket their hesitancy and defer their doubts while playfully accommodating my expectations. I solicit the reader for a similar suspension of judgment and a matching playfulness.
Let me return to the question. Like many academics, the technique of theoretical deduction habituates my style. Still, instead of delivering another authoritative intervention I would like the form and content of this exercise to cohere. I feel compelled in this essay to let the presentation emulate the seemingly capricious drift of discovery.
***
It is the second week. Forty or so students wait for a course titled: “Contemporary Issues in International Relations.” More than the usual amount of anticipation charges the air. Having the syllabus read aloud, they want to know if what they hear is genuine. Will he really present no lectures, no theory, no history, no geography? Will he merely sit on the table and say, “What do you want to talk about?” Will he just listen to empty space if no one speaks? What will he do when everything turns to chaos? Will I learn anything or will this be yet another wasted course? If he is not going to teach why does the university let him do this? Why did I listen to my friend who could not even say what she learned?”
* * *
Teachers are those parts of nature that most abhor a vacuum. Usually students cannot imagine that the most anxious person in the room is the teacher. Performance anxiety was the motive force for my first seven or eight courses. It drove me to prepare thoroughly so I would not seem the fool. It spurred me to treat every second of empty classroom space as a potential slide into awkwardness and loss of control. It tricked me into converting every moment of ambiguity into assertions of authority, displays of dominance, and threats of ridicule. Anxiety dominated my classrooms as surely as a low pressure weather system dominates the moods of those it envelopes.
The powerful are anxious because they do not understand their power, do not feel they deserve it, and cannot account for why they have it. This anxiety disciplines their face so how they feel is the inverse of what they show. A simpler and sharper motivates students. They wish to satiate their curiosity about the nature of life and their place in it. Beyond this difference, teachers and students are bound together. Each knows their’s and the other’s rank and role.
* * *
Three essays and three journals are due. I leave the topics wholly to their design. They must seek out what they feel is important - a responsibility they resist. This resistance reveals their implicit internalization of the idea that I know better than they what is best for them. It reveals their participation in their own alienation. The readings on Haiti and Bosnia are mostly novels. Students dictate the reading pace - usually a novel every two weeks. While the content of novels provides some information and much needed motivation for theory, geography, and history the novels serve to provide a common start and spark for our conversation. We discuss the plot and meaning of the novels intensely but briefly. Art succeeds like nothing else in bringing out politics. We fight over our interpretations. This gives way to concern over our group dynamics, and then to the class, gender, racial, national, and political basis of individuals’ interpretations. The lack of central control in the classroom, the nature of our conversations, and possibility or impossibility of learning become later preoccupations of class discussion. Each new novel becomes the gravitational center for such dialogues. What if anything are we learning?
***
In the beginning, watching me smile through long and awkward silences convinces them I will not lecture. With much preparation I have trained myself for these moments. They, on the other hand, cannot bear the silence. So they begin to speak and to listen. As more voices emerge so do accusation, confrontation, conflict, and anger. They feel “amazed,” and often “disgusted” by what they hear.
The thrill of constructing their own conversational patterns and of discovering each other’s voices in the first and second weeks turn into a disdain for those who challenge and disparage strongly held positions. By the end of the third week the conversational patterns seem worn; the novel shine of the experiment diminishes. For many, rather than facilitating self-discovery, others’ challenges seem instead to threaten and undermine precious beliefs. More than grades are at stake, I can see that. They risk the very stability and cohesion of deeply felt and sometimes carefully cultivated world views. Learning feels dangerous. I suggest that we do not wish to learn because learning threatens to rupture our cosmological closure. And yet, we also cannot resist learning because that danger wraps itself in desire. In the first third of the course they keep up with readings, sustain high attendance and participate vigorously.
I believe the initially high quality of commitment surges from two sources. First, they begin to accept that they co-construct the course. It embodies and expresses their labor. Second, their candid and often blunt remarks generate a captivating fear. We begin to uncover one of the crucial ingredients of knowing; the inseparability of fear from desire and the necessity of both for learning. We find ourselves creating a process that involves more than the usual trappings of participation. Not just learning but also engagement in democratic processes seems menacing.
* * *
Participation occurs in degrees. Avoiding class participates in type of critique of the course, the professor, the subject matter, academia, and life. Perhaps avoiding voting is similar. Attending class implies that it might be time worth spending. Participating by doing assignments and dancing to the rhythm provided by the instructor is, perhaps, a step up. Such participation might mean re-playing sound bites during those few seconds allotted to the student. It may mean a willingness to play the game of “if you guess what I want you to say now, you will oil the gears of my lecture and perhaps be carried to a better grade.”
These are minimal participations. We seem to want a deeper involvement. But I wonder if can we risk its ramifications. Can the students freely comment on the futility of a particular lecture, or the utility of an alternative to the one prepared by the teacher? Can the students take the themes and threads of the course in directions unanticipated by the syllabus? Can students affect the pace - speeding it up here, slowing it down there? Is the flow of ‘knowledge’ reversible? Will the class allow verbal gifts as well as anger, shouting, crying, humor, confusion, ambiguity, and accusations? Will the class honor connections between the inner and outer worlds of students and between the classroom and the culture of global political economy? Or, will it serve as a state of nature? Will students participate in selection of course material? In the determination of their performance and evaluation? How far can it go? What principle speaks to drawing the line of authority here and not there? The parallels to politics proper seem obvious enough here.
In both politics and education, our actions loudly declare that participation is far from a transparent virtue. I suspect that when we sing its praises we do not often realize what we are saying. And when we do, we sour on participation. Springing headlong into concerns over student participation without recognizing that this necessarily carries us to the deep waters of co-constructing the class room and the world reveals how privileged anxiety limits pedagogical and democratic practice. How can we, who have such little experiential familiarity with swimming and floating in such deep waters, teach participation to others? Instead of noting its capacity to envelope and sustain a diversity of life forms, we invariably demonstrate our distress about its dangers. We say participation; we mean bathing them in our bath water.
From Kindergarten to twelfth grade (and perhaps earlier, and later), we teach them that learning is a matter of assimilating oneself to pre-conceived, pre-discussed, pre-arranged forms. They learn that rather than the expression and realization of their labor, learning is that labor’s alienation. So produced and commodified our students assemble and package themselves as citizens so that the ‘teaching drive’ may use them as a vehicle to produce a new generation of order.
***
Discussion of the novels leads to advancing political positions around such questions as the value of US interventions, the nature of the US government, how life in Bosnia and Haiti are similar or different from life in the USA, and the kinds of obligations we have towards others. While liberal, conservative, and radical voices contest their visions only rarely are their arguments remarkable. It is the complexity and intensity of the social dynamics that amaze me. These are striking, unpredictable, continuously shifting and overlapping. Students rearrange their seating and cluster together according to their politics. The uncommitted or confused sit mainly in the middle. Changes in seating positions signal shifting politics. After a few weeks, however, such changes are rare. Everyone settles in for a verbal war. Here are the kinds of things they say:
- Referring to material impoverishment and the extremely politicized nature of Haiti: “I just did not realize how different their lives are and how lucky I am.” Another counters this desire to differentiate and distance with assertions of commonalty and continuity: “You know, we too have poverty. You don’t realize it but we are also only moments away from revolution.” And, “Don’t you realize that our lifestyle and our foreign policy have everything to do with their condition.” Self-identified Haitians who perhaps understand the complexity of Haitian society respond to the simplicity of these comments by either lecturing the class, or by despondently shaking their heads. Another remark produces its own angry response: “They seem just like us. They think about God, and love, and the meaning of life.” More shaking of heads, more attempts to get envision a horizon beyond simple comparisons projecting mere difference or mere identity.
- In a discussion of US involvement in Bosnia: “Saving thousands of foreign lives is not worth the loss of one American soldier’s life.” With this comment the class erupts into multiple loud accusations. They lose consciousness of classroom decorum and of my efforts to enforce it. Some side with the comment, relieved that someone else dares to express their own hidden sentiment. Others’ do not wish to live on the same planet with those who hold such views. Some press the commentator on how he measures the value of life. Those who have been volunteers in UN refugee camps fume in their seats digging their fingers into their palms.
- The following comment becomes a defining moment for one class: “I am very proud to be an American, but why does it hurts so much. It shouldn’t hurt so much to be proud of your country.” Those from the right attack her for feeling shame and for willing to admit it: “You have nothing to be ashamed of, I don’t understand you at all.” From the middle, “Why do you want to be proud?” And admiring praise from foreigners, “This is an important question.” The student who risked the comment stopped attending for two weeks. She claimed to need a break from the intensity. When she returned we were still discussing variations on her theme.
- On the relationship between elections and democracy: “The US is not a democracy. Elections are a way of duping us into believing we have a say. All the decisions are made by a handful of capitalist white males. I do not vote because I am not a dupe.” This comment provokes everyone. When forms alter, politics cannot be contained by the textbook, the classroom, or the economistic calculus of normal social science.
- After a comparison of women’s roles in Haiti and Bosnia with their roles in the US: “I do not feel harmed by men or by patriarchy. Does that mean I am oppressed but don’t know it?” This comes near the end of the term when some have learned that comments posed as questions invite thoughtful responses. However, most treat this question as beside the point. I note that issues around gender create the greatest anxiety and induce the strongest defenses. I struggle to understand why this is so.
- Not all of it is confrontational. The issue that engendered the most generous climate for discussion concerned inter-racial dating: “I am thinking about taking my black Catholic boyfriend home to my Jewish parents over thanksgiving. Do you think I should do it?” Everyone responds. Much to our surprise at least two thirds of the forty or so students have experience in inter-racial dating.
- On the “melting pot” versus the “salad bowl”: “To me, the melting pot melts away differences. It is assimilation. Assimilation is death. I will never assimilate, never.” Like the issue of elections, it is impossible to distinguish between left and right. Many seem to have accepted the efficacy of the “melting pot.” Those with marginalized ethnic heritage or self-identities as foreigners have polar responses. Either they accept a variation of “melting pot” - amending that not every difference needs melting away, or, they are defiantly communitarian. Women communtarians are the most discriminating in their approach. They wish to retain the identity of their particular culture but not necessarily its strictures on women.
- On Bosnian/Croatian writers’ contempt towards the US: “Damn it, why are they so angry at us when we are helping them?” A few of the foreign students attempt to explain the inconspicuous but sharp jabs of the aid provider’s “charitable condescension.” But the explanation works against one of the strongest self-images of US Citizens - they see themselves as effective purveyors of good towards others. Here understanding is near impossible for who will seriously consider that goodness imposed is still worse then the wickedness proposed.
- Using a Marxist analysis Harry explains how the dominant Anglo society marginalizes certain ethnicities, exploits the working class, and imperializes the Third World. Marci’s response: “Why are you unable to apply that kind of analysis to how men dominate women?” Its a precious moment, worth waiting for. For the first time in the semester the immensely articulate Harry hesitates. He is caught. His rhetoric forces him to admit a possible parallel and his possible complicity.
- On the anarchic processes of the course: “We just talk about the same things. I’ve learned nothing.” Many agree, looking for a defense from me. I do not oblige. Others wait, then counter with: “I have learned a lot, but I cannot tell you what.” And, “I am not sure I am learning anything, but I cannot stop thinking about this class.”
***
As patterns emerge so does predictability and ennui. Everyone assumes that they know where the other sits politically and actually. The discussion does not advance or sustain their interest. Invariably, the next round of confrontation revolves not around what individual’s believe but why they hold their beliefs. The conversation turns, that is, to the social determinacy of ideas and ideology. They become social scientists. Thus, Armando is said to believe X because he is a male, or an Hispanic, or a Puerto Rican, or from the working class. Likewise, Jamie believes Y because she is North American, a women, Anglo and the beneficiary of a trust fund. Sirak’s thorough anti-Americanism stems from his investment in a foreign identity. However, sometimes political positions cannot be read from social positions. We devote much energy to puzzling over how social positions produce politics and to why they do not. Thus, women who do not feel oppressed by patriarchy are considered gullible; US citizens who demonstrate sympathy to Third World causes are seen as hypocrites who misunderstand the source of their privilege; and marginalized social identities who display conservative colors are deemed brainwashed suck ups. Innuendo and scorn circulate. The most used opening is “I am outraged at what you just said…” or “I cannot believe that in this day and age anyone could believe what I just heard…”
Their indignity certainly feels real to me. They read my face to ascertain how far I will let this go. “Far” I smile. Increasingly I am becoming the target of their anger. Rightfully so; as the representative of the state I do not seem to be doing my job. Where is your teaching drive, they seem to ask. They wonder why I can’t see that they need me to stop them from hurting each other? Attendance and preparation decrease. They begin to lose interest in the experiment and faith in the conversational process.
I have been eager to intervene at this point. I have tried to cajole them into recognizing the rich and multiple voices within and alongside their preferred positions, to become comfortable with ambiguity, and to be generous towards recessive parts of themselves and others. These are difficult notions because the teaching drive trains them to argue and converse with a single purified voice. I am up against the lessons of a lifetime. I still avail myself to these cajoling tools but less often and at a later juncture. Instead, I try to use their listlessness as a tool. When they are weary they implore me to do something. We begin to recognize that we are not particularly skilled at conversation. They demand lectures.
I prepare lectures. I have been waiting to have my say. It takes just one to convince them this is not what they want. No matter how insightful or energized my presentation, they cannot go back. They want to sustain the project of conversing with each other. But they are not sure how to go on. Here my intervention has seemed necessary. I do not know whether this is because I create this juncture so that they will need me, or whether they simply do not know what to do. I tread delicately. I ask them to read for each other the assignments they write for me. This decision came easily. Relative to their public utterances, their assigned writings are nuanced by alternatives, counter voices, shades of doubt and ambiguity. Reading all their papers, I can see how multiple voices within individuals overlap with the multiple voices of others. With their permission class time is now divided between discussing the readings and reading students’ work. I do not envision an easy harmony of interests but rather a further engagement in conversation
Slowly, they begin to recognize that the complexity of their own positions matches that of their adversaries. A spirit of generosity begins to compete with the mood of confrontation and hostility. Clear differences between races, genders, classes, and ethnicities begin to be tempered with a richer complexity constituted by both difference and continuity. Especially in the last few weeks attendance is renewed as the new generosity fuses with a curiosity about how the course will end.
* * *
Some despise the course. They lose friends. They feel forced to uncover and defend parts of themselves they would have preferred to leave unexamined. What is most important is they are no longer sure they want to learn. They start to treat learning with the care and caution deserved by the sharpest tools. Others recognize that what we desire to learn most is what we most conceal from ourselves and, therefore, that learning is finally a commitment to a form of living. Formal and informal course evaluations overwhelmingly suggest that indifference to the format of the course is near impossible. Much like me, they are not often able to clearly specify or assess what happens. Nevertheless, most admit it is intense and some that it is consequential.
***
I worry that so far this essay depicts my classroom role as minimalist, non-interventionary, or as promoting laissez-faire. I do not wish to represent my engagement with anarchic pedagogical forms as promoting a libertarianism that suggests only students know what is best for them. Inverting the teaching drive does not interest me. Such a position, I fear, abdicates the critical responsibility of the pedagogue and thereby merely replicates the present and its deficiencies. If along the way I have implied that the state too must be divested of the subordinating assimilationism resulting from the teaching drive, nevertheless, I also claim that the state must somehow must retain its critical responsibility.
A more critical stance, one with which I sympathize, accepts that students and citizens may not know what is best for them. It accepts that the instructor and state may know their interests better than they themselves. This position, while it embraces responsibility, strikes me as dangerous and no less supportive of the status quo. It sustains and promotes epistemological and existential violence.
I want to suggest that a dialectical synthesis of these positions pivots on the following proposition: as an instructor I may often see their interest, better than they, but only they can uncover and claim that interest. Only through their own labor do they realize themselves. I like to think that performing that labor and discovering such interests occurs through a conversational process within which each is a potential resource for the other’s learning. With this in mind, I aim to use my institutionally sanctioned power to incapacitate mine and other’s hierarchical teaching and to promote processes of dialogical learning. This personal, pedagogical, and political commitment is nothing if not interventionary. The issue, then, is not the presence or absence of the instructor’s institutional power in the classroom or the state’s power in politics. Rather, the issue turns on the forms and purposes that power takes.
***
International relations theory continues to debate whether the US maintains its global hegemony. I think the more serious issue concerns the response to this potential fall. Some implore revival fearing not just the loss of US prestige but more ominously the slide from order to anarchy for the whole global political economy. Others, myself included, applaud the loss as a much needed but late lesson on how to live as just another among many.
I hold some rather unwavering beliefs about how the hegemon in international relations oppresses and damages those under its coercive power - especially when it tries to teach. But these beliefs would not stay affixed to the target of my derision nor to the domain of global politics. I had to ask myself if my desire to intervene in the lives of my students differs substantively from the US desire to make the world safe for democracy, freedom, and civilization? In professing what I take to be essential was I not also destroying the vitality, diversity, and rich complexity that are the prerequisites of democracy, freedom, civilization? Was I deflecting energy to their salvation because doubts about mine so fueled my fears? These questions were just a bit too close to home. I had, either, to change my valuation of the United States on the world stage, or, my grasp of the teacher’s role.
My comprehension of the mentoring role has changed but I have not given up using my authority in the classroom. I still direct the time when the course meets, the selection of the room, the tone of the syllabus, the selection of the books and videos, the form, content, and number of assignments, grading expectations, and, especially the tone and format of discussion. For me, this implies that I cannot call on the United States to either give up its power or adopt an isolationist stance. Giving up mentoring for teachers and isolationism for the US both abdicate responsibility to reconstruct a globe we have done so much to mangle. In any case, as I hinted before, both celebrating and abdicating power are shallow resolutions that avoid assessing alternative uses of authority. I distinguish two analytically separable moments here. One can use authority to recreate relations of dependency employing a double illusion. First, of having mastered time and space, and, second, of tutoring that mastery to others. The full pours into the empty, not recognizing the relative abundance and poverty of each. Alternatively, one commits to using authority in order to undermine power. One attacks all forms of undue advantage including one’s own participation in hierarchy (Shor and Friere 1987; Tompkins 1991) Now the other is no longer the barbarian in need of education and civility to be remade in my image. Rather, our mutual differences imply a conversation, leading perhaps to criticism and conflict, but also potentially to mutual enrichment (Blaney and Inayatullah 1994). And one through the other.
***
The great Sufi sage Jalaudin Rumi wrote: “New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity. Therefore, O man, increase your necessity, so that you may increase your perception” (Shah 1969, 197).
Students, like children and “barbarians,” can teach us how to create participation. The price of this instruction, though, is that they respond only if we ask them with a needy look. Generating this disposition requires that we first acknowledge a lack within. If this seems a high price to pay, we can remind ourselves that the presence of emptiness motivates our seeking after the other in the first place. All voyages of discovery, including the most celebrated, seek the other in order to expose and fill an emptiness within. I suspect that even the teaching drive can be shown to betray this motive.
***
“The essential reasoning is simple. Between the modern master and non-modern slave, one must choose the slave not because one should choose voluntary poverty or admit the superiority of suffering, not only because the slave is oppressed, not even because he works (which, Marx said, made him less alienated than the master). One must choose the slave also because he represents a higher-order cognition which perforce includes the master as a human, whereas the master’s cognition has to exclude the slave except as a ‘thing’” (Nandy 1984, xv-xvi).
If all students participate, they also all resist. They resist the subordinating assimilationism of the teaching drive sometimes with impetuous defiance but often with a compellingly suggestive inventiveness. Within the confines of their relative powerlessness they respond to hypocrisy and alienation with small but vivid ruptures of illuminating creativity. This resistance, these ruptures, whether in the classroom or the world stage maybe the most potent resource in the hands of the educator who wants to learn about learning. Conceptualized adequately, that is, with generosity and humility, this resistance can lead the anxious, the righteous, and the powerful to comprehend the opportunities learners need in order to learn. If the teaching drive pushes water uphill, then resistance to teaching flows to richer waters.
***
Even the precise logic of Hegelian deduction cannot make a reader learn what the author intends. Writers present their lessons in alternative forms but the reader reads and takes according to need. Still, because the narrative influences and constitutes the reading, not just any interpretation follows. In this spirit perhaps the reader deserves not much closure but a distillation of the author’s hopes.
I do not suppose that many will entirely welcome my claim that teaching obstructs and violates learning when it does not understand that: fear and desire of knowledge are both intrinsic to human beings; students implicitly know how to learn; the primary role of the instructor is to help make this implicit knowing explicit by self-consciously constructing anarchic forms of conversation within which such knowledge emerges “spontaneously” through the labor of the participants. Violent teaching homogenizes space, fixes time, and treats the other’s difference as degenerate (Inayatullah 1994). It projects a vision of education and citizenship constructed prior to, and independently of, the participation of students and citizens. Arrogantly indifferent to their potential contribution and transformation of political and educational processes, it erases their difference and thereby guarantees their alienation.
I do not strive to move the reader towards these claims. Rather, the essay hopes to affirm those exploring open-ended processes, to encourage those predisposed towards these moves but who find themselves hesitating (“the water is fine… really ”), and to nudge those who overlook the breach between our beliefs and practices. The goal is not to replace the old orthodoxy with a new one, but rather to retain faith in our capacity to go on wading in the deep.
***
For those whose prime interest remains citizenship I can perhaps tie together a few loose ends. A sympathetic critique of this essay offers the following comment: “Your classes become exercises in democratic conversation. The participants experience all the problems, frustrations, and limits of democratic conversations, but nonetheless, the process infects them. Is there a lesson here for citizenship?” As long as this question separates studentship from citizenship I do not think I can envision much of a lesson for citizenship. To the degree I see a lesson here, it concerns the overlap between student and citizen. I have claimed that perhaps despite their intentions teachers and statespersons alienate students and citizens through the teaching drive. In resisting the subordinating and assimilating moments of that drive, students and citizens offer rich clues to the meaningful reinvigoration of education and politics.
In part, such reinvigoration necessitates illuminating the inherent diversity of any social context. In reacting to my pedagogy, some students protest that my course format does not so much reflect as create difference and diversity within and beyond the classroom. Perhaps they are correct. However, my experience with most students suggests a different assessment. I read resistance to the assimaltionism of the teaching drive as attempts by individuals to protect their particularity. I think that both this resistance and the difference that particularity protects are invaluable to the social whole - so long as we conceive that whole as a differentiated unity. In contrast, the protesting students value, and aim to move towards, an undifferentiated unity. From my view, their promotion of assimilationism must be resisted. From their point of view, I create differences thereby increasing conflict and decreasing harmony. We might imagine that the tension between the two valuations of difference might be fruitful. Perhaps. However, for this tension to be truly productive, I suspect we will first have to undo a half millennium of the teaching drive, subordinating assimilationism, and the presumptive devotion to the goal of an undifferentiated social whole.
I do not want my appreciation of difference to be misunderstood as promoting the false idea that difference and particularity are given by nature, therefore fixed. On the contrary, I believe all commonalties and differences are social constructions, therefore mutable. Differences can be, and often should be, transformed. However, everything rests on the form of the alteration. Here I identify two pivotal questions. First, does the transformation contain the individual’s own labor? Second, does the transformational process summarily negate the characteristics of the individual or does it respect them as a potential resource?
Usually if institutions acknowledge difference they do so as a prelude to subordinating the other. Likewise, their acknowledgment of the other as equal serves as a prelude to the other’s assimilation (Todorov 1984). I believe that contemporary educational and political institutions remain baffled about how to consider their obligations to others when those others demand consideration as both different and equal. Such institutional confusion is understandable; finding a way to treat the other as both equal and different strikes me as a painstakingly difficult project. This is because the project, barely five hundred years old, is so young that we have yet to develop a language for grasping its meaning. Nor have we built institutions for practicing it imperatives.
Nevertheless, if we lack the experience of how to adequately treat others as different but equal, we have ample experience with the difficulty of trying to do so. Perhaps the first step towards reviving education and citizenship requires us to recognize this difficulty. I suspect that students leave anarchic learning formats with a stronger intuitive sense of this difficulty. I would not say that when students leave my course they naturally know how to become better citizens. Rather, I would say that sensing the difficulty of learning with and from others in a classroom begins to prepare us to engage the enormous challenge of creating a critical citizenry with different others.
Notes
References
Achebe, Chinua. (1987). Anthills of the Savannah. New York: Anchor Books.
Blaney, David and Naeem Inayatullah. (1994). “Prelude to a Conversation of Cultures? Todorov and Nandy on the Possibility of Dialogue,” Alternatives Volume 19, (1), Spring, pp. 23-51.
Giddens, Anthony. (1976). New Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Basic.
Giddens, Anthony. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Giddens, Anthony. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Inayatullah, Naeem. (1994). “Diversity as Degeneration: Temporal and Spatial Representations of the ‘Other’ in Early Modern European Social Theory,” Manuscript. Ithaca: Ithaca College.
Kariel, Henry. (1977). “Becoming Political,” in V. Van Dyke (ed) Teaching Political Science. Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, pp. 129-145.
Nandy, Ashis. (1984). The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pettman, Ralph. (1992). “Teaching World Politics (as Well as Teaching for It),” in (eds) Lev Gonick and Edward Weisband, Teaching World Politics: Contending Pedagogies for a New World Order. Boulder, CO: Westview, pp. 139-151.
Shah, Idries. (1969). Tales of the Dervishes: Teaching Stories of the Sufi Masters over the Past Thousand Years. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Shor, Ira and Paulo Freire. (1987). A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education (New York: Bergin & Garvey).
Todorov, Tzvetan. (1984). The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. New York: Harper.
Tompkins, Jane. (1991). “Pedagogy of the Distressed” in College English, vol. 52, No. 6.
I take this to be especially true in the social science and humanities where the act of human study and learning influences and changes the object of study. See Giddens (1976, 153-4; 1979, 47, 244-5; 1984, xxxiv-xxxv, 27, 346-7, 353) for more on the central role reflexivity in the social world.
The musical analogy is jazz or classical Indian music in which by design the interaction of the players, audience, and composition together determine the flow of sound and meaning.
See Kariel’s (1977) provocative essay.
I have lifted this sentence directly from Jonathan Bach’s comments on a prior draft.