Post-critical pedagogy as poetic practice: combining affirmative and critical vocabularies

ABSTRACT

Currently, the repetition of a critical way of speaking results in a stagnating tendency in educational debates. This had led to the endeavour of developing a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. This paper employs Rortyan and Latourian language in order to tackle the question of how such a post-critical pedagogy should deal with critique. It argues that if one takes critique as what Latour calls a debunking activity, then post-critical pedagogy should leave critique behind. If however critique means simply to say how something should not be, then post-critical pedagogy should remain critical. In addition, however, there is a need for enriching the critical vocabulary with more affirmative language. For accomplishing this need, in contrast to recent suggestions to go back to ontology, the paper suggests that new propositions developed by literary theorists like Sedgwick and Felski are more promising. All these arguments are framed by Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-critical pedagogy
• critical pedagogy
• neopragmatism
• Richard Rorty
• Bruno Latour

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Bianca Thoilliez, Marina Schwimmer, Martin Karcher, Pior Zamojski, Sandro Herr, and Stefano Oliverio for their helpful – and often rightfully critical – comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is in this Rortyan sense (1999) one should read ‘Vocabularies of Hope in Place of Vocabularies of Critique’ (the title of our symposium) and my use of “narratives” in this paper. Felski describes the current need for different ways of speaking as follows: ‘Anyone who attends academic talks has learned to expect the inevitable question: “But what about power?” Perhaps it is time to start asking different questions: “But what about love?” Or: “Where is your theory of attachment?” To ask such questions is not to abandon politics for aesthetics. It is, rather, to contend that both art and politics are also a matter of connecting, composing, creating, coproducing, inventing, imagining, making possible: that neither is reducible to the piercing but one-eyed gaze of critique’ (2015, 17–18).

2. I deal with only two different meanings of “critique” which admittedly risks over-generalisation. However, as I will point out, even this rough distinction is often mixed in the current writings so that this paper might make first distinctions that of course can be substituted with finer grained comparisons. For suggestions of different forms of critique see Wesche (2009) who differentiates between reflection, therapy, and description, or Vogelmann (2017) who distinguishes measuring, disrupting, and emancipating.

3. This is at least the case for the ‘Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy’ (2017) but less so in the following paper (2018) and recent book (2019). This in my opinion unfortunate development is linked to what Oliverio in this issue described as that post-critical pedagogy ‘has “gone ontological”’ (2019). I will come back to this point in the last section of this paper.

4. Thereby, Rorty ‘created a middle way between the deconstructionism of Derrida, whom Dick [Rorty] greatly admired, and science-based empiricism, which he didn’t admire much at all’ (Edmundson in Metcalf 2007, no pagination). Thoilliez (2019b) in her contribution to this issue further elaborates on this.

5. Note that I am not talking about a Rortyan “concept” since Rorty made clear that he is ‘dubious about the concept of “concept”’ (Rorty 2000b, 77). For a detailed discussion of this see Sandbothe (2003, 2005).

6. Su (forthcoming) convincingly argues that what he calls Rortyan ‘redescriptive theorizing’ has always an educational dimension.

7. In a similar wording, it is also mentioned in their paper (Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski 2018, 15) and several times in Vlieghe and Zamojski’s recent book (Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019, 2 and 163).

8. This is a point Rancière makes again and again in his writings, perhaps most notably in ‘The Philosopher and His Poor’ (2004). Similarly, Rorty, in his warning of ‘The Dangers of Over-Philosophication’ of education, notes that critics are ‘needlessly separating themselves from the people they are trying to help’ (1990, 44). For surprising affinities between Rancière and Rorty, see Schulenberg (2017).

9. This refers to the title of the symposium in this issue: ‘Vocabularies of Hope in Place of Vocabularies of Critique. Can Rorty Help Us to Re-Describe (Philosophy of) Education?’. Of course, one could argue that debunking critique can also be a source for hope – as Schwimmer (2019) in her response in this issue points out. This line of argument would provoke a series of questions which are beyond what can be dealt with in this paper, such as: for whom brings debunking critique hope – for the critic, the criticized or the reader? What kind of hope is generated by debunking critique – what is its consequence?

10. Kluge (in Kluge and Vogl 2009) emphasizes the positive and even affirmative gesture of critique in the sense of making distinctions. He gives the example that for romantics like Schlegel, negative critique would have seemed ‘absurd’ (12): ‘why wasting time by spending words on something bad?’ (13, translation KW). On Schlegel and Rorty, see Frischmann (2011).

11. The difference can be illustrated by realizing that the many contradictions in Nietzsche’s writing can be seen as problematical only in the Kantian sense of philosophy, whereas one should read Nietzsche as writer who aims at immediate affective effects in the reader rather than coherent philosophical systems.

12. Such a position would not believe Bourdieu and Rancière that their positions are mutually exclusive and incompatible (Sonderegger 2012; Kastner and Sonderegger 2014). This is important since Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski refer to Rancière heavily (2017, 2018; Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019), whereas Bourdieu is sometimes depict as critic par excellence (also by Latour 2004, although importantly very nuanced only a ‘popularized, that is teachable version […] inspired by a too quick reading’, 228).

13. This stands in stark contrast to Vlieghe and Zamojski (2019, 33–35).

14. Rorty often refers to Donald Davidson and Robert Brandom in order to emphasize this point.

15. I am aware that in the Arendtian language Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski are proposing, it would be rather about what is good in the world for the sake of its educational passing on. However, as I will point out in turn, I do not buy the distinction between education and the world.

16. Using Rorty’s distinction between discourse for private self-creation and public democracy, although recently problematized by Thoilliez (2019a), one could radicalize these questions by appropriating ontology to the private language game: Why would you bother others with essences? Why is ‘a speaker’s depth’ of ontology ‘more relevant to her participation in public debate than her hobby or her hair colour’ (Rorty 1994, 6).

17. I agree with Masschelein in problematizing ‘“achieving distance” […] as the basic move of critique’ (2004, 352). From a Rortyan perspective, I am however not entirely convinced that his Foucauldian framework can escape this move (Małecki 2011). Kluge and Vogl convincingly explore creative possibilities for ‘critique in closest proximity’ (2009, translation KW).

18. This is Rorty’s way to distinguish between Philosophy as a foundational discipline that inquires how objects essentially are from philosophy as what Sellars called ‘an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term’ (quoted in Rorty 1982, xiv, emphasis added). Possibly one of Rorty’s favourite and most often mentioned quotes, I find the quasi-Latourian emphasis on things and their relations remarkable (Latour 2005a). Thoilliez (2019b) in her contribution to this issue makes this Rortyan distinction fruitful for a ‘pedagogy with the lower case “p”’.

19. Recently, Schumann (2017) made Sedgwick’s vocabulary exemplary fruitful for educational reflections.

20. Also, they not only acknowledge but embrace the political dimension of affects (Sedgwick 2003). Again, this stands in opposition to Vlieghe and Zamojski (2019, 160–162).

21. Am I paranoid (Sedgwick 1997) or does Hayot refer to ‘forces’ the debunking critic claims to debunk?