Retrotopian risks, constant translation, without noise reduction: a response to Jan Masschelein

ABSTRACT

This paper is a response to Jan Masschelein’s keynote lecture. Taking its point of departure in a befriended support of his argument, the paper begins in the mood of affirmation as a form of critique. Thereafter it engages, first, with what it reads as a slightly retrotopian approach to digitalization in the paper. Second, it brings to attention that the gesture of rejuvenation and regeneration, which Masschelein suggests, always involves a moment of return or repetition. The question is asked what form the gesture of retrieving inherited pedagogical forms from the past takes in Masschelein’s proposal, and it is suggested that such retrieving is a work of constant translation. Third, a comment is made about the advocating of orature, issuing the reminder that on-campus education usually comes without noise reduction, that is, it requires reflection also on the discord that is calibrated in and through our voices.

KEYWORDS:

• Mood of affirmation
• retrotopia
• constant translation
• orature
• voice

In seeking out a form for my response to Jan Masschelein’s keynote speech, with which I feel much befriended, I found encouragement in the paper itself. In the section ‘reclaiming critical pedagogy,’ Masschelein suggests that it could be ‘called critical’ to be ‘making ever more precise distinctions that matter.’ This suggests to me that criticality does not need to emanate from lack or dissatisfaction but could, by contrast, begin in affirmation of what is already being said.

I find support for such affirmative critique also in literary theorist Rita Felski’s (2015) book The Limits of Critique. Here, she elaborates on what practicing criticality might imply after the masters of suspicion and if critique is to have a role to play in academia in a time that seems disenchanted with disenchantment it needs to be offered in a form that strives, she argues, ‘for a greater receptivity to the multifarious and many-shaded moods of texts’ (12). Inspired by Felski and, as mentioned, by the keynote itself, my response takes shape and form in what I would like to call a mood of affirmation. Thus, it is in the spirit of saying ‘yes!’ to what is already being said and a willingness to add something – a question, perhaps, or (hopefully) a ‘distinction that matters’ (Masschelein) – that I am responding.

Retrotopian risks?

In the beginning of the talk, the ‘hyper-modern learning factory’ is the image against which Masschelein envelops his argument. The ethos of this place (or placeless place, because it does not seem to matter anymore if we are there or not) is about ‘gains and profits’ and its outcome, he argues, is the production of individual learners focused on their own life projects. In this sense, the modern university can be seen as producing ‘anywheres’ instead of ‘somewheres,’ to borrow a distinction from the well-known British writer David Goodhart (2017), suggesting that the specific place of the university – with its campuses, lecture halls, and seminar rooms – seems to have lost its importance. This placelessness, it could be argued, was fast-tracked with the outbreak of the pandemic but even today (and perhaps because of it) neither staff nor students need always to be physically present on campus. The university and its ‘functions’ can be engaged almost anywhere almost any time.

Quite a lot of blame for what Masschelein calls ‘the destruction or devastation or weakening of the pedagogical forms of life’ in this ‘home delivery of education,’ as he puts it, is put on digital technologies. But is this image of the ‘hyper modern learning factory’ and its destruction through (not only, but mostly) digital technologies not slightly exaggerated? Is there not a touch of nostalgia soaring over the critique of digitalization and the image of the university as a ‘learning factory’? Due to the ever-present risk of creating ‘retrotopias’ which, according to Zygmunt Bauman (2017), are encouraged by a nostalgic ‘romance with one’s own fantasy’ (2), I would like to caution against too easily disregarding digitalization and the use of digital technologies in teaching. Since the liberal mass university seems to be here to stay, and since it neither seems possible nor desirable to reinvent the preliberal university (accessible only to a few, privileged, men and boys), the pressing question that needs to be asked is: How can we become masters (instead of slaves) of the digitalized technologies so that they serve our educational purposes and, hence, can contribute to rejuvenating and regenerating our lectures and seminars in the midst of the mass university model?

In addition, most of us hold in fresh memory how digital technologies became a lifeline to the outer world during the pandemic, offering much welcome “break-out rooms” from our isolated, individual lives and opportunities to uphold some form of university life despite the lockdowns. We could also recall the reports that have been showing that even if the lockdowns involved many kinds of losses for many students, there were also those who, prior to the pandemic, had found the social demands of in situ education too demanding and now found relief in not having to attend school in person and still be able to study (e.g. Åkerfeldt and Hermansson 2021).¹ So, even if the digital forms are flat, they nevertheless made (and still make) it possible to sustain some form of collective public conversation in education, albeit of a more sterile and bloodless kind.

What is the form of the return?

In discussing how we are to respond to the current ‘de-pedagogization’ of the university, Masschelein encourages us to see on-campus education as an ‘ecology of forms.’ There are parallels, he argues, between what is happening to our natural climate and the climate of the university and both places are facing the near extinction of many different forms of life. Hence, his response to the emergency is to call for a rejuvenation and a regeneration of on-campus education, particularly in the forms of the lecture and the seminar.

I will come back to the lecture and the seminar below, but first I would like to reflect briefly on the suggested gesture of rejuvenation and regeneration which indicates a movement of return – if not to any originary forms then, at least, to some forms of the past that are to be retrieved and renewed. Hence, what would need further elaboration in Masschelein’s proposal, I think, is what exactly the gesture of rejuvenation and regeneration involves. In other words, how can we, as university teachers, return to certain pedagogical forms from the past (such as the seminar and the lecture) and renew them for the future? What is the form of the return?

For the philosopher John Caputo (2018), there are two ways of returning, two kinds of repetition in interpretation but also in practices and in traditions: repetition ‘backwards’ and repetition ‘forward’ (130–131). If repetition backwards is ‘the repetition of the same’ that ‘tries to guard against every possible variation or deviation’ (131–132), repetition forward is ‘the repetition of the different’ and, as such, it ‘exposes itself to what it cannot see coming’ (ibid.). Repetition backwards is safe and ‘has a fixed model to imitate’ whereas repetition forward is ‘a bit mad,’ seeking out what is not yet known or practiced (132). For those who wish for a third option, the door is closed. The work of interpretation is, for Caputo, ‘always a negotiation’ (Caputo 2018, 139) between two irreducibly different positions, between going back (to the past) and going forward (into the future). The absence of a third option suggests that the only way to keep a text alive – or, I would like to add, to rejuvenate and regenerate pedagogical forms such as the lecture and the seminar – is to remain in the space between the going back and the going forward, that is, in the inter between interpretations.

This suggests, as I have argued elsewhere, that the work that needs to be done when retrieving something living from the past and bring it into the future is a work of ‘constant translation’ (Bergdahl and Langmann 2018, 379, emphasis in original). Since an ‘inheritance “is never a given, it is always a task”’ (ibid., quote from Derrida 1994, 67), a rejuvenation of inherited pedagogical forms like the lecture and the seminar can never involve the enactment of the same forms as before if they are to live on into the future. Hence, to my mind, the task of the teacher who wishes to rejuvenate and regenerate pedagogical forms (of life) is to become a critical translator of the heterogeneous heritage of these forms – a heritage that is always fragmented and contested and that therefore always calls for translation. The form that the gesture of rejuvenation and regeneration requires, then, is the form of ‘continuous movement’ (ibid., emphasis in original) between fidelity to the pedagogical forms of the past (preservation) and a betrayal of those forms (change).

Orature without noise reduction?

Masschelein puts focus on ‘orature’ in his re-pedagogization of on-campus education because, he writes, ‘the university as a concrete place and space is “par excellence” the site of “spoken science”.’ I must say that it surprises me slightly that Masschelein puts orature at the center of his argument given that the voice has never been lost, particularly not in digital, Zoom-based, teaching. Be that as it may. What then needs further attention, in my view, is that on-campus teaching comes with so much more than orature. With ‘more than orature’ I mean that it tends to come with all those sensory, bodily and often conflictual dimensions that are part of listening and speaking “in the flesh.” It comes, so to speak, without noise reduction.

So, what concerns me in Masschelein’s turn to orature is the absence of any conflictual or dissonant elements. The focus on voice and orature has ancient roots, but it also echoes more recent thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Alasdair MacIntyre (1990) – the latter reminding us, in ‘Reconceiving the University and the Lecture,’ that if we are to revive curriculum at the university each of us would have to play the role of a partisan, ‘someone concerned to uphold and to order the ongoing conflicts, to provide and sustain institutional means for their expression … to ensure that rival voices were not illegitimately suppressed’ (231). To my mind then, for MacIntyre, rejuvenating and regenerating orature and the lecture in university teaching would require sustaining ‘an arena of conflict’ (ibid.).

If academics are now replacing on-campus education with online material to be studied individually, this will most likely diminish the possibility to experience the university as a place where we can come together to think together and, to borrow from literary theorist Toril Moi (2017), learn how to disagree properly. Hence, my reservation against a too quick advocating of orature resonates with MacIntyre’s focus on conflict above but also with Adrian Skilbeck’s (2019) phenomenological reflection on ‘the experience of the seminar’ (54), suggesting that what is at stake in the seminar as a pedagogical form is a situation where ‘we measure and weigh up our experience of the world’ asking one another ‘[w]hat is to count in our calibration … ?’ (Skilbeck 2019, 54) In the seminar, he continues, ‘we can start to find our voice’ which is about ‘finding the right register for one’s words as they reflect our thought’ (ibid.). In line with this, I suggest that a privileging of orature calls for reflection also on the dissonance that is being calibrated in and through our voices and, hence, requires a bent ear to the more conflictual dimensions of our relationships both with the world and with one another.

The above remarks are matters of nuance and I hope it is clear that I find Masschelein’s call for a renewed language for ‘pedagogical forms of life’ truly inspirational. His work echoes the work that has been going on in feminist philosophy and theory for many decades, pointing out the deadliness of a culture that, generated by a violent morphology, narcissistically detaches itself from nature and matter. His proposal for a retrieval of ‘pedagogical forms of life’ that include both words and worlds, both speech and matter, points to the living-on of a pedagogical discipline that has its most prolific roots in regeneration and, hence, in the theories and practices of natality.

As a final suggestion about what to do, Jan Masschelein issues a call for engaging in teaching and for spending less time on writing papers for conferences and journals. Let me just say, as a final remark, that I am grateful that he is not adhering to his own call and that he accepted the invitation to come to this conference as one of our invited keynote speakers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this paper as well as being the guest editor of this special issue was made possible by support from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) as part of the research project ‘Forms of Formation: A Pedagogical-Philosophical Enquiry into Tensions Around Gender and Social Equality in the Classroom’ [project id: 2019-05482].

Notes

1. A Swedish report on the advantages of distance- and digital teaching and learning published after the pandmic, please see Åkerfeldt and Hermansson 2021: https://www.ifous.se/app/uploads/2021/02/202101-ifous-fokuserar-fjarr-och-distansundervisning-f.pdf (for the report) and the larger project: https://www.ifous.se/likvardig-utbildning-med-fjarr-och-distansutbildning/ [accessed 22.03.03].