Active words in dangerous times: Beyond liberal models of dialogue in politics and pedagogy

Abstract

Dialogue is a category that is central to politics, media, and education, and yet in all of these domains it can be confusing and ambiguous. Starting from a critical framework built on the work of educational philosopher Paulo Freire, we undertake an inquiry into the meaning of dialogical intersubjectivity and its political determinations, with a particular focus on liberal models. We situate this discussion in the context of the rise of radical Right populisms, which have exposed the strength of racial resentment and white supremacy in contemporary politics, and raised questions about the meaning of social cohesion and the relationship between speech and violence. In this context, we show how liberal calls for unity and reflexive defenses of free speech obscure the exclusions and antagonisms that traverse society, while also flattening the meaning of dialogue and betraying its emancipatory vocation. Finally, we suggest that educators should understand their work as continuous with a broader landscape of struggle, and that their interventions should be informed by an awareness of the pedagogical costs of reducing dialogue to a form of talk or method that refuses ethical and political commitment.

Keywords:

• Dialogue
• discourse
• emancipation
• liberalism
• pedagogy
• politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A much discussed instance of such protest was the mobilization that shut down the speech of Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, in February, 2017.

2 It might be objected that such slogans are an unfair target, to the extent that in their compactness they have a certain discursive flatness to begin with. However, in keeping with our definition of dialogue as a structure of intersubjectivity rather than mere speech, we are primarily concerned here with the deployment and circulation of these slogans rather than their rhetorical structure taken in isolation. Furthermore, the ubiquitous promotion and investment in such slogans is itself important and symptomatic of liberalism’s impulse toward a foreshortened and one-dimensional model of communication and collectivity. Finally, as we have noted, these slogans encapsulate the abstract understanding of solidarity, evident in liberal discourse more broadly, in a particularly evocative way.

3 Stronger Together was a slogan used by the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. Yes We Can was a slogan used by the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, borrowed from the United Farm Workers (familiar in Spanish as sí se puede).