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Abstract
This essay engages the question of conservatism in academia as one of affective investments that implicate individuals at the bodily level of sensations and desires. It attempts to shift attention from an ideological critique of education based on identity relations to considerations of the multiplicity of relations possible between teachers and students, and the potential that fluidity creates for manifesting powerful affective connections and disconnections to their respective communities of belonging. The essay considers a (conservative) student's response essay to tease out the tension that arises in the classroom encounter: a student's refusal to participate in the academic discourse of the classroom opens up another movement, as yet unauthorized, that invites non-confrontational, open-ended responses from both teacher and student that in the end (productively) invite unexpected, difficult, and creative work. By refusing to meet students in a confrontational stance, teachers can subvert the power of identity construction and strike new modes of connectivity and learning.
Notes
1. This essay has a narrow scope, focusing on concepts and assumptions that relate to teaching. There is much more that could be said, and should be said. I do not address issues of curriculum development, teacher training, educational funding and the larger political and cultural context that pertains to these important elements of teaching. I do, however, discuss a few ways of thinking about teaching that progressively-minded educators and cultural studies teachers and scholars might find interesting.
2. What these approaches have in common as a general working strategy is an emphasis on representation and identity as operative elements. Throughout this essay, I develop the point that in the context of pedagogy a focus on identity as the main locus of political action might be insufficient. Two excellent articles that provide thoughtful and informative overviews of approaches to pedagogy in cultural studies and the field of education are Kathy Hytten (Citation1999) and Ronnie Casella (Citation1999).
3. In addition to publishing Dialogues together, Deleuze and Parnet also collaborated on Gilles Deleuze, From A to Z (L'Abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet), an eight-hour series of interviews filmed 1988–1989 and intended to be broadcast only after Deleuze's death. The interviews were shown with Deleuze's permission on the Arte channel between November 1994 and spring 1995, the year before his death. For a summary of the interviews in English by Charles Stivale, see http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC1.html.
4. And, in fact, many others. At the beginning of Dialogues, Deleuze mentions specifically Felix Guattari, his friend Jean-Pierre, his wife Fanny, and Michel Foucault. Thus, Parnet remarks in Dialogues regarding the book's structure: ‘each chapter would remain divided in two, there would no longer be any reason to sign each part, since it is between the two anonymous parts that the conversation would take place, and the AND Felix, AND Fanny, AND you, AND all those whom we speak, AND me, would appear as so many distorted images in running water’ (Deleuze & Parnet Citation1987, p. 35). The image of running water suggest the dissolution and concomitant, immanent merging of individual authorship and the making of something new. See also ‘The Folds of Friendship: Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault’, in which Charles Stivale (Citation2000) offers a nuanced reading of the intense and fleeting relationships and friendships among the three thinkers as events that enabled a multitude of resonances and exchanges.
5. Generally, co-authorship still is a vexing phenomenon in academic culture in the US. Since the system of intellectual property laws are founded on the liberal notion of the self-contained individual, collaborative scholarship does not quite fit the structure. It messes with how authors are listed (alphabetical? in order of importance?) and affects such decisions as tenure and promotion. Collaborations cannot be contained by the institutional structure of academia.
6. In her historical analysis of the development of educational study, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (Citation2000) argues that studies of education have been relatively scarce compared to work done in the social sciences, psychology and the various professions. One reason for this scarcity relates to gender differentiation in modern, Western societies: school teaching came to be defined as a predominantly female occupation in the first part of the nineteenth century as common schooling was being institutionalized. As a result of the gender split, teaching has come to be seen as a less intellectual, less serious topic of study, attention and compensation.
7. Alan O'Shea argues that as long as a student is subject to a form of assessment by the teacher, ‘there is no way out of an unequal power/knowledge relationship between teacher and student’ (Citation1998, p. 524).
8. Jennifer Gore speaks directly to this concern when she argues, ‘there is little direct address in critical pedagogy discourse to ways in which teachers, students, or especially the theorists themselves need to style their gestures, postures, attitudes, feelings, desires, or actions’ (Citation1993, p. 115). See also Jo-Anne Dillabough, who writes that educators must find ways to recognize ‘the real political, ethical and existential issues at stake in people's lives: for example, tragedy, the desire for love, the realities of exclusion and alienation and, if we follow Sartre, hopelessness, uncertainty and nothingness’ (Citation2002, p. 207).
9. Newitz (Citation1998) mentions that the filmmaker Elizabeth Thompson had a difficult time securing funding from liberal groups because many of them were afraid that their support might be construed as helping the cause of a racist reactionary. Mixed with class elitism, these groups were unable to grasp the ambiguity in Winthrow's change of position and were able to only understand him as a lower-class, right-wing extremist.
10. Certainly, the language of identity politics has provided some valuable tools for under-represented individuals to make sense of their cultural locations. Tavares, for example, argues that an identity-based language did empower her because ‘that language encouraged me to imagine a very different ordering of the social’ (Citation1998, p. 80).
11. There are resonances here between Winthrow's experience of love and the dynamic of friendships. The connecting element in both instances seems to be an affectivity that runs counter to identity belonging. That is, Winthrow's falling in love with a Latina must have unleashed forces that messed with the identity affiliations he had previously developed around racism and racist organizations.
12. These questions are inspired by Leonard Hawes’ essay ‘Performative Dialogue’ (Citation2004). Hawes works through the experience of teaching a graduate seminar on the implications of multicultural ethnic conflict. The seminar participants, themselves of varying ethic, racial and political backgrounds, become caught in factional and oppositional stances. The essay traces the shift in dialogue between all participants (including the teacher) from a representational to an experiential mode of address. There are many similarities between Hawes’ affective/relational approach to dialogue and Elizabeth Ellsworth's in Teaching Positions (1997). Shifting away from dialogue that operates as a mode of structured, rational address, Ellsworth wants to start with the limits of dialogue, the interruptions, and ask not, ‘is this reading true or false, right or wrong, good or bad?’ (1997, p. 128). Instead, she wants to explore, ‘what has this reading performed or let loose in the world? The shift is one from ‘what is a body?’ to ‘what can a body do?’