Revolutionary Pedagogies
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REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIES REVOLUTIONARY PEDAGOGIES Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory Peter Pericles Trifonas, EDITOR ROUTLEDGEFALMER A MEMBER OF THE TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP NEW YORK LONDON Published in 2000 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright ©2000 by Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trifonas, Peter Pericles, 1960– Revolutionary pedagogies: cultural politics, instituting education, and the discourse of theory / [edited by] Peter Pericles Trifonas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-92568-1 (hb: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-415-92569-X (pb: alk. paper) 1. Critical pedagogy. 2. Education—Political aspects. 3. Education—Social aspects. 4. Education—Philosophy. LC196.R48 2000 370.11'5—dc21 99-056409 ISBN 0-203-90155-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-90159-2 (Glassbook Format) To my parents, Panagiotis and Martha, whose immeasurable sacrifice and love taught me that to live is but to learn; the joyful inspiration of their ancient wisdom is confirmed each and every single day by the miracle of my own children, Peirce, Anthi, and Yanni. Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi I CULTURAL POLITICS Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World 3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Strange Fruit: Race, Sex, and an Autobiographics of Alterity 30 William F. Pinar All-Consuming Identities: Race and the Pedagogy of Resentment in the Age of Difference 47 Cameron McCarthy and Greg Dimitriadis The Touch of the Past: The Pedagogical Significance of a Transactional Sphere of Public Memory 61 Roger I. Simon II INSTITUTING EDUCATION Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends 83 Jacques Derrida Technologies of Reason: Toward a Regrounding of Academic Responsibility 113 Peter Pericles Trifonas VIII CONTENTS Unthinking Whiteness: Rearticulating Diasporic Practice 140 Peter McLaren Postmodern Education and Disposable Youth 174 Henry A. Giroux Multiple Literacies and Critical Pedagogies: New Paradigms 196 Douglas Kellner III THE DISCOURSE OF THEORY The Shock of the Real: Critical Pedagogies and Rightist Reconstructions 225 Michael W. Apple The Limits of Dialogue as a Critical Pedagogy 251 Nicholas C. Burbules The Social Sciences as Information Technology: A Political Economy of Practice 274 John Willinsky Responsible Practices of Academic Writing: Troubling Clarity II 289 Patti Lather Degrees of Freedom and Deliberations of “Self”: The Gendering of Identity in Teaching 312 Jo-Anne Dillabough Permissions 353 Contributors 355 Index 359 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, John Willinksy, Roger Simon, Nicholas Burbules, Doug Kellner, Michael Apple, Patti Lather, Bill Pinar, Denise Egéa- Kuehne, Jo-Anne Dillabough, Cameron McCarthy, and Greg Dimitriadis, who have participated in this anthology, for their support of this project and for the gen- erous contributions of their texts to the collection. I have learned much from their work and have been inspired by the gift of their friendship. Heidi Freund has provided valuable insight into the task of editing this book as well as tremendous reserves of patience while it was transformed into its present form. Thank you. I would like to express my gratitude to Elefteria Balomenos for reading portions of the manuscript and for assisting in the writing of the introduction. This book would not have been possible without a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Connaught Grant from the University of Toronto. Introduction How does contemporary critical theory encounter pedagogy? radicalize it? revolutionize it? make it revolutionary? This is the central question, among others, that this volume seeks to address. It does so by highlight- ing the work of contemporary theorists who are also very well known for their rev- olutionary teaching and the radicality of what they have taught with respect to cultural politics, instituting education, and the discourse of theory. Although this characterization of the chapters presented in this volume is self-consciously fore- fronted by the title of the anthology (and any title worthy of the appellation “title” should surely thematize the heterogeneity of a body of work so as to do just that!), the text does not speak only to those who have embraced the ethical value of open- ing the empirico-conceptual and epistemic limits of one’s work and oneself to the risk of less than canonical modes of thinking. It also addresses those who would wholeheartedly blame contemporary theorizing for all that is perceived to be “wrong” with the state of the humanities and the social sciences today. By contain- ing the idiomatic values of such arguments within the thematic trajectory of this titular enframing of the topic, the essays sustain a probing articulation of the ten- sions among the discursive spaces and the real-world dimensions of an interdiscipli- nary nexus of theory that informs and manifests practice in the application of ideas. For any engagement or identification with a theoretical position or direction (for instance, a theorem, a system, a methodology, a “proof,” an ideology, an argument) implies the critical outworking of an academic responsibility to uphold an obliga- tion owed to the search for truth at all costs. This is what makes theory practice and provides a justifying principle, a principle of reason for what we think, do, and write. The collection converges upon specific interpretations of the obligation we have to respond responsibly to the alterity of those we teach for beyond ourselves. The interplay between texts I have included thereby challenges us to reflect upon and to reexamine the logic and the boundaries of “thought” and “action,” “theory” and “practice,” and what comprises and displaces the opposition of these two enti- ties in the name of revolutionizing pedagogy, radicalizing the normative limits of its ethics so as to make it more responsive to the difference of an Other. Of course, the relating of “idea” to “performance” and vice versa is most cer- tainly nothing new, especially as it relates to the teaching body and a body of teach- ing. As I have said, the desire motivating the appearance of this text is not to offer XII INTRODUCTION yet another treatise containing polemics on why one should be “for” as compared to being “against” theory in the pursuit of achieving discreet pedagogical purposes, ob- jectives, and ideals. No matter what the ethico-ideological impetus behind such a stance may be, there is no fruitfulness in taking either an offensive or a defensive posture for the sake of simply protecting the lineage, direction, and territory of a disciplinary ground from the contaminating effects of its Others. For in choosing sides, one reinstitutes the ideological errors of those familiar divisions, epistemic and methodological, that do nothing more than promote and entrench the institu- tional conflicts (skirmishes and wars) between otherwise interrelated and comple- mentary faculties and induce artificial distinctions grounding the differences among areas of study—for example, the theoretical versus the practical, the scien- tific versus the artistic, the cognitive versus the aesthetic, the rigorous versus the un- demanding, the male-oriented versus the female-oriented, the required versus the elective, and so on. The quest for validation, in each and every case, is worked out at the expense of recognizing the openings of an interdisciplinary logic—a prag- matico-interpretative space beyond the oppositionality of binary thought—that would defy the historicity of an institutional axiomatics aimed at the calculation and realization of a single, teleological destination. For it is the myopia of a repres- sion of the desire to trailblaze, to forge new directions and paths of inquiry, think- ing and teaching, that risks the danger of separating theory from practice for the sole purpose of policing boundaries and orienting the ends of research and of edu- cation. This would lead to the abdication of academic responsibility to the truth of the Other that we cannot already know and results in the instauration of a “point- less pedagogy” grounded on, of, and for the rationality of its own reason. Its logic re- mains, in effect, a prisoner to the fulfillment of its own faith and faithfulness in the laws and rules it upholds without exception by being negatively positioned toward what it must deny as Other in order to keep intact the right of its self-approving in- tegrity. A pointless pedagogy is not aimless, that is, without purpose or direction. It is, however, conceptually and performatively unquestioned (what is its point?) and therefore both unqualified and underdetermined, yet curiously enough also overqualified and overdetermined, in the limits of its responsivity by offering no opening toward a recognition of what it might exclude as being unlike itself. A pointless pedagogy—signifying everything and nothing through