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Wo Es War : Marxism, the Unconscious, and Subjectivity

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Wo Es War : Marxism, the Unconscious, and Subjectivity 4 Wo es war : Marxism, the Unconscious, and Subjectivity I Learning, at its most basic, can be described as the pro- cess of acquiring knowledge. Perhaps, with this definition’s most standard and ordinary rendition, learning appears rather unproblematic for any conception of what it means to be a student—even coalescing with the latter. Thus a student, in the standard model, is simply the actor or subject who acquires knowledge—a happy union indeed. But does such a concept of subjectivity accord with a critical education? The question arises because what makes learning critical usually turns on the registering of some socially traumatic knowledge. In the various critical theories (feminist theory, Marxism, critical race theory, and the like), this traumatic knowledge goes by such names as exploitation, oppression, subjugation, and so on. When it comes to knowledge of the disturbing kind, can we continue to assume an unproblematic homology between learning and studenthood? In other words, do students easily or willfully learn knowledge that is traumatic—for example, knowledge of social and political oppression, acts of genocide, or economic exploitation?1 Even a cursory examination of the various modes of commu- nication, from the cultural industry to schooling, will show that learning traumatic knowledge does not proceed without some resistance. It is enough to recall that the culture industry exists precisely to provide relief from social trauma, much less to help in knowing it. In that case, traumatic knowledge—the very K. D. Cho, Psychopedagogy © K. Daniel Cho 2009 72 PSYCHOPEDAGOGY knowledge at stake in critical theory—represents, from the standpoint of pedagogy, something of a problem for critical theory itself. Though endemic to all the various critical theories, where this problem is perhaps most pronounced is in Marxism. After all, Marx’s very project, at its most narrow, was to demon- strate how exploitation was not avoidable collateral for capi- talism but part of its integral structure, its very underside, that is, how the accumulation of capital is only possible if human misery also increases. Indeed, of capitalism’s fundamental law, Marx writes in Capital: “It makes an accumulation of mis- ery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth.”2 And, at its broadest, his project was to confront the bourgeois metaphysics of surplus. Instead of serving as the basis for political mobilization, it seems more plausible that the traumatic knowledge discovered by Marx generates resistance— usually referred to as “ideology”—from capitalist subjects. The question is this: if the knowledge we are concerned with is traumatic (as it is in Marxism), then, what is the corre- sponding notion of studenthood? It is within the context of this question that psychoanalysis offers itself as a suggestive con- tributor.3 For psychoanalysis has always concerned itself with trauma and its subsequent repression; but, perhaps, more saliently, psychoanalysis attempts to project a model of sub- jectivity predicated on traumatic knowledge. Psychoanalysis will then be what adds the necessary facet to the Marxian prism— this is the articulation that will be sketched out here. II First entry can be made into this problematic by examining the philosophical presuppositions underpinning the standard model of studenthood. What one finds from such an examination is that the student as actor who acquires knowledge is modeled after none other than the Cartesian theory of subjectivity, that is, the cogito, “the thing that thinks.”4 It is not difficult to find Cartesian imprints in contemporary educational thought. We need only look as far as its two most prominent figures: John MARXISM, THE UNCONSCIOUS, AND SUBJECTIVITY 73 Dewey and Paulo Freire.5 In Dewey, we find the silhouette of a Cartesian structure in his appeal to reconstruct modern United States education on a more student-centered model. Driving Dewey, here, is his conception of the student as an active thinker/learner—or, translated into Cartesian terms, the subject of the student is a “thing” that exists by thinking experientially. As for Freire, in his famous problem-posing mode of education, the student is no longer an object filled by the teacher like so many empty buckets; rather, the student is now the active agent who comes to life by acts of cognition. “Liberating education,” Freire writes, “consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information.”6 Again, Descartes is writ large in Freire’s work as the student, according to the latter’s account, is seen as a being who thinks, thus rendering any attempt to impose knowledge on the student from the outside an act of inhumanity. Descartes’ endeavor itself is well known: the fateful decision to cast doubt on all the knowledge he possesses, to effectively assume it to be so many lies, and to find instead a more sub- stantial ground on which to assuredly fix the existence of his being. How does Descartes locate this desired ground? Through the course of doubting all his possessed knowledge, treating it as a collection of myths and fairytales, Descartes discovers that the only thing he can be certain of is that, insofar as he actively doubts, he is in fact thinking. Empty of all content, the act of thinking itself is christened as the grounds for being’s certainty. Hence, the I is “a thing that thinks”—cogito—and therefore exists—ergo sum. It is quite understandable that Cartesian subjectivity would serve as the model for ontologies of the student—indeed Descartes’ methodological doubt is provocative in this regard. After all, Descartes himself did intend his Mediations on First Philosophy to be a didactic text on proper thinking. And when it comes to knowledge with which we are familiar and thus inclined to accept, the Cartesian method of doubt proves handy for creat- ing a critical distance between the thinking I and its knowledge. But we are here concerned with traumatic knowledge—that is to say, knowledge not so easily accepted. 74 PSYCHOPEDAGOGY Traumatic knowledge is at stake in Marx’s analysis of the mode of production insofar as what he has to tell us about capi- talism is not easy to digest. “If now,” Marx writes in his pamphlet “Wage Labour and Capital,” “we picture to ourselves this fever- ish simultaneous agitation on the whole world market, it will be comprehensible how the growth, accumulation and concentra- tion of capital results in an uninterrupted division of labour, and in the application of new and the perfecting of old machinery precipitately and on an ever more gigantic scale.”7 The key to Marx’s insight here is “simultaneity”—that is, the necessity to grasp, in a single motion, all sides of capital accumulation, which means the ability to picture its over- and undersides as a single totality. The overside of capitalism is obviously its various productivities: wealth, commodities, etc. These are easy enough to imagine (and desire) and therefore present no problem to any student interested in studying capitalism—indeed these things suggest themselves as candidates for Cartesian doubt. The underside however is not so inviting. It is of course the necessity of human misery. As we saw above, for Marx, to recognize mis- ery as the underside of capitalism is therefore to understand the fundamental law of capitalist accumulation. The difficulty Marx’s analysis of capitalism presents to any Cartesian model of student subjectivity is that the knowledge of human misery is not something we carry with us uncritically. Indeed, it is not difficult to find apologists who even today deny that capitalism produces misery as an essential part of its operation. Rather, misery is knowledge we do not yet fully comprehend or, more exactly, want to comprehend. As Freud might put it, the not-knowing of misery is more or less a con- scious not-wanting-to-know. An even more radical example can be found in Marx’s historical reconstruction of so-called primitive accumulation at the end of Capital. “So-called primi- tive accumulation,” Marx writes, “therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Capital, 874–75). Historically, this process of divorce is one where “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force play the greatest part” (875). The thrust of Marx’s MARXISM, THE UNCONSCIOUS, AND SUBJECTIVITY 75 reconstruction is how it exposes the bourgeois political econo- mists of his time as not willing to accept that “capital comes,” into the world, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (926). To accept that capital emerges “dripping from head to toe . with blood and dirt” can indeed be a disturbing thought, and one we may be all too willing to forget. Against such knowledge it would seem the freshness of Cartesian doubt is nullified. However, Cartesian subjectivity has its uses and should not be discarded tout court. Necessary instead is to supplement it with another model of subjectivity that could continue to animate the learning process when the Cartesian model gets stonewalled. This model is provided by the “other side” of Cartesian philoso- phy, namely, psychoanalysis.8 III Wo es war, soll ich werden—literally “Where it was, there I shall become.”9 This famous line of Freud’s can be taken as his for- mula for the psychoanalytic subject. Where some alien knowl- edge once stood, the subjective I will come into being. It is almost a complete reversal of Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum.” Whereas, in Descartes’ line, subjectivity emerges when consciousness becomes emptied out of all content, leaving only the empty shell of thought itself, in Freud’s, subjectivity emerges once the I absorbs or assumes a foreign body of knowledge. Freud’s name for this foreign body of knowledge is none other than the unconscious.
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