THE EDUCATOR'S NEW(ish) CLOTHES
© Michael Coffey 2000
Updated 4/6/01
CONTENTS | REFERENCES | GLOSSARY | CONTACT
Chapter 7.
Critical pedagoggles....'revolution ala couch potato' - adult education for action and social change, empowerment. .
...... It may be beautiful to think that we are: acting out of love; non-elitist; prepared to commit 'class suicide', and prepared to learn from the learners, who we consider our equals in a common quest for effective ways to fight against oppression and create a new world. Beautiful but is it true?
(Facundo 1984 part 3)
Some liberatory cultural workers might be Mother Teresas but the rest of us are a mix of self-interested, altruistic social reproductions, swallowing in the tails of our own myths.
(Peckham 1999, pg 12)
Critical theory faces the formidable task of unveiling structures of domination when noone is dominating, nothing is being dominated and no ground exists for a principle of liberation from domination.
(Poster 1988, pg 6)
Heckling the romance of Critical Theory
As an adult education student at UTS 1996-1999, it was very easy to play along and enjoy, what I call, the ' revolution ala couch potato ' and be inscribed and entertained by the wonderful and inspiring stories of social action and change. It was easy to uncritically accept and assume meaning and territory in terms like 'adult education', 'social responsibility', 'empowerment' and 'reflective practice'. It was a very desirable look which, for a while, I embraced with the zeal of a missionary.43 The missionary metaphor holds well for my purposes here, particularly with references to the universal and assumed themes of morality and good/evil which emerge in the discourse of "adult education for social action".
Despite a seemingly secular agenda, there were the usual suspects of pastoral concern - the 'goodies and baddies' and other famous hierarchical binaries.
There was 'false consciousness' verses 'true consciousness' and assumptions inscribed in what Pennycook (1994) calls 'easy talk' of oppressed and oppressors.
We were invited to embrace romantic notions of: 'class suicide' (Freire 1970) ; 'take control of the moment' (Newman 1999); 'to build trust and goodwill as part of our social capital' (Cox 1995); 'make the road by walking' (Freire and Horton 1990) and be on the side of the goodies.
Embedded within this tradition, there was always an essentialist presumption of love and morality and a belief in an 'innocent', centred and core self /subject. This romantic message of 'peace n love', innocence and emphasis on experience for me echoes the 'hippy' identities of the mid '60s44 and what Stronach and MacLure (1997) and Haraway (1991) describe as a nostalgic attempt to get 'back to the garden''.
Mansfield (2000) describes this notion of subjectivity, or theorising of the subject, as rediscovery of Rousseau's romantic subject. It assumes that the individual subject is a natural occurrence, or a given, which is exploited and entrapped by society (or the system). Continuing the hippy theme, I am reminded of 'Tales of Power', a 'quintessentially hippy' book45 written by Carlos Castaneda (1976), which was an essential hippy accessory46 and spiritual/philosophical manifesto.
In his text Castaneda writes of a ideal romantic subject, the 'warrior', to which we all must aspire to be47. The protagonist in his story is the heckler / trickster and Shamen Indian, Don Juan, who as an 'adult educator' of sorts, puts Carlos through all sorts of ordeals for his training. Don Juan's ultimate message or lesson is that the way to being a warrior is to realise ones true self48 and to give up the vanities of the world.
For Rousseau fulfillment and freedom comes through rejection of social pressures and by giving individuality free expression.
For Don Juan it means taking lots of magic mushrooms, engaging with the 'nagual' or otherness, travelling through time and learning how to fly.
It is easy to slip into something more comfortable and present an identity and story of such a cultural activist / popular educator. Perhaps what postmodern 'doubters' like Pennycook and Burbules would suggest this was engaging with a low risk "easy teleology". Indeed, Freire and other Critical Theorists like Habermas and Cox fitted like a pair of 'warm and fluffy slippers with a hot cup of milk' within this adult education discourse. In the same way Castaneda's ideas seemed reasonable within the very engendered hippy/surf discourse of my youth in Australia, during the mid 1970's.
Why doesn't this feel empowering?
Despite his celebrated position as the "Grand Poobah" 49of liberatory education, Freire in particular has attracted a fair amount of 'bad press' from his critics in recent years. Commenting on his work, Elizabeth Ellsworth (1993) asks 'Why doesn't this feel empowering?'. She suggests that key assumptions which underpin Freire's critical pedagogy, such as empowerment, dialogue and even the term 'critical' are repressive myths that perpetuate relations of domination. She suggests that in her work experience, that these assumptions were not only unhelpful but actually exacerbated the conditions she was trying to work against.
The reason that this doesn't feel empowering, perhaps is because as a postmodern doubt would suggest, empowerment along with emancipation and solidarity, is a chimera, or modernity kidding itself. Whilst under the guise of challenging a regime of truth, in the interests of emancipation or empowerment, there is the inevitable paradox that another regime of truth will be substituted (Gore 1992, Usher et.al 1997).
The notion of power or freedom as property - to be given back to the people - is also questionable (Gore 1992).
There is a danger of vanguardism and of the dominance of authoritative voices, of the elitist well-informed educator who has worked out how to 'educate' the 'ill-informed masses who are in the grip of domination'. (Hart 1999 cited in Usher et.al 1997, pg 196).
As Ellsworth and others have suggested, Freire falls neatly within these descriptions, as a missionary selling empowerment through Christian(ish) rhetoric. Some see conscientization almost as a new religion with Freire as its high priest. Others see it as hot air with Freire as the chief windbag!... both church and secular history suggest that the saintly educators whom Freire depends on to keep his revolution honest would turn out to be in short supply. (Manfred quoted in Ohliger 1995, hypertext) Lather (1991) suggests that another way of looking at empowerment is by focusing away from the vanguardisms of self-assertion, upward mobility or feeling powerful.
But rather, she suggests that it means understanding the causes of powerlessness, recognising discursive practices and acting both locally and globally; individually and collectively. Whilst the liberatory /critical pedagogy and postmodern posture have much in common, eg. a recognition and celebration of difference, the postmodern posture is suspicious of all totalising discourses and sees oppression existing at an internal and external level. It recognises that education can disempower, even as it aims to empower.
The postmodern posture invites us to be reflexive and self conscious of our limitations and assumptions; to examine discursive practices; what governs our practice; what sort of world we are authoring; which is part of what Usher et.al (1997) call the postmodern challenge for adult education. Lyotard (1984) also challenges the general demand for nostalgia, slackening and appeasement within practice:
...we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realisation of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage war on totality; let us be witness to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences...
Lyotard 1979, pg 82
Chapter 8.
And watch out for those sneaky (neo) Marxists, as they've just nicked the 'p' world
... in defense of the lifeworld [not].
We need a program of action.... what happens in classrooms as a result of this stuff... in workplaces... hasn't this just become a game, an abdication of responsibility?... Can we no-longer decide anything?.
(Stronach and MacLure 1997, pg 169)
We cannot simply step out of all language games and social forms which constitute our very existence.
(Toulmin quoted in Raes 1992, pg 46)
Postmoderisms - a plurality of meaning
As Tennant (2000) comments, any attempts to singularly articulate or pin down the postmodern will be futile - it remains a contended theoretical terrain or 'moorland' (Usher et.al 2000) . Many commentators talk of plural 'postmodernisms' that remain somewhat slippery (Stronach and McLure 1997). Burbules (1995, 1998) suggests that most of its celebrated theorists would not even agree with being clustered together within the category of postmodern. While Hebdige (1988) acknowledges it's complexity of meaning, he is also cautious and warns that when a word suggests so many significations, it is clear we are in the presence of a 'buzzword'.
However, the doubtful could comment that every word is a buzzword, with multiple, mobilised and slippery meanings. This is if we consider the crisis of representation between the signifier and signified or between the word and what is representated.
So depending on your interest, the postmodern nowadays could represent: 'hypercommodification' (Crook et.al 1992. quoted in Edwards and Usher 2000. pg 38) 'a state of mind'(Usher and Edwards 1994, pg 2); ' a menagerie of perspectives' (Burbules 1998); 'the dˇcor of a room or design of building' (Hebdige 1988); a pluralistic view (Bauman 1992)50; a crisis of representation or 'confidence in Western conceptual systems' (Lather 1991, pg 159); 'the resistance to closure' (Stronach and MacLure 1997. pg 6); ' a debate' (Newman in Foley 1995, pg 254); 'soft Fascism' (MacCannell 1992, pg 187); anything goes (Mason paraphrasing Feyerabend 1997); 'stylish nihilism... [constructing a] world in which language swallows up everything' (Bordo 1993 pg 291); no responsibility.... a world without freedom (Morawski 1996); neo-conservativism (Habermas 1980); 'anti -theory' (Raes 1992, pg 35); 'after just now' (Appignanessi & Garratt 1999, pg 19) and so on .... while for others it could mean 'intellectual wanker'.
Many people avoid the word completely, opting for "PoMo" or by using the word "Poststructural", or they refer to the linguistic turn and emphasise their gaze upon the modern (with their postmodern eyes) like Chappell (2000).
Containing the postmodern within Critical Theory
For 'committed' and celebrated analysts of social activism such as Newman, who writes poetically of the work of 'defining the enemy'51, 'taking control and turning back the dark wind' (Newman 1999, pg 242) the postmodern is to an extent recruited and contained within critical theory - perhaps on the side of the 'force' against the nemesis of the 'dark empire' - starring Mike Newman as Obi Wan Kenobi52. In his particular reading of 'postmodernity' Newman (1999.b) uses notions of fragmentation and difference as offering a moment of complicity, or a spur of the moment of unexpected and temporary solidarity within a conflicting situation. He imagines that it is then up to the educator (or perhaps another Jedi Knight) to shift this temporary complicity into an alliance and ultimately a solidarity. There is no social engineering or enlightenment dreaming involved in this at all [ouch - am I dreaming!].
This is one of many strategies of containment, as noted by Stronach and MacLure (1997), that are used by critical theorists / animators / liberatory educators.53 It is used as a gesture, to 'rescue' critical theory, agency, social responsibility, foundational thinking and adult education itself from a perceived dilemma of postmodern inertia.
Other possibilities for containment, could be to reduce to postmodern to pragmatic insights, tools and strategies, a theoretical paradigm or as ethical discriminations which differentiate good or bad postmodernisms (Stronach and MacLure 1997). Such containment is also evident in the recent work of Wildemeersch, Finger and Jansen (2000) in 'Adult Education and Social Responsibility' who neatly limit their good bits of postmodern idea, in particular Beck's (1994) notion of 'reflexive modernity' to guide their story of social responsibility and liberatory adult education.
Even Freire incorporates the neo-liberal post-modern (Freire 1992) into his later works !
Newman's Regard [lack of]
However elsewhere, as evident in his recently published work "Maeler's Regard" (Newman 1999), Newman perhaps mixes up his own playful and quaint disregard for French Philosophy in general, to dismiss the postmodern as idle mental chit-chat, coffee table banter and as frustratingly inert - lacking agency or application to his 'real' world. A real world that is defined with the 'true consciousness' of his particular mix of essentialism and neo-marxism, one which is similar to Cox's "Civil Society" (1995).
His dismissal of the postmodern follows in much the same way as the tension that flowed between Habermas (as the apple of the Anglo-Saxon eye) and Lyotard (French decadent).
This tension between Lyotard and Habermas was highlighted by Frederic Jameson in his introduction to Lyotard's 'Postmodern condition'(1984). He suggested that Lyotard belonged to the tradition of French philosophy that considers that philosophy is already politics, while Habermas belonged to the Hegelian/Germanic tradition which values totality and truth (Jameson 1984:ix). He suggests that in the French philosophy, thinking and text are political action. Whereas in the German tradition, as Marx endorsed, while philosophers think about the world - the point is to change it. Jameson notes that Lyotard's "The Postmodern Condition" is also a 'thinly veiled polemic' (Jameson 1984:vii) against Jurgen Habermas in which he is doubtful about Habermas's vision of a noisefree, transparent and fully communicational society. In Habermas's anti-postmodern address to the Frankfurt Institute54 in 1980, "Modernity - an incomplete project", he defended modernity against what he calls neoconservativism. In turn he calls the postmodern neoconservative - in reference to its lack of agency and social responsibility - which is the position Newman is taking.
For Newman, Habermas's knowledge counts and his framework is desirable and thus he prefers the familiarity, security and identity promoted by Habermas. It best compliments his continuing performance55 as an educator for social action.
Foley's borrowed (second hand) 'threads'
Similar containment applies to Foley, though it does appear to be the dreaded 'p' word as he even tries to avoid saying it in 'Learning in Social Action' (1999) instead choosing the word 'Foucaultians' (Foley 1999, pg 15). For me this evokes images of aliens from the French speaking planet Foucault and I read as being part of his intention of constructing 'otherness', or theoretical contraband and part of a rejection which is a 'fearful conditional of danger' (Butler 1992, pg 3). He sees validity in postmodern/Foucauldean analysis but fears its supposed lack of ethics and agency. Though having said that, Foley is equally as unkind to Habermas and the Frankfurt School of Critical theory.56 Not only have the proponents of Marx (ish) or Critical Theory appropriated and contained the postmodern.
In a recent work by Caputo (2000) and Tippens (1987) mix hermeneutics and deconstruction "radical hermeneutics" and Christianity with deconstruction, respectively. Though with Caputo's work it can be read as the work of a meticulous trickster, a cunning evangelist etc... an interesting work. But does it matter, I think not? Does it blur the boundaries of the imagined territories of modern and postmodern? Should we consult with Lyotard or Derrida for the authentic postmodern?
As Lyotard asks: '
who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?
(Lyotard 1984, pg 9)
FOOTNOTES
43 Look out.. here comes that 'born again' cultural animator....
44 "The system is a bummer maaaan! [sic]"
45 And retrospectively cringeworthy.
46 Along with pop-texts by Herman Hesse, Tolkein and Carl Jung.
47 Quick we've discovered the truth... and it's a guy thing!
48 Which, according to Don Juan the true self really was a big round ball and umbilicus of energy. (It was the seventies!)
49 A light hearted reference to the TV Show 'the Flintstones' - the Grand Poobah was the esteemed leader of the Royal Order of the Water Buffalos - which was in itself a satire on the fraternities of the Masonic Guild, Royal Order of the Odd Fellows etc... Considering the absence of gender in Freire's work - I think very appropriate.
50 Cited in Usher And Edwards 1994
51 My repetitions throughout the text of 'defining the enemy' are deliberate, because it is the antithesis of my purpose here. 52 A character from Star Wars 1977
54 I suggest the ' Dr Frankenfurters'
55 He looks convincing in his comfy English tweed and the occasional cardigan, but he is selective in his French wine.
56 Perhaps Foley's threads are woven from the fabric of Marx's dreams!