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Resources
- Discussion Papers
Two Takes on the Critical
Professor
Allan Luke, University of Queensland
Draft
chapter from: Luke, A. (in preparation/2002)
Education in Semiotic Democracies: Teaching and Learning Beyond the Nation.
Malwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Professor
Allan Luke
Download
this article as a Word document - 68K
Disciplining
the Critical
The Currency of the Critical
Two Takes
References
Disciplining
the Critical
What
counts as the critical in recent years has focused on how people use texts
and discourses to construct and negotiate of identity, power and capital.
Recent approaches include: political analyses of dominant texts and their
social fields, textual production linked to identity politics, and the
introduction of students to sophisticated linguistic and aesthetic metalanguages
for talking about, critiquing and reconstructing texts and discourses.
These various takes on the critical do not share a common political stance.
The term and its affiliated approaches have been enlisted on behalf not
only of radical redistributions of power and capital, but as well for
liberal and neoliberal educational agendas to improve individual achievement
and thinking, on behalf of postcolonial and ethno-nationalist educational
projects to recast the character of canonical text, knowledge and voice
in schooling, and to pursue of agendas of text deconstruction and critique
of master narratives.
As
recently as a decade ago, for most language and literacy educators the
term 'critical' referred to higher order reading comprehension and sophisticated
personal response to literature. To this day, the term is a stand in for
a diversity of approaches to textual practice, each contingent on particular
political and institutional fields where the teaching and learning of
language resides. What has come to count as 'the critical', especially
where there was no such marker before, depends on how the state, the media,
the school, the church and other fields of institutional authority enable
and disenable what can be said and done about texts and discourses, but
as importantly what can be said and done about identities, about histories,
and about themselves as institutions.
Beyond
whatever is written in syllabus documents, textbooks or teacher education
there is a hidden curriculum of the critical in particular political economies,
state education systems, and, indeed, in the institutional cultures of
schools and classrooms. What counts as the critical is coded in the rules
of exchange that govern the flows of discourse, but also in what can be
made and designed from extant material, bodily and fiscal resources within
and across these fields. In this way the construction of critical is never
solely a matter of discourse and text, of linguistic utterance or inscription
- however constitutive discourse may appear to be in the making of the
world. The complex relationships between the representational and the
material, between language, the physical and the corporeal make up the
local, non-synchronous 'registers' for the critical - physical, geographic
and psychological spaces as powerful as any purely linguistic or discourse
analysis per se could mark or make for us. And the ultimate critical and
empirical test of any educational reforms in a semiotic society is not
limited to changes in students' or systems' statements, discourses and
capacity to critique same - but, as it was in Dewey's time, the capacity
to contribute to the building of democratic institutions, civic spaces,
public dialogue and indeed, the capacity of such reforms to have material
consequences in the distribution of resources of all types.
In
this sense, the bodily, the material and the spatial are more than adjunct
productive conditions for text and discourse - nor are they simply sociolinguistic
or cultural contexts. They sit in complex dialectical relationships to
discourse that are as generative and constraining as any that we might
attribute to the cognitive and psychological. While we as educators might
argue amongst ourselves about the relative relations between discourse
and mind, between the linguistic/semiotic and the psychological
- the material and the bodily continue to constitute the very spaces of
possibility for the critical, for social and intellectual action of any
type. Poverty and starvation, violence and physical threat, proximity
and distance, bodily capacity and physical access to the very modes of
production of discourse - whether real or imaginary, immediate or mediated
- remain focal objects for analysis and reconstruction for every educational
project.
Nonetheless,
the material and institutional regulation of discourse itself is the most
readily discernable aspect of the construction of the 'critical' in democracies,
print or semiotic. This was Herbert Marcuse's point in developing the
theory of repressive tolerance (Wolff, Moore & Marcuse, 1969): that
institutions had other ways of regulating what could be written and said
other than by explicit censorship. What can count as the critical depends
on available discourses and discourse practices, the very things that
pedagogy enables and accesses. The semiotic potential of critique is contingent
on the kinds of 'namings', the technical fields of knowledge, epistemological
dispositions, but also on the kinds of syntaxes of action and narrative
scenarios that are available to speakers. In turn, learners' self-regulatory
sense of the possible, of agency, of actual trajectories of practice greatly
constrain the applications of critical work as readily as any overt censorship
or ideological 'blanket' on what can be read and written, heard and said.
Regardless
of its claims to be generated from students' voice, aspirations, speaking
positions and epistemic stances - each approach to critical literacy thus
is an induction into textual discipline. Language and literacy education
is a form of the intergenerational and intercultural reproduction
of practice and discipline - discipline both in the sense of a very deliberately
staged sets of bodily training, however negotiated and negotiable that
training is said to be (and it is always done on behalf of and
attuned to the intrinsic phases, interests and motivations of a constructed
version of the organic child) - and discipline in the sense of the reproduction
of particular paradigmatic world view, discourse and form of life. Through
formal pedagogy one acquires what Bourdieu (1990, p. 82) termed a "linguistic
sense of place" which "governs the degree of constraint
which a given field will bring to bear on the production of discourse,
imposing silence or a hyper-controlled language on some people while allowing
others the liberties of a language that is securely established".
In
this way, our work entails far more than teaching communicative competence,
tacit and explicit understandings of the social contexts and acceptability
of linguistic forms, genres and utterances. It entails the teaching of
patterns and practices of intersubjectivity, and thereby freedom and unfreedom,
identity and non-identity, relative constraint and agency in the participation
of flows of discourse and power across fields, markets and economies,
and, most importantly, a sense of agency and place vis a vis not
just material worlds but as well in relation to what one can do with texts,
when, how, to what effect in complex discourse and semiotic economies.
It is also, I would suggest, along these various continua that issues
of pedagogy can be adjudicated in terms of how they construct the limits
and the horizons of literate practices, of knowledge and of social action
by and through knowledge.
What
is taught and learned is far more than automaticity of skill or context
sensitivity of competence, cognate practice, volitional and rational lexicogrammatical
choice, mastery of genre or grammar. The pedagogy of language entails
"mediations which help to constitute ... [a] sense of one's own
social worth ... and, more generally, one's whole physical posture
in the social world" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 82).
When
we teach people to be literate, we introduce them into particular domains
of practice, to particular preferred discourses. In so doing, we shape
and structure with and for, around and against the bodily habitus - a
habitus that is sexed and gendered, coloured and raced, placed and, for
many, displaced and without 'home' or security. In this way, the continual
claim about literacy education somehow being a wholly enabling moment,
a point of liberation - whether in the protestant sense of 'deciding for
oneself', in the romance of reader response or language experience, whether
in the voices 'found' in process writing and whole language, or, even,
the negotiation and problematicisation of the world advocated by Freirian
educators - language and literacy education is about the production and
reproduction of habitus and practice, whether colonised, decolonised,
postcolonised or whatever. And insofar as all practice, all habits of
mind including the 'critical', all texts and discourses are already written,
patterned, already colonised and decolonised by disciplines, fields and
discourses - then reset in base relief by the institutions of school,
program, university, workplace, curriculum or lesson - they cannot be
anything but a kind of textual and discursive training and, indeed, symbolic
imposition.
Resourcing
the Critical
My
brief comments here are taken from a larger attempt in some way to repoliticise
the critical as an educational project by 'steering' it in particular
normative directions regarding the state, the nation and the goals of
democratic education more generally. The concept of 'being critical' in
the discourses of contemporary curriculum theory has already chalked up
quite a history (Kellner, in press). In the early 1980s, it would
have been strongly affiliated with the agendas of the then New Left -
the aligned projects of the international student movement, educational
progressivism, and countercultural and alternative education. With this
history, it shouldn't surprise us that it has roots in Frankfurt School
and neomarxian critical political analysis and to the romantic individualism
of that same period. Consider for example the common metaphor 'voice'
that runs across versions of critical pedagogy and critical literacy.
It ranges from variations on 'personal voice' that have a genealogy in
literary romanticism (itself an historical response to industrialisation),
to those variations on 'inner voice' which gesture to psychoanalysis and
therapeutic discourses, to notions of 'voice' that are closer to class
or ethno-nationalist consciousness, to pluralist notions of heteroglossia
that are more about capturing matters of the play of difference, whether
political, sociocultural, positional or embodied.
The
notion of critical education probably received its most formal statement
in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1974), translated
from the Portuguese in the midst of "third world" politics,
the civil rights movement, and the international student movement. Freire's
work is canonical point of decolonisation educational theorising about
emancipation, consciousness raising and education. I, like many, first
read Freire in the early 1970s, in the aftermath of 1968. This was not
a moment of great hope and aspiration but in the wake of the Vietnam War
and Watergate. I was enrolled in a summer school primary teacher education
program at Simon Fraser University taught by Jonathan Kozal and, like
many of my generation felt that Freire captured something about my own
educational experience - as a cultural minority trained in a mainstream
educational system. While Michael Young, Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu
and others were developing a nascent theoretical vocabulary for how the
various message systems of education worked politically (Young, 1971)
- Freire, even in his most traditional philosophic writings, spoke more
directly to the psychic memory and bodily experience of being Other.
What
is interesting in Freire is the degree to which the work speaks to what
we could term in hindsight a 'pre-poststructuralist' world, before the
textual/linguistic/semiotic turn, from a world that was not yet fully
inhabited by wall-to-wall Nike, CNN, and franchised transnational capitalism.
Freire's early work has two distinctive features that are often neglected
in the push to 'postmodernise' the critical educational project. First,
it is point of decolonisation theorising, without the sophisticated textual
self-consciousness, deconstructionist play, and 'skepticism' towards revolutionary
projects of Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Rey Chow and others. It was more
an initial philosophic statement on behalf of a peasantry wholly economically
and politically disenfranchised, psychically and spiritually marginalised.
Its concept of 'naming' was much more akin to an existential realisation
and ideological critique, than to a complex understanding of how 'naming'
constitutes the world through text and discourse. The complexity and politics
of truth in discourse now works in textual and semiotic designs and modalities
that Freire didn't engage with. His work described and addressed a binary
dialectical universe of oppression and liberation, hope and despair that
has become immeasurably more complex, polysemous, not just in terms of
an everyday life saturated by textuality and discourse, but as well in
terms of the complex material and ideological conditions of economic and
cultural globalisation. I'll return to this later - for it is the
source of its continuing power and strength, its relevance to some of
the points and spaces of educational application described here, and its
necessary revision in light of new economic and cultural conditions that
have arisen some three decades later.
Second,
Freire's work was an uncommon philosophical blend of Hegelian idealism,
Marxist materialism, and Christian existentialism. It brought together
Hegel's historical dialectics of consciousness, the negation of binaries
as philosophical method, and translated these into a pedagogy that stressed
historical self-determination of individuals and communities through problem
posing and solution, the latter recalling Dewey's (1958) aesthetic theory.
At the same time, Freire's pedagogical model extended Socratic pedagogy
and dialogue to a face-to-face externalisation, naming, and questioning
of the world. I think it is largely due to Freire's work that we've since
turned the simple noun 'problem' into the ubiquitous nominalisations of
"problematic", "problematise" and "problematicisation"
- all marking the critique of naturalisation and common-sense that is
at the heart of critical pedagogies. This was grounded in a strong Marxian
sense of historical self-determination by remediation of the relationship
to the means of production. Finally, in Freire we encounter a phenomenological
and existential orientation towards the recollection and recovery of the
self, with being and the ethics of care in the face of physical and symbolic
violence, material oppression and psychological repression - themes shared
with his contemporary Christian philosophers like Paul Tillich and C.S.
Lewis.
There
are, then, some powerful legacies of 'being critical' from Freire. These
were taken up in the diverse critical educational projects of the 1970s
and 1980s that grew around first and second wave feminism, and ethnic/cultural
nationalist projects of 'minority' consciousness and activism within and
against Western/Northern educational systems. These include:
- Activist
critique and engagement with civil society, including a redefinition
of the 'political', lobbying for legislative change, historical redress
and 'apology' - beginning with work of the New Left and 1968, pushed
along by feminist theory, multiculturalists and postcolonial critique,
and now salient in defense of civic and democratic space post 9/11.
- A critique
of political economy: understanding one's relationship - whether peasant
or intellectual or teacher - to the means of production, even as these
shift towards service and semiotic economies - or are rebuilt in the
return to military industrial and industrial/energy economies.
- A critique
of propaganda and ideology - beginning from the Frankfurt School critique
of political oppression, sexual repression and aesthetic commoditisation,
and extending through Birmingham cultural studies' engagement with the
codes of popular, contemporary and youth cultures.
- A critical
focus, often neglected, not on a romantic self or 'voice' but rather
on the human psychologies of struggle and oppression - on strategies
of silence, marginalisation and violence and human responses to them.
This
list isn't a further bid on what should count as the critical. Given the
necessarily politically contextual and situated nature of struggle, theory
and educational practice, there are subtle dangers about canonising Freire,
dangers of plasticising the critical - not the least of which is the risk
of concealing its own historicity and necessary self-negation. Indeed,
if we transpose this work field to field we would find different versions
of the critical emergent across curricular fields (e.g., in Queensland,
critical health and physical education; in Canada, Tara Goldstein's move
into the fields of performance ethnography), different national and regional
inflections depending on extant political economies, and, as Pippa Stein's
South African commentaries and Angel Lin's Hong Kong analyses indicate,
radically different salience of versions of the critical in North/South/East/West.
But beginning from Freire secures us a view of the available and, times,
contending approaches to the critical that I have been discussing. It
also suggests the extent to which the project of the 'critical' is as
yet open and unfinished in current educational, cultural and geopolitical
conditions. It is to this that I now turn.
The
Currency of the Critical
Schooling
and teaching remain technologies of nation. As much as our efforts at
anti-racist and anti-sexist education might be successful, as much as
several decades of research, social and political activism on language
rights, multilingualism and multiculturalism might have yielded legislatively
- the situating of schooling and pedagogy within the project and construct
of 'nation' is an unspoken yet powerful residual force in our dialogue,
that dialogue spanning a strange and ill-formed pan Anglo/ American/ Commonwealth
community of US, Canadian, EU, UK, New Zealand, Northeast Asian, and Australian
language and literacy educators. It would be interesting to run an index
check on recent works on critical literacy and critical pedagogy to see
where, how and when the terms 'nation', 'nationality' and 'nationalism'
appear, and to what extent they themselves are problematicised. Even within
our attempts to develop pedagogical realisations and approximations of
the 'critical', done meticulously across this volume, teaching remains
about, within and for the nation, tacitly about the protection and production
its Culture (and by implication its preferred ethnicities and races, languages
and codes), and committed to the production of its sovereign subjects.
The
declarations of the "end of ideology" and the "end of nation"
were code for 1980s and 1990s American triumphalism. Both implied that
the particular version of 'democracy' that stood at the fall of the Berlin
Wall was the logical and inevitable historical outcome of modernity, and
now was readily generalisable as a form of governance and economic order
- to be played out less through the military, we thought then, and more
through multinational corporations, less through national envoys and diplomacy
and more towards the global management of economic flows and domestic
institutional structures by organisations like the World Bank, International
Monetary Fund and Asia Development Bank.
In
this regard, such claims were actually expert product endorsements of
the particular American/ European/ Asian transnational species of late
capitalism - at times quite coherent and at times quite arbitrary - that
has succeeded in grasping control of flows of bodies, capital and
discourse across national borders, legal-juridical boundaries and regulatory
regimes. As sanguine as any of us might be about hasty 'end of the nation'
hypotheses, about the emergence of powerful localised identity politics
and standpoint epistemologies that at once threaten nations and bid to
establish nations, about GATT trade agreements and IMF structural adjustment
policies, and about resistance and resignation to a particular version
of economic globalisation - the nation is back, with a vengeance.
It
is back as a more permeable, but nonetheless regulatory and surveilling
boundary for international and transnational flows of capital. It is back
as a physical and psychological barrier to seal off and away the diasporic,
to eradicate the indigenous, and to disbar new racial villains and defective
speakers. It is back with a mission of the covert regulation and control
of oral, print and digital flows of discourse in the name of national
and global security. Enough of these unregulated flows of digital discourse.
Enough of this proliferation of unmonitored community, of community with
a chaotic organicity that didn't fit well into industrial surveillance.
And it is back as an overt legitimation of identity, of place, of membership,
and as a projection of physical and symbolic power on its own and on others,
often lethal.
One
of the effects of 9/11 and subsequent events has been the reassertion
of a monitorial regime on the internet and on digitalised communication
that is potentially far more powerful and transparent than over efforts
to muzzle the press, suppress parliamentary debate, or incarcerate those
who speak the unspeakable in public spaces. In some ways the very liberatory
and communitarian potentials of digital technology have begun to be domesticated
and, ironically, re-nationalised at a time when state telecommunications,
media and transportation services are being privatised and floated on
the stock market.
It
is nothing short of amazing that educational systems can continue at business
as usual in such a context. That teachers can continue to teach history
and culture as if their categories and spaces were not under critical
scrutiny and assault. But then, many schools and school systems continue
to run a postwar curriculum, preparing students for an economy past, and
patching up 'deficit' subjects while they await the return of the monocultural,
monolingual student body. In so many ways this silence and obliviousness
serves itself: The nation remains the key tacit and understated concept
for education. But it is a version of the 'nation' in denial of new times
that tends to find solace in a nostalgic educational, a kind of curricular
fundamentalism, which 'back to the basics' is.
Yet
there is little in the response to September 11 and subsequent events
that should surprise us: nationalism in the curriculum, another destabilisation
around how schools and education systems manage the ubiquitous ethnic,
linguistic and cultural other, a standardisation and tighter monitoring
of face-to-face classroom practice, and, finally, the icing on the cake:
an overt censorship about what can and can't be said about nationality
and the nation in schools.
If
there is an educational lesson from the events of the past year, it is
not about 'nation' or nationality. It is a lesson that disrupts and interrupts
for the first time in over a decade the inexorable and ubiquitous discourses
of human capital - it is a moment about difference, about the complex
yet simple issues of ethics of care, of morality, of responsibilities,
and the absolute necessity of a civic and educational space to begin negotiating,
working through, debating new social and pedagogical contacts around difference,
belief, ethics and responsibility.
The
other lesson is about capital. It is about the fragility of what Comeroff
and Comeroff (2000) aptly described as "casino capitalism",
where the psycho/individual, socio-economic and collective/cultural imagination
is captured by the metaphor and reality of risk - whether through "risk
management", "risk-averseness", or what we now commonly
term educational "at riskness", where nations that had in effect
put their economic fates wholly in the hands of transnational corporations
in effect gamble with their own economic trajectories and very survival,
as readily as the company juntas of Banana Republics would have almost
a century ago.
At
the same time, others aspire to nation or in the throes of renegotiating
'nation' as a protected and sustainable space to productively, gainfully
and safely live. The lesson for us should be about the inevitability and
power of difference, about the complex and vexed educational issues that
difference raises, not just about lingua franca, but as well about curriculum
selective traditions, not the least of which is how we construe and construct
the critical. At the same time, the evidence of the past year speaks to
the inability of current curriculum and pedagogy to provide a forum for
dialogue about, with and through diversity and ethics, and the complex
problems they raise, and about the degree to which the human capital model
still stands in practice as a subtle and concealed mode of normalisation
and discipline into nation, able to call upon the nationalist subject
to do its ideological and geopolitical bidding sans critique. One
area where mass media, educational systems and the state have worked closely
and effectively, however intentionally, has been in failing to
educate about, with, for, within, against, underneath, above, globalisation.
Two
Takes
It
is in this context that we teach second and third languages and dialects
- at times as the custodians of nation, at times as the technicians of
empire, on behalf of the spread and multiplication of capital, or perhaps
in other instances as part of a larger project of the 'critical'. It is
a context of ethnic and national retribalisation, where there is talk
of primordial "clash of civilisations", a volatile moment of
both unparalleled flows of bodies, discourses and capitals, and a moment
where such flows can face unpredictable stoppages, blockages and collapses.
What might this mean for the educational project of the 'critical' for
language and literacy education. How can we define it? What are
its characteristics?
What
exactly is the compelling reason for TESOL to engage with the critical?
Is it because the traditional student bodies of TESOL programs have historically
been objects of colonial and imperial power, or diasporic subjects living
at the economic margins of Western and Northern cultures and economies?
Is it because the work of TESOL itself, once an admixture of missionary
work and orientalism is now a service industry in the production of skilled
human resources for economic globalisation, as Alaister Pennycook (1996)
has argued? Is it because of the identity politics and dynamics of power
and patriarchy within the TESOL classroom in so many countries, which
typically entail social relations between teachers/students that mirror
larger social and economic relations between economically mainstream/marginal,
cosmopolitan/diasporic, and white/coloured subjects?
Probably
all of the above. TESOL is a pedagogical site and institution for educating
the racial and linguistic Other (Luke, 2003). If, as Bourdieu argued,
what is at stake is the construction of a habitus, an identity, a sense
of freedom and agency, with all that this construction might entail -
TESOL as an educational practice and site differs from the training of
the mainstream (if and where such an idealised, social class homogeneous,
ethno-normalised student body might still exist). It is not a technology
where teachers 'profess' or enact the production of a class and ethno/racial
habitus to a class of students already in prepossession of those constituent
discourses, dispositions and embodiments. Not only does this make teaching
and learning less seamless, lacking in ostensive organicity (and perhaps
therefore requiring a different kind of ideological 'suturing' over possible
conflict), and all the more subject to surface compliance, passive resistance,
disruption, misrecognition and mismatch (of cultural practice, background
knowledge, schemata, discourse style, genre, ideology, and bodily disposition):
'When the objective conditions coincide with those that have produced
it, the habitus anticipates the objective demands of the field' (Bourdieu,
1990, p. 84).
There
are several other implications. Where it is the case that TESOL students
have already been the objects of mainstream power, whether symbolic, economic
or pedagogic - the result is likely to be a distorted doubling of the
preferred production of the subject, and the result a normatively blended
and hybrid habitus (Luke & Luke, 1999): that is, the self-reproduction
of practice attempted by the teacher by definition will be inexact and
imperfect, creolised and hybridised in some manner. Second, and more to
the point here, is that the project of the critical will be fundamentally
different and distinct from attempts at the pedagogical production of
the critical in 'mainstream' and economically class-privileged settings.
In some ways, and the papers here anticipate this, the 'critical' will
be easier.
Time
to show my hand on the critical. At least one of the characteristics of
the critical is to engage in disruptive, sceptical and 'other' social
and discourse relations than those dominant, conventionalised and extant
in particular social fields and linguistic markets. To be critical is
to call up for scrutiny, whether through embodied action or discourse
practice, the rules of exchange within a social field. To do so requires
an analytic move to self-position oneself as 'other' even in a market
or field that might not necessarily construe or structurally position
one as other (that is, on the basis of colour, gender, class etc.). This
doubling and 'othering' of the self from dominant text and discourse can
be cognate, analytic and imaginary - or it can, indeed, be already lived,
embodied and experienced.
We
can think of the critical, then, in at least two ways - as an intellectual,
deconstructive, textual, and cognitive analytic task - and as a form of
embodied political anger, alienation, and alterity. In both senses, it
entails an epistemological othering and 'doubling' of the world - a sense
of being beside oneself, or outside of oneself, in another epistemological,
discourse and political space than one typically would inhabit. This is
a kind of distantiation that entails the capacity to watch oneself watching
without slipping into the infinite regress of ontologically ungrounded
perception. James Paul Gee (1995) frames this facility in terms of the
necessity of access to multiple discourses as a cognate prerequisite to
being able to hold any particular discourse up to scrutiny. But additionally,
such multiplicity may also form a kind of abrasion, a kind of psychological
and epistemological disconnection or suspension not only from what Gee
calls one's 'primary discourse', but from one's embodied experience and
material conditions. Having access to multiple discourses, competing
discourses, contending and abrading discourses may but will not necessarily
set the generative grounds for the critical. It may expand one's register
capacity, expand the polyvocality of speech acts, and build a repertoire
for practices for a broader array of social fields. But for the 'critical'
to happen, there must be some actual dissociation from one's available
explanatory texts and discourses, a denaturalisation and discomfort and
'making of the familiar strange', the classic ethnographic axiom suggests.
Perhaps, as Freire would argue, this is easier for those who have been
the objects of symbolic and physical violence, for those who have been
materially Othered, for those for whom the normalised pedagogical site
for the construction of the habitus feels unnatural.
Narrative:
doubles the world, wortham
Perhaps
this is where the cognitive and discursive element of the critical can
come into play. For the existential, phenomenological plight of 'being
oppressed' can become a place for basking in one's alterity - as those
pedagogies that target and stay at the level of personal give space for,
indulge, cultivate and ultimately valorise the experience of otherness
and difference.
I
am aware that these comments appear to privilege and romanticise the plight
of the 'oppressed'. But the question raised here is crucial, particularly
as versions of the 'critical' proliferate across educational systems.
In order to practice the critical, must one have experienced the practices
of embodied and physical, symbolic and cognate oppression? In order to
be the critical subject, must one have been the object of power? In order
to analytically and discursively construct 'otherness', difference
and alternative pathways, strategies and schemata - must one have been
Othered? Does having had the bodily experience of oppression, of alterity,
enable a 'ticket to ride' to the analytically, deconstructively critical?
What
is needed here is an understanding of the reflexivity of these two modes
of the critical. Freire's point was that the experience of oppression
could only be translated into action though a process of externalisation
and analysis that began with 'naming' and reading the world, including
the sources and practices of one's own oppression. This entails this process
of what Dewey (1958) called the making of experience 'cohate', or coherent,
through expression, aesthetic and design. So the bodily experience of
having been the object of power remains just that until it is rendered
coherent through naming, through problematicisation and, indeed, through
textual analysis and the use of analytic metalanguage - the 'doubling'
discourses that name and rename experience, the social and physical world,
indeed, knowledge and social relations themselves.
By
contrast, we can and should ask how and whether it is possible to teach
the 'critical' to those who have not had the experience of being othered?
Indeed, to what extent does the 'critical' sans the biographical
experience of having been the object of power and violence become a pro-forma
or indeed formal analysis and renaming of the world, a parsing of design,
or mastery of text deconstruction and reconstruction? To what extent does
ideology critique stay, indeed, just that - an intellectual exercise lacking
a translation into embodied action that might disrupt, interrupt or transform
the fields in question.
To
return to my comments earlier on the imperative of the bodily and material,
Marcuse (1969) argued that there were primordial needs of species being
- needs for meaningful labour and caring social relations, needs
for open communication and discourse, needs for physical sustenance and
shelter. It is in the violation and deprivation of these things that Freire's
sense of the oppressed pivots upon. This remains the basis for a very
different sense of the critical - not one of abstraction, of distance,
of doubling in a logico-analytic sense, of stepping back via a complex
linguistic metalanguage, but the 'out-of-body' watching oneself watch
oneself as an object of power and naming oneself as such. Everyone who
has been a relatively hapless object of racialised and gendered power
knows this. What surprised me was just how physical and material the experience
of being the object of discriminatory exclusion, racism, symbolic and
physical violence was. Sheets of rage and fear, hot flashes, paralysed
in word and action, an absolutely disconsolate immobility in the face
of power. This is not just a matter of moral outrage and critique, however
we may recount it as heroic resistance in our own communities' folk wisdom
and folk theories of success. But the pedagogic effect of such an experience
cannot be undone.
It
is for these reasons that I believe that there must be a critical approach
to TESOL. I have argued that each approach to the 'critical' is normative,
predicated on assumptions that the refashioning of language and literacy
in this way will have an impact not just on individual capacities and
life pathways, but as well on the reshaping of institutions, of local
cultures, of social lives and of civic and political spheres. There can
be no more overtly normative challenge to educational systems, educators
and the state, than how they manage their cultural and linguistic 'Others'.
Looking
over these 'takes on the critical', I am uncertain about whether TESOL
is or should be about the desire for voice and identity, about the generation
of new ways of being and communicating beyond the nation, or simply the
wanting of the power to contest power. But TESOL must do something other
than what it currently does. Otherwise it will remain a technology for
domesticating the 'other' into nation, whatever its scientific and humanist
pretences.
Acknowledgements
Thanks
to Doug Kellner, James Albright and Carmen Luke for critical comments.
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