Revolutionary Pedagogies

Cultural Politics, Education, and Discourse of Theory

Peter Trifonas, Peter Trifonas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135959364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Revolutionary Pedagogies, an innovative edited collection of essays from the cream of the cultural and policy studies crop, examines the theory/practice debate as it has been articulated pedagogically. These essays respond to the need to renegotiate the premise for an ethico-political intervention into the scene of teaching and learning. The contributors--major theorists and distinguished thinkers--seek to answer the question of whether a revolutionary pedagogy is possible as a means of transforming the cultural history of educational practice. They examine this question across disciplines in the areas of deconstruction, postcolonial and cultural studies, feminism, critical pedagogy, psychoanalysis, and educational and curricular theory.

II INSTITUTING EDUCATION

JACQUES DERRIDA
Translated by Denise Egéa-Kuehne

WHERE A TEACHING BODY¹ BEGINS
AND HOW IT ENDS²

[We’ll have more than one sign that these notes were not destined, as one says, to be published.

However, nothing was to keep them concealed. What could be more public, fundamentally, and more demonstrable than teaching? What could be more exposed, if not, as is the case here, its staging [mise en scène] or its being put into question again [remise en question]? This is why—and it is my primary reason³—I accepted the offer to reproduce these notes without the slightest modification.

But there must have been other reasons since I hesitated for a long time. Indeed what could be the significance of a fragment (more or less arbitrarily cut, as with a massicot) out of one single session—and what is more the first session—bearing more than the others the mark of the inadequacies, the approximations, the programmatic generality delivered before an audience more anonymous and undetermined than ever? Why this session rather than another one, and why my continuous discourse rather than others, rather than the critical exchanges which followed? I could not settle on a response to these questions, but I finally considered that the struggle in which the GREPH is engaged today⁴ rendered them secondary; since the proposed session refers essentially to the GREPH, why not seize indirectly [par la bande] this opportunity to make the challenges and the objectives of its work better known?

Other objection, more serious: Was my participation in this book compatible with the very subject these notes will offer for reading, at least in part and indirectly? Should I serve (or make serve) one of these numerous enterprises (here under its immediately publishable form) which multiply skirmishes against the very thing (this being said without suspecting—it is not important— all the intentions of all their agents) from which they draw their existence and whose alibis they foster? More precisely still: Do not the gathering of names, the sorting out of figures, and the exhibition of titles make clear one of these phenomena of authority (well established, already, counterinstitution, even if, considered from different angles, its unity must leave us perplexed and invite the most cautious of investigations) necessarily produced by the apparatus which, on the contrary, it should be a matter of dislocating? The connections between this apparatus and the publishing one are increasingly evident. They constitute precisely one of the objects of research of the GREPH, or rather one of its targets, which is why it should articulate its action with that of a group of research and information working on the publishing machine. The subject of what you are reading here is obvious (nondisguised), and indeed consists in calling for such actions, on the job [sur le tas].

But I am greatly simplifying, we must hurry. The laws of this field are convoluted, and one must handle this problem [s’y prendre] by attacking them [en s’en prenant à elles]. In short, because I take into account the largest amount of data at my disposal, and because it seems to me that the objectives of the GREPH mandate it, ultimately I prefer to run the risk of posing here (this time from an internal border) spiraling questions which touch upon the places, scenes, and forces which still enable these questions to present themselves.

This fragment of the first session opened a sort of counterseminar at the Research Center on the Teaching of Philosophy. This center was instituted at the École Normale Supérieure two years earlier [i.e., 1972], and is distinct in principle from the GREPH, with which, of course, opportunities for exchange are abundant.

The agenda for 1974–1975 includes the following questions:

• What is a teaching body—philosophy?
• Today, what does “defense” mean, and today, what does “philosophy” mean in the slogan “defense of philosophy”?
• French ideology and ideologues (analysis of the concept of ideology and of the French ideologues’ politico-pedagogical projects around the Revolution).]

Here, for example, is not an indifferent⁵ place.

One should not-forget-it. One should (first, let’s attempt just to see if we can pull it off, a discourse without “should,” and not only without any apparent “should,” visible as such, but without any concealed “should”; I propose that we drive them out of discourses said to be theoretical, even transethical, and even when they do not present themselves as instructional discourses; at bottom, in these last instances, in teaching discourses, the “should”—the lesson given every moment, as soon as one begins to speak—is perhaps, naively or not, all the more declared; a fact which, under certain conditions, can render it powerless faster), therefore one should avoid naturalizing this place.

Naturalizing always comes to neutralizing; or in any case, it comes pretty close to it.

By naturalizing, by pretending to consider as natural what is not and never was, one neutralizes. One neutralizes what? Or rather, to give the impression of neutrality, one dissimulates the active intervention of a force and of an apparatus.

By passing for natural (therefore beyond questioning and transformation) the structures of a pedagogical institution—its forms, its norms, its visible or invisible constraints, its frames, the whole apparatus we would have called parergonal last year, and which, while it seems to surround it, it determines it to the very center of its content, and no doubt from its center outward—one carefully covers the forces and the interests which, without the slightest neutrality, dominate, master, impose themselves on the process of teaching from within an agonistic field which is het-erogenous, divided, and worked through by an unceasing struggle.

Therefore any institution (again, I am using a word which will need to undergo a certain work of critique), any relation to the institution, calls for, and ahead of time, in any case, implies a choice [prise de parti] in this field: taking into consideration, actually considering the actual field, it calls for taking a stand [prise de position] and a bias [parti pris].

There is no neutral or natural place in teaching.

Here, for example, is not an indifferent place.

A broad analysis (historical, psychoanalytical, politico-economical, and so on, and also somewhere philosophical) would be imperative to define this here-and-now, even though in principle a theoretical analysis is insufficient here, since it becomes effectively “relevant” only for staging [mettre en scène] and bringing into play [mettre en jeu] he who in practice takes the risk of going as far as displacing the very locus from which he carries out this analysis, even though it is therefore insufficient and interminable as such.

This here-and-now appears immediately as a theater hall [salle de théâtre], a movie theater [salle de cinéma], or a converted community hall [salle de fête] (for reasons of security, and because there were not enough seats in the so-called lecture halls [salles de cours] still reserved only a short time ago for a small number of selected “normaliens”⁶). Here, in the École Normale Supérieure, in the place where I, this teaching body which I call mine and which occupies a very determined function in what is called the French philosophical teaching body today—I teach, I now say that I teach.

And where for the first time, at least in this direct form, I am about to speak of the teaching of philosophy.

That is to say where, after some fifteen years of practicing what one calls teaching, and twenty three years of civil service, I only begin to systematically question, exhibit, critique (or rather, I start by beginning there, I start by beginning to do it systematically and effectively: it is this systematic character which matters if one’s aim is not to settle for verbal alibis, for skirmishes and scratches which do not affect the established system, which no philosopher somewhat alert will ever have omitted, and which, on the contrary, are part of the predominant system, of its very code, of its relation to itself, of its self-critical reproduction, this self-critical reproduction forming perhaps the element of tradition and philosophical conservation, of its constant changing of the guard [sa relève],⁷ with the art of questioning which will be addressed later; it is this systematic character which matters, and its effectiveness, which one has never been able to reduce to the initiative of one person only; and that is why, for the first time, here, I link my discourse to the work of a group engaged under the name of GREPH); hence I begin, so late, to systematically question, exhibit, and critique—in the hope of transforming—the borders of that in which I have delivered more than one talk.

When I say “so late,” it is not (at least not mainly) to make a scene, and to once more pull the self-rectification stunt, the mea-culpa or the bad-conscience-on-exhibit stunt. That would be a gesture for which I could justify at length why I refrain from it. Let us say, to cut it very short, that I never had a taste for it and that I even made of it an issue of taste. Rather, when I say “so late,” it is to begin the analysis of both, at one and the same time, a delay which, as we know, is not solely mine and cannot be explained solely by subjective or individual insufficiencies, and a possibility which today does not open by accident or because of the decision of one person only. And the delay and the awareness one acquires of and from it, under various forms, as well as the beginning of a research (theoretical and practical, as one says) on the teaching of philosophy, all that responds to a certain number of necessities. All that can be analyzed indeed.

But even if it is a question here, after all, neither of individual errors nor of individual merits, neither of dogmatic slumber nor of personal vigilance, let us not take that as an excuse to dissolve into anonymous neutrality what is, once more, neither neutral nor anonymous.

As you know, on several occasions, I have insisted on this: the Ècole Normale should be neither at the center nor even at the origin of the activities of the GREPH. To be sure. But the fact that the GREPH will have seemed at least to begin to locate here must not be omitted; it is in no way fortuitous. That constitutes a possibility, a resource to be exploited; it must be analyzed and brought into play [mettre en oeuvre] in all its historico-political bearings. But this possibility also imports its limits. One could go beyond those only on the condition (necessary though insufficient) of taking into account—a critical and scientific account—this hardly contestable fact. Without delay or caution, we will have to keep (theoretically and practically, as one must say) a rigorous account of the role this strange institution still plays, and especially will have played in the cultural and philosophical apparatus of this country. And whatever the bottom line of this account, this role will have been very important; any denial on this subject would be futile or suspect.

On the other hand, declaring that here I will bring only a partial or particular contribution to the activities of the GREPH, without engaging it and especially without orienting it, must not cause the following fact to be misappreciated or subtracted from the analysis (deducted): after having announced it for a long time, I at least appeared to take the initiative, in a seminar I conducted, of instituting the GREPH, and first of all its preliminary proposal [avant-projet], submitted here for your discussion.

That is not fortuitous. I do not call attention to this to mark or appropriate a new institution or counterinstitution but, on the contrary, to turn over a surface, to give back, render,⁸ submit a very particular effect which comes with my function in this process.

Consequently, from what I will call, to go fast, my place or my viewpoint, it was evident that the work in which I was engaged—at the risk of new misunderstandings, and by algebra, let us name it the (affirmative) deconstruction of phallogocen-trism as philosophy—did not belong in any simple manner to the forms of the philosophical institution. By definition, this work was not limited to a theoretical content, not even to a cultural or ideological content. It did not proceed according to the established norms of a theoretical activity. By more than one trait and at strategically defined moments, it had to resort to a “style” unacceptable for a university lecture body (one did not have to wait long for “allergic” reactions), unacceptable even in places where one thinks oneself foreign to the university. As we know, it is not always inside the university that the “university style” dominates. It may happen that it clings to the skin of those who have left the university, and even of some who never attended it. It can be seen from its borders. Hence this work was grappling with the ontological or transcendental subordination of the signifying body in relation to the ideality of the transcendental signified and to the logic of the sign, to the transcendental authority of the signified as well as that of the signifier, therefore with what constitutes the very essence of the philosophical. Thus consequently, from then on, it has been necessary (coherent and programmed) for deconstruction not to limit itself to the conceptual content of philosophical pedagogy, but to tackle the philosophical scene and all its institutional norms and forms, as well as all that renders them possible.

Had it limited itself—which it never did except in the eyes of those who derived some benefit from seeing nothing—to a simple semantic or conceptual deconstitu-tion, deconstruction would have but formed a modality—a new one—of the internal self-critique of philosophy. It would have run the risk of reproducing the philosophical propriety, the relationship of philosophy to itself, the economy of traditional putting into question [mise en question].

But in the work awaiting us, we shall have ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Cultural Politics
• II. Instituting Education
• III. The Discourse of Theory
• Permissions
• Contributors