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CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND ITS COMPLICITIES: A PRAXIS OF STUCK PLACES Patti Lather Department of Cultural Studies Ohio State University

[D]econstruction is not a critical operation, critique is its ohject; deconstruction always bears, at one moment or another, o n the confidence in critical or critical-theoretical authority, that is to say i n a n authority that decides and i n the ultimate possibility of decidability; deconstruction is deconstruction of dogmatic critique.

When I taught womens studies in Minnesota, my students once termed me a neonMarxist. This had much to do, I think, with my fashion sense. But it was also about paradigmatic proliferations and, particularly, the weight put on students to declare themselves as this or that amidst constantly shifting theoretic vocabularies. In my own student days, some fifteen years ago, feminism and the neo-Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, and Louis Althusser were the hot tickets in terms of positioning oneself against disciplinary conventions, just as phenomenology had served that purpose for those a decade aheadof me. For graduate students over the last ten years or so, the discourses of the posties have been the latest contender for allegiance. This parade of successor regimes has shaped critical pedagogy. Originally grounded in a combination of Frankfurt School, Gramsci, and Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy emerged in the 1980s as a sort of big tent for those in education who were invested in doing academic work toward social justice. As an ensemble of practices and discourses with competing claims of truth, typicality, and credibility, tensions with feminist pedagogy were always there.2Theseerupted into visibility in Elizabeth Ellsworths 1989piece and, particularly, the commentary that ensued. While I agree with Dennis Carlsons enough is enough in regards to Lathers critique of Girouxs critique of Ellsworths critique of Giroux, my point in revisiting all of this is that the interchange produced the truth of critical pedagogy as a boy thing whereas the girl thing was to use poststructuralism to deconstruct pedagogy, often ones own.Now almost ten years later, the two essays featured in this special issue about critical pedagogy in the contemporary moment reinscribe critical pedagogy as
1. Jacques Derrida, quoted in Suzanne Gearhart, The Remnants of Philosophy: Philosophy After Glas, i n Hegel A fte r Dcrrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London:Routledge, 1988),235.This, of course, is situated within a counter-claim that deconstruction is also always already of the order of the critical. 2. Given the stormy history of Marxism and feminism, this was to be expected. For thc classic essay, see Heidi Hartmann, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union, in Women mid Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 1-41.
3 . Dennis Carlson, Finding a Voice and Losing Our Way? i n this issue. Interestingly, Carlson, attempting to find an accessible progressive voice, recommends autobiographical accounts of doing critical pedagogy, with a caution against going too far i n marginalizing reasoned argument. See also Janc Gallop, cd., Pedagogy: The Que,stiozl of Impersoriatio~i(Blooiiiington: Indiana Univcrsity Press, 1995); Erica McWilliani and Alison Jones, Eros and Pedagogical Bodies: Th e State of (Non)affairs,in Pedagogy,

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still very much a boy thing. This is due not so much to the two lead authors being male as it is to the way in which both essays exhibit the masculinist voice of abstraction and universalization, assuming the rhetorical position of the one who knows, what Ellsworth calls The One with the Right St01-y.~ My sense of task in what follows is to approach critical pedagogy via a move away from legislating meaning and toward contradictory voices, counternarratives, and competing understandings. I have tried to read the two essays outside of oppositional frameworks but fear that what follows is just a first reading, a reading that fails to shift ground in terms of what we cannot simply discard: humanist attachments to a dialectics of truth and negativity in the search for what to do next in academic work that hopes to be of use in struggles for social justice. While trying not to set up feminist practice as some sort of answer but rather as an effort to avoid enclosure via discontinuity and multiplicities of language, my desire has been to keep in play the very heterogeneity that is, perhaps, the central resource for getting through the stuck places of contemporary critical pedagogy. It is in that spirit that my critique of these two essays is offered as I attempt to interrupt the discourse of critical pedagogy as a reinscription of prescriptive universalizing. To counter Peter McLaren and Ilan CurZeevs insistence on the right story of critical pedagogy, I propose a thinking within Jacques Derridas ordeal of the undecidable and its obligations to openness, passage, and non-mastery.i Here questions are constantly moving and one cannot define, finish, or close. This is a praxis of not being so sure, of working the ruins of critical pedagogy toward an enabling violation of its disciplining effects.6 THE STATE CRITICAL OF PEDAGOGY TODAY: DISCIPLINE SALVATION AND The theme that cuts across both essays is the desire to salvage critical pedagogy. McLaren wants to discipline critical pedagogy with political economy; Gur-Zeev
Technology und the Body, ed. Erica McWilliain and P.G. Taylor ( N ew York: Peter Lang, 1996); Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Ferninisms a n d C r i t i c ~Pedagogy ( N ewYork: Routledge, 19921;and JenniferGore, l The Strqygle for Pedagogics: Critical antlFemniist Discourses as Reginies of Truth [New York: Routledge, 1993).
4. Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy a n d the Power of Address (Ncw York:

Teachcrs College Press, 1997), 137. 5. JacquesDerrida, Specters ofMarx(New York: Routledge, 1994),87.Undecidability is a constant ethicalpolitical rcminder that nioral and political responsibility can only occur in the not knowing, the not being sure, a space that exceeds th e calculable program that would destroy all responsibility; Derrida quoted in Richard J. Rernstein, An Allegory of Modcrnity/Postmodernity: Habermas aiid Derrida, in Working Through Derridn, ed. Gary Madison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwesern University Press, 1993),226. Hence, rather than the paralysis and/or nihilism that McLaren sees in undecidability, Derrida argues that I t is infinite responsibility that undecidahility imposes on us. 6. I develop thc concept of working the ruins in Patti Lather, Drawing the Line at Angels: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography, Qualitative Stzidies in Education 10, no. 3 (19971:285-304. Using Judith Butler, Poststructuralism and Postmarxism, diacritics 23, no. 4 (1993): 1, who uses Walter Benjamin, 3-1 Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illurnmations, ed. Hannah Arendt ( N ew York: Schocken, 19681, 253.64, I arguc thc failure of teleological history, whether Marxist or messianic, as the very ground for a different set of social relations, a different opening up of a field of contestatory possibilities versus thc Hegeliaii dream of a reconciliation that absorbs difference into t h e same. PATTI LATHER is Professor i n the Departrncnt of Cultural Studies, Ohio State University, 121 Rainseyer Hall, 29 W. Woodruff Ave., Columbus, O H 43210-1177. Her primary areas of scholarship are qualitative research and feminist methodology aiid pedagogy.

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wants to rescue critical pedagogy from those who abandon philosophy for political success. Both agree that the promise of critical pedagogy has failed, but the sense they make of its failures are at great odds. McLaren traces the domestication of critical pedagogy to multiple sources, particularly Left postmodernism, and argues for a return to historical materialism. Gur-Zeev situates critical pedagogys limits in philosophical incoherencies and argues for a return to a true social transformation via philosophical negativism. Seemingly opposed, both are caught in the Hegelian enclosure of dialectics where the central move is recuperation of difference into the same, Be it McLarens positive utopia of consciousness, identity, knowledge, and praxis, or Gur-Zeevs negative utopianism of transcendence and human redemption not conditioned by historical reality, both are grounded in a Hegelian philosophy of knowledge which believes i t knows all there i s to know.7In the rest of my commentary, I engage McLarens and Gur-Zeevs essays in order to explore what Derrida terms a certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any.. .messianism.BI conclude by disciplining the featured essays in this special issue with some feminist pedagogy. POLITICAL ECONOMY RELXJX Speaking from within my poststructural suspicion of philosophies of presence that underwrite the resisting subject and a universalizing praxis warranted by a plenitude of knowledge and meaning, I find the McLaren essay caught in a desire for reassuring sureties. These include rescuing the revolutionary project, privileging consciousness in the call for voice, and assuming the explanatory and argumentative power and rhetorical persuasiveness of a more vigorous Marxism. Tamed by its joining with feminist and anti-racist struggles, McLaren wants critical pedagogy to return to historical materialism to fight the disarray of the left in the face of the consolidation of global capital.Situating class struggle as the main game, building solidarity includes a universal proletarianism that takes into account the objective laws of history and transhistorical standards of justice via a move of
7. Shoshona Felman, quoted in Ellsworth, Tenchins Positions, 67. Felman, in Shoshona Fclman, [ncq~ies Lacan nnd the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19871, goes on to differentiate post-Nietzchean philosophy of knowledge as that which believes i t knows i t does nor know and Freudian as that where authority is given to the instruction of a knowledge that does not know its own meaning, to a knowledge...that is not a mastery of itself. 8. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 89. 9 , It IS not that I am uninterested in the question of materialism, which is, at base, the question of the ohject, therefcrent. Art historian StcphcnMelville, inCo1orHas Not ReenNamed: Objectivity inDeconstruction, in Seams: Arl us Philosophicd Context, ed. Jeremy Gilhcrt-Rolfe (Amsterdam:G and B Arts, 199h), 12946, for example, is interested in objectivity in deconstruction: moving back closer to the object via ouifailed engagement with it. Melville asserts that the Kantian object argued an irreducible phenorncnological status to the object that exceeded interpretation. While Kantian foundationalism caught the object in static frames, it did foreground the objects excess that resisted containment without remainder by any sensemaking machine. To recover meaning is to understand the ways of grasping an object, our being struck hy it. This banishes both universalism and subjectivism. A postmodern materialism, then, is about the evasion of presence. But it is also about that upon which deconstruction does its work, that which survives deconstruction by being that upon which it depends. Thc object, as Melville notes, isbottolnlessly resistant to nomination, attached to its specificity and its surfaccs of visibility. Things are present and complete, but the truth of them depends on what is visible/knowahle via highly troubled knowledge practices.

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strategic universalism. Shades of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis emerge in the call to transcend mere reformism and the necessity of global economic transformation if schools are not to reproduce the status quo. While the specificity of local struggled is recognized as necessary if not sufficient, it is anti-capitalist struggle that is the best means toward a new social order. McLarens concern is identity politics, aestheticization of the real, and political paralysis. His critique of critical pedagogy and the need for a different economic logic to think about the relationship of school and society under conditions of transnational capitalism are well taken. But the statements of yearning and struggling for a socialist alternative, lack of utopia, and laments regarding Nietzschean perspectivism and despair left me feeling that the search for a new revolutionary agent looks suspiciously like the old one. The dream of doing historys work remains, yes, but embodied and corporeal critical pedagogy of service learning as an updated version of taking it to the streets via a curriculum on global sweatshops is too little too late in terms of an exhausted rhetoric regarding the long-term goal of democratic reform through education. And the rhetoric of moral exhortation, the universalizing calls for class and economics as the motor force of history, and disattention to the problematic of agency at the end of the metaphysics of subjectivity reinscribe enlightenment-bound critical theory in its project of freedom through conscious expansion of knowledge, a repetition of the Hegelian narrative of the subject of history arriving at absolute knowledge. As McLaren recognizes, radical posturing on the part of academic Leftists is by no means a recent invention and his interest is in revitaliz[ing] Leftist critique of capital in the hope that intellectuals can be about more than reaping the benefits of scholarly rewards. Given my sympathy with James Ladwigs critique that the educational Left in the United States has largely failed to effect change not only in global capitalist relations but also in its more specific target of schooling, my interest is in deconstructing the position of intellectuals in struggles for social justice toward something other than academic heroics. The charge that deconstruction is about the forces of arbitrariness and nihilism in contemporary thought by those invested in some sort of return to philosophies of mastery, rationality, universality, and certitude is well rehearsed and demands politics on the usual grounds. Yet the question of the politics of deconstruction is perhaps interminable. This is so given its taste for aporias over utopias, its attention to the complex interplay of logic and rhetoric, and its rejection of that which is too strong, too erect, too stiff in favor of a sort of stammering and stuttering in terms of the constitution and protocols of knowledge as to what might be able to appear as passage and process, what might be open beyond oppositions, what might enable counter-economics of praxis.
10. James Ladwig, Ac~idemic Distinctions: Theory and Methodologyin the Sociology of School Knowledge [New York: Routledge, 19961. Anyons review of Ladwig contests this charge of the irrelevance of Leftist work in education and also takes hiin to task for his argument regarding a strategic shift froin qualitative to quantitative work, an aspect of her critique with which I am in agreement. Jean Anyon, Rank Discrimination: Critical Studies of Schooling and the Mainstream in Educational Research, Educntronal Resenrcher {April 1998):32-33. 11. John Caputo, On Not Circumventing the Quasi-Transcendental: The Case of Rorty and Derrida, in Madison, Working Through Derrida, 161. Caputv is writing about Christopher Norriss reading of Derrida.

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Quite different from McLaren, Derridas return to Marx is about learning to do without surety of knowing. Critical political discourse has been crippled by assumptions of universality and the transparency of essence to appearance. McLarens call for critical cultural consciousness combined with closer scrutiny of class and global capitalist relations reinscribes a kind of logo-centric form of responsibility that polices the subject and its identity and disallows the unconscious and undecidability.I2His combination of oppositional, adversarial logics, cultural alienation, and a subject-centered praxis philosophy reinscribes dualisms and the search for non-complicity in a way that gives short shrift to the necessities of the ordeal of undecidability. This is the want[ing]to be sure....The sureness of this certainty that attempts to foreclose the undecidability that haunts the limits and a certain exhaustion in our thinking of the political. In Getting Smart, I ended the section on post-Marxism with Michel Foucaults prophecy that it is clear, even if one admits that Marx will disappear for now, that he will reappear one day.141 however, expect areappearance quite different from did, McLarens discourse of mastery/transparency/rationalism and repositioning of economistic Marxism as the master discourse of the Left, the principal intellectual resource for movements of social and political eman~ipati0n.l~ Rather than McLarens comforts of transformation and closure via the final victory of the oppressed and the levelingprocess of the call to achieve common ground on the field of oppositional politics, my interest is a post-Marxism that confronts complicity, incompleteness, and dispersion.16While agreeing that political economy must not be dropped out of Leftist analysis, I share Derridas interest in a Marxism of aporia: a tentative, contextual, appropriative, interventionist, and unfinished effort to shift the terrain.,I7 This is a sort of knowing from our failures of knowledge that is quite other to McLarens effort to persuade a return to political economy via a homogenizing
12. Thomas Keenan, Fables of Kesponsibility: Aberrations and Predicamenls in Ethics und Politics (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 19971, 47. 13. Dcrrida, Specters of Marx, 38. 14. Lawrence Kritzman, ed., Michel Foucauli: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (New York: Routledge, 1988), 45, quoted in Patti Lather, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy Withlin the Postmodern /New York: Routledge, 1991).
15. Paul Patton, Marxism in Crisis, in Beyond Marxism, ed. Judith Allen and Paul Patton (Sydney: Intervention Publications, 19831, 53. 16. See John Feltete, Postmodernism and Cultural Studies, paper presented at the Theory, Culture and Society Conference, Pennsylvania, August 1992; iohn Caputo, Deconstriiction in a Nutsliell: A C0nver.w tion with lacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997); William Spanos, The End Education: Towcird Poshurnanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Prcss, 1993); Butler, Poststructuralism and Postmarxism; and Wendy Brown, Wounded Attachments: Late Modern OppositionalPoliticalFormations,PoliticalTheory21,no.3 (1993):390-410. McLarenisnot alone in thisrcccnt call to return to a political economy that reinscribes economisni. See, for example, E. San Juan, Jr., Beyond Postcoldriial Theory (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998).

17. Ellen Rooney, Better Red Than Dead: Althusser and the Fetish of Ideology, Y a k French Studies 88 (1995):195. Rooney is writing about Althusscrs reading of Marx as marked by discrepancies, repetitions, hesitations, and uncertainties, always beginning again, a doubling between historical situatedncss and political interestedness, in short, reading as a necessarily guilty rather than innocent practice.

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address and a totalizing politics that offers global political solutions to humanity in a way that homogenizes social bonds. It is not that economic power carries little weight in determining educational policy and that macro-level trends and structural and economic contexts can be neglected. Rather, what is at issue are the assumptions McLaren makes about the possibilities of a universalizing discourse of truth telling, and correct readings in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty. This structure of address is in marked contrast to practices of feminist pedagogy where the effort is to speak from discontinuities, the failures of language, self deception, guilty pleasures, and vested interests: what Ellsworth calls a speech which comes from elsewhere to provoke something else into happening - something other than the return of the same.lK NEGATIVE DIALECTICS REDUX Gur-Zeev lumps all critical pedagogies together: paternalistic, feminist, and multicultural versions are collapsed into normal critical pedagogy. This conventional critical pedagogy is opposed to genuine critical pedagogy, a nonrepressive critical pedagogy that refuses all violence in the quest for transcendence. Gur-Zeev situates the positive utopian search of critical pedagogy for emancipation as part of normalizing education and its violence. The dogmas and illusions of critical pedagogy are, in short, a hegemony with repressive political consequences. It is the positive utopianism of the belief in revolutionary perfectibility that is at issue for him. Prologue to postmodern theories of complicity, later critical theory saw the oppressor inherent in every revolutionary. Modern rationality underscored fascists, Marxists, and liberal democrats alike. The relentless colonization of the lifeworld cannot be countered by the naive emancipatory project of a paternalist critical pedagogy. The hermeneutics of the self and the hope for nonoppressive relations across differences are paltry weapons against the victory of instrumental rationality. Gur-Zeev argues, instead, for the philosophical negativism that underwrote the Frankfurt School, the negation of the positivist conception of knowledge. GurZecv critiques critical pedagogy for the voluntarism undergirding its concepts of authentic voice and anti-violent dialogue. Forming a dogmatic idealism and vulgar collectivism that is more about progressive middle-class American liberalism than about German critical theory, with its philosophical pessimism, critical pedagogy is censored for its glorification of experience and affect. Its philosophical incoherencies are taken much to task, particularly its adorers of difference who reinscribe foundationalism, ethnocentrism, vitalism, vulgar realism, and naive positivism. Difference is but an artifact of capitalist production and genuine critical pedagogy must recognize the limits of d d o g u e and the real horizons of power if a nonrepressive possibility is to be found.

18. Ellsworth, Teaching Positions, 124-25.Quoting Felman quoting Jacques Lacan, Ellsworth discusscs the different forms of pedagogical address of two films about the Holocaust.

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Gur-Zeev posits no escape from instrumental rationality, no in-betweens, a totality of containment. Yet he endorses an alternative spirituality as a transcendence of reality in his search for some non-terroristic knowledge and non-normalizing counter-education. Such a search disregards arguments that all language is violent; all knowledge is normalizing; and all oppositional knowledge is drawn into the order against which it intends to rebel. This is Derridas theory of complicity and Foucaults nothing is innocent. Seeing no place for redemption within a historical framework, Gur-Zeev wants a pragmatism toward moral elevation, a utopian praxis of spirit, self-realization, and reflectivity where critique is a prayer that cannot change the world, but allow transcendence from it. The possibilities for redemption lie in overcoming history. Here Walter Benjamin is (mis)read as endorsing the Godly context as the only possibility for a non-dogmatic starting point toward a nonrepressive critical pedagogy.$In sum, Gur-Zeevs messianic revolutionary transcendence combines with a suspicion of the knowledge of repressed groups into a mystical vanguardism in order to recover the disappearance of Spirit and the exile of reason which was replaced by instrumental rationality. This position might be termed, in Derridas words, Hegelian neo-evangelism.*
THINKING OTHERWISE: A PRAXIS STUCK OF PLACES

Both essays are saying something right in terms of the need to rethink critical pedagogy in different historical times. As well, however, both seem to me symptomatic of the yearning and unsettlement of the academic Left, given the demise of humanism and regimes of transcendent generality. While tending toward a conflation of postmodernism and identity politics, McLaren well recognizes the nontransparency of experience and the weight of culture in the construction of raced and gendered as well as classed subjectives. Unlike McLaren, Gur-Zeev recognizes how the demystification of the discourse of deliverance positions narratives of salvage and redemptive agendas as ever deeper places for privilege to hide.21 Feminism has long put emancipatory agendas under suspicion for their coercion, rationalism, and

19. This not-uncommon misreading of Benjainins use of theology to break with the neo-Kantianism and ossified Marxism of his time is discussed in Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin (New York: The Guilford Press, 19961, 227. Benjamins inessianic Marxism or secular messianism argued both the limits of secularized reason and the intertwinement of theology and philosophy. The secularized discourse of post-Kantian modernity is not as different from earlier theological discourses as modernists would like to believe - this was Benjamins turn to theology, against the devaluation of truth in the name of knowledge. But this is theology present as form rather than content, the hunchback who stays out of sight in order to better guide the hand of the puppet of historical materialism. See Raincr Nagcle, Theatre, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity(Ba1timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991),190andsenjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History. Another sense of the undecidability of the hope that something redemptive may appear to fill the God-shaped, Max-shaped hole is Kafkas messiah who arrived only the day after he was needed. See Andrew Wernick, Post-Max: Theological Themes in Baudrillards America, in Shndow of Spirit. Postmodernism and Religion, ed. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (London: Routledge, 19921, 69. 20. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 100. See also Barnett, Hegel After Derrida 21. Spanos, The End of Education, 187

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universalism.22 Adding Foucaults nothing is innocent mantra to Derridas thesis of complicity, we are faced with no outside of power networks, normalization, and tendencies toward dominance in spite of liberatory intentionsz3 Concepts of transformative intellectuals, ideology-critique, a voluntarist philosophy of consciousness, and pretensions toward emancipating or empowering some others are marked as an inadequate praxis. Rather than a return to either the historical materialism or negative dialectics of these two essays, my interest is in a praxis in excess of binary or dialectical logic, a praxis that disrupts the horizon of an already prescribed intelligibility to address Derridas question: What must now be thought and thought ~ t h e r w i s e ?Against ~~ Gur-Zeev,the logic of negation as a trial to go through before restoration of some lost unity, messianic or not, breaks down in the face of the challenges of social changes that collapse our categories. In Specters of Marx, Derrida begins a list: labor, production, unemployment, free market, foreign debt, arms industry, inter-ethnic wars, the Mafia, and drug cartels. Both recognized and then selectively forgotten by McLaren, such concepts are collapsed in their very axiomatics by tele-technic dislocation, rhizomatic spreading and acceleration, and new experiences of frontier and identity. In short, the organization of knowledge ruled by the Hegelian inheritance is radically insufficient in the face of a new set of givens that disrupts the conceptual oppositions that structure traditional thinking. Refusing the much that must be refused in the Hegelian enclosure of dialectics, negative or not, is a tempting move in the face of the much that must be rethought: the concepts of certainty, morality, meaning, and praxis; resistance and agency; the unconscious; empowerment; rationalism and dialogue: the list goes on.2iBut I am
22. See, for example, Judith Stacey, CanThereBeaFeminist Ethnography! Womens Studies Znterncitional Forum 11 (1988):163-82; Patti Lather, Getting Smart; Daphnai Patai, U S . Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible? in Womens Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Sheila Gluck and Daphnai Patai [New York: Routledge, 19911, 137.54; Ann Opi, Qualitative Research, 52-69; and Michelle Fine, Appropriation of the Other and Empowerment, Feminist Review 40 (1992): Disruptive Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research [AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press, 19921. See Denise Riley, AmI That Name! Feminism and the Category of Womenin History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)on the problems of women as a universalizing category. A recent twist on this is Laura Lee Downs, If Woman is Just an Empty Category, Then Why am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night! Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject, Comparative Studies in Society mid History 35, no. 2 [ 1993):414-37. 23. For a recent Foucauldian argument along these lines, see Thomas Popkewitz, The Culturc of Redemption and the Administration of Freedom as Research, Review of Educational Research 65, no. 1 (1998):1-34. 24. Derrida, Specters of Murx, 59. 25. Mourning Marxism! Philosophical Explorations in Fcminism, Poststructuralism and Education, Mary Leach, Patti Lather, Katc McCoy, and Wanda Pillow, American Educational Research Association annual convention, San Diego, April 1998; Alice Pitt, Qualifying Resistance: Some Comments on Methodological Dilemmas, Qualitative Studies in Education, in press; Deborah Britzman, Lost Subiects. Contested Objects: Towards a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning [Albany: SUNY Press, 1998);Mimi Orner, Interrupting the Call for Student Voice in Liberatory Education, in Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, ed. Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore (New York: Routledge, 19921, 74-89; Elizabeth Ellsworth, Educational Review S9, no. 3 [ 1989):297-324; Ellsworth, Why Doesnt This Feel Empowering! H~irvard Teaching Positions; and Mary Leach, Can We Talk! A Response to Burlmlcs and Rice, Hrirvilrrf Educational Review 62, no. 2 [ 1992):257-71.

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entirely persuaded by poststructural theory that it is what seems impossible from the vantage point of our present regimes of meaning that is the between space of any knowing that will make a difference in the expansion in social justice and the canons of value toward which we aspire. Implementing critical pedagogy in the field of schooling is impossible. That is precisely the task: to situate the experience of impossibility as an enabling site for working through aporias. Ellsworth calls this coming up against stuck place after stuck place as a way to keep moving within the impossibility of teaching in order to produce and learn from ruptures, failures, breaks, and refusals.26 This is in contrast to either the experience of plenitude that underwrites McLarens call for a revolutionary socialist project for education or Gur-Zeevs mystical overcoming of history. In the post-enlightenment stirrings and strivings of contemporary theory, the philosophy of the subject, reflection, and praxis are being rethought. Marjori Levinson, for example, formulates a post-dialectical praxis that is quite different from a Kantian or Hegelian a n a l y t i ~ . ~ modernist metaphysics of presence, The assured interiority and subject-centered agency, the valorizing of transformative interest in the object, and G.W.F. Hegels affirmative negativity and dialectical overcoming - all are at risk, refused in a way that attempts to signal the size and complexity of the changes involved. Rather than what McLaren terms the abandonment of hope in revolutionary social change, such a praxis is about ontological stammering, concepts with a lower ontological weight, a praxis without guaranteed subjects or objects, oriented toward the as-yet-incompletely thinkable conditions and potentials of given arrangements. Hence, my interest is in a praxis that attends to poststructural suspicions of rationality, philosophies of presence, and universalizing projects - a praxis that moves away from the Marxist dream of cure, salvation, and redemption.2x Learning to see the imperialism of our continued investments in teleology, persuasion, consensus, and ideology-critique premised on some real knowable outside of discursive renderings, the task becomes not so much to invent or incite as to use praxis as a material force to identify and amplify what is already begun toward a practice of living on.2Q This is a praxis that can survive the critique of Marxism, a praxis immanent in practices that helps us think not only w t but in our actions. ih
FEMINIST TROUBLE REDUX

Looking through the pile of feminist pedagogy papers accumulating on my desk, I find one by a New Zealand colleague, Alison Jones, which presents a very different take on critical pedagogy. Written for a 1998 conference in Australia, her essay on pedagogical desire is quite unlike the abstract exhortations of the two essays chosen
26. Ellsworth, Teaching Positions, xi, 9 27. Marjori Levinson, Pre-and Post-Dialectical Materialisins: Modeling Praxis Without Subjects and Objects, Cultural Crilique (Fall 1995): 111-27, 28. Shoshona Felinan and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Wi~iiessiiigLiterature, l-sychoaiid,vsis.and History (New York: Routledgc, 1992), 177. 29. Etienne Balibar, T h e Philosopliy of Mnrx (London: Verso, lYYS),122.

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to be featured in this issue in grounding her thinking in a concrete instance of liberatory pedagogy.,in Ellsworth terms this the specific study of what happens and how in actual instances of dialogic teaching practice in order to interrupt the mysticism that often attends critical pedagogy and its inflated promises by asking hard questions about the workings of desire in our practices toward freedom..i Deconstmct[ing] moments in classrooms when things go wrong, pedagogical meltdowns are used to foreground the limits, the necessary misfirings of pedagogy.2 Following in this tradition, interested in the difficulty of dialogue in multiethnic classrooms, Jones looks at what happens when majority and minority students are separated in a classroom of ninety third-year undergraduates in a course on feminist theory in education. Theorizing from her experience of team teaching this course, she troubles such critical pedagogy imperatives as authentic voice and dialogue across differences as desire for the other and absolution on the part of the nonMaori students. Based on the data soundbites Jones provides, Pakeha (white) students want dialogue across groups; Maori and South Pacific Island students relish the break-up into discussion groups based on ethnic sameness. Using Gayatri Spivaks Can the Subaltern Speak?Jones argues that the issue is whether the voice of the Other is hearable, whether majority students can develop the ears to hear what is often misrecognized as the silence of the subaltern.j3 Theorizing that recognition of difference means access for dominant groups to the thoughts, cultures, lives of others, Jones traces the resistance of subaltern students to the demand to make themselves visible to the powerful. The colonizers infatuation with access to/ unitywith the other is situated as the inability of majority students to see the limits of knowledge available to them and the inescapability of their collusion. Reading such desires on the part of majority students as a quest for redemption via a teach me! love me! demand, Jones names this cannibal desire to know the other through being taught/fed by her as avoyeuristic refusal to know that the other may not want to be known. Jones concludes with a call for a politics of disappointment, a practice of failure, loss, confusion, unease, limitation for dominant ethnic groups as a necessary aspect of critical pedagogy within epistemologies of uncertainty and multiplicity. Providing a counternarrative to two featured essays of such abstraction and unabashed universalizing of project, Jones moves in the space opened up by Ellsworths 1989 implosion of the canons of critical pedagogy. What I endorse in such writing is the move away from a too-dogmatic relation to its own discourses; its asking of

30. Alison Jones, Pedagogical Desires at the Border: Absolution and Difference i n t h e University Classroom, paper presented a t the Winds of Change: Women and the Culture of the Universities International Conference, Sydney, Australia, July 1998.
3 1. Ellsworth, Teciching Posilions, 99.

32. Patti Lather and Elizaheth Ellsworth, Introduction: Situated Pedagogies, Theoryinto Practice 35,no.
2 [1996]: . 1

33. Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossbcrg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313.

LATHER

Critical Pedagogy and its Coniplicities

497

genealogical questions regarding the origins of ones concepts, the weight of tradition, the ways current codes of traditional political problematics are insufficient, and the construction of complicated, disturbed answers. Reflexive without being paralyzed, working the ruins of modernist philosophies of knowledge toward possible practices of the impossible, Jones writes about critical pedagogy with/in the ordeal of undecidability. Positioned in storytelling and theorizing out of her own problems of practice, Jones interrupts what Spivak terms the inspirational academic heroics of the highly abstract, universalizing, and prescriptive voice that so characterizes the two featured essays.34 My disciplining of critical pedagogy is not so much to salvage it as to salvage praxis in a post-Marxist time. Praxis is about philosophy viewing itself in the mirror of practice.35I am trying to enact a logic that thinks praxis as a practice of living on where one must work - practically, actually, while simultaneously dislocating the self-presence of any successor regime as a sort of redemption.,6Rather than the one right story, what I propose in Joness subversive repetition of the ruins of critical pedagogy is a knowing with/in our doing, what Derrida terms to do and to make come about, as well as to let come (about).Situating praxis as a ruin made habitable by a fold of the between of presence and absence, Jones practice and the tradition out of which it comes serves as both more and other than example. As a double-edged story that attests to the possibilities of feminist practice yet, in thevery telling, registers the limits of it as a vehicle for claiming truth, such a practice is a topology for new tasks toward other places of thinking and putting to work, This is a praxis of the undecidability and constitutive exclusions of praxis, a nonreductive praxis that calls out a promise of practice on a shifting ground. Such a move is in, with, for, and against the much that must be refused: the privileging of containment over excess, thought over affect, structure over speed, linear causality over complexity, and intention over aggregative capacities. M Ontological changes and category slippages mark the exhaustion of received categories of mind/body, nature/culture, base/superstructure, and spiritual/secular. The goal is to shape our practice to a future that must remain to come, in excess of our codes but, still, always already: forces already active in the present. As an arena of practice, critical pedagogy might serve a transvaluation of praxis if it can find a way to participate in the struggle of these forces as we move toward an experience of the promise that is unforseeable from the perspective of our present conceptual frameworks.

34. Gayatri Spivak, Responsibility, boundnry 2 21, no. 3 [ 1994): 19-64.

35. Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 41. 36. Dcrrida, Specters of Marx, 131

37. Ibid., 98.

38. Levinson, Pre-and Post-Dialectical Materialisins. I foreground this example as a way to trouble my own tendencies to frame the discussion in U.S. terms. Thanks to my colleagues at Yorlr University for pointing this out when I delivered thc paper in Toronto in ruly of 1998.