| On pedagogical authority: One teacher's choice |
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by Hervé Varenne One the main things I
did do was to write a piece on authority in education. This is the
piece that I am now making public without significant rewrite. A
rewrite would anchor it in a different time, late December 2001,
when the wisdom of the United States government's response can be
assessed in terms of its results rather than in terms of the hopes
and fears it generated at first. It is best to preserve an earlier
anchoring. But the shift in perspective is worth using to highlight
the themes of the piece: the sources of the authority to speak as
teacher and the cultural constraints on authorship. So I start in
this foreword with a brief history to serve as a case study. The text was shaped as an address to students and colleagues during a panel discussion held on November 16th, 2001. This event was "my" response to the central administration-to the extent at least that I am the one who convened a planning committee of students and staff. The event itself, not surprisingly, was announced in a flier announcing that read: "the Department of International and Transcultural Studies invites you..." There were no challenges to this masking of the persons involved and the possible coopting of those among the faculty or students who did not think it such a good idea. Who are the personal actors here? Many did act: there was "I," the committee of students and staff I assembled to discuss the plans, the faculty who participated as speakers or audience, the central administrators who suggested that "something be done for the students." This is by no means an exhaustive list, and it should certainly include those who did not participate and thereby made a context for those who did. And I ponder: who is
the author of any event large and small? Who sets it up in its particular
shape? Who authorizes it? Authorship, authorization, authority,
these are the issues that the events of the past Fall have crystallized:
Who is the agent behind the planes? Who authorized military action
in Afghanistan? Where does the authority come from that lead men
and women to act within the grand schemes that others, far away
and perhaps long dead, have set for them? This is one of the many
moments when we must act even though, or precisely because the act
will make history in the lives of many, including many we do not
know or who may, later, challenge our choices. These are political issues.
They are also educational ones. It is now well-known at Teachers
College (but was much less known three months ago) that the institution
was heavily involved in building a school system for Afghanistan
in the nineteen fifties and sixties. It is probable that, in the
next few years, the faculty and students of Teachers College will
again be involved in the country. They will write text books, rebuild
school buildings, redesign teacher education programs, etc. They
will do it in the midst of a crowd of Afghans, Americans, Europeans,
Japanese, etc., government officials, military people, missionaries,
etc., all of whom will have something to say and some authority
to commit finances, printing presses, building contractors, etc.
In this cacophony, voices from the great traditions of American
education, from Dewey to Maxine Greene, will be strong, though probably
not overwhelming. But they will also claim the legitimate authority
to direct action-even if only the moral authority that comes, in
America, with the affirmation that the child, developing his or
her personal genius, must be at the core. After all, this is what
Teachers College, for more than one hundred years has done on an
ever more global scale. As Bourdieu reminded
us (1977 [1970]), pedagogical authority is what makes schools practically
possible. But, in Bourdieu as in most social scientific writing,
authority has a bad name and the word only appears as part of a
critical narrative-if not one that seeks to deconstruct common sense
and leaves the agent (author, teacher, administrator) with no grounds
on which to act for others in the future of the collectivity. But
of course, deconstruction, as published practice in academia, is
a constructive act that is part of a system of educational authority
that it cannot abolish. "I" am not an author for other
authors unless I speak with the authority that comes to me through
my social positioning. I, as Chair of the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, was authorized to set something in motion. It would be an "event" during which faculty members would speak about the implications of "September 11" for their work. The student committee with whom I planned the event agreed with me that we would encourage "intellectual" rather than "therapeutic" pieces-as a form of altogether explicit resistance to the authority patterns that, during the initial weeks, gave the public podiums at Teachers College to therapists and counselors who would "help us with our emotions." I was never directly challenged for the title I came up with for the event, "America Abroad,"-though one colleague indirectly questioned my wisdom in using the word "America," thereby reminding me of a set of sensibilities that I had forgotten in my search for something with rhetorical punch. In this brief comment, as in the brief moment when I decided not to hold hands with colleagues in a therapeutic moment I could not quite escape, issues of authority and authorship re-emerge. At the moment of action, authority did not dictate whether I would say "America" or "the United States." But at this moment, various voices grounded in different traditions challenged the setting of the stage, and stood ready to mete the consequences. At this very same moment, I, as teacher, professor, department chair, did set a particular stage for others in their future and thus reconstituted a certain authority. A die was cast and a price may have to be paid. Responsibility cannot be escaped. And thus, at this moment, "I" speak: Opening After such
an opening paragraph, some might expect a deconstruction of this
or that usage of "we." I might be expected to highlight
the political interests not-so-well hidden in any particular statement
starting with "we." But this is not where I am going.
I assume that all such statements are rhetorical and political.
I assume that to assert "We should stand united" is to
try to convince audiences of the validity of a particular analysis,
critique or proposed course of action. And I assume that the same
is true of the assertion "we should not seek revenge."
I also assume that most of us are astute enough consumers of political
language to see through the maneuvers - whether we end up cheering
a particularly apt rendition of a personal position or we end up
angry at an attempt to coopt our energies or enlist our loyalty.
Neither we in this room, nor our adversaries, are "cultural
dopes," unaware of the conditions of human existence in culture. My concern
today is constructive rather than deconstructive. I am searching
for what I, as an actor in particular conditions, should do given
what has happened, what is still happening, and what will happen
in the next weeks, months, and indeed until the end of our lives?
I have to give personal answers to these questions-and this text
is one of them. But the content of the answer, as such, is not my
concern either. My concern is with the conditions that make me one
of those who, in this particular setting, may speak answers. But
"may" in English, as a grammatical form, does not quite
capture a situation where I was put under firm pressure to stand
here and propose answers. At this moment I must speak, ex
officio.1 I am trying to understand
an imperative that comes with the office of professor and department
head. In a very minor way, it is but an instance of the broader
mechanisms that make it necessary for me to teach, to investigate,
to publish, to administer-that is to act on this collective stage.
Above all I am concerned with the grounds that make legitimate the
social construction of these various positions and then "authorize"
me to speak. These are the mechanisms that make me an "officer"
of this institution, and, through the chartering process inscribed
over Low Library, an agent of the "People of the State of New
York." And these mechanisms, of course, are the same that require
other agents of the State in certain positions of power to act in
ways that may include military responses. I also speak
here as an "agent" of cultural anthropology. I am speaking
as someone who carries the burden of a long tradition of concern
with "culture" and who continues fully to participate
in the reconstitution of this tradition through dialogue with peers,
colleagues, students and all other parties who might find useful
what cultural anthropologists have to say. The difficulty, for me,
is that cultural anthropology is founded on the recognition that
all human products, including political constitutions and their
institutional correlates, like schools or universities, emerge in
history not through the necessity of evolution but in a contingent
process of bricolage where shreds and patches borrowed from
all over temporarily assemble themselves in patterns that immediately
start to decay.2 This,
briefly sketched, is the relativistic position that every generation
of cultural anthropologists since M. Mead at least has reconstituted,
ever more radically. It is the position that stands as one aspect
of a possibly fundamental critique of the very grounds of our democracies
to the extent these grounds present themselves as "self-evident,"
the reflection of "Laws of Nature" that are also the laws
of "Nature's God." These "truths" are the grounds
for rights that are "unalienable"-as the Declaration of
Independence proceeds to affirm. To play on the word "alien,"
one might say that the Declaration affirms that these truths cannot
be made "other," that is culturally specific, temporal,
and temporary. They are general, valid for all times and universal.
But the common sense of cultural anthropology has now established
that truths are never universal or "trans-cultural." As an "agent"
of both the State of New York and cultural anthropology, I am now
at a moral impasse which I interpret as a call to recast anthropological
theory about culture, and perhaps move to a justification for democracy
based not on universal truths but rather on human ones. We do not
have to accept a relativism that ends up grounding all authority
in power and hegemony. We can search for a theory of constitution
through participation that would recognize the legitimacy of traditions
opened to continual contestation. In any event, there are serious
analytic problems with radical relativism, besides the moral and
political ones. It remains hard to see how pure power can enforce
routine authority-unless one hypothesizes that most people are so
thoroughly indoctrinated into dominating ideas that they will not
see through them. With the critics of socialization theories of
social order, I am convinced that all can see through hegemonic
claims-even when they can do little about them. I have explored
some of the implications of this stance elsewhere (Varenne and McDermott
1998). As I continue to do so, I want to argue that the grounds
of social action are not rational, in the universalistic sense we
inherit from 18th century philosophers. Neither are they simply
"arbitrary" as the acts of the kings of the old European
orders could be. The foundations of social order are moral. They
are a matter of legitimacy and authority that then raise issues
of commitment, critique and potentially radically destructive resistance
among those whom historical accident bring together, whether by
birth, conquest or trade. This address, obviously, is an instance of the problem that we are all facing as actors in particular historical situations. I write this address now, in early November 2001, in response to the question some of you asked of me a while ago: what do I have to say about the death of 6,000 human beings at the hand of nineteen other human beings? What is my response to the various political responses - including of course the military response? To those questions I have a "personal" response, but as I thought more about it and analyzed my various emotional responses, I have come to accept that, eventually, I was asked to speak and now do speak because of the positions I occupy as anthropologist, professor, department chair, and because of your trust that I have come to occupy these positions through a legitimate process. I suspect very few of you would accept a claim from me that I remain a stranger, invisible in a foreign land, under the primary directive not to participate in the everyday life of the people I am visiting. The fact is that, as one ends up occupying positions like anthropologist or professor, one must assume, existentially as well as administratively, the historical and ideological burdens that have produced these positions. This is something Jean Paul Sartre well understood when he refused the Nobel prize in 1964 so that he could continue fully to occupy the position of "writer" that had been, of course, constructed in Euro-American cultures two or three hundred years earlier. If we have accepted invitations to join this faculty, or if we have accepted admissions to this institution, then we must work in the terms set by this institution, and the broader institutions that constitute it-all the way to the constitution of the United States and the Great Traditions of Europe out of which it sprang in conversations with other traditions, great and small.3 We can, of course, make tactical choices within the tradition, including some that might be revolutionary. But we cannot free ourselves from the conditions we find when we enter the tradition-whether as an infant or as a visitor later in life. Thus, I speak to you as an educator accepting the task of offering students something they might not get by themselves, that is, a particular understanding, which, in a graduate school, must be that form of understanding which will transform students into scholars, that is school people, in what is the Great Tradition of Euro-American scholarship. I am not being ironic here. When our authority to speak is publically invoked or contested, responses are required that refer back to the bases of this authority-at least if we are trying to respect those who invoke or contest. In brief, I should not have accepted to speak here if I were not ready existentially to assI am not being ironic here. When our authority to speak is publically invoked or contested, responses are required that refer back to the bases of this authority-at least if we are trying to respect those who invoke or contest. In brief, I should not have accepted to speak here if I were not ready existentially to assume the position given me. If we accept the position of teacher, or that of "development" expert as most of us will do here, then we must also accept the burdens that come with the particular forms that we can legitimately use. Irony is not allowed, nor radical skepticism. The play is too deep. We cannot withdraw. We must speak, act, and do so decisively even if small voices of doubt continue to pull at us. The everyday
reconstitution of America But she argued then, and I am arguing now, that this process, a rhetorical one in her book, and educational one in our classrooms here and abroad, a military one in Afghanistan and elsewhere, can be a legitimate one. That some might, at times, coopt the authority of the American institutions for their own purposes does not make these institutions less legitimate or less worth fighting for. The fact that some manipulate election laws to prevent some people from voting does not make voting illegitimate. On the contrary! Voting is worth fighting for. A humanistic education for all is worth fighting for. The free exercise of religion is another one. We might now include, after 30 years of call to "multiculturalism," the right to the free exercise of one's customs, including one's language, dress, foods - but perhaps not the right to institute political ideologies practically incompatible with the other rights. Democracy
as cultural fact I speak here as a cultural anthropologist, summarizing the main points of some "Anthropology 101" course. In the routine version of the course, I would emphasize the arbitrariness of the American forms, their contingent historical development and evolution, how they enable and disable the people of the United States. With a bow to Bakhtin and others, I would also emphasize contestation and resistance, and de-emphasize enculturation. And I would also emphasize the work that all who encounter America perform to reconstitute it. I would probably not address the issues of legitimacy that I am raising here-at least not in periods of peace and prosperity. And thus, in periods of war, I could be accused of undermining the grounds that make reconstitutive action legitimate, in the United States and abroad. Students would be right to ask me whether I am really saying that there are no "self-evident truths" on which to base a constitution. If "free speech" is a cultural construct, then there are no independent justification for defending this constitution and all it entails. The students of Teachers College should also ask what is the justification for our professional role in shaping not only "our" children but the children of all who come under our purview? By working here, have we made ourselves into the blinded agents of the ruling class, peddling their ideas to unsuspecting masses? To clarify
these issues, let us consider briefly another stark example. Some
will remember the Coca Cola jingle from the 1970s "I want to
teach the world to sing in perfect harmony." I have always
found it somewhat disquieting precisely because it is so concise
in summarizing our mission here at Teachers College. We may dislike
being coopted by a global corporation, but the goals of the jingle
("harmony") and the means ("teaching") are precisely
ours. It is all the more disquieting for an educator who is also
a cultural anthropologist that the total enterprise in which we
participate is much more encompassing than the commercial one within
which Coca Cola operates. We do not have to entice people to buy
our products. People must come to us for the certification that
entitles them to significant rights and privileges. They must do
so because, in modern democracies, schooling is free, compulsory,
and carefully regulated by the State. Many of our ancestors fought
for this to be the case throughout the 19th century. I say "many
of our ancestors" to remind us that some of our ancestors did
bitterly contest these processes locally, nationally, and internationally.
This resistance has not ended and we continue to fight for this
political and ideologically if not militarily at the opening of
the 21st century. These are no trivial matters and Ivan Illich (1970)
was somehow justified in seeing in this an act of ultimate hubris.
As a sometime critic of particular forms of schooling that can easily
be shown to disable many people in particular ways, I understand
the urge to "de-school" society. There might be legitimate
futures, and there were pasts, when schooling is neither compulsory
nor state-regulated. But, at this point, I cannot imagine how this
could be, practically, and I must face the grounds for schooling
so eloquently stated by Dewey (1959 [1897]). Dewey unapologetically referred back to the "self evident truths" on which earlier generations have founded the political system we still live under, and that many of us continue to invoke when we have noticed that some policy or other is not consistent with them. A century later, schools of education carry the same torch, particularly in their staff of behavioral scientists, including anthropologists, searching for the universal psychological or sociological mechanisms that teachers must then use to achieve their State mandated goals. We now know that it is as easy to deconstruct calls to science as it is to deconstruct calls to God as justification for any course of action. Radical relativism is all corrosive philosophically-though only if we accept the term of a debate where commitment is made dependent on rationalistic proof. There is another route that recognizes, not the "artificiality" of all human institutions, but rather their artfulness. This shift preserves 'art'-that is production, construction, constitution, sensitive to actual conditions and open to the making of new ones, some of which may carry the legitimate authority of the collective. Democracy
as moral imperative: participation, critique, reconstitution Colloquially,
"we, the Talibans and us in this room, are in it together."
I have talked about this "it" as a complex organization
of positions that each of us try to make our own after being recruited
in them. This includes all forms of specific resistance to this
construction, whether peaceful or not. The terrorists are "with
us," they are talking to us, and we must respond. My main concern
is to understand the kind of "togetherness" that binds
together crowds of strangers in a com-unity of sorts. Technically,
I am interested in "the conditions of joint participation in
a complex event."5 I want to
investigate the implications of the fact that, for certain overwhelming
purposes, we are inescapably "we" to each other and somehow
responsible for what others are doing. It is easy to accept that
we are "we" with our most intimate others, with our friends,
neighbors and colleagues. It is more difficult to face that we are
"we' with those who oppose us, loyally or not. This is what
the events of the past months have reminded us of.6 All forms of togetherness are difficult to account for, and it is all the more difficult to account when the relationship is indirect and mediated by institutional mechanisms. It is particularly difficult to do so when the relationship is antagonistic. Most classically, social thinkers have worried about the prerequisites of peaceful togetherness. As most of them proceeded to assume that togetherness necessitated consensus, they also had to assume that, in cases when some were oppressed, they would be made unaware of their conditions. I am proceeding in other directions.7 I am more concerned with continually emerging consequences as the unexpected happens including the apparition of new persons or populations. I am not worried about the haphazard process that bring us together, and I am not sure much is gained by attempting to attune these more carefully in the hope that conflict will be muted. I am worried about what can happen when people who have been thrust together become aware of the organizing grounds of their interaction. As this awareness develops, much can happen that eventually requires difficult work by all whether this work is reconstitutive, transformative, or destructive. The issue is not hegemony, it is authority. Provocatively,
I have said that I speak here as "agent of America." I
am not saying that I am an actor "in America" (though
I started with this formulation in the introduction to this text).
Neither am I saying that I "am" American. I am stressing,
controversially and argumentatively, that the grounds of my agency
is controlled by the cultural arbitrary of America that has built
this podium and placed me behind it. I have also hinted that through
my acceptance of the offers that have been made to me to assume
this position, I have become existentially committed. In other words,
I am responsible. But before I move to this final argument about
commitment and responsibility, I want to explore further how I am
talking here about participatory agency. Like many of
us in this room, I was not born in the United States and I am not
a citizen. I entered this country on a student visa and I remain
a "resident alien." At this point I intend to keep this
status, and accept that I will remain alienated from certain aspects
of the political processes in this country. Others in this room
have made other choices but it is fair to say that "even though"
we were born all over the world, we hold all sorts of citizenships,
we have all sorts of personal habits, different mother tongues,
different religious faiths, etc., we do work together in this department
and university in the terms set up by the university and this country.
Whether we accept or not the visa regulations of the United States,
or the conditions for citizenship here, we work with them. But the recital
of our "differences" and of our apparent ability to work
together, if it is not properly contextualized, threatens the more
precise understanding I am seeking. This contextualization requires
that we take a brief detour into the American symbolic imagination
that sets up, and then limits, the discourse of "diversity."
"Diversity" we know has to be celebrated. Those of us
who come to the United States late in our lives also find out that
diversity is also linked to "community." Thus the all-inclusive
recital of difference that ends Zangwill's play8
that has been so famous for its title-The melting pot-is the prelude
to a statement about the future when all will find themselves in
harmony, united by a common goal and coming to the common understanding
that we are all human beings striving for the same fundamental values
enshrined in particular institutions and expressed in particular
symbols (Varenne 1998). Those of us who have stood before a judge
during the ceremonies of "naturalization" know that a
version of this discourse leads to the recitation of the Pledge
of Allegiance, facing the flag with our right hand on our heart.
Some of us will not do so, and others will not be able to do so
as it becomes even more difficult to transform a student visa into
one that makes one a "resident" alien and then a citizen. E pluribus
unum. As a social scientist concerned with meaning I delight
in the wonderful interplay of values, symbols, rituals and institutions,
that is at work here. I also recognize the great strength and limitations
of the implicit model of sociability summarized in these three words.
I am particularly critical of the hypothesis that consensus and
the sharing of values is both a prerequisite, and the inevitable
by-product, of the movement towards the stabilization of any culture
(polity embodied in particular discourses and institutions), and
thus of democracy as culture. This was common sense to Dewey and
justified his call for particular schools. It led to the construction
of Teachers College as a school of education rather than as a training
institute. Later these ideas were explored and reconstituted by
all sorts of social scientists, from classical anthropologists claiming
the notion of "culture" as "learned" and "shared"
as their focus, to mainstream and critical sociologists working
with concepts like socialization, hegemony, or habitus. I speak here
from a different point of view that starts with the evidence that
sociability can proceed even when people share very little, or when
they specifically disagree, or when they suffer in body or soul
because of the organization of the social field in which they find
themselves. Starkly, this is the view of sociability that starts
with fields of battle rather than utopian fields of communal dreams.
The problem in our relationship with these students in Afghanistan
we know as "Talibans" is not that they are radically different
"cultural" others. It is not that they speak another language
and that we misunderstand their cues. It is, from my perspective,
that they and us are now together locked in centripetal dialogue
we cannot escape. This dialogue brings us ever closer to the mutual
awareness of the grounds of what may otherwise have remained the
unexamined common sense of our routine world. Historians
will tell us that the dialogue between, greatly to simplify, Europe
and Islam is not a new one and it can be traced hundreds if not
thousand of years. This dialogue was renewed on different grounds
as the Europeans colonized much of the rest of the world. And it
was renewed again as the migratory movements were reversed and the
rest of the world came to Europe and the United States. Marshall
McLuhan once analogized what was already noticeable in the 1960s
as the emergence of a "global village." This was before
the Internet, before the cost of international travel collapsed,
before capitalistic industrialism took root in what was then "the
Third World." It was a time when most McDonalds were still
located within the United States. What he and his critics did not
realize is that this image of the global village is not a benign
one: villages are where most of humanity fights most bitterly with
neighbors they have come to hate in disputes that are always a complex
of material interests and ideological faiths. When the Founding
Fathers of America separated Church from State, they may have remembered
the uncivil wars of religion that had rent Europeans villages and
towns over several centuries. Joint participation does not breed
consensus, it breeds contempt (as well as envy and resentment).
Or, to put it more mildly, it is as likely to breed contempt (exploitation,
prejudice, alienation, etc.) as to breed consensus (shared understandings,
mutual recognition, love?). We have little choice but to accept
Bakhtin's views that togetherness must produce new voices in centrifugal
processes that never returns a system to homeostasis. Where does
this leave us? It leaves us with the reality that all we do will
constitute personal choices about how we are going to participate
in the global village. We have to participate, or rather we are
always participating, whether we want it or not. Isolation is not
an option. Neither is ironic contemplation: the type of historical
deconstruction cultural anthropology has become famous for may be
useful for "understanding" but it cannot guide action.
We do have to examine the grounds that authorize our positions and
briefly take the position of those "others" to whom we
will become significant in that we may make a difference in their
lives-for example our students. We have to understand the activities
that reconstitute our positions with their rights and privileges
(possibly quite limited). And then we have to decide whether to
live within these boundaries, whether to challenge them, whether
to seek their destructions, whether to defend them. We have to do
this, day in and day out, and not simply when major existential
choices must be made. Like a marriage that may, in Euro-American
mythology, start in unaccountable surprise, participation in complex
social systems involves both moments of formal commitment and continuing
work to preserve the slowly shifting grounds of the interaction.
This work may lead to divorce (and, happily rarely, murder). It
also leads to readjustments, and reconstitution. However much we
may have worked to establish a way of being together, there will
be more work to be done. In times of peace-hopefully most of the
times-this might be a matter of changes here or there in this or
that aspect of what has been routine. This may or may not change
the grounds of the interaction-at least not perceptibly. At other times the challenge is radical. It attacks the grounds of the interaction. In family life it might lead to divorce and physical separation. But most of those who divorce know that it is not so easy fully to separate and break all relationships-particularly if other human beings, children for example, are involved. In our world today, full separation is just not possible and so the challenges have to be squarely faced. We must expect these challenges to the legitimacy of democracy and we cannot truly expect that our educational or political system will lead to a time when all challenges will be framed in the rules of our own political discourses. The recent events must be seen as challenges to the grounds of these institutions and political discourses. Hopefully, this challenge will remain limited in the amount of energy it can summon, and our response can remain similarly limited. But there could come a time when the challenge, whether it comes from fundamentalist Islam or some other ideology I cannot imagine though someone else will, is indeed so strong as to be possibly overwhelming. I think that, at such a time, we will have to fight, on any one of the many sides that will be drawn. More optimistically, but equally weighty, is the time when we will have to teach the children of the fundamentalist Muslims, as we teach the children of the fundamentalist Christians. Hervé Varenne is Chair of the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. FOOTNOTES REFERENCES CITED Benedict, Ruth |