See also: The scene of teaching, part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4.
"This is the ethical demand of online reading: we must read our interlocutors in a way that respects the possibility of their never writing again without foreclosing the possibility that they could do so. Such an ethics would respond to the ambiguity of life and death in the blogosphere.” (Kushner, 2009: 114)
In countering the Enlightenment narrative of the aim of education, Readings (1996: 19) argues that pedagogy should not aim to produce autonomous subjects who are supposedly made free by the information they learn. Rather, the goal of joining authority and autonomy should be relinquished. This would allow the scene of teaching to be better understood as a network of obligations.
In this view, teaching and learning become sites of obligation, loci of ethical practices, rather than (solely) as means for the transmission of scientific knowledge, such transmission, in any case, being far from transparent. Teaching thus becomes answerable to questions of justice, as well as to criteria of truth (Readings, 1996: 154).
Thus, Readings (1996: 154) advocates that we seek to do justice to teaching rather than simply know what it is. [In this context, see also Doing justice to the other]
Teaching, therefore, is not merely about the (transparent) transmission of information and the emancipation of the autonomous subject (from all relationality and dependence). Instead, it should be recognised as a site of obligation that exceeds an individual’s consciousness of justice. This turn to the pedagogic scene of address, with its ethical weight, is a way of developing an accountability (as response-ability) that is at odds with (business) accounting (Readings, 1996: 154).
The scene of teaching can then be understood as a radical form of dialogue, i.e. in the sense of Bakhtinian (non-transparent) dialogism not Habermasian communicative transparency.
In Bakhtinian dialogism, the addressor's articulated, externalised ‘speech’ or ‘discourse' comes into contact with the addressee’s modes of (internalised) discursive understanding, the addressor's speech/discourse clashes with the addressee’ speech/discourse. Dialogue in this sense is inter-discursive, not (simply) transmissive; not simply the transmission of content, received in a void, a tabula rasa. This clash of discourses produces an unanticipated combination, an emergent discourse of which neither addressor nor addressee is ‘master’.
Given this frame, teaching is not primarily a matter of transparent communication between autonomous subjects, functioning alternately as senders (content providers) and (empty) receivers (Readings, 1996: 154).
For Readings, such an approach might avoid the potential pitfalls of the pedagogic relation, which he defines as:
- the hierarchisation in which the professor is an absolute authority and the student an empty receptacle for the transmission of reconstituted and unquestionable knowledge (authoritative mode)
- the claim that teaching raises no difference between teachers and students (demagogic mode)
- the reduction of education to the training and development of technocrats, without questioning the purposes and functions of that training (technocratic mode)
All three potential pitfalls share an orientation toward autonomy or independence, an assumption that knowledge involves abandoning a network of ethical obligations. To have knowledge, in this view, is to gain a self-sufficient, monologic voice, to attain an autonomous, independent identity, putting an end to obligated relations to others.
In place of the lure of self-sufficient identity and independence from all obligation, Readings insists that,
“… pedagogy is a relation, a network of obligation.” (Readings, 1996: 158)
While Readings suggests that the teacher is a kind of rhetor, that is, a speaker/actor who takes account of the audience, rather than simply a magister, who is indifferent to the specificity of his/her audience, this does not mean we should adopt sophistic rhetoric as a model for the pedagogic scene. Adopting a sophistic rhetorical approach risks turning the pedagogic relation back into a site of subjective calculation, an agonistic contest of subjective wills who continue to use language instrumentally, i.e. to develop an instrumental rhetoric of manipulative seduction (Readings, 1996: 158-159).
Teaching is neither convincing students, through magisterial domination, nor fusing with them, dyadically.
Teaching, as a practice, constitutes a pedagogic scene structured by a dissymmetrical pragmatics. This unequal relation must be addressed in terms of ethical awareness. The scene of teaching belongs equally to the sphere of justice as to the sphere of truth. The relation of student to teacher and teacher to student is one of assymetrical obligation, one which appears to both sides as problematic and which requiring further study (Readings, 1996: 161).
One potential way to understand the condition of pedagogical practice is to grasp that it forms “an infinite attention to the other”, in Blanchot’s (2009) terms.
As Readings (1996: 162) explains, no individual, in themselves, by themselves, can be just. To do justice is to recognise that the question of justice exceeds individual consciousness. It cannot be answered by an individual moral stance. This is because justice involves respect for the absolute Other, a respect that must precede any knowledge about the other. The other speaks, and we owe the other respect. (See Doing justice to the other)
Thus, Readings (1996: 162) continues, to be hailed as an addressee is to be commanded to listen, a performative order within an ethical frame constituting a particular regimen of intersubjectivity. The ethical nature of this relation cannot be justified. We are obligated to listen, without knowing why, before we know what it is that we are to listen to. To be addressed is to be placed under an obligation. The nature of this obligation is that of being situated within a narrative pragmatics. To be situated in a narrative pragmatics is to become engaged in the practices of elaborating an actantial network.
Education, then, becomes the drawing out of the otherness of thought through the development of an actantial network. This process undoes any pretension to self-presence, and always demands further study (Readings, 1996: 162-163). To think beside each other and beside ourselves, is to explore an open network of obligations, an actantial network, that keeps the question of meaning open as a locus of debate (Readings, 1996: 165).
In short, for Readings (1996: 189), the pedagogic relationship compels an obligation to the existence of otherness. The incalculable attention that the heteronomous instance of the Other, the fact of others, demands is another name for the social bond.
References
Blanchot, M. (2009). The unavowable community. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill.
Kushner, S.M. (2009). Transnational blogospheres: virtual politics, death, and lurking in France and the U.S. [PhD thesis]. Department of Romance Studies, Duke University.
Parvulescu, A. (2013). University of dissensus/university of laughter. Journal of Midwest Modern Language Association, 37 (1), 47–58.
Readings, B. (1996). The University in ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
