Abstract
This is an article review of Peter McLaren’s Pedagogy of Insurrection (New York: Peter Lang, 2015). While it seeks to position McLaren’s work within the context of critical pedagogy, this paper also assesses McLaren from the wider discussion of Marxist–Hegelian discourse as it evolved within the Left. Engaging with McLaren critically, this article insists that the nuances that make his work are not simply essential to its study but more importantly they give it a unique radical edge. No serious reader or student of McLaren’s could simply take any radical stance as read—and more so when this emerges from decades of activism, teaching and writing. One cannot read McLaren alla prima. Moreover, the paper shows how at the core of McLaren’s work one finds complex questions that attest to the profound dedication by which he approaches the labors of criticality. Furthermore, this article seeks to draw a distinction between McLaren and critical pedagogy, arguing that his work occupies a very special place that has grown in its specificity and character. This needs to be strongly identified, uniquely appreciated, and further articulated in order to be understood. Here it is argued that while sustaining a huge share of what is now identified with critical pedagogy, McLaren’s work must be seen from beyond those confines as his work moves even beyond education itself. In this context, this article analyses Pedagogy of Insurrection against the work of, among other, Ernesto Laclau, Hannah Arendt, Ivan Illich, Antonio Negri, Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and his 4th Thesis on Feuerbach.
For the fact that the secular foundation detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm is precisely only to be explained by the very self-dismemberment and self-contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter itself must, therefore, first be understood in its contradiction and then revolutionized in practice by the elimination of the contradiction. — Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845: §IV, added emphasis) We find ourselves faced with a revolutionary tradition that has pulled the flags of the bourgeoisie out of the mud. We must ask ourselves, though, confronting the historic enemy of this age: What besides the mud are we left with? — Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly (1991: xx, added emphasis)
Introduction
In 2004, when I first set foot on New York City as an immigrant academic, I strongly felt that my immediate duty was to understand and engage with a city and a whole nation that were at their most delicate: three years after 9/11 and at a time when George W Bush was preparing to face off a challenge from the Democrat Senator John Kerry, a Catholic, decorated Vietnam veteran who famously turned against the war, and whose American credentials were too impeccable not to be taken seriously as an ‘obvious winner.’
Being quite naïve about the electoral machine that moves and determines presidential elections in the United States, like many others I joined in the liberal snobbery—perceived or otherwise—that predicted a Kerry walkover. After all, we all thought, President Bush’s often-incomprehensible way with words and his much-contested politics were enough to gain Kerry strong support from those who were hoping for a different kind of politics, including those who (to my puzzled reaction) were referred to as ‘Reagan Democrats’, a term which to my European political sensibility made no sense whatsoever.
Yet, it soon became obvious that intellectual snobbery does not pay on such occasions. (Actually it never pays!). Kerry lost and Bush not only won, but he also won without any question and, as he declared in his victory speech, he was intent on cashing in on the electoral capital that he had just gained from the American electorate. It was very evident that the lesson from then Governor G W Bush’s win over Vice-President Al Gore 4 years before was not learnt.
A dialectic unturned
Beyond the presidential election itself, it was clear that history was not going to repeat itself by turning tragedy into farce. Beyond President Bush and subsequently President Obama, the tragedy that was 9/11 never turned into a political farce, as wrongly predicted by those who, in addition to citing Marx out of context, have a habit of entertaining their nominal expectations of a political dialectic while consistently proving to be as erroneous and naïve as ever before. Indeed the tragedy of 9/11 turned out to become even more tragic in how the consequences of dogma and identitarian thinking resulted in a series of events which, by and large, left the world into an even worse dilemma than ever before; one which, after the so-called Arab Spring between 2010 and 2012, we stopped identifying terror with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Bin Laden but with the worst nightmare of Daesh—whose ultimate dystopia threw the categories of left and right politics into even more disarray, naïveté and abject incredulity.
To use the jargon, with what we face at this point in time (whatever ‘time’ might mean to those who assume it to be theirs to manipulate), the dialectic does not appear to have ever turned. If anything, it seems to have turned inwards, playing those double binds by which, as the non-identitarian philosophy of melancholy would remind us, notwithstanding the promise of liberation, the Enlightenment gave us Auschwitz and Communism gave us Stalin and the Gulags—enough for cynical conservatives to gloat and reinforce the fallacy of their own dystopian world.
More so, as I have argued elsewhere (Baldacchino, 2015), history has been reduced to a prosthetic synthesis which, in its Soviet and Neo-Liberal forms, came to close and ossify the hopes of radical change in whose open-endedness, theorists of an evolutionary history from Vico to Hegel, Marx to Dewey, endeavored to capture and realize the human right of freedom and intelligence.
Yet in forfeiting the realization that historic syntheses are as vulnerable to prosthetic fixes as emancipation and freedom are prone to turn into their very opposites, those who somehow believed that redemption is a matter of reason, freedom, will and organization, forgot that such premises are not given, but made and obtained by a series of events that do not simply fit within a logical assumption of a dialectic that turns just as somehow the Platonic notion of truth retains validity and remains a viable backup for when the planet runs out of carbon energy. In other words, we often forgot the caveats by which history is often described and analyzed by the same practitioners and theorists to whom we look for guidance and wisdom.
Then again, many would tell us that the point here has to do with the primacy of struggle, that by which we gain a critical consciousness and by which such caveats become visible and tangible enough to do something about them. Yet if that is what it is—indeed a critical struggle that somehow animates the mind into thinking that an extension beyond the all is possible – then we must ask why these teleological expectations were never fulfilled, and where they appeared to do so, were not sustainable. Perhaps, as McLaren states, “[w]e need to mediate dialectically interpretation (subjectivist) and explanation (objectivist) by fusing hermeneutic (subjectivist) and structural (objectivist) approaches.” (McLaren, 2015; PI: 10 1 ) Though one would not be blamed for asking: “Isn’t this what many on the Left have been saying for years?”
While McLaren’s position remains central to the ways by which theory and practice (or indeed praxis) make sense and gain effect, the truth is often hidden in plain sight: like critical consciousness, the struggle for change in all its forms cannot assume itself as a syllogism, neither is it sustained by the certainty of a dialectic that still inhabits a Galilean space—as Negri (1991: xviii) rightly points out. The certainties, by which many have reassured armies of social and radical democrats, students, Occupy and other protesters, unionized workers and professionals eager for social justice, cannot simply lead to an ascertained objective. This is because despite the desirable gift of autonomy to the individual whose desire for a conscious multitude must be cautioned against the herd instinct by which Nietzsche denounced both Christianity and socialism—while rejecting what he calls those “anti-Semitic hooligans” (Nietzsche, 2002: §251, 142) who would later try to appropriate his philosophy; we also have to face up to the fact that emancipation tends to fold on itself (Laclau, 1996) unless we realize that the dialectic’s extensions retain the right to move inward, just as they become sensitive to the reluctance by which humans in their diversity, live their life and make do by what they find to be an ease of immediacy.
Panegyrics on the need to be critical are by no means a guarantee for everyone to come around to do so. Cries for liberation and clenched fists united in song are what they are: aesthetic means by which we manage to keep smiling when in effect all we’re left with is the melancholic need to cry—as Roberto Benigni and the late Massimo Troisi would tell us in their film Non ci resta che piangere [We can only cry] (Benigni and Troisi, 1984).
I am with McLaren when he asks: “Is it too late to re-enchant the world, to remold the planet in mytho-poetic terms, to create a past dreamtime, a mystical milieu in the present, to give ourselves over to dream divinities, to live in the eternal moment, to mold sacred totems from the damp clay of the riverbed?” (PI: 9) Replying, I would argue that it is a right to dream of a better world, as Dr King has famously reassured us. But one cannot stop there, as further questions are pertinent: “Why does such a dream seem impossible?” This time the reply is not mine, but I borrow it from Hannah Arendt’s remarks to Dorf Sternberger, when, scandalized by how many leftists like Sydney Hook and surprisingly an anti-fascist like Ignazio Silone were quick to denounce their former comrades to the McCarthyist witch hunt in the 1950s, she says that marching under the banner of freedom and democracy, these converts were attempting “to condition man and to adjust him to society (whatever that may mean)” adding (in German) “Here Smith conforms to Jones and Jones conforms to Smith.” (Knott, 2014: 70, 134, 32 n)
Far from giving up by simply lamenting over the sorry state of the Left and its history, here I want to cast my commentary on McLaren’s book beyond the assumptions that are often made of his work, where he is often cast into a certain rigid framework by which many often become enthused by him, but who risk to turn his work into an object of adulation that only satisfies a certain kind of shallow idealism, which quickly wears off once other more convenient interests creep in. I say this not only of McLaren but other great theorists, about whom I have written. Here I include John Dewey, Maxine Greene, Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire, whose work, as much as it is admired, often falls prey to their adulators and detractors who in equal measure tend to gloss over and prejudice the fine points of their respective philosophies by ironing out what often appear to be contradictions and paradoxes, when in effect it is the paradox and the contradiction that makes their work exceptional (Baldacchino, 2014).
It is with this approach to a creative open-endedness that accepts within it the power of aporia that I would read McLaren’s Pedagogy of Insurrection and it is also with this that I would also seek to question aspects of it while concur with other parts.
Ancestral bones
The historiography that McLaren offers in his book is often animated yet precise in terms of how one cannot deny that admittedly Empire has done its worse. Then again this raises several questions, as to why hasn’t history ended with the triumph by which Empire, in its various synthetic complexions of liberty on one hand and emancipation on the other, failed to ever assume the portents by which those on both sides of the Cold War, being both children of the Enlightenment promised in the wide-eyed faiths of liberalism and socialism?
This is where I begin to pose serious questions, mostly done from a position of radical democratic auto-criticism, by which the critique of Empire remains, to date, still stuck in the right analysis but often finds itself at a loss when the complex practice of doing is either turned into impractical bureaucracies by which, Gorbachev (1987) once reminded us, the Soviet state became like a huge machine that collapsed under its sheer weight, or as we find in most modern liberal and social democratic approaches, governance and the economy become a matter for managerial systems whose virtues either fall foul of the organizational assumptions of the expert and his or her performativity (Lyotard, 1989) or of what Ivan Illich called a world of disabling professions, led by “bodies of specialists that now dominate the creation, adjudication and implementation of needs [which] are a new cartel.” (Illich, 2010: 15)
Illich’s description of such managerial bodies which to him characterized the mid to late 20th century, still holds relevance to the performativity by which the managerial class—whether it claims to be conservative, liberal, progressive or non-political—has indeed become: “They are more deeply entrenched than a Byzantine bureaucracy, more international than a world church, more stable than any labour union, endowed with wider competencies than any shaman, and equipped with a tighter hold over those they claim as victims than any mafia.” (Illich, 2010: 15)
McLaren singles out a similar situation, yet his opening scenario takes on a different complexion from Illich’s surgical critique. McLaren characteristically starts with a major assault that pertains to the senses as much as it calls for both brawn and brain: This behemoth we call capital is not some creature encountered in the medieval surrealism of Hieronymus Bosch or a Bestiarum vocabulum of the Middle Ages or in a sideshow banner in a county fair midway where you might be expected to find, in the abhorrent language of the carnival, Melvin Burkhart the Anatomical Wonder; Zippy the Pinhead; Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins; Johnny Eck, the King of the Freaks; or Koo Koo the Birdgirl. (PI: 5)
As we take the arts by way of analogy, one must remember that in their film, Non ci resta che piangere, Troisi and Benigni (1984) imagined a world where time was malleable, allowing them to try to stop Columbus from doing his worse and ‘discover’ America. The (im)possibility here does not lie in time travel, nor does it betray a comedic twist onto what could have happened. Quite the contrary, the value of Troisi and Benigni’s dream is the same possibility by which medieval philosophers of difference like Duns Scotus, would still place possibility at the heart of a world and universe whose theocentric determinism was never a sign of paralysis but a signal of hope and exploration—even when the explorer needed the fiat of a church preoccupied by the necessary immanence by which truth must be conveyed.
This is also where I would find McLaren still confessed in the belief that redemption will come because it is there for the taking and it is up to us to have faith in ourselves. While this smacks of optimistic determinism, it should not be an issue, as indeed what McLaren implies carries with it a degree of humility by which, unlike those who misread pragmatism as a sign of total and uncontrollable slippage into an equally misconstrued sense of undetermined contingency, he seeks to walk the tightrope. Here, he is balancing what he sees as a dialectic that throws at us anything it could, while still holding onto the fact that humanity cannot simply give away the sense by which truth is not simply fabular. For McLaren history is not a bag of ancestral bones carried by the errant revolutionaries of a world, who like the chosen people have to endure diaspora and abuse, while seeking the Promised Land.
Adding weight to McLaren’s preoccupations is a distinctly American phenomenon, where “[t]he champions of neoliberalism—the antinomians, the pre-millennialists and post-millennialists—see those who would oppose their master—the socialists, liberals and communists—as in league with the anti-Christ.” (PI: 6) This prompts him to reclaim Jesus from the stultifera navis that more than ever before in history, now seems to have ventured into forbidden seas with characters like Donald Trump and other Republicans claiming Jesus as their ideological witness. What I find interesting is that this twist, while not surprising from a Catholic point of view, takes one into unchartered waters in an American context which is very much unlike the politics of mainland Europe—especially in a secularized Catholic world, where secular liberals, communists, anarchists and socialists alike shared traditions with anti-clericalist, republican and anti-monarchist movements, but they nevertheless retained a strong veneration towards Christ the redeemer, dressed in red and being lynched by the clergy, the rich and the autocrats of the day.
Within a North American context, McLaren’s Christian-revolutionary hallmark reclaims a narrative that he brings up from the Latin American heritage, which after the Second Vatican Council saw an upsurge in liberation theologies of all kinds. Unless one understands this claimed heritage, one would be missing out on the subtleties of McLaren’s work, which is sometimes held back by the earnest and heavy lyricism that characterize its rendition.
More so, his way of putting across this sense of liberation may well seem paradoxical to many who, even when accepting the revolutionary heart of Jesus’s message, struggle to understand where McLaren is coming from, even when he copiously cites all the right liberation theologians that he recruits in his epic critique of capitalism. However, this appears paradoxical only to the eyes of those who fail to understand that in a Christian approach to justice, nothing is impossible, just as Jesus’s message was based on love yet also said to bring in the sword.
Additionally, one could see how many would regard this approach as sheer utopia. Then again, the utopian is not forbidding of the possible. It is just a way of projecting one’s own ambitions and desires onto a history that appears to forbid it. A desired utopia—an ou topos, a no place that as yet does not seem to exist—is what makes one’s outlook revolutionary. Here the Christian message is put across as a narrative which at the very best would put one on the receiving end of immense hostility, and at its worse it would lose one’s life, as McLaren goes to show in citing his own hagiography of personalities whom he affectionately considers as ‘comrades’: from Jesus to Che Guevara, from Paulo Freire to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. In citing such a hagiography of the Revolution, McLaren feels the need to impress on his readers that the desire for struggle is a sign of being human: “How is it possible to follow the message of Christ when his dire warnings about economic inequality are ignored?” asks McLaren. “If you accept Christ as your personal savior and support a system that creates inequality and injustice, then what does this say? This goes beyond whether you vote for a Democrat or a Republican. It is at the heart of the struggle to be human.” (PI: 105)
This is where I totally reject John Elmore’s hasty and decontextualized critique of McLaren and Paulo Freire’s subscription to liberation theology as a “sacrificing of logic and reason for the blind faith of religion” (Elmore 2016, p. 5). Elmore does not only distort Freire and McLaren, but he is also removing their approach to Christianity from the rich revolutionary and radical traditions that emerged from Liberation Theology, not to mention the history of Latin American struggle itself.
Elmore savages McLaren’s work stating that “Dr. McLaren has dedicated his life to the development of pedagogies that seek to cultivate ‘radical consciousness’, so we might shed our corporate-constructed blinders and ‘see’ the illogic of capital that limits human freedom and postpones the construction of a more just world. Yet, he claims membership in an organization that has been, and continues to be, a central purveyor of an absolute truth, provided by a god, that justifies the subjugation and domination of women, demonizes homosexuals, and brainwashes children.” (2016, p. 20) Again, not only is Elmore misrepresenting McLaren’s subscription to Christian radical theology, but he is also confusing it with the same hierarchical organisation that dismissed and sanctioned Liberation Theology.
One cannot have it both ways. If Elmore is criticizing the conservative hierarchy of the Catholic Church in all its excesses, he cannot at the same time put McLaren’s and Freire’s engagement with Liberation Theology in the same camp which rejected the radical interpretation of the Christian message.
Elmore’s twisted logic comes to the fullest degree of absurdity when by his simplistic jumping and confused understanding, he links McLaren’s approach to Jesus with Adolf Hitler’s claims on Jesus. Such a distortion can only find its equal in how Nietzsche’s work was conveniently Nazified by his own anti-Semitic sister who, taking opportunity of his illness, she turned his work into a Nazified testament to what, in effect, Nietzsche loathed most.
Beyond Elmore’s pathetic confusion, McLaren’s work is clear and speaks for itself. Likewise, its radical lineage is clear and in no way does it detract from those traditions of radical thinking by which McLaren himself invites to approach with a degree of humility.
The fallacy of good intentions
Perhaps, much more importantly the heritage and approach in McLaren’s work could help us assess his engagement with (and what I would call his inherent critique of) critical pedagogy. For me to identify a critique in McLaren is not intent on being heretical. Having said that, I would never shy away from the airesis—indeed the heresy—that gives me the freedom of choice in its original sense of moving away from the expected canon, especially when what is at hand—in this case critical pedagogy—was never meant to become canonical, given the dialectical groundings that it claims.
My point on McLaren’s critical position is intent to invite a closer reading of his enthusiastic endorsement of critical pedagogy as an attempt “to bring out the pedagogical dimensions of the political and the political dimensions of the pedagogical”, by which these come to focus on “building alternative and oppositional forms of sustainable environments, of learning environments, of revolutionary political environments.” (PI: 28) Yet one must not forget that later on in this chapter, he strongly dismisses what he calls a pedagogy of ‘desire.’ “A pedagogy of desire” he states, “does not emancipate students from economic oppression.” This, he considers as “designed to free teachers and students from emotional distress. The purpose of pedagogies of desire is not understanding, but seduction and emotional investment in teaching as an affirmation of power.” (PI: 40)
While I would have chosen another term than desire (as this has an import—such as the Lacanian one—which could even be revolutionary), I would concur with him in that he is highlighting the myth of good intentions, which more often than not, comes in naïve forms of critique, mostly claiming to be a form of critical pedagogy, but which forgoes any idea of paradox, contradiction or even aporia by which originally Hegel’s dialectical notion of Bildung was intended. Thus McLaren asks for a pedagogy of critique which, “is about the production of transformative knowledges,” and which unlike a pedagogy of desire “is not about liberty as the freedom of desire, because this liberty, this freedom of desire, is acquired at the expense of the poverty of others.” (PI: 41)
Here one could follow in McLaren’s trajectory, which is more than asserted in this book. In fact, one could see how he takes the opportunity to attack a wide complexion of positions by way of reinforcing his anti-capitalist armory—including, the political emasculation of universities (PI: 3, 63ff), “economic catastrophism” (PI: 59), his critique of Piketty’s insufficient critique (PI: 61ff), his “agnostic relationship” with liberal modernity (PI: 66ff) and President Obama (PI: 83ff) … just to start with.
It is safe to say that McLaren’s work is mostly tied to critical pedagogy, but this is very much contextualized in a very robust sense of history as characterized by struggle. McLaren admits that much more recently he has rekindled an interest in Marxian texts and he seems to have moved further into a context where he sees class as a fundamental category of his critique. This distances him from other directions by which many reach out and see themselves related partly or wholly to a critical pedagogical project. There is therefore a reason for him to distance himself from the sense by which critical pedagogy becomes a mere desire to make things better, in that he feels the need to come across as robust and alert to the fallacy of good intentions which often permeates the professions and critical pedagogy itself, and which he strongly rejects.
McLaren’s problem with desire is perhaps best explained in conjunction with his discussion of otherness, which also impinges on the dialectic and the primacy he gives it—methodologically, pedagogically and also in terms of his overall political and moral vision of the world. McLaren argues that desire “aims to conquer the otherness of the external world—or the ‘other’—but as soon as one object is negated, it is followed by another that needs to be negated and so on. When desire learns that it cannot consume the other and thus satisfy itself, it therefore seeks to satisfy itself in another self-consciousness.” (PI: 88) This implicit critique of how good intentions “conquer the otherness of the external world (or the ‘other’)”, reminds me of Arendt’s controversial paper “Reflections on Little Rock” (Arendt, 1959), which not unlike her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, attracted harsh criticism from progressives and conservatives alike. Without taking the topic off at a tangent, I want to recall how Arendt’s paper begins to challenge what is often characterized as a two-dimensional approach to otherness, and in this case racism and segregation. This paper bears relevance because what Arendt seems to suggest prima facie is that simply desegregating schools would reinforce discrimination. The backdrop to this is the historical events of Little Rock school in 1957 when nine African-American students registered to enter what was an all-white school.
Arendt writes how it is difficult to forget the image of the African-American student “accompanied by a white friend of her father, walking away from school, persecuted and followed into bodily proximity by a jeering and grimacing mob of youngsters.” So far, this is just a recollection, but Arendt moves on to a subtler critique, when she states that “the girl obviously, was asked to be a hero—that is, something neither her absent father nor the equally absent representatives of the NAACP felt called upon to be. It will be hard for the white youngsters, or at least those among them who outgrow their present brutality, to live down this photograph which exposes so mercilessly their juvenile delinquency.” (Arendt, 1959: 50)
Here Arendt draws the reader's attention to how a far wider set of contradictions, a public context that pertains to the wider life of a Republic and its Law, is left to be felt by the youths, both black and white youths, almost to fight for themselves. The absence of the adults—the father and more poignantly the NAACP—is something which one could see as being not only controversial but also in line with Arendt’s candid and clear stance. We know that the approach with regards to the Holocaust landed her in deep trouble with some of her own close friends. But it seems to me that the punch line in Arendt’s critique that matters most in this case is the following: The picture looked to me like a fantastic caricature of progressive education which, by abolishing the authority of adults, implicitly denies their responsibility for the world into which they have borne their children and refuses the duty of guiding them into it. Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards? (Arendt, 1959: 50)
In the specific case of critical pedagogy, my question would be how and where should the real struggle for social justice and equality happen. If the locus is implicitly in forms of organized learning—such as schools or even universities—then this remains highly problematic, not only because it limits education to a schooled affair, but where political struggle is curtailed under the paradigm of schooling which in and of itself remains supplemented and contextualized by a bourgeois take on universal education. If critical pedagogy remains schooled in the Galilean space of a Jacobin sense of liberation, it also remains insufficient because in effect it carries within it the same a prioristic assumptions by which Kant (1900) assumed education to be an amelioration of the youth based on an ethical assumption—to which we need to add a much wider socio-economic context that is still sustained on severe inequality.
It should be evident by now that the focus is not inequality itself, but the assumptions made for it, and by which even liberal and progressive forms of identity politics have shown themselves to be grossly insufficient. In addition to the classic cases of Latin America or Africa, we can find a more tangible example in how Southern European economies have become the locus of the most puzzling and yet sharpest political and economic struggles; and this happened notwithstanding their established critical democratic pedagogies (and here I am using pedagogy as a wider notion of formative cultural Bildung). Politically speaking the emergence of movements like Syriza and Podemos, in their success and failure, confirms once more a political predicament that is very similar to Europe in the 1930s.
This was not confined to Europe, but extended to the whole globe. In an article he wrote in 1935, John Dewey clearly identifies a pseudo-liberal wave, which, in its absolutism, failed to understand history’s ‘temporal relativity’ and thereby thought that old solutions could apply to new situations, when in effect what appeared to be the same, was radically different. (Dewey, 1935: 226) At this stage democracy was at its weakest. The democratic process itself became an instrument for the rise of the worse kind of struggle—that between democracy and fascism. There is no guarantee that this situation would not repeat itself, especially when, as I have stated earlier, the dialectic seems to have not turned, but seems to be stuck in an historical loop of senseless repetition, although we cannot make the same mistake and assume that old solutions could resolve what history’s temporal relativity is throwing at us. This is best summed by Yanis Varoufakis in his book And the Weak Suffer What They Must? (Varoufakis, 2016): By February 2010 the 2008 blast had reached Europe, bringing to breaking point its weakest link, Greece. The euro started to buckle, with potentially frightful consequences for Europe’s banks, business, people and politics. But instead of fretting over the appalling prospect of a postmodern 1930s, Europe’s leaders had different priorities. Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary who had spent the previous twelve months fighting the crisis on the other side of the Atlantic, could not believe his ears in a meeting with his European counterparts. “We’re going to teach the Greeks a lesson,” they told him. “[W]e’re going to crush them.” (Varoufakis, 2016: 232, emphasis added)
“Equal elementary education?” asks Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program. “What idea lies behind these words? Is it believed that in present-day society (and it is only with this one has to deal) education can be equal for all classes? Or is it demanded that the upper classes also shall be compulsorily reduced to the modicum of education—the elementary school—that alone is compatible with the economic conditions not only of the wage-workers but of the peasants as well?” (Marx, 1875: part IV)
Here Marx’s question is focused on the locus of the struggle. And I emphasize struggle because McLaren’s point is moved by struggle as a category of radical change. I hazard to guess that in McLaren’s mind the notion of insurrection is quite distanced from Hollywood’s rendition of Reds (Beatty, 1981) and I am sure he is not imagining another rendition of October (Eisenstein, 1928). However, I do sense in his work that the idea of struggle remains central to praxis, even though I see it sitting more in the contexts of non-violence and active resistance.
This is why it is important to identify what McLaren actually means by terms and concepts like struggle, the dialectic, and revolutionary critical pedagogy. In Pedagogy of Insurrection we have a genealogy and hagiography. The hagiography is not sentimental, but equally compelling in terms of the recognition that he pays to those whom McLaren sees as examples of noble minds that dare think differently. One may not have the same saints, but the very notion of saintliness which, as Badiou argued, is “immersed in an actuality” only to be faced by the severity of the institutionalized church (or indeed political party), to then become priestly. (Badiou, 2003: 39) My take on the saint is slightly different, and perhaps closer to McLaren’s approach to the comrades in his hagiography, in that to me the makings of a saint come from “a way of contemplating rationally through an attentiveness given to the unknown: that which one cannot comprehend.” (Baldacchino, 2012: 74) This draws with it the approach to what appears to be impossible, while at the very same time, takes in a much wider view which is equally dialectical in that it takes into consideration the fact that sainthood could well lead to priesthood and to the crystallization of ideas into dogmas, churches and parties (and here, maybe, I slightly differ with McLaren’s strong faith in some of his adopted saints, with the distinct exception of Jesus and Freire).
McLaren’s vocation
As much as I have nurtured, over many years, great respect for McLaren’s work, mission, and I dare say vocation, most of his books confront me with a problem of scale. By scale I do not mean the length of his arguments, the elaboration and detail by which he brings his critique to the reader’s attention, or indeed the strength of enthusiasm by which he makes his point. Rather my issue is methodological. I find his methodological scale problematic in that I often find myself torn between his incessant need to put capitalism on perpetual trial, and the way by which he wants to mount his case for the prosecution on several scaffolds which I admire as constellations of discourse and energy but which I begin to doubt when I peel off their various layers in order to get to the core. And here I am assuming that McLaren firmly holds onto a core, as he seems to partake of an essence and ground by which he articulates his argument and critique—unlike others, who coming from similar philosophical lineages, would pause and hesitate to assert with equal force of conviction.
In his interview with Sebastjan Leban, published as chapter 6 in Pedagogy of Insurrection, McLaren’s prosecution of capitalism is also aimed at several factors that he sees as sustaining the same capitalist agenda that he puts on trial. As is typical of many theorists on the Left, there is a habit of asserting certain lines of thinking while taking out others. In McLaren’s fire one would find theorists like Marcuse, Laclau and Mouffe, to many extents Negri, and though never mentioned, I suspect that he would not be comfortable with the theoretical trajectories carried by the likes of Arendt, Rorty, and Vattimo. Žižek is indeed cited, but McLaren carefully moves around him and never engages with his work. While here I am not trying to classify McLaren in the family history of Hegelo–Marxist and related philosophers and theorists, it is important to identify where he stands, given that in this book he clearly sets out to draw his own genealogical tree and particularly in this chapter one finds moments which McLaren creates in order to clarify his own position.
Unlike many contemporary theorists and philosophers McLaren feels the need to universalize his case and takes on what he also sees as problematic assumptions, which he often dismisses as potentially or indeed actually relativizing moments in realms where the subject—in its various iterations, whether political, philosophical, social or linguistic—is asserted outside the framework of struggle and the political change that it aspires to. He also sees these as lineages that stand to devalue the efficacy and essence of the Hegelo–Marxist case that he champions. Thus, while he makes several overtures for a context where the subjective, the hermeneutic and other relationships are valued, on the other hand he seems to quickly dismiss such possibilities unless they pertain somehow to the totality by which a historicized and clearly antagonized set of situations are put in place and by which, according to his position, this could maximize a blow to what is on trial—capitalism.
Many would not find this problematic at all, and I for one tend to regard this as expected from a theorist who sees himself as “a staunch advocate of education as a means to further socialism, that is, to bring about a world outside capital’s valorization process or, put another way, outside labor’s value form.” (IP: 226) However, as McLaren’s multidirectional critique emerges, I cannot help finding myself back in the dilemma with which I was confronted when, in my 20 s I decided to embark on a reading and critique of a giant of Hegelo–Marxist theory, Georg Lukács. Indeed Lukács does not seem to feature high in McLaren’s hagiography, but I would be very surprised if Lukács is not somewhere in his political unconscious, urging him to value the totality by which the dialectic would make far more sense than in Deleuze’s folds or Negri’s Spinozistic multitudes. Perhaps this is best captured when, in a moment of synthesis, McLaren tells Leban: We struggle here for the simultaneity of universal and particular rights. And in doing so we don’t privilege the idea of culture as a signifying system, but as a form of embeddedness in the materiality of social life. In doing so, we can’t abrogate the normative sense of what constitutes oppression; we consider it as a regulative idea. That’s why I agree that we can advocate an epistemic cultural relativism (in the serious rather than the vulgar sense) in arguing that there is no privileged access to the truth, and that there is no direct correspondence between an object and its representation, but at the same time I am opposed to a judgmental relativism—that there are no grounds, rational grounds, for advocating some beliefs over others (we do this through dialoguing, in the spirit of respect, with other cultures, that is, respecting the non-subjective character of their values). (IP: 238, emphases added) When people are in a situation of radical disorder, people need some kind of order, and the nature of the particular order is secondary. This relationship in which a certain particular content assumes the function of a universal fullness which is totally incommensurate with it is exactly what I call a hegemonic relationship. As you see, the dimension of force is present there, and the dimension of persuasion has to be present there as well (…). If we had a dialogical situation in which we reached, at least as a regulative idea, a point in which between the ontic and the ontological dimensions there would be no difference, in which there would be a complete overlapping, then in that case there would be nothing to hegemonize because this absent fullness of the community could be given by one and only one political content. But there is no overlapping there between particularity and universal function; in that case the relation is going to be hegemonic because there is always going to be a precarious taking up of this universal function by the particularity of social forces. (Laclau, 1999: 7, emphases added)
While I would entirely agree with McLaren that “the bête noir of the progressives” is positivism, I cannot understand why McLaren attributes this to those “vulgar cultural relativists who believe that there is no real truth when it comes to values, and that one culture’s values are no better than another culture’s values and there is no basis for judging the values of one culture over another.” (PI: 235) My surprise abounds because McLaren would be the first to denounce the many social scientists that now populate Educational Studies who have made it almost mandatory that empirical studies and the quest for certainty and number must rule the roost in how a progressive agenda of the School is conducted. Among these progressive educationalists many claim critical pedagogy as their field, and would almost always find a line or two of McLaren’s own to cite.
We also know that those who would claim a horizon for a ground, or indeed a dialectical state of historical contingencies instead of a Hegelian universe, have done this in opposition to the positivist same bête noire by which any hope of struggle or resistance—let alone insurrection—has become null and void. Let’s not forget that what Lyotard critiqued in his work, was not simply a denunciation of the Stalinist parody of socialism, (Lyotard, 1993) but more so the managerial advent of the new social democracies. (Lyotard, 1989) There is no relativist solution in any of these critiques. Rather, as we know, these critiques opened up unique insights by which theorists like Laclau could say (in my opinion rightly) that, “[i]n a situation in which emancipatory struggles start, there is always a whole transformation at the discursive level: you know how to handle a set of situations to which you didn't have access before. So discourses against oppression (if we understand by that the notion of literacy in its widest sense) are absolutely essential for any struggle against oppression.” (Laclau, 1999: 8) What is more intriguing is that the point of such a discovery of a discourse of struggle comes when these are not present—in other words at that political moment of aporia when we realize that we do not have a discourse of struggle and so we need to invent it. I would argue that this is one of those rare moments when critical pedagogy could become revolutionary.
To be fair, in the same page that McLaren critiques Laclau and Mouffe, he does say that it is possible to think of totality, “as a field of social relations structured by the heterogeneous and discontinuous integration of diverse spheres of social existence, every one of which is in turn structured by its own historically heterogeneous, temporally discontinuous and conflictive elements.” But here he qualifies these elements as having relative autonomy “and can be considered a particularity and singularity.” However, one could sense how McLaren, not unlike Lukács, becomes anxious over the possibility of slippage, and so he hastily qualifies his statement: “But they move within the general tendency of the whole.” After all, “We can’t think of totality as a closed structure.” (PI: 235–236)
Conclusion: The labors of criticality
While I take the liberty to engage with McLaren critically, I want to conclude this article review by insisting that the nuances that make his work are not simply essential to its study but more importantly, they give it a unique radical edge. No serious reader or student of McLaren’s could simply take any radical stance as read—and more so when this emerges from decades of activism, teaching and writing. One cannot read McLaren alla prima. At the core of McLaren’s work one finds complex questions that attest to the profound dedication by which he approaches the labors of criticality.
In this paper, I wanted to draw a distinction between McLaren and critical pedagogy for a reason: Peter McLaren’s work occupies a very special place which has grown in its specificity and character and this needs to be strongly identified, uniquely appreciated and further articulated in order to be understood. I would argue that while sustaining a huge share of what is now identified with critical pedagogy, Peter McLaren must be seen from beyond those confines as his work moves even beyond education itself.
This highlights the open and transparent way by which McLaren, as a committed critical theorist, confronts the daemons that afflict his pedagogical vocation. Pedagogy of Insurrection stands out as one of those works where the author is taking stock; looking back but also partaking of what Maxine Greene used to call futurity, a term that she borrows from Sartre, but which she gives a new value in terms of a hope and a conviction that radical change is always possible. Like Greene, McLaren attracts newer and younger audiences but equally creates new spaces for his old detractors to retain. This comes with the territory if one takes a position that is clearly stated and where the claim for freedom is not simply made, but asserted and fought for.
In Pedagogy of Insurrection, not only is McLaren stating clearly what he believes in, but he is also making a serious and deeply complex case for what he has dedicated his life. While I would not be so sure that what he approximates would eventually turn out to be the case, I do share his enthusiasm for the possibility of radical change. He sees it as almost inevitable if we seek to identify the conditions by which oppression would lose its strength. I would see such possibilities as more contingent on a continuous search, often marked by failures but also new hopes, when a possible articulation of change becomes hegemonic by dint of our realization of its own insufficiency and absence. It is a different approach, but which shares a common logic with McLaren’s—one that is dialectical in method and where the idea of the whole is asserted in terms of what determines it as a way of negating the partial.
Not unlike Lukács, McLaren is not ready to accept that we could access or approximate a notion of totality via the partial, as this may well give the semblance of passivity. This is why he states clearly: “I don’t believe that human beings are relegated to a passive role in which they are swept away in a swift current consisting of historical laws of motion, or of nature-imposed necessity.” (PI: 237) Then again this is where I would find strong agreement with him, in that an understanding of radical change has to reject the idea of necessity, taken as a groundedness imposed by the anxiety of contingency.
The point remains pedagogical, though here it is my turn to be anxious about education as a schooled affair, even when it seeks to reassure me by its critical stance. I say the issue is pedagogical because by pedagogy one must mean a larger context than one of teaching. In its original engagement with leadership and the youth, pedagogy belongs to the agonistic spaces by which dispute and struggle come to mind as forms of dialectal reasoning (i.e. as the reasoning of vernacular and communitarian democracy). It is here that I would go back to the opening citation, from Marx’s fourth thesis on Feuerbach. Critically appraising Feuerbach’s secularization of religion into an idealist structure, Marx (1845) argues that left unchanged, such a structure remains equally problematic especially when secularized. By detaching itself from itself and establishes itself “in the clouds as an independent realm,” the secular foundation finds itself dismembered and disjointed in a self-contradictory predicament of its own making. Like Marx, McLaren critiques the left by urging a close understanding of this very phenomenon. McLaren explains how in failing to realize this phenomenon, progressive educators refuse “to move beyond a reclamation of the public sphere” and embrace “an anemic and abstract conception of democracy and freedom” which means that the status quo is preserved “while reality is eroded.” (PI: 237)
So where does this leave critical pedagogy? I would suggest that the method of approach is found in Marx’s fourth thesis. Marx argues that the secular foundation itself must be understood. It must “first be understood in its contradiction.” We cannot simply remain uncritical even when secularism in the first place lies at the foundation of a critical repositioning of our philosophical and political approach to the world. What follows, according to Marx (1845), is that this foundation would then need to be “revolutionized in practice by the elimination of the contradiction.” Reflecting on this through McLaren’s critique I would argue that it is when we identify the contradictions that are holding back this foundational secularization that practice qua criticality will be revolutionized.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.