Abstract
Starting from autonomist theorist Antonio Negri’s concept of constituent power and from decolonial philosopher Enrique Dussel’s notions of obediential power and the ethics of exteriority, this study outlines key principles for democratic education in the present. The article contrasts these philosophical starting points with the work of John Dewey and offers a critique of his theory of democracy, showing that a critical conception of democracy should begin from the emphasis on relationality and collaboration that Dewey shares with Negri and Dussel, but should be developed in a way that is sensitive to the insurrectionary imagination and ethics that are foregrounded in the latter theorists. Specifying these emphases for the educational context, the author argues that we should rethink democratic education in the first instance in terms of trauma, rather than reconciliation; that we should look past familiar senses of criticality toward an affirmation of the agency of students and communities; and that we should center revolutionary desire within the framework of a pedagogy of longing.
Democracy is a vexed question in the present. Progressive and critical visions of democracy struggle with the burden of tired rhetorics of engagement. The language of democracy is appropriated continuously for efforts at empire-building. Meanwhile, democratic education is increasingly marginalized under the pressure of educational accountability regimes. This study is an intervention into this context, and an effort to specify the meaning of democratic education in the current moment. In this investigation, I start from two contemporary philosophers—and two radical philosophical traditions—to understand democracy in an alternative frame. The first of these is Antonio Negri and autonomist Marxism; my focus is on Negri’s interpretation of the concept of constituent power. My second starting point is Enrique Dussel and decolonial theory; within Dussel’s work, I focus on the notions of obediential power and the ethics of exteriority.
Negri and Dussel share an emphasis on the originary power of the multitude (or pueblo, in Dussel’s terms), from which constituted and institutional power derives. They also both foreground the revolutionary potential of relationality, a condition that Dussel analyzes in terms of a decolonial ethics. In the course of my analysis of these ideas, I offer a critique of prevailing progressive conceptions of democracy, and I outline several important philosophical starting points for democratic education in the present. I argue that the resources these two radical traditions make available for conceptualizing democracy should push us, against the image of democracy as unity and reconciliation, to rethink teaching and learning in terms of a basic (political) trauma, as well as to look past familiar senses of criticality toward an affirmation of the agency of students and communities. Building from these principles, I conclude this study with a discussion of a pedagogy of radical longing—faithful to students’ imaginations and desires—that should animate contemporary democratic education.
I develop these positions along the way by juxtaposing them with John Dewey’s conceptions of democracy and democratic education. Dewey’s ideas stand in contrast to the cheapened models of engagement that official politics offers us. He shares with Negri and Dussel a focus on communication and relationship as central criteria for democracy. Mobilizing complex processes of social coordination and organization, democracy for Dewey is an active principle, not a detached index of institutional procedures. At the same time, I argue that the ambivalence and enervation of the principle of democracy in the current moment also finds an echo in Dewey’s work. His philosophy fails to register the irreducible antagonisms that extend across social life, and forgets the revolutionary desire that works past the limits of his own project of reconstruction. To this extent, Dewey’s philosophy is partly complicit in the assimilation of democratic education into the structure of the given. By contrast, I argue that if we start from the emphasis on relationality, solidarity, and collaboration that he shares with Negri and Dussel, and yet develop this emphasis in a way that is sensitive to the insurrectionary ethics, creativity, and desire that are centered in the latter, a model of democratic education can be proposed that is responsive to the particular challenges of the historical moment.
Constituent power and the crisis of politics
The notion of constituent power, as it has been developed in the work of Antonio Negri, including in his work with Michael Hardt, is an important starting point for thinking democracy in the present (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004, 2009; Negri, 1999, 2003). Building on a long history in political philosophy of engagement with this idea, Negri understands constituent power as the force that brings political life into being—the generative power, or potenza, from which democracy springs. However, in contrast to many thinkers who focus on the way in which constituent power is absorbed into and constructs established political orders, Negri emphasizes the permanence and absoluteness of constituent power: In contrast, the paradigm of constituent power is that of a force that bursts apart, breaks, interrupts, unhinges any preexisting equilibrium and any possible continuity. Constituent power is tied to the notion of democracy as absolute power. Thus, as a violent and expansive force, constituent power is a concept connected to the social preconstitution of the democratic totality. (Negri, 1999: 11)
There are important echoes of Dewey in Negri’s arguments. Most importantly, like Dewey, Negri locates the source and meaning of democracy outside the structures of the state, electoral politics, and official advocacy with which this category is usually identified. Dewey’s criteria for democracy are also, in the first instance, social ones: The first [element] signifies not only more numerous and more varied points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The second means not only freer interaction between social groups … but change in social habit—its continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse. (Dewey, 1997a: 86–87)
Nevertheless, the notion of constituent power as articulated by Negri differs from (and presses against) Dewey’s sense of democracy in several important respects. In the first place, whereas Dewey understands richness of experience as grounding democracy and providing the rationale for processes of governance, Negri emphasizes the essential antagonism toward institutions and sovereignty that animates constituent power: Everything, in sum, sets constituent power and sovereignty in opposition, even the absolute character that both categories lay claim to: the absoluteness of sovereignty is a totalitarian concept, whereas that of constituent power is the absoluteness of democratic government. (Negri, 1999: 13)
Furthermore, the process of struggle foregrounded in the notion of constituent power is directed above all against capital itself, which is not merely a limit to creativity but, in fact, a process of absorption and transmutation of life, strength, and potenza. Just as capitalism feeds off the natural creativity of life at the level of the exploitation of labor, so too at the level of its institutions it exploits and subsumes the history-making force of constituent power’s permanent revolution. By contrast, for Dewey, the evil of class society is understood in terms of a condition of isolation. An antisocial spirit, Dewey argues, marks nations in their isolation from one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if they had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated from the interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned and unlearned. (Dewey, 1997a: 86)
Within a temporality of democracy registered as an impetuous present (Negri, 1999) rather than a simple continuity of experience (Dewey, 1997b), education needs to expose the constitutive crisis that lives as much in the habits and categories of ordinary experience as in the visible confrontations of politics itself. Education does not provoke this crisis, but rather uncovers it. Dewey’s injunction to educators to test thinking against the evidence of the world, and to connect academic work to life outside the boundaries of the school, might in this regard be pressed against itself. If constituted power, like the constituted experience of education in schooling, is written in letters of domination and assimilation, as Negri’s analysis suggests, then a democratic pedagogy will have to be directed in the first place against the given, if only to mobilize the power of relationships and collaboration that Dewey so ardently insists on. In this history—the history we in fact inhabit—the richness of experience at which Dewey’s philosophy aims can be nothing other than the richness of revolt—a rebellion against a form of rule that aims not merely to sideline constituent power, but rather to refuse and defeat it.
Obediential power and the ethics of exteriority
Negri’s elaboration of the notion of constituent power, juxtaposed with Dewey’s work, might be said to reveal the missing element of the political in the latter’s notion of democracy—where the political is understood not in the sense of the constitutional or institutional, but rather as a terrain of antagonism, insurrection, and dissensus (Rancière, 2010). On the other hand, the work of decolonial philosopher Enrique Dussel (1985, 2003, 2008), and in particular his notions of obediential power and exteriority, might be said to expose the attenuation of the ethical in Dewey’s philosophy, even if, just as is the case with Negri, there are important concerns and commitments shared by Dewey and Dussel.
For Dussel, the possibility of democracy depends on a responsibility to ethical principles that are the framework for authentic forms of intersubjectivity at the existential level as well as for civic action and governance at the level of politics. Relationships are foundational for Dussel, just as they are for Dewey. However, from Dussel’s (1985, 2003) perspective, to specify ethical relationships properly means to confront the historical facts of Eurocentrism, conquest, and cultural marginalization. Dussel argues that within western philosophy and politics, tied genealogically to imperialism, the world as totality of meaning excludes the reality and dignity of the oppressed, and this totality as Being affirms itself against the non-Being of the (indigenous, exploited, and impoverished) Other. As Dussel describes it, the true ethical moment is not that of a responsiveness to an already intelligible Other as interlocutor, but rather that of a traumatic impinging on the given of the Other as exteriority: Others reveal themselves as others in all the acuteness of their exteriority when they burst in upon us as something extremely distinct, as nonhabitual, nonroutine, as the extraordinary, the enormous (“apart from the norm”)—the poor, the oppressed. They are the ones who, by the side of the road, outside the system, show their suffering, challenging faces: “We’re hungry! We have the right to eat!” (Dussel, 1985: 43)
Likewise, in political life, the people (pueblo)—the community of the oppressed and marginalized—becomes a political actor not in being incorporated into the system, but rather in tearing down its walls, affirming the will to live against a fetishized and dominative politics (Dussel, 2008). Although for both Dussel and Negri the source of politics is the transformational power of the pueblo/multitude, Dussel argues further that the liberatory potential (potentia) of the people must realize itself on the terrain of feasibility and practicality, and become institutionalized in some form (potestas). The challenge is for potestas to remain accountable to the pueblo and its liberatory vocation. The form of this democratic accountability, this refusal of the fetishization of politics, is a power that “commands by obeying”—what Dussel (2008) calls “obediential power.” Fulfilling the mission of obediential power means being attentive to a call and vocation in which “the one who ‘calls’ is the community, the people, and the one who is called feels ‘summoned’ to assume the responsibility of service” (Dussel, 2008: 25).
For both Dewey and Dussel, democracy crucially means overcoming social distance and division. As is often remarked, central to Dewey’s vision of education as a democratic process is his emphasis on the way that it can overcome differences and bring people from diverse backgrounds together within the framework of a common experience (Moses and Chang, 2006). For Dewey, the overcoming of distance and division does not just follow from an arbitrary throwing together of learners, but is rather the result of engagement in a “constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience” (Dewey, 1997a: 76), a process that remakes both impulses and desires (Dewey, 1997b), and that works at both the individual and institutional levels. Likewise, for Dussel, liberatory struggle depends on a solidarity that also aims to overcome distance, though in a way that is different from that described by Dewey. Solidarity, for Dussel (1985), refers back to a primordial condition of proximity (in the first instance, of mother and child). Both romantic love and comradeship, for instance, work across the distances that organize the world to recall this original proximity—not the ontic closeness of separate beings (or of separate bodies in a classroom), but the ethical closeness of subjects in “face-to-face” relation (Dussel, 1985: 19).
Furthermore, this ethics of proximity means more than particular persons encountering each other; it extends to encompass the social, historical, and physical environment. Thus, human beings remake themselves in their interventions in and in their responsibility to their material surroundings. For Dewey, this worldly dimension is represented in his expanded notion of practical or industrial education, an education that refuses to divide mind and body. On the other hand, Dussel (2008) highlights this practical dimension in terms of a basic responsibility to the reproduction of life in economic, cultural, and ecological terms. Dewey’s empiricism is echoed in Dussel’s (2008: 20) insistence, against an idealistic orientation to politics, on “the heterogeneous differentiation of functions through institutions that allow power to become real, empirical and feasible.” The space of democracy is in this way at once transformative and practical, its ambitiousness guided by a responsiveness to materiality.
However, just as Negri’s work exposes a basic antagonism—between the constituent and the constituted—that cuts across the space of politics and which Dewey’s account obscures, Dussel points to the ethical space subtending politics as a space of confrontation and radical struggle, rather than merely of negotiation and coordination. In a history given by imperialism and alienation, the ethical recognition of the Other is at the same the intrusion of exteriority into the world as given (see also Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2011). For Dussel, the oppressed stand out against and beyond their assimilation by the system. In this context, the epiphany in which others are recognized (against their reduction to mere instruments) is not an indifferent step forward for democracy, but rather a traumatic interruption of the sense and order of Being: “As other than the system, that one is beyond Being. Inasmuch as Being is and non-Being is not, the other is not. If the other speaks, provokes, or demands, it is the verbal expression of non-Being” (Dussel, 1985: 51). From Dussel’s perspective, then, the social coordination and control that remain desiderata for Dewey within a process of reconstruction (by citizens and/or students) must rather be devastated by the ordeal of ethical recognition. Put another way, for Dewey, education reconstructs the inadequate architecture of society, opening passages where there were only closed spaces and letting light in against the dimness of inertia and prejudice. But for Dussel (1985), this house of the social, indeed of Being itself, rests on the foundation of the non-Being of the Other. Justice does not mean improving the construction of this system, but rather breaking its beams and shattering its windows, which offer to the privileged inhabitants only a reflection of themselves. This western philosophical and cultural projection of the centered self, even as it seems to insist on growth and change, remains a repetition of Being and thus a repetition of the assimilative truth of conquest.
Dussel’s obediential power is opposed to the corruption that comes with fetishized power, which is power for its own sake, enclosed in bureaucracy and separated from the people. By contrast, from the vantage point of Dewey’s (1997a: 87) criterion for democracy, in which “more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond,” authoritarianism is to be rejected because of its paucity of opportunities for relationship, communication, and collaboration. In an authoritarian system, “stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided” (Dewey, 1997a: 84). However, this argument ignores the active violence of institutional power, which usurps and corrupts the foundation of politics in the people. The everyday contraction of politics to a set of institutional (especially electoral) procedures is not merely a truncation of democracy (West, 2009), but an active denial of the pueblo that is the true source of politics (Dussel, 2008). This is more than a matter of pointing to a terrain that Dewey tends to underemphasize. From the standpoint of the oppressed global “periphery,” the very virtues of the center, including the norms of established democratic life, are expressions of a dominative ontology and a fetishized politics—in Dussel’s (1985: 57) terms, a “legality of perversion.” As history has shown, even the Deweyan and progressive impulse to challenge division and stratification can easily be made to cohere with an alienating rationale of mere diversity, as opposed to an insistence on the ethical and political alterity of the Other. By contrast, the category of the pueblo expresses the political and hegemonic agency of the oppressed. Otherness is not mere difference here, but rather exteriority and anti-power, as the starting point for genuine political creativity and transformation.
Rethinking democratic education
The accounts I have described share with Dewey and progressive education more broadly an emphasis on the centrality of relationships to democracy, as well as a focus on cooperation and solidarity as foundational to social life. They differ from him, however, in understanding democratic collaboration as essentially insurrectionary and partisan—that is, fundamentally oriented against the world as it is given and fundamentally accountable to the oppressed and exploited multitude. Taken together, the arguments of Negri and Dussel propose a reframing of the “conjoint communicated experience” that is the Deweyan criterion for both democracy and education, and it is to the implications of my investigation for education that I now turn. Here I offer a critique of aspects of Dewey’s work while also outlining key principles of a critical pedagogy grounded in the notions of constituent power and decolonial ethics. This means considering the meanings of relationship and democracy in the space of teaching, and specifying what are in the first instance political concepts in pedagogical terms.
Against reconciliation
For Dewey (1997a: 123), the progressive classroom coordinates individual and social development in a unified project of becoming: “It is the particular task of education at the present time to struggle in behalf of an aim in which social efficiency and personal culture are synonyms instead of antagonists.” The effective curriculum work of the teacher, which sets out a flexible and yet organized educational environment, allows for a multilevel process of integration: integration of a student’s personal capacities (versus one-sided training); integration of different students within the collective space of learning (versus an antisocial and antidemocratic individualism); and integration of local and present interests with social and long-term aims (versus an irrational provincialism). In this way, Dewey arguably stages in his educational program a fantasy of reconciliation. The progressive Deweyan classroom aims to reveal the unity of the apparent antinomies of modern experience: the individual and social, for instance, do not come to a compromise in his account, or collide toward a Hegelian synthesis, but are rather revealed as ultimately identical. Thus, the control exerted by the rules of a game is not a limit on the freedom of the individual child, Dewey (1997b) argues, but rather the condition and occasion of this freedom, since individual agency can only exist in social context. One might even say that, for Dewey, the exercise of individual freedom expresses this social organization.
Thinking education in terms of constituent and obediential power means challenging this emphasis on integration and reconciliation. The accounts of Negri and Dussel start from a principle of antagonism that not only opposes the rulers to the ruled, but also traverses internally the body of the collective subject of the pueblo/multitude—or, in the educational context, the students. For instance, in an extended analysis, Negri argues that the revolutionary force of the early Soviet workers’ councils was not in serving as building blocks of socialist society and government, but rather in mobilizing and organizing revolutionary desire—a desire directed against constituted power and the state itself. To the assimilation, by the constituted power of the state, of moments of revolutionary mobilization, “the communists must always answer no; the movement must continue and go beyond itself” (Negri, 1999: 292). Insurrectionary agency and creativity are in this way in fundamental tension with sites of even “radical” institutional or constituted power, and thus, in order to stay faithful to the gap of revolutionary desire, they must go beyond themselves and aim for the very abolition of constituted power.
Likewise, the group that is the teacher and students together cannot aim simply to actualize the full potentials of the classroom environment, to integrate and coordinate them in the manner suggested by Dewey. Rather, this group must aim to surpass itself toward a set of possibilities already disallowed by the educational institution. The classroom, as the site of constituted and institutional power, does not just hamper the possibilities of teaching and learning, but rather absorbs, exploits, and assimilates them (Lewis, 2012; Means, 2011). The university, for instance, seduces us with the promise of free inquiry, all the avenues of which are nevertheless labeled and catalogued within its diverse programs and faculties (Edu-Factory Collective, 2009). By contrast, where learning is alive and enlivening, it is directed against education as unity and reconciliation. This is more than a matter of a contradiction between authentic inquiry and the acquisition of the symbolic capital of educational credentials. Even the hum of the progressive classroom, at once organized and unpredictable, ultimately expresses the school and society of which it is a part. By contrast, the insurrectionary classroom must imagine and instigate a rupture, both social and educational. The kinds of critical conversation that it opens up should enact a break with the reason of the school, and create the possibility of an unruly and autonomous teaching and learning (Slater and Griggs, 2015). Thus, to the extent that teaching is determined by a decided set of institutional possibilities, democratic pedagogy must in the first instance also be directed against education itself.
Pedagogy and trauma
The temporality in Dewey of democratic education is best captured in his principle of continuity of experience. The principle of continuity, he argues, means that educational environments should reckon with and respond to accumulated experiences in the past, while at the same time reorganizing the understandings and identities that have been their result with a view to opening possibilities for further growth (Dewey, 1997b). The principle of continuity in Dewey is closely connected to the principle of reconstruction, which challenges the received wisdom of the past, the accumulated habits of students, and the gulf that separates different classes and communities. Reconstruction is more than a simple gradualism that tinkers with ideas and institutions until they are more or less perfected. Nevertheless, the principle of continuity works as a theoretical and practical limit to this process of reorganization. Continuity establishes a temporal coherence; it integrates past, present, and future; and it aims to liberate powers that exist as potentials in the individual and society. This temporal coherence corresponds to the underlying relationship between Dewey’s vision of democratic society and actually existing western modernity. While Dewey outlines a political and pedagogical rearrangement that would reshape this modernity, the principle of continuity nevertheless demands that the new must grow from the inner trajectory and possibilities of the given.
The reframing of the notions of relationship and democracy that I have outlined in this article suggests a temporality for pedagogy that is very different. Against the notion of continuity, the radical time of politics that emerges from the autonomist and decolonial accounts I have considered in this article might be understood in terms of the notion of trauma. This term is popularly used to refer in a general way to painful experiences. However, the Greek root means, more specifically, a wound or blow—a sense that foregrounds the objective register, whereas the popular usage emphasizes the subjective. Thus, ethics, for Dussel (1985), depends on the effect of the shock of recognition of the Other—the impinging on Being by non-Being or exteriority, as I have described. This is a kind of ontological trauma that is much more than subjective; it points to the abyss that grounds subjectivity (Žižek, 1999). Pedagogy, as a relational and ethical project, must engage the dynamics of this traumatic recognition, a recognition that absolutely confronts settled forces and conditions. This does not mean that democratic education is always concerned with “revolution” rather than “reform,” in a narrow sense, but rather that we have to recognize that democracy involves a passage through an essential moment of crisis.
In terms of the interactions between students and teacher(s), we can recognize this trauma within the transformation produced by dialogue. Dialogue aims not at reconciliation, but rather at the ordeal of intersubjectivity (Freire, 1996). Dialogue does not mean submerging interlocutors within an undifferentiated unity, but rather confronting them with the upsurge of alterity, and demanding from them an extension of self toward this otherness. As Dussel (1985: 63) puts it, in the moment of recognition that is the condition of dialogue, “suddenly the glassy stare of the instrumentalized is transformed into a penetrating gaze.” Dussel highlights the shock of this encounter, and the way that the settled identity of the privileged is disrupted, even injured, by the gaze of the oppressed. In the same way, recent work on the dynamics of whiteness in education points to the distance and defenses that white teachers place in the way of recognition of and solidarity with students of color (see, for example, Leonardo, 2009; Picower, 2009), and shows the risk and stakes of these encounters. These defenses aim to ward off the ordeal of recognition and the ethical responsibility it implies—since to defy them is dangerous to the teacher’s settled identity. It may seem incongruous to claim that everyday interactions in classrooms or other educational spaces are, or should be, marked by such moments of risk, but that is what is demanded by a truly radical and ethical pedagogy (De Lissovoy, 2010).
Just as Dewey means reconstruction to refer both to the reorganization of impulses in the individual student and to the reorganization of purposes in society more broadly, in the same way the particular sense of trauma that I outline here should be understood as a social and cultural process just as much as an individual one. In education, this process is importantly registered on the terrain of curriculum. By curriculum I mean the epistemological underpinnings of what is taught just as much as the educational resources and environments themselves. It is at this point that the decolonial problematic most clearly touches down on the terrain of teaching. Cultural domination takes place crucially on the terrain of knowledge; in education, this means a “pedagogical alienation” for marginalized students which can even be felt as a “cultural death” (Dussel, 1985: 90). From the standpoint of an ethics of liberation, the curricular response cannot be mere reorganization. Rather, the decolonial option proposes a different epistemological order, and disrupts the claims of the dominant (Mignolo, 2011). To propose a curriculum unmoored from Eurocentric exceptionalism means displacing the “center” (Dussel, 1998); it means privileging the projects and desires—the sciences, literatures, and arts—of the “periphery” (McCarthy, 1998). The decolonial option presents a significant challenge to progressive educational philosophy to the extent that it decenters the latter’s central epistemological and cultural supports.
The meaning of criticality
The progressive conception of democracy in politics and education should be juxtaposed with a properly critical conception; nevertheless, the meaning of the critical has to be specified. In this regard, the theoretical resources I have drawn on here also press on familiar approaches to critical education and their conceptions of the relationships that organize teaching and learning. These tensions can be instructive for our consideration of Dewey himself.
For instance, the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (1996, 2005) and the tradition that has followed him points beyond the reorganization of impulses and understandings that Dewey proposes toward a more radical project of emancipation. Importantly, the liberation of the oppressed in the Freirean tradition requires and starts from the intervention of the teacher or organic intellectual. From the standpoint of Negri’s (1999) analysis of constituent power, however, the constituted power of institutional agents, including teachers, derives ultimately from the originary power of the multitude. This fundamental creativity can be inflected and organized by educators and leaders, but it does not depend on them for its emergence or effectivity. While Negri’s work tends at times to be excessively enthusiastic about this autonomous agency, it does propose an interrogation of the “epistemological curiosity” (Freire, 1998) that places the critical teacher/leader, in an epistemological sense, in an advanced position relative to the students. Without abolishing the figure of the teacher (in the manner of Rancière, 1991, or Illich, 1970), Negri’s work challenges critical educators to be more attentive to the centrality and agency of students themselves, and to learn even more profoundly “to speak by listening,” as Freire (1998: 104) puts it.
Similarly, the permanent revolution of constituent power extends upwards through the register of epistemological authority, challenging the notion of science upon which both Deweyan progressivism and critical education have sought to establish their practice. For Dewey, science offers a method for thinking itself, on which pedagogical experiences should be modeled. This method passes sequentially through the moments of “perplexity,” “conjectural anticipation,” “careful survey,” “elaboration of the tentative hypothesis,” and “testing the hypothesis” (Dewey, 1997a: 150). On the other hand, for critical pedagogy, the alternative science of ideology critique lifts teaching and learning out of the realm of the merely ingenuous (Freire, 1998; McLaren, 2007). However, just as the position of epistemological advancement that these approaches reserve for teachers risks obscuring the agency of students, so too does the emphasis on the authority of a scientific method potentially risk obscuring the primacy of revolutionary desire (Dean, 2012)—as well as the shock of the ethical encounter, highlighted by Dussel (1985), between teacher and student—as the criterion for radical education. Love is not simply a prerequisite in this regard, but rather the essence of method itself, apart from which the methodological science of educationalists fades into a dry recipe.
From this perspective, criticality has to make its way past the negative toward a radical affirmation of students and communities. The Deweyan and Freirean dialectics of democracy aim at a properly educated subject of praxis; this subject is understood to be the end product of enrollment into an educational program of citizenship and conscientization. However, while not denying the central role played by educators and leaders, we should recognize that the true author and subject of democracy is the multitude itself. Teachers, in accordance with Dussel’s (2008: 18) notion of obediential power, which recognizes that “there is no other subject of power except the community,” ought to be fundamentally responsible to this original agency in students—not simply as a raw capacity that waits to be effectively molded by the teacher’s understanding, but rather as the creative power that is already organizing the occasion of teaching and learning.
Conclusion: democracy and the pedagogy of longing
The foregoing discussion suggests that democratic education must involve the shock of encounter—with the Other, with desire, with the impossible. The principles of constituent power and exteriority point to an erotics of democracy in which love pulls subjects toward each other and toward a revolutionary project—and beyond the placid transactionalism of prevailing liberal conceptions of democracy. While Dewey’s account of democracy is powerful, positing a shared space of interaction and communication that extends beyond familiar definitions of civic engagement, he nevertheless does not engage the revolutionary and libidinal horizon of politics and teaching. If politics and pedagogy depend on being faithful to radical desire (which, in the Lacanian sense, is always a desire for desire, a faithfulness to the gap that lives within the given), Dewey betrays this desire in his preference for a process of reconstruction that reorganizes reality (the subjective reality of learners and the objective reality of society) without confronting the antagonism between constituted power and the desire of the multitude. By contrast, the ethical and insurrectionary projects of Negri and Dussel are animated by a desire that demands this confrontation, an erotics of democracy that remembers the necessity of love as revolutionary struggle.
Democracy means nothing if it does not engage subjects in a demand for what reality refuses. This is the indispensable kernel of democratic teaching. When we speak of democratic education, we ought to speak of a pedagogy of longing. An education for democracy is an education that presents to students what has been refused, and invites them to remember their need for and commitment to it. This pedagogy seeks to uncover the ways in which we are fundamentally vulnerable to each other (Butler, 2004), and the ways in which we must desire the end of the processes of domination that exploit these vulnerabilities. To speak of longing is to speak not merely of a personal disposition, but rather of a collective and political project. In his notion of communion, Freire (1996) proposes a project of this kind; however, to frame critical pedagogy in terms of longing is to emphasize how the communion of teaching catches us up in the most intimate of ways, as well as how it immediately confronts the contrary commandment—from power—to brokenness and isolation.
The proposals of Dewey and progressive education already importantly move the center of gravity of teaching away from abstract lessons in history or civics to engaged and collaborative experiences that mobilize the democratic capacities of students. However, a critical and decolonial pedagogy of democracy, as I have outlined it, would invite students to additional and riskier collaborations, in which not merely their habits of mind are unsettled, but also their suffering is witnessed, their anger is awakened, and their desire is provoked. It is important to acknowledge that students do not require educators to give them permission for the condition of engagement that I evoke here. However, teachers can crucially participate in furthering this process, and can lend important resources to it. Curriculum, for instance, remains a crucial site of decolonial contestation (Paraskeva, 2011), and efforts (by teachers and faculty) to decenter the western and northern authority that has anchored curriculum show that basic reconfigurations of the politics of knowledge in education are possible. Furthermore, neoliberalism’s increasingly frenetic siphoning of resources from public schooling and its assault on instruction through processes of accountability is a crucial generative theme for teachers to respond to (Au, 2011). In this case, democratic education confronts its antagonist immediately in the ordering of the experience of school itself. Beyond simply exposing these processes, democratic pedagogy should incite the imagination of students toward a different kind of teaching and learning, and articulate, with them, a praxis that can materialize this imagination.
Democratic education cannot mean just the inculcation of certain orientations and dispositions. It has to participate in crystallizing for students the contradictions that set the basic conditions for experience: the contradiction between dead and living labor (i.e. between capital and human imagination); the contradiction between the Being of the powerful and the (non-)Being of the excluded and erased; and the contradiction between an ethics of deferral to constituted or fetishized power and an ethics of insurrection (faithful to constituent and obediential power). Beneath the traffic of opinions that constitutes what is conventionally understood as politics, the antagonisms just mentioned produce the real terrain of the political. We ought to feel the real injuries that these contradictions and this struggle visit upon us, underneath the salves that power’s false generosity provides, and we ought to feel (which is perhaps even more of an ordeal) the real desire that captures us when we begin to experience transformation as possibility and actuality. In this pedagogy, the power of collectivity, communication, and relationship becomes concrete rather than abstract, and shifts from an ideal to a material, and dangerous, practice.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.