Abstract
Despite best efforts to the contrary, obscenity oozes out from under the rugs of “polite” schooling and “tidy” society. In this post-qualitative inquiry, the authors pursue questions in defense of pedagogies of obscenity. In what ways do educators fail to educate when they eschew obscenity, understand shame and disgust as opposite to curiosity, and seek to teach in safe and sanitized classrooms? How might obscenity be educative? Drawing on their classroom experiences, the authors engage Žižek and Gallop in an analysis of (potentially) offensive classroom practices and events. They conclude that (Žižek and Gallop’s) obscenity might enable scholars and educators to generate critical classroom spaces that travel a delicate line between offense, discomfort, and learning. The authors suggest that there is much to defend in a pedagogy of obscenity, and that the value of obscenity may be learning to live and work more critically with(in) and against the perversions of education.
Obscenity is not new to philosophy, human folklore, or the classroom (Holt, 2008). Some human cave paintings and art artifacts are of sex organs and sexual acts, and the earliest of these may be nearly 40,000 years old (White et al., 2012). The oldest remaining record of “dirty jokes,” Philogelos, is a book that dates back to the 4th or 5th century AD and includes jokes we might find funny and/or obscene today: “‘I had your wife for nothing,’ someone sneered at a wag. ‘More fool you. I’m her husband, I have to have the ugly bitch. You don’t’” (quoted in Holt, 2008: 13). While we cannot speak decidedly for what ancient civilizations found obscene, there is no doubt that contemporary teachers, texts, and educational institutions deem some artifacts, images, ideas, forms of humor, and topics more or less appropriate for sharing in classrooms (see, for example, Ravitch, 2003).
Despite best efforts to the contrary, obscenity oozes out from under the rugs of “polite” schooling and “tidy” society. Obscenity (also in classroom contexts) has been with us for a long time, yet contemporary forms of obscenity might look quite different from the above cave paintings and joke books. In addition, contemporary safe spaces have changed. We, educators, have many experiences where even the most “safe” and antiseptic lesson plans led classes into moments of obscenity, offense, and discomfort. From a theoretical standpoint, Alcorn (2012), drawing on psychoanalytic theories of affect (for example, Sedgwick, 1995, 2003; Tomkins, 1962, 1963), argues that offensive moments in the classroom can provoke deep-seated biological responses of shame and disgust, which directly inhibit learning—that is, when taking in an offensive thought or belief, an involuntary shame/disgust response to “vomit out” prevents meaningful engagement with potentially productive ideas.
In this post-qualitative philosophical engagement with and reading of data (see, for example, Lather, 2013; Lather and St Pierre, 2013; Van Cleave, 2017), we engage and interrogate Žižek (for example, 2000, 2008) and Gallop (1988) to work through pedagogies of obscenity in general and our experiences with obscenity in the classroom in particular. This article is not a philosophical treatise on obscenity but an exploration into what obscenity did/does or might do in educational contexts. In this way, we put the concept of obscenity to “work” (see also Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) in/on our classroom experiences, pedagogical practices, and reflections. A variety of obscenities—the kinds that ooze up in classrooms—are available for this type of reflective analysis. We focus on two broad forms of obscenity in two parts following our introduction—Part 1: profanity, sex, and obscenities of the body (Gallop) and Part 2: bigotry, sexism, and “politically correct” political and discursive obscenities (Žižek)—as starting points for our inquiry.
The aim of our inquiry is to pursue questions about obscenity and learning in order to explore what might be said (if anything) in defense of pedagogies of obscenity. Reflecting on our experiences with obscenity in the classroom, we consider ways we might fail to educate when creating a clean, safe space for learning means eschewing obscenity, and when we understand shame and disgust as opposite to curiosity and learning (see also Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2015). Following Strohminger (2014: 485), who discusses academia’s current fascination with “disgust,” we wonder about the excitatory nature of the obscene: “Does sexual arousal make us insensate to the stimuli that usually give rise to disgust, or do disgusting stimuli flip to become sexually exciting? Do flashes of disgust themselves become appealing when above a certain threshold of arousal?”
Monstrosity (of obscenity) in the classroom
Drawing on Žižek, we understand obscenity as part of a pre-ontological monstrousness. Beneath the surface of culture and society rests a pre-ontological domain that is monstrous yet necessary, productive yet obscene (see, for example, Krečič and Žižek, 2016). However, obscenity is often forbidden, hidden, and seemingly absent (yet present) in many classrooms (Sobre-Denton and Simonis, 2011) and, as such, obscenity blurs boundaries between forbidden or monstrous spaces and safe spaces.
Žižek and Kearney (2003) can help scholars and educators rethink monstrosity and its purposes or functions. Strangers, Gods, and monsters are all names for the experience of alterity and otherness within and amongst us (Kearney, 2003). Monstrosity is likely to bring forward experiences of novelty, strangeness, and namelessness, and, as such, monstrosity cannot be completely recognized or be recognizable. “Sublime is that mark of the unforeseeable and incommensurable which flouts our rules of reason, and ultimately reduces us to silence” (Kearney, 2003: 92) or to a pause or hesitation. Monstrosity may also attract the foreign and the otherness in teachers and students, becoming their “Others par excellence” (Kearney, 2003: 117), surrogates and substitutes for forbidden life. Monsters might also function as potential surrogates of the self (see also Baade and Hightower, 2011). To Žižek, this monstrous reality rests at the core of us as a species. The monstrous in pedagogy would include obscenities that pass beyond acceptable and normative limits of educational practices and discourses. The monstrous violates expressible and pleasant subjectivities by troubling and questioning positions of the moral teacher, ethical educational content, the good student, or acceptable classroom interaction. Krečič and Žižek (2016) note that “the sublime pleasure is a pleasure in unpleasure, while the monstrous generates only unpleasure, but, as such, it provides enjoyment” (63). This lust/pleasure distances the subject from purposiveness and provokes disgust. “Disgust arises when the border that separates the inside of our body from its outside is violated, when the inside penetrates out, as in the case of blood or shit” (64). Furthermore, Krečič and Žižek draw from Kristeva and her notion of “abject,” stating: “what we experience in such situations is not just a disgusting object but something much more radical: the disintegration of the very ontological coordinates that enable me to locate an object into external reality out there” (69). The distinction between the object and subject, myself and others, becomes blurred and unclear, simultaneously producing fear.
According to Krečič and Žižek (2016) individuals deal with “abject” in different ways—from ignorance and avoidance to disgust, fear, and constraining it to private and secluded (safe) places (toilets, hospitals, bedrooms). For example, in parts of India, Hindus defecate in public without anyone commenting on or documenting their squatting bodies and the feces they leave behind. Krečič and Žižek (2016) explain that, in the example of Hindus, “it is blunt foreclosure that voids those acts and objects from conscious representation” (72). This foreclosure appears as a hyphen or virgule, “allowing the two universes of filth and of prohibition to brush lightly against each other without necessarily being identified as such, as object and as law” (72). We wonder what happens when filth and prohibition rub against each other in educational spaces, and what it takes for obscenity to “produce” in the classroom. What forms of knowing, what critiques, might be enabled if we summon the obscenities of the monstrous to work against our given and normative social orders? What productive disruptions might this allow in the classroom? What if we welcome rather than spend so much time gentrifying the monstrous, and hiding (from) the spaces that emerge in our teaching when offense and obscenity ooze out from under the rugs, rocks, and closets?
Pedagogy as pederasty or contamination
Welcoming the monstrous could offer opportunities for teachers and learners to break down normative pedagogies as “clean” or “pure” (safe) educational encounters. Gallop (1988) addresses obscenity as defiling innocence and dispelling ignorance through a Sadean framework of pedagogy. According to Gallop: “the fact that the teacher and student are traditionally of the same sex but of different ages contributes to the interpretation that the student has no otherness, nothing different from the teacher, simply less” (43). As is typical of De Sade and Žižek, such metaphors bring philosophy and pedagogy into the bedroom, subsuming the psychosexual into a game of philosophy and learning: One of Sade’s contributions to pedagogical technique may be the institution, alongside the traditional oral examination, of an anal examination … pederasty is undoubtedly a useful paradigm for classic European pedagogy. A greater man penetrates a lesser man with his knowledge. The student is empty, a receptacle for the phallus; the teacher is the phallic fullness of knowledge. (43)
What follows from Gallop and learning-as-defilement is a loss of cleanness and innocence in exchange for knowledge-as-pathogen—knowledge that infects bodies through various invasive modes of transmission. For example: “I invade your body with obscenity and you grant me your attention. I shock you into opening up, putting down your laptop, and turning off your cellphone.” The student has just taken in something “real” and they take notice. Yet what happens when we work to undermine the teacher’s mastery over knowledge and subsequently to unmaster desire, to realize that “good teaching” is not always “clean teaching” and that to truly be discursive we must also engage in the monstrous? Does obscenity disrupt this desire or is the position of “good teacher” required in order to be obscene? How do we begin to open up ourselves and our classrooms to obscenity? And why should we?
We are exactly that kind of bad
As Vonnegut opened Slaughterhouse-Five, this all happened more or less. It definitely started at a conference and certainly at night—later than it should have been, as conferences all start pretty early. We were all slightly inebriated—some more than others—among friends and in our comfort zones. As the night progressed, our talk became less and less academic and more and more casual. We got to talking about classroom experiences and obscenity. It was liberating to learn that one of us once said “fuck” in the classroom and no one seemed to mind. We laughed when one of us recounted a story of farting loudly in the middle of a lecture. We commiserated on times when our students did and said things we found offensive, marginalizing, and/or hateful, and expressed our desires to silence those students. That night blossomed into our year-long collaboration on obscenity in the classroom, in which we wrote about, exchanged, and discussed obscene classroom moments. In our conversations, we connected those moments to political and pedagogical discussions and events (academic freedom, pussy-grabbing presidents, debates about free speech versus safe spaces, trigger warnings, spikes in hate crimes across the USA, etc.), and theoretical readings. Throughout, we asked: If obscenity happens, how might we defend its presence in the classroom?
We pursue this question by engaging and interrogating Žižek (for example, 2000, 2008) and Gallop (1988) in a two-part analysis of potentially offensive examples of our classroom practices and events. In Part 1, we focus on bodily obscenities. We draw on Žižek’s (2008) provocative account of torture in In Defense of Lost Causes to interrogate a classroom teacher we position as responsible for an obscene classroom moment—an intrusive menstruating body—and ask her to defend herself against our (obscene) interrogations. We use Gallop, Žižek, and Massumi to help us with our interrogations, asking what right she had to be obscene and to shock. We explore the ways in which shock connects us and our students to the pre-ontological monstrous, and the possibilities that connection may open and foreclose.
In Part 2, we focus on “politically correct” political and discursive obscenities in a narrative monologue written by a fictional college teacher. Through this monologue, we explore and push up against the boundaries of obscene and safe spaces, and venture into the possible limits of our defense of pedagogies of obscenity. We pursue the limits of opening up our classrooms to the monstrous, including teachers’ power(lessness) to do so, what happens when filth and prohibition rub up against each other, and the limits of the kinds of pederasteries we might wish to pursue, promote, and/or defend. We conclude that Žižek’s and Gallop’s vulgarity might move scholars away from purified and sanitized discourses and practices, enabling educators to consider and generate critical classroom spaces that travel a delicate line between offense, discomfort, safety, and learning.
The events in Parts 1 and 2 are those we shared and discussed during our year-long collaborative post-qualitative inquiry into disgust. The events are from the school/educational lives of the authors but, at the same time, these events could be “fictional,” since fictional events carry the same potential of becoming, happening, and affecting as “real,” remembered, or documented events. The “empirical” possibility of monstrous, obscene, and potentially disturbing bodily events, including interrogations (Part 1) and the use of safe words (Part 2), happening in the classroom exists in every educational space where bodies and body particles interact, and filth and prohibition make contact.
Part 1. Interrogating pedagogical body particles
In Part 1, we (“not-so-innocent witnesses”) draw from pride-and-ego-down interrogation techniques that are used to attack and insult the egos of detainees. Pride-and-ego-down interrogation enables us to bring forward voices and perspectives of possible disgust that might not become accessible in order to interrogate the various perspectives of our obscene classroom intruder—the menstruating body.
Interrogation techniques have been used by the military, law enforcement, and counterterrorism for a long time to elicit objective and difficult information from detainees, prisoners, and sources of various kinds (see Kelly et al., 2013; MacCauley, 2007). More specifically, the US Army’s “Field manual” (Department of the Army, 1992) characterizes the pride-and-ego-down approach as attacking the detainee’s personal worth and pride—their loyalty, intelligence, appearance, and abilities. The purpose is to force the detainee to defend their abilities and, by doing so, they will reveal sensitive information. Similarly, in this article, we use interrogation techniques against ourselves, our thinking, and educational experiences to “self-question” the worth of our knowledge and memories. The interrogation questions are ours, our peer students’, the comments of our teachers and educators, and memories and notes of educational discourses shaping schooling experiences locally and internationally.
The menstruating body and the female teacher producing menstrual blood and flows commit a crime against the civilized institution of education and against a neutral, pure, and clean teacher body. Pride-and-ego-down interrogation techniques assault the ego of the menstruating body—not a single menstruating body, but a menstruating body actualized differently in different contexts and continuously shifting through intervals of movement. “It is across intervals of intensive movements that the body becomes something else” (Massumi, 2002: 107).
The menstruating female teacher body is also a medicalized and examined (as reproductive, fertile, and physiologically average) body. Gallop (1988) draws parallels between educational and medical examination. For example, students’ virginity is a sign of purity and educational possibility, as well as an indication of sexual beginning (absence). Through examination, authorities can combine bleeding with the penetration of hymen. However, the flow of menstrual blood is more complicated. “Menstrual blood does not wait for a leader or driver to exact it; so it renders the examination inexact”: The pedagogical examination which attempts to regulate the student on the basis of external rules, of the teacher’s rules, is messed up by the régles, the rules, flowing from within. The bodily, fluid, material, feminine sense of régles undermines the Sadian pederastic pedagogue’s attempt at exact examination, at subjugation of the pupil to his rational, masterful rules. (Gallop, 1988: 52) Menstruating Body 1 Bright, fresh green pants. Teacher’s pant color resembles fashion from local department store in a rural town. Bright-green color is also a color of living, a color of biology. Bright green blending with red. Spread legs across the table. Menstrual period has started today without any prior signs. No stomach ache or cramping. Just blood. Blood gushing through green pants creating bloody stains on the teacher’s desk. Does somebody notice? Nobody notices. Continue and carry on. Pretend and forget. For now. Interrogation questions: Did you not notice that your teacher body was read by students as a menstruating body? Did you think you were an attractive woman for some teenagers in your class? Did you enjoy displaying your menstrual blood? Did you enjoy foregrounding your sexuality, even though you knew about the expected and anticipated neutrality of teacher bodies? Did you enjoy the spread of blood across your crotch? Did you experience pleasure? In its spatial aspect, the body without an image is the involution of subject–object relations into the body of the observer and of that body into itself. Call the spatiality proper to the body without an image quasi corporeality. (57) Menstruating Body 2 “Irmeli cannot dress like a student because she is a teacher,” students whispered. She was a well-liked, student-centered, and beloved middle school biology teacher. She inspired her students and taught them with passion. She had great communication skills that she also used to flirt with male teachers, especially a handsome male chemistry teacher she shared an office with. Irmeli always began her morning lesson by a lecture while sitting on the teacher’s desk with her legs spread. One fall day, it did not take long before Irmeli’s green pants were noticed by all the teenage students in the class. She had one large red-brown stain in the crotch. Her menstrual pads had leaked and blood stained the desk. Maybe she did not have a pad. The location and color of the stain clearly signified menstrual blood. The desk became a stage for display and revelation of womanhood. Irmeli did not seem to notice that the students stared at her pants and the bloody desk. Irmeli sat on the desk, talked, taught, laughed, and finished her lesson. Later, Irmeli wore the same pants again with a stain less visible but always present to the students. Irmeli had become a spectacle and her pants continued signifying womanhood and menstrual cycle again and again. Irmeli’s body and bodily fluids continued to present themselves in different forms for different student bodies. Her body put forward a transformative motion between one bodily state (non-sexual teacher body) and a radically different one (bleeding and menstruating woman). Interrogation questions: Why would you wear the bright-green jeans again if you knew you had a stain on them? Why would you let your blood stain the table if you felt wetness in your pants and you noticed your pad leaking? Why would you sit on the table if a chair was available? Did you think about crossing your legs and covering the blood stains? Did you cramp? Menstruating Body 3 During women’s menstrual cycle, the lining of the uterus thickens to get ready for pregnancy. During the period, the body sheds the uterus lining along with blood. The amount of blood and fluid lost is usually between four and twelve teaspoons each cycle. A normal period lasts between two and seven days. The amount and color of blood can vary. Bright-red blood indicates that it has been produced by the body recently. Women may see brighter-red blood if they have a lighter flow or frequent periods. Dark blood is essentially older blood. This means it has been stored in the uterus longer and had more time to break down. Many women notice darker-red blood when they first wake in the morning. Sometimes, when bright-red blood mixes with cervical fluid it can appear an almost orange color with red flecks. Heavy bleeding is one of the most common problems women report to their doctors. Many women become accustomed to heavy periods, considering them to be normal. Over time, though, the excess monthly blood loss can lead to anemia, potentially causing weakness or fatigue. Generally speaking, one out of every five women has heavy periods. However, many women do not know that they can get treated for it. Others do not seek out help because they are too embarrassed to talk with a doctor about their problem. Interrogation questions: Have you ever heard that pads and tampons leak quite frequently? Why did you not consider extra protection and frequent change of pads? Have you ever talked to your doctor about the heavy days? Are you periods extra heavy? Did you consider another brand of pads or tampons? Did you consider using another pair of pants? Did you not notice how the students compared your body to the human body you were teaching to them as part of the biology lesson and reproductive biology classes? Would seeing a menstruating teacher make you feel sick and maybe vomit? the body is no longer a transducer but rather a resonation chamber, a resonating vessel that compulsively, ineffectually registers the force of gravity—as what? In states of near-sensory deprivation and, more importantly, of deprivation of expression, the mind cannot stop but neither can it continue. (Massumi, 2002: 106) Do you consent to be part of our research? Meanwhile, the phone rings. The school nurse calls. “You need to pick up your child immediately,” is being stated in deterministic voice. My son has vomited—twice. Prearranged phone call with colleagues to talk about disgust paper needs to be postponed.
Part 2. Dispatches from the ivory tower: a monologue
In this narrative monologue, we turn our focus from bodily obscenities to political and discursive ones. We draw on empirical/fictional discursive obscene and offensive classroom moments to pursue what discursive obscenities make available in the classroom, the kinds of resistance(s) they might enable, and the limits of possible defenses of pedagogies of obscenity. We ask what might be (our, the desired) limits to opening up our classroom spaces to the monstrous, to welcoming moments when filth and prohibition rub up against each other. We organize the monologue as a kind of pedagogical reflection in which a college teacher reflects on their power in the classroom and pursues increasingly obscene thoughts, memories, experiences, and imaginations to provoke, disturb, and shock their thinking about obscenity. The teacher reasons that this reflection is vital to their practice of a pedagogy of obscenity in which they attempt to undermine academic hierarchies and walk a delicate line between offense, discomfort, safety, and learning. I attended a safe-zone training on campus today. Maybe we all need safe zones and safe words to safeguard against monstrous spaces? As if we and they can. The safe word for today is trigger warning. … Sometimes there isn’t even a safe word. It can be a gesture. When Christopher Hitchens voluntarily subjected himself to waterboarding, they gave him two weighted metal bars. When he had had enough, because he was gagged with a rag stuffed in his mouth, a shirt pressed over his face, and he couldn’t talk because they were pouring water over the shirt and into his mouth and nose, he was supposed to drop the bars. If the interrogator didn’t see the bars fall, at least he’d hear the long metallic clang ringing over all the choking and gagging noises. Trigger warning! … What classroom gestures tell me something is a trigger, or an offense? Shuffling in seats? Eyes cast downward? How many gestures before I foreclose or gentrify the monstrous? What does that even mean? … What do we do when we cannot speak or we cannot gesture? I have this paper you can sign. Check the boxes next to the items you are OK with. We all have hard and soft limits. A hard limit: what must not be done, ever. Soft limit: something that can be done but only in a certain way. We need a second language, a system of signs and symbols, to make sure we are heard, loud and clear, over all the troublesome bits. … Maybe every student in my classroom should sign an informed consent. … Žižek (2009) said a joke once. I didn’t find it funny. Žižek talks of “short circuits” creating faulty connections in a network; it breaks the system down and induces a shock—the shock, of course, intended to give us a new way of seeing and to engage us in a more critical view of the reading. The joke involves a Mongol, a farmer, the farmer’s wife, testicles, dirt, and rape. We are told that the joke was quite common among dissidents in Russia. I suppose they found it funny, or so we are told. Or it could be that Žižek wants to distance himself, just enough, so that the audience doesn’t make too much of a deal about it. Or maybe he doesn’t care. You bought his book. You knew what to expect. Resistance is kind of like that joke. You may feel like you are resisting but in the end you’ll be no better than the Russian farmer and his wife. You were exploited but at least you didn’t do exactly what you were told. The goal of resistance isn’t to soil those in power. The goal is to castrate them and take away their power. Is obscenity a pair of scissors or is it the dirt on the ground? … I sometimes say something shocking in class to get students’ attention. It usually works. I like to think it undermines my power, which is a kind of resistance to academic hierarchies. In this case, obscenity is both the scissors and the dirt. I castrate myself. … I said “fuck” in class one time. Nothing happened. The students loved it. They laughed more than they did at my (dirty) jokes. I started cursing a little more, testing the waters, with an occasional “bullshit” or “ass.” I tried to make it seem like it just slipped out and wasn’t intentional. But it was intentional. I have the mouth of a sailor. That semester when the student evaluations came in, most of the students wrote positive comments about my approachability and openness, though one student wrote that I was biased, not open-minded, and didn’t behave professionally. Does it matter that I have power over them? That they are a captive audience? Today’s safe word is culturally responsive education. … I did it again the following semester. Same results. Students seemed to really like it. I am now known as an approachable instructor. … Ecstavasia and Addison (1992) once entitled an essay “Fucking (with theory) for money.” I haven’t seen a royalty check yet for anything I have written. Does that clear my conscience or does it make me worse than Žižek’s farmer? At least he disobeyed. I just go through the motions and do what the editors tell me to do. … Kim (2015) talks about narrative analysis as “flirting with data.” Should I encourage my students to move beyond flirting—to round first, second, third, and fourth bases with their data? And how would they write that up? Would they clean it up for the journal editors too? … I wonder if, instead of “fuck,” I would have received the same responses if I had said a word like “retard” or “faggot?” Talk about self-castration. … Is it possible to use obscenity in a progressive way? Can words that have social consequences for those who use them ever be constructive? … In his show Louie, Louis CK creates a scene where the word “faggot” is discussed. A bunch of comedians and friends playing poker; a discussion about why the word is offensive; a mixture of solemnity and humor. The issue of the origin of the word is explored. Homosexuals were treated as less than witches. The stake was too good for them. Witches had dignity. Homosexuals, they were burned with the other faggots; the kindling; the fires that are used to start the real fires. And yet, there are still jokes to be had, supposedly. It’s all locker-room talk, after all. … President Trump used the same excuse to justify his comments about grabbing women by their “pussies”: locker-room talk. … Could my classroom be a locker room? Would that excuse work for me, too? … I don’t remember the last time I actually talked to someone in the locker room. I always try to avoid eye contact. It isn’t exactly the place for conservations. … “Pussy,” short for the term “pusillanimous,” to mean cowardly, timid, lacking in courage. Merriam-Webster tells us the word is derived from the Late Latin pusillus or “very small.” The diminutive of pusus, or “boy.” … The locker-room excuse. A cowardly set-up to justify one’s words. A pusillanimous justification. … Obscenity is power. I have power over someone when I offend them. It doesn’t matter what they think, only what I say. “We are always more influenced than we realize by the ideas we contest” (De Beauvoir, 2014: 79). What happens when the class begins to realize they are prisoners, albeit ones that pay a lot of money to be incarcerated in classrooms? Do they have to put up with this shit? … Louis CK admitted to sexual misconduct. Maybe his voice is simply that, the voice of a pervert, and there is no lesson to be learned. Maybe the lesson is to simply justify the obscenity: “Look, it is meaningful, so I can say what I want!” … Obscenity. Humor. Satire. Irony. All are now (or have always been) ideological. There are political consequences. But that won’t stop humorists. It won’t stop politicians either. What about teachers and students? … Are we merely soiling those in power or castrating them? Or is it the other way around? Are they using obscenity to castrate and divide us? To soil us and bring us down to their level? Maybe I should just try to keep my classroom clean and intact. … Badiou called Sarkozy a “rat.” They accused him of using language similar to those in power during the Third Reich—a trick, Badiou (2008: 3) states, “invented two or three years ago and use[d] against anyone who displeases them.” If they can call liberals “communist swine,” “cucks,” and “snowflakes,” why can’t Badiou call conservatives “rats?” … “Society and the State need animal characteristics to use for classifying people” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 239). We know that animals, much like politicians and philosophers, travel in packs—rats and pigs, wolves and sheep, sometimes even jellyfish. Not because they sting but because they lack a backbone and ruin your holidays at the beach. … But what if the term “rat” was once used by fascists and Nazis to disparage Jews and justify their extermination? Or how the Hutu majority in Rwanda used similar pest-like metaphors in the actions taken against the Tutsis. … A riot broke out in Berkeley because the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was going to give a talk. People were hurt. Were people acting like animals? … What about fungal characteristics instead of animal ones? Stormy Daniels called Trump a “toadstool” in reference to his manhood. … According to Žižek (2008), political correctness is a more dangerous form of totalitarianism. … Is my classroom a totalitarian regime? Is it my responsibility to soil myself and students? … Has the safe space become a mechanism by which the left builds an ideological ghetto? Did the pressure to sanitize the words of the other become a means to alienate the traditionally blue-collar base that the left assumed would continue to support them? … There is a joke told by comedians after hours, when everyone has gone home and all that remain are other comedians. It usually starts something like this: a family walks into a talent agency. It is a mother, father, two daughters, and a baby. “Sir,” the father says, “our family has a wonderful act. If you let us perform it for you, I just know you’ll sign us.” Who would have known that Bob Saget, the father from the beloved family sitcom Full House, had such a filthy mouth? Seriously, just YouTube it: “Bob Saget and aristocrats.” … I’ve seen a picture of Žižek sitting on a toilet. Has he soiled himself? … I was once written up in elementary school for saying “Oh, hell.” Even my religious mother thought the whole thing was a bit pedestrian. … I was assigned to read Troubling the Angels by Lather and Smithies (1997) in a class. I couldn’t finish it. I got sick reading it. I actually threw up. Two years previous, I had been a retroviral chemo patient. Injections once a week. Six pills every day. Three in the morning. Three in the evening. The injections made me feel like I had the flu. Chills. Muscle aches. No taste for food. The pills made me nauseous and, after about a month, made my skin itch and burn. I had scaly scars on my stomach and thighs from all the injections. Nearing five months, I had to inject into the flabby sections of my triceps. I did it wrong once and the needle, as short as it was, went completely through to the other end of my arm. I hate needles. The book brought this all back to me. The chills. The fear of needles. The feelings of sickness that never seem to get better. I couldn’t do the assignment. It was too much. Trigger warning! TRIGGER WARNING! … How could my professor have known? … I always tell my students the following: we live in a complex, crowded, and chaotic society. People are all around us and often in close proximity, within our safe zones. Each of these individuals lives in their own world with their own values and their own way of doing things. Occasionally, you will step on their toes. And sometimes it will really hurt them. It is inevitable, society being what it is. But remember the following: you, too, will have your toes stepped on and, occasionally, it will really hurt. And sometimes you tread on your own feet, fall down, and give yourself a concussion. You cannot live in this chaotic place without understanding how to forgive. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Or maybe we should all sign our waivers. Check the boxes next to the items you are OK with. Make sure to specify the hard and soft limits. … Or is Nietzsche right? I’ve become the kind of monster I intended to fight all along?
What are we (educators and educated) left with? What comes after Žižek?
Our article is not a call for or exercise in unfiltered obscenity, unlimited, seemingly inappropriate language, or continuous insults toward the other. In its obscenity and paradox we hope the opposite. We put forward our thoughts and experiences to serve as notes against the tidiness, orderliness, and docile-body discourses taking place in contemporary educational spaces; reminders of educational and moral/ethical paradoxes to be worked through; and/or provocative invitations that enable us/we/them to enter messy, dirty, and unpleasant spaces of educational practices and discourses. Our point here is not to insult, traumatize, or mock, but to take up a question of difference in order to begin to reverse norms of “safe language” or appropriate classrooms. It is possible that unpleasant discourses and practices stimulated or brought forward through obscenity, or some other forms of unexpected affect, can offer productive ruptures and critical places of rethinking, negotiation, and exploration of educational and pedagogical liminality. What might students learn and gain from Irmeli’s menstruating body? What is the pedagogical value of “fuck?”
In addition, we are concerned, following Žižek, about the narrowing of space for engagement with contentious issues, ideas, and experiences when words, phrases, and ideas are increasingly relegated as “obscene” (by both the right and the left). If educational discourses and practices are overly cleansed, controlled, and censored, we might not have much (life) to discuss and share. Thus, we obviously worry about creating and enforcing normative “safe spaces” in which language, language practices, and discourses are strictly policed and become totalitarian.
Johnson (1995: 129) describes pedagogical discourses as disinfecting dialogues characterized by cleanliness: “no odors, no germs: it is sanitized, deodorized, bleached” to keep otherness and other “isms” at bay. We desire no cleansing and doubt that it is possible to keep anything disgusting or obscene in our pedagogies at bay. Thus, we do not seek to share (yet) another line of neutral, “nice,” and convenient concluding pedagogical wonderings or deodorized reflections about teaching and our experiences (obscene or otherwise). Instead, we open up a liminal space in which we and others might reflect on the possibilities of and for obscenity in the classroom. We would like teachers and students to consider getting dirty, bloody, and disgusting, not to promote ugliness, perversion, or hate, but to push the boundaries of clean and easy pedagogies, and to live with physical, feeling, and desiring bodies—mind/bodies with(out) shame or guilt.
If, according to Žižek (2008: 17), “there is an inhuman core in all of us,” then the “predominant way of maintaining a distance toward the inhuman’s … intrusive proximity is politeness.” But politeness is ambiguous: This is what is wrong in politically correct attempts to moralize or even directly penalize modes of behavior which basically pertain to civility (like hurting others with vulgar obscenities of speech, and so on): they potentially undermine the precious “middle ground” of civility, mediating between uncontrolled private fantasies and the strictly regulated forms of intersubjective behavior. (Žižek, 2008: 19)
We suggest pedagogical obscenity as a way to degentrify the monstrous. When Žižek (2000: 53) theorizes the pre-ontological domain, he says: “What is at stake in the process of ‘Oedipalization,’ the establishment of the rule of parental Law, is precisely the process of ‘gentrifying’ this monstrous otherness, transforming it into a partner within the horizon of discursive communication.” The student–teacher–classroom dynamic is necessarily/already a process of gentrification. This dynamic seeks to make it clean, to anesthetize it, to be the opposite of Socrates and “un-corrupt” the youth, to make the student a member of some old and easy order. In being obscene, teachers might attempt to disrupt, to terrorize this easy order, to dispel innocence/ignorance and create a (not-so-safe) space for (re)constitution of the imagination.
Finally, in In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek (2008) explains that the purpose of his book is to problematize all-too-easy alternatives to (Stalinist) terror by encouraging scholars and readers to reinvent terror that will not let off the hook various forms of historical failure and monstrosity. He encourages a move beyond the narcissism of the lost cause, accepting the full actualization of a cause while simultaneously acknowledging the risks for catastrophic outcomes and disaster. Obscenity and perversion put teachers, students, and other potential pedagogical objects at risk. Harmless and docile teacher–student bodies may attack and objectify others—for democratic purposes. For Žižek, subversions might be a part of a faux radicalism of liberal-capitalist order: this is how the establishment likes its “subversive” theorists; harmless gadflies who sting us and thus awaken us to the inconsistencies and imperfections of our democratic enterprise—God forbid that they might take the project seriously and try to live it. (Žižek, 2008: 106–107)
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.