The current assault on public education is no longer a project solely of the right. Efforts to privatize, corporatize, and commercialize public schools with various schemes including vouchers, in-school advertising, and corporate curricula have infiltrated the language, logic, and common sense of liberals and progressives who only a few years ago would have considered privatization unthinkable. The move to privatize public schools has to be understood as part of a larger societal shift to gut the public sphere and increasingly privatize traditionally public institutions such as prisons, public legal defense, the medical safety net, public transportation, and national and state parks to name a few.
Not only are such infrastructural institutions as prisons, hospitals, and schools being reduced to the logic of the bottom line but traditionally public spaces and forums in mass media have been virtually eliminated. Newspapers, film, television, radio and publishing are powerful forces for shaping public opinion, making common sense and forming identity itself. Yet, public control of these "public-making" technologies has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of just a few massive private conglomerates. For example, presently, all of the major TV news divisions are owned by just four companies: GE, Westinghouse, Disney, and Time Warner. Of course, the increasing concentration of public space by private interests translates to intensified private pedagogies aiming to represent the concentration of wealth and power as being in the public interest. For example, news shows increasingly position viewers primarily as consumers whose chief concerns are with the low prices of commodities rather than as democratic citizens concerned with social equality and an increased standard of living for all. Recently, on CNN, Secretary of Defense William Cohen spoke of a possible U.S. bombing of Iraq in terms of the benefits to consumers at the gas pumps. Such an incident showcases the extent to which the logic of privatization has infiltrated the public sphere. It also highlights the dangers inherent in the privatization trend. Social subjects are increasingly interpolated as consuming subjects; citizenship collapses into consumerism. As democracy becomes a market, democratic traditions such as the ideal of equality, the respect for human rights, and the vision of a more just future go out the window.
Public schools have long been a part of the democratic tradition. While tremendous work remains on rethinking the elements of a genuine democracy, this part of the public sphere continues to be instrumental in transmitting democratic values. If we are to locate a threat to the democratic ideals of a plural society, valuation of difference, and freedom we should be looking at the aforementioned rising tide of privatization but also the rise of right-wing extremism and other fundamentalisms. For example, groups such as fundamentalist Christians attempt to seize the public schools to institute a religious agenda; fiscal conservatives want the schools to become like businesses with the bottom line dictating infrastructural demands and the dictates of the market driving the curriculum; social conservatives, such as E.D. Hirsch, see the schools as a site of struggle for the True Universal Values which can be transmitted through a common core curriculum.
Fundamentalists, such as the religious right and social conservatives, seek to impose their one true version of history and morality. While social conservatives argue for the inherent superiority of an already dominant, white, male, straight, European culture, the Christian right, often overlapping, spearheads an effort to Christianize this vision. Both of these fundamentalisms are strongly anti-pluralist. Rather than making different groups and different cultures central to national culture and to power-sharing, they view difference as a threat to the one respective true vision. Hence, social conservatives call for assimilationism and the Christian right typically does not explain what happens to unrepentent Jews, gays and others in their monologic utopia.
Fiscal conservatives are anti-pluralist as well. Fiscal conservatives often argue that a free market is the surest way to end racism and sexism by providing unfettered opportunities for all. This, of course, elides the histories of group oppressions which maintain and reproduce cultural and social inequalities. Excessive market freedom has proven throughout the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years that the continuing upward redistribution of wealth has fallen hardest on non-whites and women. Fiscal conservatives attempt to conflate democratic freedom and market freedom or actively oppose democracy itself as a threat to market freedom. As political theorist Nancy Fraser has pointed out, a pluralistic democracy depends upon economic justice because cultural and economic oppression are not autonomous spheres but rather are imbricated. Popular self-rule and the conditions for freedom and equality demands limits on the concentration of wealth and power.
Understanding the social, economic, and political context for current educational debates provides educators and educational theorists with interpretive maps for challenging material and ideological forces which threaten the democratic tradition and hinder the possibility of democratizing all social spheres. New books in education enter into a conversation about what is to be done in the field and, hence, also propose a vision for the larger society. Given the current context with the looming threats to democracy and difference, how does Elizabeth Ellsworth's recent book respond?
Teaching Positions should be noted for its concern with questions of difference, pluralism, and freedom. The book is organized around the author's claim that educational theory, and critical educational theory in particular, has been lacking a crucial film theory concept, namely, "mode of address." Mode of address refers to how people are socially positioned by film. It's a question about how dynamics of social positioning get played out in film viewing -- who does this film address you to be within networks of power relations associated with race, sexuality, gender, class and so on? And what difference does address make to how you read and use a film? What difference does it make, even, to historical dynamics of social "control" and "change"? (TP, p.1-2)
Mode of address describes the relations involved in reading a text or a film. Drawing on Derrida and Lacan (but more heavily on those in the field of communications who draw on Derrida and Lacan, Shoshona Felman and J. Donald), Ellsworth's mode of address employs the notion of difference to explain the fundamental absence constituting communicative relations. Every presentation to others is always a self-representation. Because there is no access to natural reality, only signification, there is a constitutive indecidability, an indeterminacy at the core of communications, social relations, and signification itself. Communication always fails. Dialogue is impossible. In this view, violence originates with the closure of signification, with the refusal to recognize the constitutive disjunction in communicative relations. In other words, any attempt at determining, settling, or fixing meaning excludes and hence, does violence. Within this framework, according to Ellsworth, the task for educators is to teach students to read towards indeterminacy, to develop "analytic diologue" as opposed to communicative dialogue.
Communicative dialogue (the usual mode of speaking), it is claimed, commits the violence of squashing the indeterminacy and indetermination at the core of dialogue by structurally presuming certainty. The author's answer to communicative dialogue is analytic dialogue. Analytic dialogue like psychoanalysis seeks to dredge up the repressed unconscious, (the absent yet overdetermining core of discursive relations) by subverting communicative structures in which meaning is fixed. "Analytic dialogue produces what Felman calls, following Lacan, textual knowledge. It is knowledge of the necessary and productive indirectness and disconnectedness of the routes we use to read the world and texts."(TP, p. 126) It is these epistemological claims about the nature of communication which drive Ellsworth's theory. Her project seeks to remedy misrecognized disconnections at the heart of communications.
Roughly the first two thirds of the book discusses the importance of mode of address in film and in the classroom and talks about the problems of closure and how it is committed by the continuity techniques of both film and dialogue. The call for discontinuous modes of address comes about half way through and then the last third of the book, part two, concerns paradoxical modes of address in which the author looks to the literary style of magic realism, the writing of Patricia Williams, and the Internet among other places to locate cultural texts which challenge continuity structures by providing discontinuous presentations. I believe that Teaching Positions provides a rich example of the wrong direction certain schools of educational thought are moving. The absences and theoretical mistakes of this book offer a lesson in the dangers of textually-based theory and a lesson in what democratically-minded education theory should include.
Teaching Positions does not look to the material interests or structural concerns producing the conditions for monoculturalism and unfreedom. She does not address how the political economy of schools and of the mass media reproduce intensifying logics of privatization and fundmentalism, which reduce questions of difference, democracy, and the public good to questions of individual consumption. Instead, in Teaching Positions the fundamental threat to difference, pluralism, and freedom is located strictly in the communicative modes people employ. In this view, oppression is structured into the "nature" of dialogue. Oppression, violence, and exclusion stem from closures of signification, the fixing of meaning. Hence, certain forms of communication which presume claims to truth, understanding, or knowledge are inherently flawed. Politics becomes instrumentalized as an issue of communication -- namely, the correct reading practices and the correct kind of dialogue. Teachers should promote forms of communication that call into question their own meaning-making assumptions and question their assumptions about the identity of the listener. She thus looks to interuptive modes of communication such as magic realism, the writing of Patricia Williams, and deconstructive literary and film techniques to suggest that all teaching adopt what she calls analytic diologue.
The fundamental error of this book from which all the others derive is the strictly epistemological basis for her theoretical claims. Namely, by attempting to establish the nature of communications she gives primacy to signification and textuality. In this paradigm, power, history, and politics become subsumed by textuality. This collapses culture into communication such that the materiality of culture falls out. Postioning herself as a communication theorist, an outsider, who happens to teach pedagogy, Ellsworth claims to be bringing to educational theory a communication theory which should replace dominant modes of classroom dialogue and ways of reading texts.
Ellsworth's privileging of textuality, collapse of culture and communication, and collapse of cultural production into cultural consumption becomes startlingly apparent on page 172, where she praises the Internet for its indeterminacy, openendedness, and infinitude:
... like the futures of our lives and selves, the future of the web as text is unknowable. What we do with the web is more like writing than it is like spectating. Surfing the web is more like writing the web than watching the web. And writing the web, like all writing, makes a final reading of the web, like reading all texts impossible. A final interpretation can never be arrived at; we never arrive at the web's future, or at the future of what our surfing has written through the web.
While she may get offered a job with Microsoft, Ellsworth certainly has no sense of how particular cultural products serve certain private interests at public expense. Are we to believe that we "write" the internet the same way Microsoft does? Materialist theories recognize that consciousness and communicative forms are overdetermined by the tools we use and the materiality of the world in which we live. Epistemologically-based theories presume thought can be free of the physical conditions which produce it. As a result, epistemologically-based theories efface relations of power and politics. Power and politics are crucial concepts for anyone interested in expanding democratic social relations. In the case of Teaching Positions, epistemologically-based communication theory has no way of asking how, for example, the commercialization of the Internet and its placement in schools serve specific populations and reproduces unequal social relations. In the context of cultural studies, another communication theorist, Lawrence Grossberg, explains well part of the theoretical downfall of the epistemological bent. (We can benefit here by reading "cultural studies" as "educational theory")
By equating culture and communication, communicational cultural studies conflates the general problematic of cultural studies, with its instantiation as a question about the constitution and politics of textuality (i.e. about the nature of cultural and/or communicational practices). This itself has a number of important consequences. First, it installs the primacy of signification (with its logic of identity and difference) over power (with its logic of determination). It reduces the entire project of cultural studies to the admittedly important political and contextual struggle to put questions of ideology (signification, representation, and identity) on the agenda. As a result, the politics of culture becomes a question of meaning and identity (with an occasional nod to pleasure). Power (domination and subordination) is always hierarchical, understood on the model of either the oppressor and the oppressed or oppression and transgression. And following the idealist traditon of modern philosophy and social thought, "the real" -- the material conditions of possibility and of effectivity, the material organization and consequences of life -- disappears into culture, and social life is reduced to experience. All cultural studies has to worry about is culture! (Grossberg, p. 283, Bringing it All Back Home)
Considering her past work championing student experience as an education insider, it is no coincidence that the epistemological paradigm which reduces social life to experience appeals to Ellsworth. Having achieved educational notoriety as an opponent of critical pedagogy with her essay "Why Doesn't this Feel Empowering?," Ellsworth argued that the emancipatory politics of critical pedagogy are at odds with the student experience of it. Valuable at the time for raising the feminist insight of student voice in the context of critical pedagogy, that article was dismissive of the history and entirety of critical pedagogy as field and as project. Relying upon a false dichotomy between rationality and experience the author chose the latter to argue for discursive knowledge based exclusively on partiality and narratives.
While in that essay rationality was the straw person, in Teaching Positions communicative dialogue becomes the opponent. Both expositions couple an experiential relativism with a transcendentalizing discursive theory. In other words, she joins an uncritical valorization of experience with claims about the nature of communication. The result is that despite the author's insistence upon the importance of history, power, politics, and context, the politics of textuality can not take any of these seriously. By placing critique in the realm of communicational structures rather than in the way power is wielded by individuals and institutions the author seriously delimits human agency and choice. This allows no accountability for destructive practices committed against schools by the individuals in the technology industry and the public sphere, for example. At the same time her relativist theory leaves educators incapable of making ethical or political distinctions. In what follows I will use Teaching Positions to discuss the difference between the way textual educational theory and what I will call here political educational theory deals with politics, history, and power.
Politics
Part of the importance of Teaching Positions comes from the fact that Ellsworth does claim to be elaborating a contextual and historical theory concerned with unequal power relations. However, because this theory universalizes the nature of communications in a way which leads to ethical and political relativism and an unlimited pluralism, Ellsworth recreates a fancier version of the identity politics from which her early work speaks. In textual politics, politics becomes the open reading of texts and the valorization of different readings. In this view, according to Ellsworth, a bad political position insists upon a correct reading and a refusal to acknowledge the impossibility of a correct reading.
The first problem with this kind of identity politics is that it starts and ends with the celebration of different readings and hence different identifications and identities. Of course, some readings and some identities should be preferable to others. However, to value some identities over others, say, anti-racist identities over racist ones, requires reference to an ethical or political standard. This does not mean one must use a universal standard or one which must stay the same. Yet, Ellsworth allows no referent, limit or framework to qualify which identities should be excluded. This is because the politics of textuality preclude the possibility of what Chantal Mouffe calls "the Political."
In The Return of the Political, Chantal Mouffe explains a central deficit of liberal democracy -- what she terms "the Political." The Political refers to the inevitability of conflict central to any political configuration. Drawing on the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt, Mouffe points to the friend/enemy grouping, which forms the basis of politics, to suggest that society needs to be understood as constituted by incompatibility and difference. Recognizing the inherently conflictive nature of society calls for the formulation of political principles which draw on political liberalism's tradition of individual rights and the communitarian tradition's insistance on the common good. She writes,
Once we accept the necessity of the political and the impossibility of a world without antagonism, what needs to be envisaged is how it is possible under these conditions to create or maintain a pluralistic democratic order.(RP, p. 4)
Teaching Positions refuses to accept the inevitability of conflict and has no way of making sense of the political. Because exclusion itself becomes the only political referent, there is no way of making ethical or political judgements. In this view, violence comes from textual exclusion. Ellsworth's reading of Felman's reading of Claude Lanzman's film "Shoah" exemplifies identity politics' unwillingness to grapple with the inherently agonistic dimension of the political.
Lanzman's film about the Holocaust stands as the most comprehensive film testimony to the event. Running longer than nine hours it, remarkably, never attempts to recreate the event through representation. The film consists of witness, survivor, and culprit testimony. Lanzman has written about the dangers of attempting to recreate what is unrepresentable and has criticized Steven Spielberg for attempting to do so with "Schindler's List." Ellworth reads "Shoah" as a cultural product which refuses the conventions of continuity. Because Lanzman, who conducts the interviews, never explicitly asserts whose version of the Holocaust was true, Ellsworth, quoting Felman, claims that the film is a struggle for remembrance which simultaneously tells of the impossibility of telling. The discontinuities, the difference between points of view keeps the question of the Holocaust from being "settled." According to Ellsworth one discontinuity takes the form of those who witnessed the genocide but did not really see. The event of the Holocaust, in other words, had empirical witnesses -- people who saw. But "cognitively and perceptually" it was without a witness because while people saw and heard, they did not look, did not understand and, indeed, can never understand.
Aside from the tendency to transform a historical event into a narrative, this way of looking at the Holocaust risks effacing a political truth. Namely, that the interviews in "Shoah" reveal that people did see, did understand that a genocide was happening before their eyes, and they chose not to intervene. In "Shoah", Polish peasants confess not only did they watch the Jews come in on trains and enter the camps but that their standard of living increased with the Jews gone, that they took the Jews' houses, that they no longer feared their husbands being seduced by the beautiful Jewish women, that the Jews were to blame for their own murder, and that the Jews got what was coming to them for killing Christ. What the textual view seems to be unable to account for is that the Holocaust was neither a misunderstanding nor a result of the closure of signification. It was a political project deliberately and painstakingly executed by specific individuals with a specific political agenda. That is why the Germans called it the final solution. The conditions which produced the event were ideological and cultural but also economic and political. In short, the Holocaust was the result neither of a bad reading nor a misunderstanding by goodwilled people.
Yet because Ellsworth's political project is one of reading towards indecidability she has no way of either making ethical or political judgements in light of conflicting historical claims or of facing the political realities that individuals or groups may have competing desires and interests which cannot be reduced simply to a misunderstanding. Within the textual paradigm the agonistic dimension of the social disappears. If reading is always an indirect and strategic act, then, and never a simple mirroring of a text in an understanding reader, reading will never be finished or complete. One reading will never be the "correct" one, the "ethical" one, or the "just" one -- because any reading already has done the inevitable violence of excluding other possible readings, and, therefore, other readers... Which reading will I/we perform, after all, in this situation? Why this reading instead of that reading? These are open and indecidable questions because constitutive discontinuities between self and self, and between self and other, render inaccessible any "higher authority" such as the Truth, Knowledge, or even understanding of the correct, right, moral, best, or final reading. And as a result, these questions cannot be escaped. (TP, 126-7)
Ellsworth is caught in a tired binarism between universalism and relativism. She assumes that any position, any claim to truth or meaning is a claim to a universal, transcendental truth. This is not so. The rejection of universalizing thought does not have to lead to a position of extreme relativism from which one is incapable of preferring the survivor's version of the Holocaust to the Nazi's. One can take a moral and political stand based on the context and with reference to a project which addresses the context.
For example, the radical democratic project seeks to promote a society constituted by different interests yet united by certain egalitarian principles and traditions. In this instance, the liberal tradition of the respect for human rights becomes the referent for preferring one reading over another. Or one might say that the communitarian ideal of common good would prevent the extermination of any one segment of the social. Likewise, a radical democrat would actively exclude those identities advocating genocide on the grounds that it is at odds with the principles of the project. The project is, of course, subject to revision by the polities which constitute it. This example shows that one need not resort to universalist or extreme relativist claims to engage the political. Finally, the feebleness of Ellsworth's extreme relativist position in justifying political decision and action comes through on page 128:
Let's say that, as I watch Shoah, I count Lanzmann's reading of the Holocaust as one that makes the world and my own life rise in value, and I count the organist's explanation for why the Jews were exterminated as one that makes the world and my own life fall in value. My "judgement" or "choice" has been made possible, thinkable, intelligible, because of ongoing intellectual, political, cultural, emotional, aesthetic, social, and physical labors of tens of thousands of people across decades. My choice of Lanzmann's reading over the organist's is a social and historical achievement. It is a historical and cultural "fact" that to many people today, remembering the Holocaust is "valued" over forgetting; encountering its discontinuities is valued over denial and ignore-ance.
The moral and political spreadsheet to which Ellsworth refers justifies her reading on the grounds that remembering the Holocaust is socially valued. By this logic if forgetting the Holocaust was socially valued then it too would increase her value and the world's. Such positivistic presentism provides no moral or political justification as to why Ellsworth prefers one reading over another.
History
This book is ahistorical in both form and content. Teaching Positions erases the history of educational theory which informs it and relies instead upon vast generalizations to create straw person arguments. Critcal feminism in education such as the work of Maxine Greene, Carol Gilligan, Valerie Walkerdine, and Patti Lather with whom Ellsworth appeared in The Education Feminist Reader may as well not exist based on the absence of the discourse in this book. Critical pedagogy and the sociology of education exist only as logocentric caricatures; they are lumped together and not a single reference or example justifies Ellsworth's claims about the fields. The irony of this is two-fold. First, Ellsworth achieved notoriety in critical pedagogical circles appearing in edited books such as Giroux and Simon's Popular Culture, Schooling and Everyday Life and by attacking the field in journals and in edited books of critical pedagogy such as Breaking Free: the Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy. Her appearance in these volumes situated her as an insider to critical pedagogy and an important voice of dissent within it. Yet one would never know this history from Teaching Positions. Rather, Ellworth situates her current writing with reference to her graduate school film studies and repeatedly claims to be an outsider to educational theory. Why would she erase her own academic history?
This question brings us to the second irony. Namely, the work in critical pedagogy that she dismisses has long been addressing the ideas in Teaching Positions, albeit with more concern for issue of social inequality and power relations and without an unfettered relativism or a balkanizing textually-based identity politics. For example, the idea of mode of address which the author borrows from film studies refers to an idea better known in critical pedagogical circles as the process of identification. Whereas for Ellsworth this concept refers to "how a film addresses you to be within networks of power relations," Ellsworth's mode of address stops short of connecting the identification process to the political economy of cultural production and distribution.
In critical pedagogy, theorists have always avoided looking at film as merely interpellative. Rather critical pedagogy's primary focus on questions of power, politics, context, and identity formation has given primacy to seeing how these connections work to maintain and reproduce social and cultural inequalities. The critical pedagogical ideal of democratizing social relations has prohibited ignoring larger questions. Critical pedagogy refuses to do what Ellsworth has done in this book and isolate questions of textuality and ideology from relations of power, politics, and morality. Ellsworth's claim that film studies is an unlikely place for pedagogy implies that pedagogy has not been concerned with issues of popular culture. In education Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Roger Simon, Donaldo Macedo, Joe Kincheloe to name a few, have written extensively on the relation of pedagogy and culture. Outside of education Stanley Aronowitz, Lawrence Grossberg, and others have explored the relationship between communications, culture, and pedagogy.
How do teachers make a difference in power, knowlege, and desire, not only by what they teach, but by how they address students? (p. 8)
This question has been specifically addressed in McLaren's Schooling as a Ritual Performance, Giroux's Theory and Resistance in Education, in Popular Culture, Schooling and Everyday Life, and in Breaking Free. Ellsworth also claims that all previous educational theory does not recognize the unpredictable, uncontrollable, unmanageable, disobedient dimension of the pedagogical relation. The above works all address this. However, unlike Ellsworth, they also refuse to suggest that this recognition somehow stands on its own as an emancipatory insight or the sole basis for a politics and pedagogy. Considering the vast body of literature which currently exists in critical pedagogy and the sociology of education that addresses signification and representation within relations of power one must wonder what motivated this willfull erasure of history. This sort of intentional misrepresentation can be expected of shoddy right-wing scholars such as E.D. Hirsch.
Ignoring the literature has its costs. By totalizing the field she makes claims such as this,
And yet, education, whether critical or traditional, is inundated by discourses and practices that assume the possibility (and desireability) of a dual, reflective relation between student and teacher. They assume the possibility of using language to mirror, for example, the teacher's meaning, intent, knowledge (be it already achieved or in the process of being constructed). They assume the possibility of then using that mirror of language or curriculum to "show" the teacher's knowledge to the student, which the student can then "see," and "understand," and reflect back in measurable ways.(78) [beginning her career in education]...The primary mode of address in education appeared to be: There is no mode of address here -- no mediation -- here's a neutral record of reality.(79)
Paulo Freire's criticism of what he called "banking education" in Pedagogy of the Oppressed formed the basis for ongoing critical pedagogical critiques of simple transmission models of teaching and learning. Early work in British and French Sociology of Education by Michael Young, Pierre Bourdieu, and Basil Bernstein long ago challenged reductive transmission models which are currently championed by right-wingers interested in a common core curriculum. More recently Magda Lewis, Roger Simon, Henry Giroux and many others in critical pedagogy have updated, expanded, and continued the critique of the instrumentalist tendencies of transmission models of learning. By neglecting the critical tradition Ellsworth does violence to the field and does a favor for those conservatives pushing for common culture and privatization. Various strains of conservatives are the folks most hostile to multicultural, diverse, and genuinely democratic education. It is the right-wing advocating scripted curricula and a prefabricated core of knowledge to be absorbed by students. Progressive educational theorists need to build on critical traditions rather than erasing them if they are to challenge the threat posed by the right and expand democratic possibilities. These historical exclusions are highly ironic in light of Ellsworth's avowed political project in the book -- namely, to challenge textual exclusions.
Teaching Positions is ahistorical in its theoretical content as well. Ellsworth's textual politics, identity politics, and relativism present readers with a lesson in the dangers of ahistorical writing. As I mentioned earlier this ahistoricism stems from the textual bent. Ellsworth's project is an epistemological one which aims at establishing the truth of communication. Rather than putting forth a political, contingent and contextual project textual educational theory assumes that communication is structured in fixed ways which do not change over time. The failure of textually-based theory to grasp the historically situated nature of communications appears in the author's discussion of the way "realist" film making sutures meanings by employing continuity techniques.
Ellsworth recognizes an important insight of critical pedagogy, namely, that cultural products do not simple reflect reality. If a cultural product such as a film actually has the power to constitute reality by making meanings, then, as Ellsworth suggests, we need to be able to deconstruct the ways that this happens. Employing the catch-all term "realist modes of address" Ellsworth claims that the problem with the classic Hollywood cinematic style is that it treats its own mode of communication unproblematically. Like the structure of communicative dialogue, realist modes of address trick viewers into the illusion of true knowledge through continuity techniques. However, by understanding the suturing power of film as embedded in cinematic technique, Ellsworth has no way of accounting for how cinematic techniques (or modes of conversation) are struggled over ideologically over time. Likewise, locating the suturing power of conversation as embedded in a particular way of speaking presumes that a particular technique is inherently liberatory or oppressive. For example, historically, "discontinuous modes of address" have had the potential to call into question the process of identification.
The work of Jean Luc Godard employed discontinuous strategies as a way of simultaneously referencing and breaking with cinematic conventions which give certain significations intelligibility. The sudden cuts and interruptions which he used in "Breathless" worked at that time to reveal the constructedness, the production of the work of art. Today, however, the techniques of discontinuity which Godard used in "Breathless" no longer interupt or remind the viewer of her suspension of disbelief, or of the dominant language of film. Instead, those techniques are used to suture as on television shows such as "ER" and "Homocide" which have appropriated stylized jump cuts so that now they produce seamless narratives. Film techniques which deconstruct the production are struggled over, appropriated, and excluded over time. In this case, performative deconstructive cleverness including discontinuous modes of address have become an integral part of mainstream postmodern aesthetics.
For example, the 1997 MTV movie awards included a segment in which Carrie Fisher, who played princess Leia in "Star Wars," presented an award to an unsung cinematic hero, Chewbacca. The screen flashed the word "Chewbacca" while "Star Wars" clips played on a background screen. The actor who played Chewbacca took the podium in costume and howled in character and then left the stage. The audience cheered this hip display of ironic misrecognition. Of course, the joke was that the actor who played Chewbacca never received his due because of his costume and the ceremony reinforced this misrecognition by collapsing the actor and the character. The show called into question the identification process and the suspension of disbelief by playing with the idea of the collapse of actor and character. However, this was not a critical enterprise. It brought the audience into hip collusion with the production and the producers rather than working to reveal the production, or call into question the material and ideological interests served by the production. Wink, wink, we all know that this is just a show. Cut to commercial.
Ellsworth does not seem to realize that audience recognition of discontinuous modes of address has become, at the current historical juncture, a part of the show itself. Communicational structures and culture need to be seen separately in order to critically understand how each are a part of larger power struggles.
Power
Educational theorists need to realize that the problem is not that of meanings being fixed. The fixing of meanings is inevitable in that it happens at the level of language. Yet, because meanings inevitably get fixed, the over-arching question is, who has the power to do the fixing. The control of discourse is a textual, ideological issue but it is also fundamentally a political economic issue as well. For this reason, I prefer the term "identification" to "mode of address." The mode of address refers to the structure of communication. Ellsworth personifies the communicative structure in her section titles: "Who Does Communicative Dialogue Think You Are?"; "Communicative Dialogue Claims: "No Mode of Address Here!" This language implies that identifications originate with communicative structures rather than people who produce identifications within particular configurations of power. "Who Does Communicative Dialogue Think You Are?" is a question which removes the agency from those engaged in producing cultural identifications.
Educational theorists ought to be concerced with how we read but also with the political economy of textual production. Which reading will I/we perform, after all, in this situation? Why this reading instead of that reading? These are open and indecidable questions because constitutive discontinuities between self and self, and between self and other, render inaccessible any "higher authority" such as the Truth, Knowledge, or even understanding of the correct, right, moral, best, or final reading. (TP, p.127)
If readings are arbitrarily produced and if reading is writing then we are forced to wonder what makes advertisers spend billions of dollars a year to place ads in magazines and on television, and everywhere else for that matter. Advertising works because it effectively produces desire. Advertisers know that readings are not arbitrarily performed. Certain texts resonate with broader public discourses and simultaneously remake these public discourses. The glaring question absent from Teaching Positions is "what makes some texts have the force of ideology and others not?" Who has the power to close signification? Who has the power to produce identifications and who does not? Though we would never know it from reading, these questions which connect ideology to power have been at the forefront of the critical pedagogical tradition for years. These same questions must be at the forefront of democratic educational endeavors as well.
Finally, educational theory concerned with power must have a sense of the public. The textual politics paradigm individualizes power. Because, in this view, cultural production is cultural consumption, the individual act of reading becomes the only political intervention. The language of the common good and the public has no place in this view. As I discussed earlier, in light of the contemporary threats to difference and democratic life, the language of the public remains a viable opposition to increasing privatization and fundamentalism.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I want to reiterate eight aspects of Teaching Positions which derive from its textually-based epistemological foundation to enumerate why educational theory concerned with difference, pluralism, freedom, democracy, and the public sphere must be political, historical and connect to relations of power. 1) The individual focus of discursive paradigms such as Ellsworth's elide structural considerations, 2) this book is ahistorically organized, and 3) the theoretical underpinnings of the book are ahistorical as well, 4) freedom, pluralism, and difference need to be situated in a larger political or ethical framework (such as radical democracy) to avoid the balkanizing tendency and hierarchisizing of oppressions of identity politics, 6) this book collapses the identification process and the production of identifications 7) this book lacks a sense of what gives some representations the force of ideology and makes others irrelevant 8) this book denies politics namely, the inevitability of conflict, exclusion and silencing that accompanies social relations.
If educational theorists are serious about challenging the threat to public education, the public sphere, democracy, and difference they need to be concerned with the macro forces at play in robbing people of control over their labor and the world they live in. Ellsworth's book and textually-based theory more generally goes in the utterly wrong direction by searching for oppression structured into micro structures which are historically contingent products of larger overdetermining social forces.
citation:
Saltman, K. .Why Doesn.t This Feel Political? Review of Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching Positions. Teachers College Press, New York, 1997.. Journal of Critical Pedagogy 2,no. 1 (November 1998). http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/saltman.html