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in the co-opted halls of academia
EXILE AS A SPACE OF DISRUPTION
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing.
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YOUR
COMMENTSHow
can one not be in exile working in academia, especially if one
refuses the cliques, mediocrity, hysterical forms of resentment,
backbiting, and endless production of irrelevant, if not sometimes
unethical, research that increasingly has come to characterize
the corporate university? The spaces of retreat from public
life now occupy too many institutions of higher education and
have transformed them into dead zones of the imagination mixed
with a kind of brutalizing defense of their own decaying postures
and search for status and profits. Leadership in too many academic
departments is empty, disempowering, and insular, lacking any
outward vision or sense of social responsibility. Mimicking
the instrumental logic of a business culture, too many administrators
lack the vision, totality of knowledge, or will to address what
role the university should play in a democracy. Too many individuals
are tied to endless committees, overwhelmed by the mediocrity
they or others endorse, and fearful of anyone who steps outside
of the boundaries of bureaucratic conformity and civility. Excellence
has become part of an empty recruiting slogan that has little
do with the actual work or scholarship of faculty who are often
punished or resented for such work.
One
thing is clear: The retreat from the ethical and political imagination
in higher education in too many countries has become legion.
Little is being done to address the army of subaltern labour
that has become the new poor in higher education and elsewhere.
Moreover, faculty are increasingly told that the most important
register of scholarship is grant writing over and against activities
of teaching, community engagement, or other forms of public
scholarship. In addition, students are constantly being told
that they should feel good instead of working hard and focusing
while being burdened, at the same time, with an insufferable
amount of financial debt. Too many academics no longer ask students
what they think but how they feel. Everyone wants to be a happy
consumer. When students are told that all that matters is feeling
good, and that feeling uncomfortable is alien to learning itself,
the critical nature of teaching and learning is compromised.
This
is an academic version of the Dr. Phil show where infantilized
pedagogies prove to be as demeaning to students as they are
to professors. Professors are now increasingly expected to take
on the role of therapists speaking in terms of comfort zones
but are rarely offered support for the purpose of empowering
students to confront difficult problems, examine hard truths,
or their own prejudices. This is not to suggest that students
should feel lousy while learning or that educators shouldn’t
care about their students. To the contrary, caring in the most
productive sense means providing students with the knowledge,
skills and theoretical rigour that offers them the kinds of
intellectual challenges to engage and take risks in order to
make critical connections and develop a sense of agency where
they learn to think for themselves and become critical and responsible
citizens. Students should feel good through their capacity to
grow intellectually, emotionally and ethically with others rather
than being encouraged to retreat from difficult educational
engagements. Caring also means that faculty share an important
responsibility to protect students from conditions that sanction
hate speech, racism, humiliation, sexism, and an individual
and institutional attack on their dignity.
For
a range of theorists extending from Theodor Adorno to the post
colonialist theorist Edward Said, exile was a central metaphor
for defining the role of academics. As oppositional public intellectuals,
academics played an indispensible role in Adorno’s notion
of critical theory and Said’s work in defending the university
as a crucial public sphere. They also played a crucial role
in engaging culture as a site informed by mechanisms of power,
and taking seriously the idea of human interdependence while
living on the border — one foot in and one foot out, an
exile and an insider, for whom home was always a form of homelessness.
In Representations of the Intellectual, Said argued
that exile referenced a space of engagement and critique, serving
as both a theoretical and political reminder that educators
often occupy a similar role and space where they work to “publicly
raise embarrassing questions, confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather
than to produce them), and refuse to be easily co-opted by governments
or corporations” while offering models of social engagement
that redefined the role of academics as civically engaged public
intellectuals. This politically charged notion of the oppositional
intellectual as homeless—in exile and living on the border,
occupying a shifting and fractured pedagogical space in which
critique, difference, and a utopian potentiality can endure—has
provided the conceptual framework for generations of educators
fighting against the deadly instrumentalism and reactionary
ideologies that have shaped contemporary educational models
in public schools and universities.
Under
the regime of neoliberalism, too many institutions of higher
education have transformed the culture of education into the
culture of business and are now characterized by a withdrawal
into the private and the irrelevant.
In
this view, education is driven largely by market forces that
undermine any viable vision of education as a public good connected
to wider social problems.
Solidarity,
rigor, public scholarship, and integrity are in short supply
in many departments and are largely ignored by the new and expanding
managerial class of administrators. In this context, exile is
less a choice than a condition that is forced through policies
of containment and procedure where contingent faculty are given
short term contracts, struggle with course over loads, and bear
the burden of time as a deprivation rather than a space of reflection
and ownership over the conditions of their labour. Under such
circumstances, exile is a state that can just as easily be manipulated
to produce a key element of the neoliberal university which,
as Noam Chomsky points out, is “designed to reduce labour
costs and to increase labour servility.”
Exile
in this context speaks to new forms of faculty servitude that
restrict and shut down spaces for dialogue, scholarship, dissent,
and quality teaching. This is a form of forced exile, one wedded
to expanding faculty powerlessness and undermining any sense
of autonomy. It is against this notion of oppressive exile wedded
to the market driven prescription of undermining faculty power
while intensifying their labour that the concept of exile has
to be rethought. Instead, exile must be seen and theorized as
part of a larger political and empowering discourse connected
to an affective and ideological space of struggle and resistance.
Less an oppressive space of containment and deskilling, exile
can become the grounds for a revitalized kind of public space
and activism where a new language, a new understanding of politics,
and new forms of solidarity can be nurtured among the displaced
— that is, among those who refuse the neoliberal machinery
of social and political violence that defines education solely
as a source of profit, mode of commerce, and “feel good”
pedagogy. The renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s comments
on his notion of welcoming exile under certain circumstances
should not therefore surprise us, especially in light of his
own experience of marginality as a Jewish public intellectual
and as a courageous exemplar of civic courage. What must be
understood and emphasized here is that Bauman’s position,
along with that of Adorno and Said’s, does not constitute
a celebration of marginality. Rather, for all of these scholars,
exile is an affirmation to keep going in the midst of what sometimes
appears to be a deadening form of academic madness and insularity
driven by forces which constantly seek to undermine the university
as a democratic public sphere. Bauman writes:
I
need to admit, however, that my view of the sociologists’
vocation does not necessarily overlap with the consensus of
the profession. Dennis Smith has described me as an “outsider
through and through.” It would be dishonest of me to deny
that denomination. Indeed, throughout my academic life I did
not truly “belong” to any school, monastic order,
intellectual camaraderie, political caucus, or interest clique.
I did not apply for admission to any of them, let alone did
much to deserve an invitation; nor would I be listed by any
of them—at least unqualifiedly—as “one of
us.” I guess my claustrophobia—feeling as I do ill
at ease in closed rooms, tempted to find out what is on the
other side of the door—is incurable; I am doomed to remain
an outsider to the end, lacking as I [do] the indispensable
qualities of an academic insider: school loyalty, conformity
to the procedure, and readiness to abide by the school-endorsed
criteria of cohesion and consistency. And, frankly, I don’t
mind.
While
I don’t want to romanticize positions of marginality and
exile, they may represent some of the few spaces left in the
university where one can develop a comprehensive vision of politics
and social change, challenge the often deadening silos of disciplinarity,
while making connections with wider social movements outside
of the university. The fight for the university as a public
good is essential to the development of a vibrant formative
culture and democracy itself. Exile may be one of the few spaces
left in neoliberal societies as democracy is pushed ever farther
to the margins where individuals must learn to work together
to cultivate a sense of meaningful connection, solidarity, and
engaged citizenship that moves beyond an allegiance to narrow
interest groups and fragmented, single issue politics. Exile
might be the space where a kind of double consciousness can
be cultivated that points beyond the structures of domination
and repression to what the poet Claudia Rankine calls a new
understanding of community, politics and citizenship in which
the social contract is revived as a kind of truce in which we
allow ourselves to be flawed together. She writes:
You
want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others
you’re constantly waiting to see that they recognize that
you’re a human being. That they can feel your heartbeat
and you can feel theirs. And that together you will live—you
will live together.The truce is that. You forgive all of these
moments because you’re constantly waiting for the moment
when you will be seen. As an equal. As just another person.
As another first person. There’s a letting go that comes
with it. I don’t know about forgiving, but it’s
an “I’m still here.” And it’s not just
because I have nowhere else to go. It’s because I believe
in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another
way of being. Let’s make other kinds of mistakes; let’s
be flawed differently.
To
be “flawed differently” works against a selfish
desire for power and a sense of belonging to the often suffocating
circles of certainty that define fundamentalisms of all ideological
stripes. Being “flawed differently” also suggests
the need to provide room for the emergence of new democratic
public spheres, noisy conversations, and a kind of alternative
third space informed by compassion and respect for the other.
Under such circumstances, critical exchange and education matters
not as a self-indulgent performance in which individuals simply
interview themselves but as public acts of reaching out, a willingness
to experience the other within the space of exile that heralds
and precipitates a democracy to come. This would be a democracy
where intellectual thought informs critique, embodies a sense
of integrity, and reclaims education in the service of justice
and equality.
What
might it mean, then, to imagine the university as containing
spaces in which the metaphor of exile provides a theoretical
resource to engage in political and pedagogical work that is
disruptive, transformative and emancipatory? Such work would
both challenge the mainstream notion of higher education as
a kind of neoliberal factory, as well as the ideological fundamentalism
that has emerged among many conservatives and some alleged progressive
voices. What might it mean to address the work that we do in
the university, especially with regards to teaching as a form
of classroom grace -- a place to think critically, ask troubling
questions, and take risks, even though that may mean transgressing
established norms and bureaucratic procedures?
Exile
is not a prescription or rationale for cynicism, nor is it a
retreat from one’s role as an informed and engaged faculty
member. On the contrary, it is a space of possibility where
the reality of the university as defined by the culture of business
and a reductive instrumental rationality can be challenged by
a view of the university as a public good, one that expands
and deepens relations of power among faculty, administrators
and students while redefining the mission of the university.
In an age of overwhelming violence, war and oppression, universities
must create formative cultures that allow students to assume
the role of critically engaged citizens, informed about the
ideologies, values, social relations and institutions that bear
down on their lives so that they can be challenged, changed
and held accountable. Exile in this sense is a space of critical
dialogue, a posture of engaged dissent, a place filled with
visions that refuse to normalize the present while imagining
a more just future. It is a deeply political and moral space,
one that makes education central to any viable notion of agency
and politics, and works hard to create the public spaces and
formative cultures that make democracy possible.
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