What can critical pedagogy learn from postmodernism? Further reflections on the impossible future of critical pedagogy
Year: 2005
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Critical Pedagogy faces today a very strange situation.While being positioned in a seemingly comfortable position and warmly received by so many liberals, post-colonialists, multiculturalists, postmodernists, and feminists (to name only few of the long list of its adorers), it is being domesticated, appeased, or even castrated by the present order of things.It became too successful, under different titles, while under the flag of Critical Pedagogy it became domesticated, disoriented, or dogmatized.As many of the authors of this collection have noted, today it has become difficult to speak of Critical Pedagogy; it is quite ambitious even to articulate the essential elements common to the various and conflicting pedagogies that propagate themselves under the banner of Critical Pedagogy.Critical Pedagogy was constituted on the central concepts of Critical Theory and on the material, social, and cultural conditions that enabled the critical Utopia.It was part of a rich Western tradition, not just a sign of a dramatic crisis in modern thought and reality.If in classical times the whole was conceived as prior to the parts, and harmony preceded differences and otherness, the imperial Roman era already acknowledged the turn away from the wholeness of the cosmos.Stoa and Gnosis represented it in rich, different, ways.For Gnosis Being is temporary; not eternal.Being is essentially split and antagonistic to itself.The temporarity of Being and its infinite not-identical-with-itself is acknowledged also by St. Augustine in the tenth book of his Confessions as well as in the first Letter to Thessalonians in the New Testament.Without abandoning truth, it faced the retreat of classical togetherness of humans and the wholeness of the cosmos, as well as the priority and supremacy of the whole over its individual parts.Cosmic intimacy and unproblematic self-evidence were replaced by alienation; alienation between the parts and the whole, and alienation within the individual himself.Medieval Christianity offered an alternative via the home-returning project.With the assistance of dogma and well kept walls between classes in society, and between Christian-Jewish sacred truth and existence, it maintained a fairly stable illusion of coherent, steady, relations between the intellect, moral faculty and the aesthetical dimensions of life, and the body.This relative stability was perceived as part of a redeemed, yet fragile and threatened whole: between the Christian, the world, the Other, and knowledge about worthy knowledge.This stable hierarchy, which divided Spirit and body, supra-human and worldly-life, was never genuinely harmonious, stable, coherent, or wholly penetrating.In actuality it did not safely protect the hegemonic social order and its realms of self-evidence: it was actually questioned time and again by rebellious poor farmers, well-educated heretics, witches, madmen, children, women, Jews, and other Others.And yet, it enjoyed relative success in hiding its immanent violence, which offered, aside from inequality (after death), suffering, ignorance, and effective silencing of the free spirit.At this price, however, it offered meaning to the given reality and hope for transcendence.The demolition of the medieval Western Christian world was brought about by the strengthening and universalization of two versions of its arch-rival: the alliance of classical Greek thought and Judaism.Herman Cohen emphasized the universal realization of Judaism as the expression of the critical spirit and humanism 1 Karl Marx 2 emphasized the universal realization of Judaism as manifested by the logic and practice of capitalism.3 The medieval Christian world could not very long resist such united, erotic, transcending powers.The medieval order could not sustain durable resistance to the new philosophical and scientific revolutionary developments, 4 or to the economic, social, technological, and national challenges imposed by the spirit of capitalism.In modernity the critical project was aimed at a positive mission: reestablishing the world as a home; offering a home returning project for humans, back to a (pre)meaningful wholeness enhanced by rational, solidarian, dialogical, individuals.Within the framework of Enlightenment individuals committed themselves to re-constitute the Garden of Eden on earth via critical thinking and collective rational-political praxis.The Critical Theory thinkers of the Frankfurt School were faced with the problematic of the unattainable metaphysical assumptions for this mission.They also acknowledged the new, irrelevant, social conditions for the realization of the Enlightenments educational project and along with Heidegger and existentialism, they not only refused any metaphysic, they further developed a Diasporic philosophy one that addressed humans ontological Diasporic existence.They responded to the human condition as being-thrown-into-the-world, meaninglessness, and omnipotent-cannibalistic-violence that enhances culture and progress only as new forms of nihilistic negation of love of Life in its wholeness.For late Adorno and Horkheimer, this was the beginning of a new, vivid, thinking, not the end of their utopian undertaking.Even if they were not aware of it, we can still identify in
Author: Gert Biesta
Institution: University of Luxembourg
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W652013092