The Other Side of Pedagogy

Lacan's Four Discourses and the Development of the Student Writer

T. R. Johnson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438453200, 9781438453194
• eBook ISBN: 9781438453217
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

University classrooms are increasingly in crisis—though popular demands for accountability grow more insistent, no one seems to know what our teaching should seek to achieve. This book traces how we arrived at our current impasse, and it uses Lacan's theory of the four discourses to chart a path forward via an analysis of the freshman writing class. How did we forfeit a meaningful set of goals for our teaching? T. R. Johnson suggests that, by the 1960s, the work of Bergson and Piaget had led us to see student growth as a journey into more and more abstract thought, a journey that will happen naturally if the teacher knows how to stay out of the way. Since the 1960s, we've come to see development, in turn, only as a vague initiation into the academic community. This book, however, offers an alternative tradition, one rooted in Vygotsky and the feminist movement, that defines the developing student writer in terms of a complex, intersubjective ecology, and then, through these precedents, proposes a fully psychoanalytic model of student development. To illustrate his practical use of the four discourses, Johnson draws on a wide array of concepts and a colorful set of examples, including Franz Kafka, Keith Richards, David Foster Wallace, Hannah Arendt, and many others.

CHAPTER ONE

THE CRISIS

FORFEITING OUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET

Surely everyone who teaches in a university noticed, during a span of months in 2011, the wave of bad press. “Why is the overall quality of undergraduate learning so poor?” asked Robert Arum and Josipa Roksa, in an editorial in The New York Times that summarized a study that Arum and Roksa had recently published under the antagonistic title, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Their newspaper article appeared on May 14—timed to coincide, no doubt, with commencement ceremonies, and to sour them. “Your So-Called Education,” the headline read, and, in the paragraphs that followed, Arum and Roksa explained that they had tracked several thousand students over four years at more than two-dozen diverse institutions and measured their learning. The study claims that nearly half the students showed no improvement on their test scores during the first two years of college, and more than one-third showed no improvement over the entire four years. “We found that large numbers of students,” add Arum and Roksa, “are making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework [and] only a modest investment of effort.” They continue, “The average student spent only 12 to 13 hours per week studying—about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying.”

The root of the trouble, argue Arum and Roksa, is the culture of consumerism. “The authority of educators has diminished, and students are increasingly thought of, by themselves and their colleges, as ‘clients’ …” The results should surprise no one: students “look for ways to attain an educational credential effortlessly and comfortably. And they are catered to accordingly. The customer is always right.” Many schools invest in “deluxe dormitory rooms, elaborate student centers, and expensive gyms,” and make sure that students are “looked after by a greatly expanded number of counselors who serve an array of social and personal needs.” To compete nationally in this consumerist model of campus life, universities must divert funds from the educational mission and send it instead toward these amenities. Thus, students are taught by fewer and fewer full-time faculty. Still worse, universities measure the performance of these part-time workers primarily through student course-evaluations, which incentivize these teachers to “demand little and give out good grades.”

This latter issue—the ease of getting good grades—also drew attention in the national press that same summer. Two months after the editorial by Arum and Roksa, The New York Times reported on a study by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy that collected data on grades at more than two hundred four-year colleges and universities. They report that, today, about 43% of all letter grades given are A’s, a 28% jump from 1960 and a 12% jump from 1988. While the number of B’s doesn’t seem to have changed much, the upward spike in A’s comes at the expense of the dwindling number of C’s, D’s, and F’s. Rojstaczer and Healy suggest that this trend began in the 1960s and 1970s, because faculty worried that D’s and F’s on a report card could send a young man to Vietnam, and that the trend accelerated in more recent decades for the reasons noted above: the student has become a customer, customer satisfaction is a top priority, and therefore even the most lackluster students can expect grades that will make them fairly happy. The upshot: as an editorial in The New York Times of December 10, 2012 put it, “The lack of meaningful academic standards in higher education drags down the entire system” (Carey A27).

Despite the apparent ease of getting good grades and the university’s budgetary allowances for keeping students happy, students are generally miserable. Unprecedented numbers of students, according to the Wall Street Journal, are self-medicating to a degree that leads them to seek help in recovering from substance abuse, and a growing number of campuses have created what are called “recovery communities,” a support system explicitly designed to help addicts stay sober during their college years through special clubhouses, recreational opportunities, scholarships, meetings, and courses (Helliker). About twenty colleges this summer formed the Association for Recovery in Higher Education, the article continues, and the recovery communities on these campuses are growing—at Kennesaw State University outside Atlanta, for example, there were only three members in 2008, and by the summer of 2011, there were fifty. If there is no such recovery community on your campus, there might be soon: Texas Tech was recently awarded a $700,000 grant to tell other universities about its program and how to replicate it. Why? Because, among Americans seeking treatment for substance abuse, no demographic is growing faster than students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. The number in this age group more than doubled in the first decade of this century.

The diminished sense of well-being is not restricted to those inclined to substance abuse. Again, from The New York Times, this time from January 27, 2011: “The emotional health of college freshman … has declined to its lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.” The article, under the headline, “Record Levels of Stress Found in College Freshman,” reports on a study of more than 200,000 incoming, full-time students at four-year colleges, and it notes that the number of students who claim “above average mental health” has dropped by more than 10% since the mid-1980s (Lewin A1). The study, corroborated by anecdotes from overwhelmed college-counselors, suggests that the global economic downturn of 2008 accounts for rising levels of depression and anxiety among today’s entering frosh.

Very little that students encounter in their classrooms mitigates this misery. When students are taught by adjunct faculty, as more and more are—people with impossibly low salaries, zero job security, and little chance of improving their situation—their negative attitude is likely corroborated by the teachers. But even if they are taught by tenured faculty, those who would seem to be in precisely the opposite circumstances, they are learning from people who, according to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (June 3, 2012) seem to be “some of the unhappiest people in academe,” beleaguered by “exhaustion, doubt, and even depression,” their reserves of energy and idealism mostly wiped out by the job search, then the long, bedeviling grind toward tenure or gobbled up by the mundane administrative burdens that, as humanities departments in particular are downsized, must be carried by fewer and fewer people.

Regardless of the disposition of the person teaching the class, the sheer cost of a university education might undermine students’ faith in the value of our courses. Consider yet one more nasty article about universities from the New York Times in—once again—the summer of 2011. In the “Room for Debate” feature of August 23, nine different leaders in discussions of higher education addressed the worth of what we offer: “Americans are spending more and more on education,” the feature began, “but the resulting credentials … seem to be losing value in the labor market.” The lead-off respondent, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, said the same thing, only more viciously: “For some people in some careers, some colleges may be worth the price they charge.” However, “[M]illions of other people are paying more than quadruple what their parents paid 25 years ago (plus inflation) for a vague credential, not much knowledge or skills, and a crippling amount of debt.” He then draws a withering comparison: “Five years ago, the establishment was saying, ‘Everyone should buy a house. Don’t worry about the price. You’ll earn it all back later. What could go wrong?’ We know how that ended.” For Thiel, the upshot: “spending four years in a lecture hall with a hangover” is an “antiquated debt-fueled luxury good” that Americans must learn to live without.

Our courses are worth nothing—or, given the debt students incur to take them, they actually have a negative value.

These dissatisfactions are hardly new. Well over a decade has passed since Mark Edmundson published his widely discussed polemic, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” in which he identified what then seemed a new kind of weather gathering in the culture of universities. Edmundson suggests that, shortly after World War II, with the help of the GI Bill, college enrollments grew a great deal, universities expanded accordingly, and soon thereafter they expanded yet more to accommodate the baby boomers; but because schools expand much more easily than they contract (faculty get tenured, can’t be let go; and administrators aren’t eager to cut their own positions), universities, after the last of the baby boomers graduated, had little choice but to market themselves aggressively to fill their classrooms. This, says Edmundson, “meant creating more comfortable, less challenging environments, places where almost no one ever failed, [and] everything was enjoyable …” He quotes an administrator who, in only mild hyperbole, said that admissions offices now more closely resemble marketing firms, and he notes that, “as soon as someone enters his junior year of high school, and especially if he’s living in a prosperous zip code, the informational material—the advertising—comes flooding in.” And he adds that, because these advertisements constitute most students’ first encounter with the university, many of them inevitably continue to define their experience of the place essentially the way a shopper would, that is, as a consumer. Thus, they show little enthusiasm or passion for what they encounter in their courses, no matter how hard we try to unveil for them the profundities in this or that benchmark of civilization, no matter how vexing the revelations we try to design for them. Rather, they evince, “on good days, a light, appealing glow; on bad days, shuffling disgruntlement,” much as though they were running an errand at the mall.

Edmundson, writing about his students in 1997, foregrounded the role of the economy in this comedy: “They’re aware of the fact that a drop that looks more and more like the Grand Canyon separates the top economic tenth from the rest of the population.” And so, inevitably, they are quite cautious, tolerating a relatively boring, risk-averse relation to the content of their courses—dispassionate, nonserious, low-stakes—because the business of getting an educational credential itself couldn’t have much higher stakes. “We may be on a conveyor belt,” they suppose, in Edmundson’s view, “but its [sic]worse down there on the filth-strewn floor. So don’t sound off, don’t blow your chance.” Ultimately, Edmundson concludes that his students lack any fire for their courses, any real desire to grow, because, most pointedly, they “lack the confidence to acknowledge what would be their most precious asset for learning: their ignorance.” In short, Edmundson’s students, in the mid-1990s, didn’t feel safe and secure enough to engage directly with what they didn’t know.

Edmundson calls what they don’t know their ignorance, but in what follows, I’ll call it the unconscious—that knowledge that, as Elizabeth Ellsworth says, we passionately disavow or ignore, and that, again, when we have the courage to engage it, is our most precious asset for learning (62). It is that part of the individual that exceeds the individual, the discourse of the other, Lacan will call it, the realm of desire as that which is always borrowed from—and directed—elsewhere, and thus is always at odds with the ego’s fantasy of autonomy. Unconscious desire is what divides us from ourselves and links us to each other. In this sense, the unconscious functions much like a public. It is what—in the context of overwhelming financial anxiety—we don’t have the confidence to engage, that most valuable resource that we forfeit.

Another assumption: if Edmundson’s students in the mid- to late 1990s didn’t have the confidence in themselves or in their world to dialogue with what they didn’t or couldn’t know, consider how much more acute must this phenomenon be in the wake of the last decade: the failed presidential election of 2000, the terrorist attacks of the following year, the eight-year war in Iraq that turned out to have been triggered by bogus intelligence, the much longer and even less conclusive quagmire in Afghanistan, the botched response to the failures of the federal levees after Hurricane Katrina, and, of course, the financial downturn of 2008, which has struck at the very heart of the consumer culture that owns so many students. What Edmundson casts, in the mid- to late 1990s, as boredom and superficiality among undergraduates has surely morphed by now into a bitter anxiety about the social structures they are inheriting and the job market they face after graduation and, most pointedly, the costs they will incur in the meantime.

Whatever is draining university classrooms of the high regard they may once have enjoyed, surely no one would dispute that campuses could do a great deal more to enable positive forms of human connection. In Terry Eagleton’s words, we need to invent new forms of belonging (21). Or to put it in ways that may seem awfully old-fashioned, even crusty, to today’s readers, we need a new set of standards, a fresh articulation of our values, a way of organizing our reflections on how we interact with students, a scheme for guiding these interactions, and improving them. Some might hear what I’m saying as a plea to get tougher when we grade, but that’s far too simple. We should not simply give more C’s on student work, but rather judge their work—and ourselves—more carefully, more rigorously. We need a new way of talking about how we talk with students.

We need, most specifically, the conceptual tools of psychoanalysis in order to speak to, with, and about what we can’t know, to re-access our most valuable asset for learning—the unconscious. In fact, if the classroom itself can be thought of as a miniature emblem of public space, of intersubjective desire, of the unconscious, then perhaps that’s why it has become in recent years an object of such vitriol. Precisely because we live in such a rattled era that no one has the confidence, much less the courage, to engage its potentials, it has become a target for aggressive critique sponsored by empirical studies that naively hope to measure gains in knowledge. In the most extreme eruptions, it becomes a hunting ground for crazed gunmen bent on mass slaughter.

THE ROOTS OF OUR CRISIS

My project partially echoes Thomas Rickert’s Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject, when he asks why our pedagogy so often seems relatively ineffectual: we train students to be attentive critics of culture and ideology, yet this training all too rarely induces real transformation in their lives (3). Rickert suggests that perhaps we need to understand that “the performative and symbolic aspects of pedagogy are as important, if not more so, than the specific content” (207). In other words, how we teach might shape students more directly than what we teach. What, then, are the key points to bear in mind as we devise our relationships with our students? Most of us embraced, quite some time ago, the Freirean, decentered classroom, so why then aren’t more of our students becoming the awakened, engaged activists that, presumably, they should become? What are we, in our conversations with them, not doing?

What if our students’ uncanny ability to decipher the sorts of people we are and their deep-seated impulse to mimic us explain their reluctance to discover, in themselves, a meaningful sense of agency and desire with respect to their course materials and wider culture? Are they simply following our lead, as our own doubts about agency spread to them? I think my hunch would be confirmed by John Schilb, who, as editor of College English, spoke, at the MLA in December 2009, about this pervasive preoccupation with the issue of agency that he sees in manuscripts submitted to the journal: “Many of us are earnestly, even frenziedly trying to develop a theory of it, in the belief that otherwise we’ll lose it.” And he continues, “Our nervous harping on agency is driven by a dubious assumption: namely that in order to intervene in the world, we must have a full-blown theory of how our behavior can matter.” Until we have such a theory, such a justification in hand, we suppose that can’t do anything else—that is, that we’re stuck, and our Prufrockian hand-wringing over how to proceed only drives our students ever deeper into slackerdom.

This problem began, argues Terry Eagleton, early in the twentieth century, when, in the aftermath of the First World War, artists were working through the impossibility of restoring what they saw as the comforts of the old, relatively well-ordered universe of the nineteenth century; by roughly 1960, however, these artists had become familiar, even domesticated, and the challenging, heroic-dissident strain in their pessimistic vision migrated to the realm we’ve come to call theory. The phase from roughly 1965 to 1980, says Eagleton, saw the extraordinary, now famous projects of theory-building, and given the mandate to pessimistic dissent inherited from the artists of the 1920s and ’30s, these theories focused on what lay just beyond theory’s reach, the stuff that no one can ever fully articulate: difference, the unconscious, the body, desire. This movement eventually exhausted itself, Eagleton claims, and by 1980, had largely collapsed. In its wake, intellectuals became preoccupied with the local: “micropolitics,” Eagleton quips, “broke out on a global scale.” And the new object of study—“culture”—took shape through the widespread assumption that theory was sheer futility. By 1989, the two greatest proponents of what Eagleton casts as the new “anti-theory,” Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, had decided that theory was merely an attempt to justify one’s way of life. That is, it seeks to give you reasons for living the way you do, an explanation; but, for Rorty and Fish, this is ultimately neither possible nor necessary. As Eagleton paraphrases them, “You cannot justify your way of life by theory because theory is part of your way of life, not something set apart from it.” And what counts as a “legitimate reason or valid idea will be determined by your way of life itself. So cultures have no foundation in reason. They just do what they do” (54). In short, for the antitheorists, cultures cannot be theorized or evaluated, because you are always either judging from within some culture, your remarks redundant and complicit, or you’re outside it and thus ultimately uninformed.

This obituary on high theory—in fact, on all thinking—would be corroborated by Edmundson, who contends that, in the classroom, we’ve seen the flowering of cultural studies as, at worst, a vapid substitute for thinking: the students-as-customers “[get] what they most want—easy pleasure, more TV”; that is, increasingly light and directionless chatter about what students like and don’t like about, say, the latest Madonna album. In short, in the absence of any critical framework or distance, any theory, the classroom b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Recovering the Unconscious: Pedagogy’s Other Side
• Chapter 1 The Crisis: Forfeiting Our Most Valuable Asset
• Chapter 2 Contemporary Composition Studies: Development Means Joining Our Community, and That’s All There Is to Know
• Chapter 3 Why the “Growth” Movement Didn’t Grow—And an Alternative
• Chapter 4 Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy: Some Historical Context and Key Terms for Doing the Impossible
• Chapter 5 A Perfect Ignorance and Paralysis: The Discourse of the Master
• Chapter 6 Only Following Directions: The Discourse of the University
• Chapter 7 “Songs … dripping off my fingers”: The Discourse of the Hysteric
• Chapter 8 Playing by Ear: The Discourse of the Analyst
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover