Abstract
I summarize the ascendancy of the concept of “power” in US curriculum studies since 1968, arguing that the field’s preoccupation with the concept reproduced the political defeat school reform represented. With the public school curriculum no longer under its jurisdiction, the field turned from “curriculum development” to “understanding curriculum,” a reconceptualization of the function of the field that engendered new concepts, among them “reproduction theory” and, later, “resistance theory.” Efforts to understand curriculum as primarily political were challenged in the 1980s by scholars arguing that race or gender were more primary that politics, but these new preoccupations with “identity” and, later (with the arrival of postmodernism in the late 1980s), “discourse” retained the previous preoccupation with power. Now widely accepted, these discourses are no longer intellectual provocations but background assumptions, and I argue they cannot convey the specificity of the circumstances surveyed in chapter 1. New concepts—including those from international and Jewish studies—can help structure the coming reconceptualization of the field.
To recall a product of intellectual breakthrough while forgetting the analytic conditions of its utterance is to have the answer but no memory of the question.
Charles David Axelrod (1979, 1)
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Notes
Cultural studies generally, Anderson and Valente (2002, 14) observe, seemed to have made “agency detection among the apparently disempowered the overriding priority of its enterprise.” What appears among the subaltern was denied to the visible, e.g. teachers.
The assertion of “race”—and its more encompassing conceptual cousin “culture”—as totalizing seems strange given Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous 1963 demand that a person be judged by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin. Identity politics reinscribed racialist concepts while inverting their valence. One casualty is the concept of “character” (see Pinar 2011a, 10–11) left to be appropriated by cultural conservatives. Interracial collaboration is also a casualty, contradicting the history of civil rights struggle generally and the intellectual formation of key African-American intellectuals specifically (see Posnock 1998).
For the descendants of colonizers, some form of self-shattering (Pinar 2006b) must characterize at least the initial stages of subjective reconstruction. For descendents of the colonized, some affirmation of indigenous culture is obviously appropriate, but as a moment in working through the effects of colonization. Recall that Sartre endorsed négritude as just such a moment, a judgment with which Fanon at first struggled, then accepted (Hansen 1977, 34; Mercer 1994, 298). To decolonize the curriculum starts but cannot end in either self-shattering or self-affirmation, as working through the past engenders provides passage to a future we cannot foresee.
My critique of identity politics is specific, namely its tendency to collectivize identity and alienate political allies, what I have termed “strategically dysfunctional essentialism” (2009). Clearly, political interventions linked to identity remain essential in specific locales on specific occasions. The curriculum censorship legislated in Arizona is a case in point. On January 1, 2012, after a new state law focused on Mexican-American studies courses that had been criticized as anti-white was upheld. Michael Winerip (2012, March 19, A8) reports that it became illegal to teach Mexican WhiteBoy by Matt de la Peña in Tucson public school classrooms. State officials alleged that the book contained “critical race theory,” a violation under a provision that prohibits lessons “promoting racial resentment.” Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was also banned. Not only books were censored, class lessons were as well, among them one entitled “From Cortes to Bush: 500 Years of Internalized Oppression” (quoted passages in 2012, March 19, A8). While that title seems overly expansive and threatens totalization, Arizona lawmakers’ reaction affirms its timeliness.
Speaking of gay studies, Chauncey (2000, 305) blames not processes of “maturation” and “deferentialization” but institutionalization: “We also face the problem that any such institutionalization of intellectual inquiry threatens: namely, to reify and naturalize the very categories it was initially designed to critique, and to freeze a rapidly developing field at a particular moment in its evolution.” That seems a fair statement of what has happened with efforts to understand curriculum as political, racial, and gender text. It is important to remember, however, that institutionalization can enable as well as disarm intellectual critique.
John Willinsky is not afraid to affirm the ongoing significance of the (unfinished) Enlightenment. “Enlightenment,” he (2006, 149) summarizes, “is about moving people out from under the tutelage of others. Enlightenment is furthered by a good education system, by all means, but it can only be sustained and made vital, I would dare to conclude from Kant’s and Derrida’s positions, by finding ways of increasing people’s access to intellectual resources that would support the public reasoning and freedom Kant speaks of.” Willinsky is not alone in associating the aspirations of the Enlightenment with open access. “[A] great part of the excitement of life in the post-Enlightenment period,” Marilynne Robinson (2010, 3) points out, “has come with the thought that reality could be reconceived, that knowledge would emancipate humankind if only it could be made accessible to them. Such great issues, human origins and human nature, have the public as an appropriate theater, since the change they propose is cultural.” And it should go without saying that the “public theater” includes the public school curriculum. It must not disappear online, but remain an assembly in which subjective presence renders academic study immediate and often improvisational.
Lather’s “not-knowing” becomes for Springgay and Freeman (2010, 229) the “unthought” and a process of becoming that is “always incomplete,” the latter term reiterating one thesis of the 1962 Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development yearbook. Not only history but subjectivity disappears in this embrace of “intercorporeal understandings” and “an intimate curriculum” (Springgay and Freeman 2010, 231). While “touching” (2010, 231) is an intriguing concept, its ethicality is not obvious despite the authors’ assertion (2010, 237). That is one of Murray’s (2010, 240) points (elaborated in his response), namely that touching and being-touched are ambiguous in their meaning; the body requires thinking and articulation (2010, 242; see Gershon 2011). Despite its promise, in this essay radicalization overreaches itself.
Concepts appear (and/or reappear) as the conclusions of evidence, empirical or argumentative. (They can also reveal evidence, functioning as binoculars rendering visible other concepts have kept hidden. But in these instances too, the precision of referentialization is key.) When such evidence derives from lived experience and the historical moment (themselves intersecting concepts), there is that (possibly lasting) moment of resonance, as readers now have words for what before was experienced but not expressed, or perhaps not noticed at all. In adherence to the established concept, evidence becomes its extension, and the concept survives severed from its conception, institutionalized through repetition, no longer provocative, only iconic. Like other slogans—LaCapra (2004, 211) is here discussing the educational embrace of “excellence”—“such concepts become formalistic floating signifiers—word-balloons without words—to be filled with any possible content, however gaseous.” Deferentialization denotes, then, the severance of a concept from the specificity of its genesis; it loses its self-reconstructing link to the historical moment and devolves into self-referentiality, no longer provocative but an incantation, not a call to arms. In a Benjaminian sense, intellectual breakthrough represents “redeeming aspects of a past or present situation that may be reactivated, transvalued, or refunctioned and inserted into a significant different context” (LaCapra 2004, 211). That “redemption” is the reconstruction that constitutes intellectual advancement.
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© 2013 William F. Pinar
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Pinar, W.F. (2013). Intellectual Histories. In: Curriculum Studies in the United States: Present Circumstances, Intellectual Histories. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303424_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303424_3
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