No Offense, Doug: Critical Thinking Beyond the Pleasure Principle
In the comment section of the last post, Doug made the following statement:
I hate to always do this. I'm a theory guy, so here comes the dreaded theory. In Seminar XX, Lacan identifies four discourses that I think are relevant to why Doug might be mistaken in his belief that students have to enjoy in order to learn. For the sake of this post, I'll oversimplify Lacan's four discourses, but only to the extent of reducing their nuances:
1) The source of agency doesn't come from the individual, but rather from some idealized imagining of knowledge itself. The impossible objective of this discourse is to produce a mastership of knowledge. If we were to translate this into critical-thinking skills, then this is the call to master a primary text, all of its nuances, etc. The primary point of critical thinking in this discourse is to question the paraphrasing's fidelity to the primary text.
2) The individual subordinates knowledge to the production of pleasure and/or the recuperation of a loss. Again, in terms of critical-thinking skills, this is the call for new and new, more pleasurable applications of a theory, paradigm, metaphor, etc. When not a call for pleasure in itself, this discourse calls for the recovery of a loss, such as in marginalized discourses. The primary point of critical thinking in this discourse is to question the appropriateness/accuracy of the transposition from the application's original context to such new contexts.
3) The source of agency in this discourse comes from some idealized imagining of authority that governs over the subject. The subject sees only knowledge/information in others, and thereby suppresses other subjectivities (other people's personal lives, etc.), with the ultimate objective of producing recognition for oneself. In terms of critical thinking, this discourse questions the careful negotiation of different (types of) information in a critical community.
4) The source of agency in this discourse comes from pleasure itself. This discourse subordinates any possibility of mastership to the production of new knowledge. The production of knowledge is the sole objective of this discourse. In terms of critical thinking, this discourse is the closest to deconstruction: a question of premises and then of their relationships to conclusions.
In order to create his cool little "mathemes," Lacan makes the outlandish claim that these are the only possible discourses. While this is obviously untrue, his explanation of how we circulate through the different discourses brings about an important point. We teachers want our students to be capable of all of these different discourses and their different types of critical thinking.
Therefore-- no offense, Doug-- we don't want our students to reduce their critical thinking skills to only those that derive from or produce pleasure.
What propels me into critical thinking isn't duty, or heroic altruism, or any other such world-historical imperative; it's sheer enjoyment. If our students can't learn to feel that enjoyment, they won't do it.
I hate to always do this. I'm a theory guy, so here comes the dreaded theory. In Seminar XX, Lacan identifies four discourses that I think are relevant to why Doug might be mistaken in his belief that students have to enjoy in order to learn. For the sake of this post, I'll oversimplify Lacan's four discourses, but only to the extent of reducing their nuances:
1) The source of agency doesn't come from the individual, but rather from some idealized imagining of knowledge itself. The impossible objective of this discourse is to produce a mastership of knowledge. If we were to translate this into critical-thinking skills, then this is the call to master a primary text, all of its nuances, etc. The primary point of critical thinking in this discourse is to question the paraphrasing's fidelity to the primary text.
2) The individual subordinates knowledge to the production of pleasure and/or the recuperation of a loss. Again, in terms of critical-thinking skills, this is the call for new and new, more pleasurable applications of a theory, paradigm, metaphor, etc. When not a call for pleasure in itself, this discourse calls for the recovery of a loss, such as in marginalized discourses. The primary point of critical thinking in this discourse is to question the appropriateness/accuracy of the transposition from the application's original context to such new contexts.
3) The source of agency in this discourse comes from some idealized imagining of authority that governs over the subject. The subject sees only knowledge/information in others, and thereby suppresses other subjectivities (other people's personal lives, etc.), with the ultimate objective of producing recognition for oneself. In terms of critical thinking, this discourse questions the careful negotiation of different (types of) information in a critical community.
4) The source of agency in this discourse comes from pleasure itself. This discourse subordinates any possibility of mastership to the production of new knowledge. The production of knowledge is the sole objective of this discourse. In terms of critical thinking, this discourse is the closest to deconstruction: a question of premises and then of their relationships to conclusions.
In order to create his cool little "mathemes," Lacan makes the outlandish claim that these are the only possible discourses. While this is obviously untrue, his explanation of how we circulate through the different discourses brings about an important point. We teachers want our students to be capable of all of these different discourses and their different types of critical thinking.
Therefore-- no offense, Doug-- we don't want our students to reduce their critical thinking skills to only those that derive from or produce pleasure.
Labels: critical thinking, Lacan, pedagogy, Writing as Drama
posted by Gray Kane at
1:38 PM
5 Comments:
Gray,
So who said anything about wanting "our students to reduce their critical thinking skills to only those that derive from or produce pleasure"? I wrote about the motivating force that "propels me into critical thinking"--not about the different forms that critical thinking takes once the need for it has been activated in me (or my students). I think you're confusing input with output here. I'm talking about input--what motivating forces will make our students critical thinkers, which to me means make them want to be critical thinkers, which to me, yes, does always involve enjoyment. You're talking about the critical-thinking skills themselves, which for me are the output of the desire to think critically. "The primary point of critical thinking in this discourse is to question the paraphrasing's fidelity to the primary text": yes, fine, that's the point of it, but what motivates someone to want to do this?
Let's oversimplify those four points even more: (2) and (4) are related to pleasure, and (1) and (3) are related to power. (2) also entails the possibility that, instead of producing pleasure, the individual recuperates a loss (and thus diminishes a pain); and while (1) involves power over (mastery), (3) involves submission to authority.
So two questions:
First, are you suggesting that (1) and (3) are (or should be) divorced from the production of pleasure? In other words, in them students don't (or shouldn't) enjoy mastering a text or submitting to authority?
And second, while obviously it's possible to force students to go through the motions of critical thinking by requiring it of them, will they continue to do it after the coercion stops if they don't also learn to derive pleasure from it?
As Marshall Alcorn Jr. argues in his Lacanian book Changing the Subject in English Class, if authoritative demand is the only motivation for performing an action, this tends to "deplete the ego of its power and energy" (Robert Samuels, quoted by Alcorn 51). As Alcorn suggests, this depletion "causes social problems. Because the normal subject of society is produced by a submission to the demand of the Other, the normal subject is robbed of a flexible response to feeling states both within the self and within others. Desires that arise from within particular selves are not mobilized for social interactions; desires that arise in others are not recognized. In this way, the social field suffers from an inability to transmit freely among different subject [sic] messages inflected with spontaneous expressions of desire” (51).
Like Alcorn, and from what I know of Lacan like Lacan also, I'm very suspicious of any pedagogy that attempts to divorce learning from pleasure, desire, jouissance.
Pleasure plays a role in all four of Lacan's discourses. Within the context of our discussion here, the question for Lacan isn't which discourse contains pleasure, but rather what is the role of pleasure in the discourse. Is pleasure the objective? Is pleasure the source of agency? (In other words, does joyful playfulness motivate us to partake in a discourse for some other goal?) Is pleasure not the starting point or the endpoint, but rather the material of what we do (work in itself as pleasure) in service of another objective? Or is pleasure repressed? (Even if repressed, it still plays a role.)
My question has to do with the role of pleasure in a classroom. Even if a student/teacher represses/suppresses pleasure in an exercise, such as in the effort to produce an impossible recognition from an essentially absent authority, there's not only an opportunity for critical thinking, but also a type of critical thinking that the student perhaps can't access otherwise: the evaluation not of the source material itself, but rather of the student's own ability to adequately summarize/paraphrase the primary text.
Pleasure always plays a role, but sometimes that role pertains to the student's ability to repress pleasure in the service of understanding someone else's point.
At times we teachers have to encourage students to repress pleasure in the service of understanding a pre-existing point.
When Alcorn addresses these four discourses, he keeps the sequence the same as Lacan's sequence. I changed the sequence because I believe that compositionally, students have to repress pleasure in the service of understanding a pre-existing point before the students can apply it in other contexts (pleasure as objective), negotiate it with other information (pleasure in work itself), and then evaluate the premises and their relationships to the conclusions (the motivation of pleasure in the play of signs).
Lacan, Alcorn, and Bracher make the mistake of privileging this last strategy as the primary one. Lacan calls this final discourse "the analyst's discourse." He privileges it because this is the one that keeps the discourses circulating. Alcorn and Bracher seem to forget this incentive for Lacan's privileging the analyst's discourse. They write their points from the standpoint that these other discourses, most notably the master's discourse, should be avoided. Quite the contrary, I believe the research process has to start there.
In which case, for me, the class can't start out fun. Fun is what we get to after subordinating fun to the understanding of a pre-existing point.
Gray,
In which case, for me, the class can't start out fun. Fun is what we get to after subordinating fun to the understanding of a pre-existing point.
I don't see how you derive this principle from anything that went before! In other words, the only justification I can find in your comment for the understanding-before-fun principle is "for me"--not "in which case."
I'm not enough of a systematic thinker to want to pin down the order in which fun and understanding must be made to arise in a classroom. For me, it's important that fun and understanding be swirling around more or less at the same time.
But for me, fun and understanding aren't enough. You also have to add a sizable dollop of confusion to the mix. Without confusion, to my mind, there is no context for learning. Students who aren't at all confused, who understand everything, have no need to go in search of understanding. Pedagogically controlled (titrated?) confusion seems to me an absolutely essential element in all learning.
Of course students come to class confused about a lot of things--and inclined to avoid thinking about those things, because they find confusion painful. They also come to class certain about (understanding) other things. The first step in teaching these students something, to my mind, must be to destabilize their certainties while also giving them strategies for dealing with confusion that make it less painful, and, if possible, more pleasurable. In my experience, that only works if they have fun while doing it.
In my comment, I said, "students have to repress pleasure in the service of understanding a pre-existing point before the students can apply it in other contexts (pleasure as objective), negotiate it with other information (pleasure in work itself), and then evaluate the premises and their relationships to the conclusions (the motivation of pleasure in the play of signs)."
This is the sequence I was talking about.
The confusion is always already there, but I postpone the majority of the destabilization of their certainties until after they've produced a text to destabilize-- in other words, when they're at the stage for them to "evaluate the premises and their relationships to the conclusions (the motivation in the play of signs)."
We all have our different styles. For me, sequence is everything.
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