No Offense, Doug: Critical Thinking Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In the comment section of the last post, Doug made the following statement:

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.

The Bill O'Reilly Syndrome, Jackass, and the Brawndo Effect: Critical Thinking in the Classroom

I'm sorry to have posted such a long post. I'll try not to do this again in the future. But this is a pedagogical problem that I've been trying to work out, and I feel it's silly for me to have access to you all without getting your input. I've been trying to define the primary obstacles to critical thinking. Thus far, I've identified what I believe are two such obstacles: the perpetual state of "going with the flow" that produces stubborn ideological adherences, and the growing social tendency to reject appeals to reason.

I know everyone hates Heidegger and theory, but Heidegger describes this “going with the flow” as such:

Being-lost in the publicness of the "they"[,] Dasein has... fallen away from itself... and has fallen into the "world." "Fallenness" into the "world" means an absorption in Being-with-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. (See Macquarrie and Robinson's translation of Being and Time, 220.)

Within its original context, Heidegger's description refers to a manner of human existence ("das Man"). This form of existence enables a student to attend to oneself, others, and the world, but "in a mode of groundless floating" such that attention is "everywhere and nowhere" (221).

As the expression "going with the flow" suggests, the student experiences “the publicness of the ‘they’” as both an extension of the self and a source of agency. In other words, we are dealing with identity politics. The student forfeits personal critical thinking in favor of a collective judgment (222), which results in a “knowing it all” attitude (ibid). For some reason, Bill O'Reilly comes to mind. Heidegger describes this attitude as being a part of an individual’s general movement into an interpretive “groundlessness” (223). However, the social component of "going with the flow" hides the interpretation’s groundlessness (ibid). Moreover, the sense of “common knowledge” endows the student's uncritical movement with an illusion of correctness and stability (ibid).

In "A Pedagogy of Force," Mark D. Halx and L. Earle Reybold make the following observation about critical-thinking skills:

If learning requires effort, then critical thinking requires absolute exertion. In 1941, Mortimer Adler noted that learning is painful. He also cautioned that thinking is "fatiguing not refreshing." Kroll (1992) suggests that students are often more comfortable with "ignorant certainty" than they are with "intellectual confusion." When students first begin to think critically, they often experience discomfort because critical thinking calls for students to reflect; set aside their established assumptions; and consider other, sometimes counter, perspectives. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, students too often enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. (296-297)

According to Heidegger, anxiety (in Halx and Reybold’s terminology, “the discomfort of thought”) causes a person to flee from critical thinking. This anxiety comes from a sense of uncertainty that leads a person to perceive the indefinite objective of critical thinking to be totally meaningless (Heidegger 231).

In other words, the sense of meaninglessness is the ultimate source of our students' anxiety.

Subsequently, the student “flees” from the anxiety-producing indefiniteness of critical thinking by adhering to definite entities within the world-- in Halx and Reybold's terminology, "the comfort of opinion." What Heidegger describes—this "going with the flow," this fleeing towards “the ‘at-home’ of publicness” (234)—in fact amounts to the logic behind ideological adherences like Bill O'Reilly's. Ideological adherences reveal a flight from the anxiety-producing indefiniteness of critical thinking in favor of more definite entities within the world (233-234).

We avoid rather than confront the sources of our anxiety, and our current stage in the globalization process is filled with anxiety-producing indefiniteness, particularly on the level of conflicting ideologies (the Western ideological war against Islamic fundamentalism, conservative vs. liberal ideology, etc.). These ideological conflicts reverberate on the level of identity formation. Globalized media and increased travel, both for work and enjoyment, render a local source of identity as being an insufficient interpretive framework—without providing a more stable, global source of identity to replace it.

As a result, our students cling to more definite, often-material entities in the world-- in lieu of the anxiety-producing indefiniteness of critically negotiating unstable local, national, and global citizenry. After the anxiety-producing indefiniteness of September 11, many businesses facilitated this movement away from anxiety-producing indefiniteness. According to Markus Giesler, part of what we now consume are definitions of ourselves as we merge with our products on the level of identity. The iPod led that movement by transferring marketing’s focus from the identity of the company to the identity of the consumer. Consumers individualize their personal consumer choices to thematize their pedestrian activities. In the face of the anxiety-producing uncertainty of our current global environment, now many people use their consumer choices to label themselves-- for example, as Christian, conservative, multicultural, or environmentally conscious.

The ideological and material adherences of identity formation don't in fact block the indefiniteness of critical thinking. Instead, the person has to avoid critical thinking first, before that individual can cling to the material statements of an ideological precipice. In this sense, ideological and material adherences are symptomatic of a preexisting repression of critical thought. In other words, they are not the cause, but rather the effect of repressed critical thinking.

Media trends reveal another symptom of repressed critical thinking that is perhaps a response to the stubborn ideological and material adherences of identity formation. There is a growing movement to reject appeals to reason. Since 2000, the Jackass slapstick comedy troop has produced a franchise, complete with spin-offs such as Viva la Bam and Wild Boyz. In addition, the franchise has inspired an all-female version called Rad Girls. The strategy for this style of comedy involves the production of contrived, often physical conflicts for the comedy troop to overcome—not through reason, but rather via physical endurance and laughter (a bodily release of tensions). To facilitate this strategy, the conflicts are always decontextualized and thus deprived of greater meaning. For example, Jackass Number Two's opening dislocates the Spanish cultural practice of the Running of the Bulls—specifically from Pamplona, Spain to suburban America. Deprived of its historical/geographical/cultural content, the cultural practice is reduced to the absurdity of fear and aggression. In other words, the opening to Jackass Number Two portrays a closed-minded and distinctly American perception of the Running of the Bulls: uncritically, we Americans tend to see the Spanish cultural practice in terms of the absurdity of our corralling bulls through our own neighborhoods. The movie frequently dislocates and dissembles cultural practices, such as the Indian medical practice of using leeches and the cultural practice of interacting with cobras. The comedic style’s dismissal of reason (both that of our own and others) is in fact a dismissal of interpreting difference, often in an intentional confrontation with that difference. As a scene in the second Jackass movie demonstrates: You in India put leeches in your eyes; I from California will put leeches in my eyes, and from an American perspective we will experience solidarity, because now I am as absurd to my own ideology as you are to my ideology. In other words, the dismissal of reason has an ethical component to it, particularly in the context of our current ideological war. The strategy pursues solidarity, but outside of the realm of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles involved in ideological uses of reason.

The rejection of reason has affected marketing trends as well. Like the Axe cologne commercials, the Brawndo advertisement denies the supremacy of reason in our decisions—namely through statements such as "What are electrolytes? I don't know, but they're extremely awesome." The advertisement instead privileges instincts, and predominantly that of aggression: “Drinking [Brawndo] will make you wonder why you haven’t ever crushed a human skull with your bare hands. But you won’t have to, because you’ll already know that Brawndo tastes how that would feel, which is like having sex with a tractor trailer in a parking lot. Grrrrrrrr.” The source of this aggression becomes more evident when we look at an earlier source of the Brawndo advertisement. The Canadian comedy troop at Picnicface.com won the contract for the Brawndo advertisement by making similar advertisements for a fictional energy drink, Powerthirst. The organizational structure of the Powerthirst advertisement parallels that of the advertisement for Brawndo. However, unlike the advertisement for Brawndo, the Powerthirst commercial admits an instance of cultural contact. In the Powerthirst advertisement, if you give Powerthirst to your white babies, your white babies will run "abnormally fast"—so fast "that people will think they're Kenyans" and "they'll get deported back to Kenya." The moment of cultural contact is unintelligible. The Kenyans are "abnormal." Rather than attribute normalcy to foreign cultures, the advertisement instead encourages this unintelligibility of "abnormalcy" for ourselves—namely through a suspension of our reason.

It is as if this multicultural tolerance that suspends the logic of difference (your white baby will "get deported back to Kenya") in fact also suspends the conflicts that arise from difference. However, this strategy (the repression of the logic of difference) produces an excessive remainder of aggression. In other words, by repressing reason in the face of globalization's constant cultural/ideological conflicts, we cling to decontextualized, dissembled representations of conflict. The conflict is still there, only irrational—in fact, unrationalizeable.

If a growing number of commercials, television shows, and movies discourages reason, and if these media manifestations reflect a greater social demand to which such media appeals, then these factors reveal a growing individual frustration with the inability to reason with others in society. In other words, the two symptoms of repressed critical thinking work against each other. On one side, individuals uncritically “go with the flow” of available subject positions-- in order to escape the indefiniteness of critical thinking in our current, complex and extremely uncertain phase of globalization. On the other side, individuals avoid intellectually negotiating ideological difference in favor of a suspension/repression of that difference, with the result of a surge in aggression. Rather than embrace the material statements of intellectually “going with the flow,” they embrace the bodily statements (manifestations of instincts) of anti-intellectualism.

Both strategies intellectually deny meaning in the indefiniteness of critical thought. The best way to comprehend this similarity is in terms of sequence. First, a person rejects the indefiniteness involved in critical thinking in favor of “going with the flow.” This produces stubborn ideological adherences. (We can call this the "Bill O'Reilly Syndrome," although the stubborn ideological adherences can be liberal just as easily as conservative.) With the rise of cultural or ideological contact from globalization, the person represses the resulting increase of ideological differences—with the effect of those differences resurfacing on the level of instinctive drives, namely aggression. (We can call this the "Brawndo Effect.")

What we are dealing with here is split subjectivity. Critical thinking enables a person to experience oneself and the world as an open-source code: our program is never complete, but rather always in the process of becoming. Critical thinking enables healthy, conscious change-- both individually and socially. However, our current phase in globalization has provided too many unintentional changes. Our students and many others in our society feel the desire to stabilize their perceptions. We ignore aspects of ourselves that don't correspond with those stabilized perceptions. We split from these repressed aspects of ourselves and become Bill O'Reilly on the level of our statements. To the extent that we want to experience solidarity in the midst of unnegotiated difference, we become Jackasses. We experience the Brawndo effect by getting drunk and wrestling our friends after watching Fight Club or Ultimate Fighting. After we get that aggression out of our system, we return to our Bill O'Reilly identities and continue ignoring aspects of ourselves and dismissing aspects of others that undermine our stabilized perceptions. And we indefinitely postpone healthy, conscious change.

The Bill O'Reilly Syndrome is a dangerously debilitating approach to this globalizing world. Globalization requires critical thinking more now than ever before. As Halx and Reybold explain, "Most definitions of critical thinking emphasize a heightened awareness of multiple points of view and context, as well as an evaluation of one's own thought processes before reaching a conclusion. Thus, critical thinking requires the presence of mind to 'assess and scrutinize "knowledge" prior to its consumption'" (294-295). Until our students can decipher "multiple points of view and context," they won't be able to navigate their globalized world. Until our students can "assess and scrutinize 'knowledge' prior to its consumption," they won't be able to navigate conflicting social agendas. Until our students can evaluate their own thought processes before reaching a conclusion, they won't be able to bring about healthy, conscious change-- either for themselves or for the community.

What I can't figure out is how either to bypass the original repression of critical thinking (in other words, if we were to conceive of the above sequence as merely a student's sequential reaction in each critical instance, and not of something initiated before we get them in the classroom) or to work against the repression of critical thought. If we were to conceive of the above sequence as merely a student's sequential reaction in each critical instance, then the key seems to be to convince the students that there's meaning in the critical process, before they repress the indefiniteness of critical thought. I haven't figured out how to do that yet. Advice?

The only sure-fire way to destabilize what a student holds onto in lieu of critical thinking is for us to deploy some sort of deconstruction, at least as far as I can figure out. The only problem with this approach is that it makes the classroom an antagonistic experience.

Any advice?

Again, sorry for the excessively long post.