When We Coinstitutionalize Theory and Diversity

Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility. By Pamela L. Caughie. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

At the center of Passing and Pedagogy Pamela L. Caughie quotes Mary Poovey's description of cultural criticism, in a 1990 essay in College English, as a "three-tiered enterprise" that attends not only to "culture as an interdependent set of institutional and informal practices and discourses" but also to "the traces this larger social formation produces in individual texts" and "the study of the role our own practice--in this case, teaching--plays in reproducing or subverting the dominant cultural formation" (qtd. on 151). Teaching, broadly conceived to include our roles as scholars and teachers, is central to Caughie's book:

The real testing ground for our ways of reading is the dynamics of the classroom exchange where our statements function not as constatives, passing on knowledge, but as performatives, producing effects. Teaching is advocacy, values advocacy, as many theorists have argued; yet those values do not lie in what we teach or in the claims we make for our teaching but emerge in the dynamic interaction in the classroom where the face-to-face relation to others and their responses is immediate, though not unmediated. (173)

Her play on one of the many connotations of passing ("passing on knowledge") reflects a recurrent pattern in the book, as does the emphasis on responsibility both here and in the book's subtitle. Her distinction between constatives and performatives reflects "the general shift in academic inquiry from questions of truth to questions of value, from what we know to what we do" (202), which is itself parallel to "the shift from textual interpretation to cultural critique" (62). Caughie attributes this change in emphasis to postmodernism in general and to deconstruction and cultural criticism in particular. As she announces at the beginning of her fifth chapter, Passing and Pedagogy is appearing "at a critical moment in the profession when literary studies and composition studies in colleges and universities across the country increasingly are becoming cultural studies" (177). In that broader context there is, as she points out in her closing pages, "a newly emerging and ever-proliferating academic discourse on passing" (247).

At the heart of that discourse are the phenomena that Caughie describes at various points as an "anxiety," a "clash," a "disjunction." She spells out one in her opening pages--"When various postmodern theories that deconstruct the 'self' converge with various studies programs that revive it, anxiety arises over the positions that we find ourselves in as professors and learners in the newly configured university. Passing is an appropriate figure for the anxiety of having no secure position" (13)--and then returns to it midway through the book: "Cultural studies emerges in the clash between antifoundational theories that deconstruct the self and studies programs that revive it" (177-78). Caughie's reference to a "disjunction" applies to the question of who may or may not teach what, a question involving "the authority of experience and the role it plays, as well as the limits it sets, in teaching for diversity" (124): "It is this disjunction between what one professes and how one is positioned that I have been exploring in terms of passing" (234). Indeed, she positions Passing and Pedagogy in terms of several overlapping issues:

This book responds to the need for a strategic and pragmatic intervention in several distinct but related debates that continue to preoccupy us: the place of cultural diversity and identity politics in academic discourse; the institutionalization of a multicultural curriculum and a cultural studies paradigm; the politics of postmodern theories and the hegemony of Theory itself; and the aims of what some call critical pedagogy and others call advocacy teaching. (2)

Proceeding from the notion of pedagogy "not as a method but as an event" (65), Caughie argues that it "entails the site of our actual engagement with others, and yet so much writing about pedagogy elides the messiness [End Page 418...