Free Action or Resistance: Cultural Critique in the Classroom

By the time students arrive in college, they have experienced a dozen years of institutional education. For many, finding means to avoid or resist schooling has been an integral part of surviving that experience. Standing on the other side of the classroom, I imagine all teachers have encountered student resistance in one form or another. However, when one teaches “cultural critique” and seeks to inculcate a critical attitude toward the dominant culture, including school, then resistance becomes a more vexed problem. Learning to resist is an element of learning cultural critique; however student resistance to learning (or learning institutions) can prevent them from gaining access to critical methodologies that would make their resistance more specific and effective. While many teachers might be tempted to use their authority to maintain discipline in the classroom, teachers of cultural critique cannot apply their institutional power without producing contradictions within their teaching. Even if they choose to exercise this power, confronting resistance to critique can be difficult in the current context of higher education, where critique is often met with suspicion from both administrators and academics.

Henry Giroux believes that given cultural studies’ concern with “the critical relationship among culture, knowledge, and power, it is not surprising that mainstream educators often dismiss cultural studies as being too ideological, or simply ignore its criticisms regarding how education generates a privileged narrative space for some social groups and a space of inequality and subordination for others.” [1] Because critique challenges concepts of identity, knowledge and ideology upon which academic practices, particularly pedagogic practices, operate, it is seen as a threat. However, it is possible to perceive critique as Giroux does, as an asset in addressing the concerns many teachers share about the educational system.

Responses to teaching cultural critique, and the student resistance it engenders, reflect larger theoretical differences within the academic community, specifically as those differences result in conflicting theories of subjectivity. Gerald Graff and Gregory Jay argue that cultural studies pedagogies wrongly intercede in what they identify as a personal relationship between individuals and institutions. They describe the psychological and emotional ties that link students to the institutions that cultural studies critiques. Oppositional Marxists, such as Theresa Ebert, Ma’sud Zavarzadeh, and Donald Morton, see these ties as ideological. They view the students’ psychological and emotional responses as a product of material-institutional practices that withhold the critical understanding students need to overcome their initial reactions.

As I will explore, these theories of student resistance articulate resistance as a response to a deficiency within the student. The identification of this lack within the student also becomes the premise for pedagogical action: students have some psycho-emotional and/or material deficiency, and pedagogy serves to address it. However, I will argue that schools manage student action through these discourses of lack, that subjects become articulated as students through the assignment of specific lacks (the obvious ones being knowledge, experience and maturity). In order to avoid this particular form of institutionalization, it is necessary to find means for articulating student action outside of these discourses. In particular I will examine how Lawrence Grossberg draws upon Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic philosophy to develop such a pedagogy.

My investigation into student resistance begins with my experiences teaching cultural studies in a first-year writing course. The problem crystallized for me during a class discussion of two excerpts collected for a cultural studies textbook: Paula Gunn Allen’s analysis of the role of misogyny and homophobia in colonization and Gloria Anzaldua’s accounting of her border existence. The class’ responses to Anzaldua centered on the problem of immigrants who should “learn to speak the language.” That the populations both of the writers discuss were in place long before U.S. settlers arrived was irrelevant to them. Forget the history. Right now it would simply be more efficient to learn to speak English, to become part of “the” culture. After reading Gunn Allen’s exploration of the relations between sexuality, gender, colonization and Christianity, the students’ resistance did not focus upon the claims that colonization is violent, or even that Christianity could play a role in that...