(^{radically trivial}) Strategies of Clown Pedagogy

One of the strategies of clown pedagogy—as we have already indicated in our discussion of Professor John W. Crowley's ideology of knowledge-as-parody—is the use of those pedagogical devices that reinscribe the commonsense of the ruling class into everyday life and, in doing so, ensure that the economic interests of that class are seen as the interests of all classes. In clown pedagogy, the interests of the ruling class are regarded as part of the “laws of nature." One does not critique them; one simply DESCRIBES and APPRECIATES them in the form of poems, novels, plays, essays—all of which contribute to the on-going process of naturalization. “Survey” courses are staunch allies of clown pedagogy in representing the economic interests of the ruling class as an ORGANIC part of nature itself. It is in “survey” courses that students are indocrinated [indoctrinated--Ed. 2003] into the pre-existing “order of things," while being led to believe that they are “learning” new knowledges.

Today of course the post-al clown pedagogue has become more “seasoned” (thus the emergence of the idea of knowledge as “parodic” in the capitalist academy—see D. O'Hara's Radical Parody) and now presents the “survey" as a “progressive” teaching device—a means for re-organizing and re-ordering the established order of books (revising “the canon")—ultimately legitimated through the claim that the “survey," in such revisions, opens up new spaces for marginal persons. These new “survey” teachers, however, forget to tell their students that the revision of the canon takes place within the established order of wage-labor and capital. That it is simply a cosmetic reform. The concept of the “canon," therefore, is a highly privileged notion in post-al clown pedagogy because while it allows for a “forgetting” of what space the (revisionary) “survey” actually occupies within bourgeois society, it also allows for the survey teacher to represent the “survey” as a progressive pedagogical tool. In short, in survey courses the idea of “revising the canon” helps clown pedagogy produce the ideological effects of the “natural”, while at the same time simulating revisionist effects of de-naturalization.

Professor Harvey Teres's course for Fall 1995 is an exemplary instance of this ideological tactic of “revision” for purposes of “preservation”, of complicity with the capitalist knowledge industry, and or manipulation of the “canon” to simply reinforce the pre-existing order of things. In this course the established canon comes back with a vengeance and the “classic” is once more represented to students as an inevitable “natural fact."

His “course," Professor Teres writes “surveys” the “extraordinary richness and variety” of fiction in the US after WWII. The course, in other words, “takes for granted” without explaining why, the “richness” of fiction in this period. This is the period in US history which is marked by mass murder (Hiroshima), ethnic cleansing (Vietnam), racism (the Watts and LA class uprisings), terrorism (the attack on Libya), the complete annihilation of a nation (Iraq), the dismantling of all social programs for the poor (from the Reagan administration to Gingrich) . . . In his course description, what makes the fiction of this period of aggression of capitalism “rich” is left unsaid. This “un-said” of the course is in fact the assumption that there is “something” inherent, essentially subsistent in the text itself (the something that no one can explain), that brings about the “richness” of the text.

This “richness”..the logic of which underlies several of the analyses of the sexual harrassment case in the English Department in early April 1995--is the “richness” that the “creative” writer puts in the text itself as a result of his own emancipation from social norms, his emancipation from the laws of social citizenship. When the imperative of social citizenship that rules against the oppression and exploitation of one citizen by another is pointed out, the “creative” writer simply rejects those laws of social citizenship as an imposition on the “creative” faculty--a form of POLITICAL CORRECTNESS that is codified Stalinism.

Nabokov, the first writer to be studied in Prof. Teres' course, is an exemplary figure of a fascist writer who has systematically declared the “creative” writer to be beyond the boundaries of the social (PALE FIRE). All social activists in his novels are either terrorists, Stalinists, or Communists who suffer from a complete lack of “creativity” and are obsessed with “human rights"—another Stalinist code that gets in the way of the “creativity” and “freedom” of the “imagination." Lolita, which is an instance of “richness” in this course, is an example of the unleashing of male aggression (in the guise of “creativity") on the body of a young woman. The “creative” man (addicted to having his own way) cannot be bothered by the “political correctness” of the injunction that says one human being should not subjugate another human being for his pleasures. The pornographic, the sadistic, and the voyeuristic that marks the narrator's creative “journey” of erotic self-discovery (at the expense of another human being) is presented, in Nabokov, as the process of the creative man's self-liberation from inhibitions and political correctness--outside of the cities (on the road--far away from all codes of collective life). Like all pornographic narratives, LOLITA is a larger story: it is the story of a society that sanctions aggression against, and destruction of, the many by the few. It is a narrative of pornography, of “profit” and war--it is an allegory of the penetration of capitalism into Vietnam. This narrative is represented as a “rich” narrative to be learned by the young women and men who take this course.

It is not just Nabokov who in LOLITA legitimates “creative” freedom over and above the norms of social solidarity: the same theme is repeated over and over in the fictions that Professor Teres claims have extraordinary “variety." Yet there is no variety here, or, rather, there is merely a variety of backdrops. Other such “rich” novels in the course as Roth's GOODBYE COLUMBUS, Gass's OMENSETTER's LUCK, Updike's RABBIT (the saga of the creative businessman who knows no boundaries)--all repeat the same theme of violation and narcissism. The crowning moment of the course is the reading of John Hawkes's THE CANNIBAL. In this novel the “erotic” and “capital” converge in the trope of “cannibalism"--the devouring of the other (in an orgasmic moment) without inhibition (political correctness) and under the license of creative freedom, To devour the other is the ultimate mark of “rebellion” against the human community.

The survey course naturalizes its selections by claiming for them the status of the “compelling." The events in the English Department of Syracuse University in early April 1995 have shown how the “compelling” is the trope of freedom for aggression, the devouring of the other, and the sign of the legitimation of desire--the desire of the “creative” writer who cannot and should not be stopped (let's have no political correctness here). He is “compelled” and the organic force of the compelling is beyond the laws of “political correctness"--those Stalinist roles that ask the citizen writer to be respectful of social solidarity and commonality. Professor Teres teaches “compelling” books that invade the body of woman (in the name of erotic freedom), trivialize social struggles for change (ARMIES OF THE NIGHT), turn racism into an “existential” question, and in doing so perform the ruling class ideology that racism has nothing to do economics and politics and is basically a personal matter of “being-in-the world” (INVISIBLE MAN). It trivializes anti-sensitism by reducing its pain through the uproar of laughter and self-mocking (HERZOG). As we have seen in the discourses of The RADICAL TANGERINE--the current organ of clown pedagogy—humor is an ally of fascism and humor is necessary to reduce and trivialize the serious and the grim. Bellow, who produces SUPER-CLOWNS (HENDERSON, THE RAIN KING; HERZOG . . .) to make laughable the crimes of capitalism in Africa (HENDERSON, THE RAIN KING) and in EUROPE (HERZOG), then becomes the master comedian of Professor Teres's course, which, in the name of the aesthetic (formal richness) normalizes emotions and feelings that have acquired naturalness under capitalism as the “rich” fiction of America since WWII. No one taking this course will know that it was in this period that the US brought down democratically elected governments in the world (Chile), wiped out an entire nation (Iraq), destroyed the economy of all nations that did not go along with its imperialist policies (Nicaragua), starved and killed children by cutting food and medicine to them (Cuba), . . . How could a fiction that goes along with these practices and makes them tolerable by turning them into existential jokes be a “rich” fiction?: Only if “richness” is the “richness” (unbridled self freedom) of creativity and aesthetics, and only when this creativity and beauty are proposed to students as the beauty and freedom of something so “extraordinary” that it cannot be explained by the “ordinary” laws of motions of capital—the laws of the exploitation of workers by owners.

CLOWN PEDAGOGY laughs in the face of history and represents literature as “in itself" rich and beautiful regardless of what that literature hides about the cruelty of capitalism. Survey courses are allies of clown pedagogy and are retained even in the “new” ETS curriculum at Syracuse University because without surveys the clown pedagogue cannot complete his job of indoctrinating the rising labor force.

Professor Teres's course is being offered in a department whose curriculum is supposedly THEORETICAL: there is not a single THEORY book in this course--not even a book discussing the CANON or the CLASSICS! Courses in a theory curriculum are supposed to be acts of problematizing knowledges. Professor Teres—and with him the entire faculty--laughs at the very idea of a theory curriculum which is an act of intervention in knowledge-production. Practically everyone in the Department is observing the destruction of the theory curriculum with “smiley faces." Everything is ok with them, just so long as they can re-read LOLITA and have a “good time” being “creative."