radically trivial
Alternative Orange Supplements
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Spring 1995 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 4, No. 2 (pp. 10-20). | ||
| • August 16, 2003 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original. | ||
The Pedagogy of the Jest
Having ran out of arguments, the entrenched powers of the English Department have now decided that "parody" is their most effective mode of covering their intellectual bankruptcy. THE ALTERNATIVE ORANGE which has struggled to make serious intellectual critique a part of the everyday life of students and faculty on this campus, will publish a series of “supplements” to read these trivial texts that the creative writers, Jungians, Yeatsians, the trade union clique... have decided to issue (through their faith-full scribes). We read these trivial texts because they are documents of the collapse of this department which is unable to engage its students and THE ALTERNATIVE ORANGE through rigorous discourses and has now taken refuge in amusing the crowd through the pedagogy of jest.
The Pedagogy of the Jest
The pedagogy of the jest is a form of cultural practice and pedagogy (not just in the classroom but in all sites of communication in culture) through which those values, attitudes, ideas, and concepts that have lost their historical legitimacy are renewed. In bringing back these concepts, the jester renders help to the bourgeois academy and the capitalist ruling class by keeping alive the social relations of production whose time has passed (because of the advancing forces of production) and in doing so prolongs the role of capital. The pedagogy of the jester is most popular at the time of crisis of bourgeois values when the values in question can no longer be appealed to in any literal and serious way. The jester—by the act of jesting—tries to discredit the emerging social forces by evoking a past in which the "lost” values were not lost and the “new” FUNNY and RIDICULOUS ways of thinking/writing/understanding had not yet become so visible. At the present historical moment, the pedagogy of the jest is a popular mode of teaching on US campuses. From Ulmer's teletheoretical solution ("Textshop for Psychoanalysis” in College English, November 1987) to Fish's There's No Such Thing As Free Speech... and It's a Good Thing Too (1994), the pedagogy of the jest has become a virtual boom industry... My subject, however, is not just an examination of the pedagogy of the jest in general, but inquires as well into its manifestation on the local scene—Syracuse University in particular. For instance, a course I registered for this semester: ETS 678 taught by Professor John Crowley:
Tuesday, January 17, 1995
I went to class on this afternoon to the first session of “American Literature, 1870-1914." Professor Crowley began his lecture on recent developments in literary studies and their relation to the “survey course”. He suggested that the time has come to go back to “traditional scholarship” (of the type exemplified by the survey course). However, he added that the situation has changed and the only way one can return is through PARODY... we have to go back parodically, which is another way of saying we have to work our way back by joke... I was a little amused and somewhat puzzled about a literary studies that is parodic... is the grade in the course also a parody of a grade? How about my dissertation? How about my Ph.D. degree? Would I end up getting a parody of a job? All these questions were somewhat clarified when later I got hold of a copy of the English Department NEWSLETTER... where in the minutes of the “Advisory Committee” I read that (again) Professor Crowley had commented on the merit raises. Evidently, the English Department uses a “point system” for raises: 20 points for a book, 5 points for a lecture, etc. Professor Crowley's comment was that the system should be used “self-parodically” (Dec. 8, 1994). I wonder if he would accept the parody of a paycheck, parody of a merit raise?... I bring up these questions not to be parodic about parody but to point out a fundamental contradiction in the pedagogy of jest; having to recognize the bankruptcy of traditional practices, traditional pedagogues appeal to “parody” as the basis of their intellectual inquiries and their pedagogy; while, on the other hand, when it comes to their own material interests, like a paycheck, parody is not the answer...
In other words, we think it is too easy to display the pathetic after-effects of these pedagogies (in the writings of the scribes) and leave the sources alone. We are more interested in showing how the pedagogy of the jest produces the clown who seems to think that evoking the fog of “cafe au lait," quoting headline-ish clichés from philosophy books, and providing inscriptions in the Greek alphabet are the ultimate signs of sophistication and “hip"ness. We are interested in showing how the material resources of this university—which refuses to buy political journals—are used to produce clowns who mistake the fog of their caprice with the depth of metaphysics and speak through that fog as the new Sages of Marshall Street.... Instead, we will examine in a serious manner the lessons of the master comedians and show how they teach their jesters-in-training to use parody as a cover-up for—while actually participating in—the rage spreading across the US today, and manifestly evident in The Radical Tangerine, of the angry, white, heterosexist rednecks whose main “homeland-refuges” on US college campuses today are the anti-intellectual, anti-conceptualizing, anti-theory creative writing programs and their supporting humanities professors. This clown pedagogy—which produces “sophisticated” Rush Limbaughs with an academic accent—pretends, like the Limbaughs and Ralph Reeds of national politics, to “soften” the ugly violence of racism ("Brooklyn accent"), gay-bashing ("pederasty"), sexism.., while actually intensifying the teaching of those practices. Radically Trivial will supplement the tradition of the AO and its relentless critique of bigotry and hate-mongering and show how the master comedians in English, Philosophy, Religion.., are making hatred of the “other” a natural part of the daily life of the bourgeois university by rendering it funny and charming—an expression of individual idiosyncracies rather than the systemic effects of entrepreneurial capitalism.
NEW/T AGE CLOWNING AND REACTIONARY PEDAGOGY
Traditional notions of masculinity, femininity, sexuality, marriage, family, fatherhood.., are under tremendous pressure today and are undergoing change. The idealist mainstream assumes that some people have simply “changed their minds” about these issues: thus a debate is now raging between the conservative bourgeois critics, theorists and pedagogues (Newt Gingrich, with his televised course on “Renewing American Civilization," is their exemplar) who deplore these changes and wish to restore traditional views and bourgeois progressives who call for a new level of tolerance for the different. Actually, this debate only obscures the fact that these tensions are consequences of material and historical changes that reflect the strains created when the mode of production has moved to a new stage, which requires new forms of subjectivity, while the social relations of production have lagged behind in an earlier stage. The point then is not merely to “take sides” in this struggle between the reactionaries, on the one hand, and the liberals, on the other, but to inaugurate a productive reunderstanding of social practices and their consequences by accounting for how the changes have come about in the first place.
Entering these debates with courses on marriage and masculinity, Professor Gates mystifies the issues by appealing to an up-dated New Age vocabulary of transhistorical universals (myth, archetype...) and to a timeless Reason behind all phenomena. By doing so, he implicates himself in a new parodic pedagogy: timeless Reason is only a parody of reason since it obscures the fact that reason itself is not timeless but historically produced. Of course the New Age pedagogue tries desperately to distance himself from the New/t Age pedagogue by presenting a “softer” position (that of the more serious traditional jester/clown who speaks the “truth” in “wise” riddles) that serves as a “foil” to the “hard” position of the actual political rulers (King Gingrich and the rest of his court). Ultimately, however, such New Age-y explanations not only obscure the actual causes of today's tensions over gender, sexuality, marriage, family. . . but also—by appealing to understandings that attempt to “stabilize” (render transhistorical) these categories—reinforce the wide-spread reactionary and proto-fascist moves of the frightened white, middle-class, heterosexual male, who—as the discourses of The Radical Tangerine illustrate all too clearly—is so enraged by these changes that he wants—at whatever cost in brutality and oppression—to calm his threatened self and save his masculinity, his whiteness, his class position, his sexuality, his family... In the final analysis, such a pedagogy is aimed not at intellectual, social, political clarification but rather at confusing the labor force into thinking that what is really causing all the problems in the 1990s are all those people at the racial, gender, sexual, immigrant, welfare... margins and not capitalist relations of exploitation.
