| PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 1997 |
Revolutions That as Yet Have No Model:
Gert Biesta
Performance Pedagogy and its Audience[1]
Utrecht University
One of the central problems for modern education - that is, education since Kant - is the problem of pedagogical authority. The prevailing understanding has been that it presents educators with a paradox. Kant has identified this paradox - "How do I cultivate freedom through coercion?" - as the pedagogical paradox. The paradox lives on in the idea of "liberation-through-socialization," which has become the cornerstone of liberal education. Child-centered pedagogy has tried to circumvent the paradox by excluding authority from education, arguing that the only road to freedom is through freedom. In its most extreme forms it has thereby eradicated pedagogy altogether.In her paper, Audrey Thompson addresses a specific instance of the problem of pedagogical authority by raising the question as to how educators can problematize prevailing power relations without reproducing them. Both liberal and student-centered education can be seen as attempts to answer this question. Contrary to mere indoctrination -"Thou shalt not oppress" - they articulate conceptions of education which acknowledge the Enlightenment interest in the realization of human freedom. Yet, so Thompson argues, both remain entangled in the problem they try to solve.
The problem with liberal education is that it conceives of freedom as the result of a "passage" through the canon. Students can therefore only become critical of the canon after they have mastered and thus confirmed it. A student-centered approach seems to have better credentials, as it does not require such a passage. Thompson shows, however, that it also runs the risk of endorsing existing power relations. The problem is, that a student-centered approach must, at least provisionally, accept and respect students' experiences, even if these experiences are themselves oppressive.
Thompson seeks her way out by means of what I consider to be an amended version of the student-centered approach. She presents performance pedagogy as a form of experience-based education which does not start from "authentic" or "natural" experience but from what is experienced as a result of performing - acting "as if" - in a pedagogically created situation. The result of such a performance, Thompson claims, is that both the "original" and the "performed" experience become denaturalized and thus politicized. Performance pedagogy thereby attempts to move the student "beyond the present and the particular" - which reveals that it also has a liberal impetus.
The critical device for performance pedagogy lies in the recognition that alternative perspectives are "coordered" in such a way that one of them - the dominant perspective - appears as natural and neutral. Inhabiting a space on the margin - either by being marginal or by performing in such a space - opens up the possibility to "see" the existing (co)order and thereby denaturalize the natural and politicize the neutral.
Thompson provides a thoughtful and compelling argument, which definitely deserves more attention that just the few remarks of this response. The questions that I want to raise, concern the extent to which performance pedagogy actually moves beyond what it tries to leave behind.
I believe that Thompson is correct in arguing that performance pedagogy can, in principle, overcome the central problem of the student-centered approach, that is, the problem of the (alleged) authenticity of oppressive experience, expressed in the claim that any experience is (politically) valid just because it is personal. By letting students try on or act out alternative positions, the "natural" character of their original experience might indeed get deconstructed. Yet, as I will argue, not all performances seem to me equally suitable for doing so.
It is less easy to see how performance pedagogy can escape the main problem of liberal education, that is, the problem of having to concede to a/the canon in order to be able to challenge it. Thompson argues that for performances to be pedagogically valuable, they must be informed by study. Students need to be informed about what is "appropriate and expected" in a certain setting, so that they can respond "meaningfully and respectfully." Students need to be prepared in order to "recognize and appreciate culturally unfamiliar practices" and to know "as to what is at stake." If this is so, it suggests that performances can only do their work after students have mastered a certain body of knowledge. While this does not mean that all relevant knowledge will by definition be oppressive, performance pedagogy can, for precisely this reason, not so easily escape the canon.
The claim that performances need to be informed by study also raises the question as to what extent performances actually make a difference, that is, to what extent performances actually are needed to bring about the desired result. If it can be known beforehand what is "appropriate and expected" in a certain setting and what it means to respond "meaningfully and respectfully," performing in such a way seems hardly able to introduce new and unexpected experiences. It will only confirm to what one already knows - and if one is not willing to know it, I doubt whether one will be able to experience it as a result of the performance.
Here, I am also puzzled by Thompson's suggestion that performing as a participant instead of as an "aesthetic spectator" should be aimed at acting appropriately. I doubt whether acting appropriately will move students out of their "comfort zone" so that they can become aware of the "unnatural" character of their experiences. The main problem that I see, is that acting appropriately (for example, with etiquette - Thompson's example) allows for students to maintain a distinction between the role they play on the one hand and themselves as the players of that role on the other. Bcause of the possibility of this distinction, disturbing experiences can always be attributed to the role, so that they will not really affect the player.
Thompson tries to solve this problem by introducing a distinction between behavior and performance, arguing that the latter differs from the former in that it is motivated by a commitment of the student to learn from the situation. Once again, this raises the question whether students that are not committed will in any sense be urged to deconstruct the naturalness of their experience as a result of acting appropriately.
The problem of acting appropriately can also be approached in terms of participation. To put it bluntly: participating appropriately is not to participate at all. It is only making moves in a game that is already defined by its rules. If performance is just acting by the rules, one can move smoothly through the scene, without having to experience any disturbances - and perhaps without experiencing anything at all. What, to my mind, is missing in Thompson's account of performance, is an audience, or more specifically, co-performers. These are crucial, because the meaning of a performance is never defined by the intentions of the performer but only by the response of the co-performers to the performance. Because, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, human actions act upon beings "who are capable of their own actions," which means that human interaction is not an interaction between "performing robots," responses are inherently unpredictable.[2] In this sense, a performance can never be appropriate, for what is appropriate can only be established after and as a result of the performance.
The above remarks can all be related to a central idea of performance pedagogy, viz., that the performance, although "material and embodied," should be understood as "framed by the conventions of acting-as-if" rather than those of "action-as-agency." I believe that this is a problematic assumption, not only because it allows for students to hide behind the roles they are playing, but also because it leaves out the crucial role of the audience in the performance. While I share Thompson's belief in performance pedagogy as a way to deal with the dimensions of the problem of pedagogical authority she addresses, I want to suggest that performance pedagogy should not focus on acting-as-if and acting appropriately, that is, on acting artificially. What it should focus on, instead, is on real participation, the only artificial - or pedagogical - element being the fact of introducing students to those situations where they are to participate from a margin. Instead of waiting for the revolution which, if it can be anticipated, is no longer a revolution and never has been one, I believe that performance pedagogy should seize the revolutionary "moment" of inherent unpredictability in human interaction itself. This revolutionary moment, which as yet has no model and, being revolutionary, will never have a model, only comes into view when we acknowledge that performances need an audience to have any meaning at all.
Send in the audience!
[1] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Revolutions That As Yet have No Model," Diacritics 10, no. 4 (1980): 29-49.[2] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989[1958]), 190, 178. See also my discussion of Arendt's work in Gert Biesta, "Education, Not Initiation," in Philosophy of Education 1996, ed. Frank Margonis (Urbana, Ill.: Philosophy of Education Society, 1997).