AGAINST POLEMICS,
FOR DISARMING COMMUNICATION

René Vincente Arcilla
Teachers College, Columbia University

I am very pleased to be part of this conversation on Suzanne Rice and Nicholas Burbules’ thought-provoking paper. Their call to make the communicative virtues central to education represents a prophetic leap of philosophical imagination, and broaches plenty of serious questions for our consideration as we try to catch up. Despite being puzzled by parts of their discussion, I am largely persuaded that the promotion of these virtues would indeed make life easier for a democratic culture of diversity. But our consensus about these educational aims, I must say, is somewhat disturbed by the polemical stance they adopt toward so-called “postmodernism.” I wonder whether this stance is really necessary, and whether it might not risk squandering the appeal of their project on a critique that leaves its target in a stronger position than ever.

Rice and Burbules argue that there is a “tendency toward self-contradiction” in “postmodern thought,” one which “suggests that an exclusive focus on dissention, destabilization, and disturbance cannot sustain a positive conception of education.”¹ Although what is supposed to count as “postmodern thought” is left rather vague, they do give us one example, an essay by Mustafa Ü. Kiziltan, William J. Bain, and Anita M. Canizares which advocates cultivating in education a Lyotardian practice of paralogy, specifically, “a logic which defies and defers ‘consensus’…guided by the search for dissention, which destabilizes and disturbs closures generated by closed economies of meaning, dialogue, and self-regulative systems.” Rice and Burbules interpret this passage and the rest of the essay to be claiming that “aims such as dialogue or community are undesirable.” They observe, however, that “these authors often implicitly invoke just such values as a basis for their own positions.” How can it make sense, then, for Kiziltan, et. al. to defy consensus in the name of dialogue and community?

I do not see that there is necessarily a contradiction here. Dialogue and community need not rest on consensus, and doubts about the latter do not have to entail a repudiation of the former. On the contrary, we could argue that just as many affirm the value of regular housekeeping despite the fact that a life without dirt and disarray is inconceivable, so we could affirm periodic paralogy even though there is never any question of living without some practical forms of consensus. And we could do so precisely because destabilizing our consensus about settled matters spurs us to renew dialogue with those we can no longer take for granted, and with still others with whom we have yet to become comfortable. For a full-blown development of this argument, I would refer to Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent work, especially The Inoperative Community and L’oubli de la philosophie;² in more traditional philosophical literature, the argument is intimated in the Meno.

What draws Meno and Socrates into a more honest dialogue and a more intimate sense of community, after their initial sophistic one-up-man-ship, is less a consensus about a specific proposition and more an acknowledgment on each of their parts that the question, “What is virtue?” — a question which ought to be answerable by those who want to argue about whether virtue can be taught and whether teaching or communicating can be virtuous — has put them both at a loss for words. By each acknowledging this aporia that interrupts communication, they each surrender any claim to knowledge and power, or even to a desirable position that they could call home, and fall back instead on a trust, from a position of vulnerability, that they may together commune with the mysterious sky to which they are both exposed. Such an acknowledgment substitutes trust for consensus and self-disarmament for polemics, as bases for dialogue.

Reflecting on the above prompts me to check the disputatious tone that is creeping into my words: I am not sure that I am actually disagreeing with Rice and Burbules; perhaps they already meant the notion of consensus to proceed from the leap of trust I am evoking here. If so, then I would simply suggest that it is equally possible to read Kiziltan, et. al. as affirming as well the need for such trust with their paralogy. Destabilizing received meanings — as Jacques Derrida does, for example, with the term “communication”³ — could serve the purpose of tempering the self-confidence we possess in asserting those meanings, and of stressing the need to risk opening ourselves to trust. Rice and Burbules, Kiziltan and his coauthors, and myself might all be pretty close here: out at sea in the same boat.

But perhaps Rice and Burbules would prefer to keep their distance. Nothing prevents them from reading postmodern literature in a mistrustful fashion, but I would warn that doing so carries its own kind of risks. One is that of performatively contradicting their very appeal to communicative virtue. How plausible is it to try to persuade people that they should make the virtue of charitable understanding an educational priority — because others, in our interpretation, have rejected such understanding? Such an argument suggests that something is being preached which is not being practiced.

This line of argument also risks ironically validating postmodernism insofar as the latter is interpreted to be articulating reasons to resist Rice and Burbules’s blandishments. It renders them liable to the countercharge that their tendentious interpretation of postmodernism precisely betrays a hegemonic will to power, one that confirms the suspicion that “attempts to engage in dialogue or to foster community…inevitably exclude and suppress marginalized groups’ histories, perspectives, and concerns.”⁴ Postmodernists would then be encouraged to identify themselves as such a group, and to name Rice and Burbules the communicative vice squad.

By pointing out these risks, do I mean to side with postmodernists against Rice and Burbules? Not at all. I find that some postmodernist criticism does indeed tend toward self-contradiction, although for reasons different than those Rice and Burbules offer. What might give the impression that paralogy contradicts its own communicative premises, as they contend, is a tendency among postmodernist critics to use paralogy in an ad hoc fashion against certain targets, as if one’s own position were somehow shielded from paralogy’s effects, and as if those effects could be pointed like a muzzle at some parties and away from others. Thus calls to paralogy tend to be sublimated (aufgehoben) at convenient moments, as in the sentences which immediately follow the sentence of Kiziltan, et. al. which Rice and Burbules cite.

As we suggested earlier, it [paralogy] furthers the project of constituting ourselves as autonomous subjects by resisting and transforming boundaries, products of regimes of truth. As such, the limit-attitude typifies the principle of paralogy and thus legitimates itself without any recourse to metanarratives or the performance of the system.⁵

I read the italicized terms as marks of the same repression and containment of paralogy which these authors criticize in others, marks which turn their Bataillean “transgressive limit-attitude” into yet another Hegelian work. Some writers, like Derrida, try to maintain a stance of humility toward the deconstruction of their own intended work by the paralogical forces they unleash and which pass self-reflexively through their texts. But Kiziltan, et. al. and Jean-François Lyotard, not to mention others, appear content to denegate paralogy’s effects on their own discourse by attacking the anti-paralogical, “terroristic” vices of “others.” They risk contradicting not the communicative premises of paralogy, but their express affirmation of it. No wonder, then, that such righteousness risks convicting itself of hypocrisy, and prompting a more consistent discourse of virtue, one which tries to reach out to others “like ourselves.” But what about the “others” who want to compel us to be like themselves?

By all means, we should support the development in education of a discourse of communicative virtues. But I urge us to resist the suggestion that this discourse must be antithetical to another that deconstructs the oppositions which privilege certain thetical, positive identities. Both discourses stand to help each other foster a more understanding community, and so should enter into dialogue rather than debate.

Furthermore, I would advise those of us who are interested in developing the educational potential of paralogy and deconstruction to be less afraid of subjecting our own discourses to these forces, and about exploring the defamiliarizing effects of self-contradiction. In particular, we should not be intimidated by any demand that we serve a recognizably “positive” conception of education, and should not turn our discourses prematurely into a defense of one such conception and an attack on its competitors. As a rhetorical figure, “positive” tends to conflate an ill-defined hope for something better with a comforting set of assumptions which may in fact reinforce the causes of communicative distrust. Hence to join a maxim to one of Rice and Burbules’: the stronger the push for virtuous communication across cultural, racial, or gender diversity, the greater the need for a via negativa that would disarm polemical assertiveness and respect the stranger that is our “self.”⁶ Let me conclude, then, with a passage from Theodor Adorno that points to a hope beyond me, the hope that the way to a pacifistic community points beyond us all.

Nothing is more unfitting for an intellectual resolved on practicing what was earlier called philosophy, than to wish, in discussion, and one might almost say in argumentation, to be right. The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of that spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down…. Such naivety is at work wherever philosophy has even a distant resemblance to the gestures of persuasion. These are founded on the presupposition of a universitas literarum, an a priori agreement between minds able to communicate with each other, and thus on complete conformism. When philosophers, who are well known to have difficulty in keeping silent, engage in conversation, they should always try to lose the argument, but in such a way as to convict their opponent of untruth.⁷

---

¹ These quoted phrases, and the rest in this paragraph, are all from Suzanne Rice and Nicholas C. Burbules, “Communicative Virtues and Educational Relations,” Philosophy of Education 1992, ed. H. Alexander (Champaign, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1993).

² Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. by Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Jean-Luc Nancy, L’oubli de la philosophie (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1986).

³ See Limited Inc (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988).

⁴ Rice and Burbules, “Communicative Virtues.”

⁵ Mustafa Ü. Kiziltan, William J. Bain, and Anita M. Canizares, “Postmodern Conditions: Rethinking Public Education,” Educational Theory 40, no. 3 (1990): 368.

⁶ Cf. Rice and Burbules.

⁷ Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: New Left Books, 1974), 70. I would like to thank the members of the Teachers College philosophy colloquium for sharing with me their thought-provoking responses to Rice and Burbules’ paper.