License to Feel:
Teaching in the Context of War(s)
Megan Boler
University of Auckland
On Tuesday, January 29 at 6:45 a.m. I read the Sentinel
headline and front page story: "Saddam Hussein threatens
to attach nuclear warheads to his Scuds." In dawn's vulnerable
moment, having read the news before establishing my usual media-guard
censors, I am ravaged by this information and unable to focus
appropriately on my role as Composition and Rhetoric instructor,
on my agenda of thesis statements and this week's readings by
Jewelle Gomez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Adrienne Rich. I enter the
classroom at 8 a.m. unconsciously needing community, needing from
these people reassurance and comfort that I am neither alone in
my terror nor completely removed from safety. I invite a discussion
of the impact of the war, and ask specifically how are we sustaining
ourselves, where are we getting support. One after another they
tell me that they have not read a paper or watched television
in days, or a week; they have chosen to "block it out,"
they say. In response to an in-class writing prompt, one student
writes:
Since I'm not keeping up with the news, it's kinda nice to come in and know I'm not the only one ignoring the news because it bothers them too much…when the war is over (hopefully very soon) I'm not sure it would have touched my life at all (except emotionally). I'm gonna forget about the war once it's over.
There are several exceptions: one got in his car to get gas, and drove instead to San Diego for the weekend to seek his family's reassurance. From our previous discussions I know that one woman has a boyfriend in Saudi Arabia; laughing, she had told us that when they finally spoke on the phone, the first time since war broke out, he told her he was "safe" in a surveillance tower -- and then told her that the tower was one of Iraq's main targets. Another woman had told us that most of her friends are over there. And one young man fears the draft, as he believes his only other option would be deportation, given his immigrant status as a Korean. Yet today, not one out of sixteen speaks to the question of support or self-sustaining strategies. When they tell me they have all checked out, I feel acutely alienated and alone in my particular moment of terror.
Afterwards, I realized that my emotional needs and needs for political analysis will not be met in that seminar classroom. I may strive to create a sense of community and to develop emotional epistemologies, for example, to teach students how to combine passionate response with critical analysis, to define and identify how and when particular emotions inform and define knowledge. But under normal circumstances I of course do not expect emotional support. However, there is something unique about a time of war that does indeed change my expectations. The fact that, even during war, the academy persistently guards against productive solidarities leads me to ask: "What is it about institutionalized power relations that constructs isolation and powerlessness?"
On that day I attempted, with language that failed me, to create what another writing instructor colleague told me she had asked of her class: "We are a community; we are going through this together, so let's be here for each other." But they cannot be there for me. Age and power deny this. Identity politics and fear separate us, possibly even more acutely, in a time of war. We are, in fact, a very strange community if we are one at all: the white folks sit together, the black folks sit together, the Chinese women sit together, the Filipinos and Chicana sit together, the two Asian men sit together; even in war, these boundaries are rarely crossed, and we are shrouded in silence.
But I do not say any of this to them. Instead, I affirm that "checking out" is one invaluable survival strategy, commonly used by any sort of trauma survivors to enable them to withstand the horror of repeated abuse, shock, or invasions of boundaries. I tell them also that I feel an obligation to ask them to think about the war, and particularly about how it is being represented in the dominant media. I establish that for each class two persons will bring in articles -- preferably foreign or alternative press -- and offer a quick analysis. I change their open-ended "creative" assignment, due next week, to a "creative" response to some representation of the war. The next week, however, when they read their poems aloud and exhibit collages in class, I am dumbfounded: in my long experience with this particular assignment in its usual form, it has been profound and productive. The result of my imposed direction to respond to the war resulted in a handful of moving poems, but for the most part some of the least impressive, uninspired "creative" work I have seen.
The crisis I faced discerning my responsibility and effective teaching strategies during the Persian Gulf War extends far beyond that winter, and continues to haunt me. Like the boundaries of public and private which have become increasingly blurred in the last decades, what counts as "inside" and "outside" the appropriate focus of knowledge and education becomes increasingly complex. As an intellectual worker, what responsibility do I have to local, national, or international social and political realities in which my citizenship and institution of affiliation are implicated? Is the classroom a sanctuary from the everyday, where educators and students alike can justify abdicating any direct responsibility for "outside" political events?
The pragmatic response to my alarmist worry is, quite simply, that given the time, subject, and commodified constraints of a classroom it is not possible to do justice to an entire social agenda. Furthermore, if the class is not in a position adequately to study the political and historical events leading up to the Persian Gulf War (or CIA-backed military support of dictatorships, the destruction of East Timor, the Panama Invasion, or the drug war and trade in this country), then the gesture is empty. But more disturbing to me than any particular errors made in terms of my curriculum is the phenomenon I witnessed in acute form during the Persian Gulf War: "What accounts for the pervasive construction of a rampant feeling of powerlessness, which none of us were able to transcend on that fateful day?"
To answer this, I first sketch the "twilight zone" as the psychic terrain of emotion in the modern state of late capitalism, and the students' predominant exhibitions of powerlessness and numbness. I then turn to an analysis of the repetitive trauma effected by the media, which constructs that "twilight zone," and secondly, an analysis of how Michel Foucault's concept of "pastoral power" helps explain my limited effectiveness in contradicting the numbness constructed during the war. The aim of this essay is to suggest important distinctions between feelings and reality, outlining the mutually interdependent ways in which feelings and reality construct one another, with an eye towards how emotion both informs and offers directions as well as limits possibilities.1
LOCALIZED SITES OF GLOBAL SHOCKS
Twilight: "an intermediate state that is not clearly defined." Denial is the psyche's odd twilight zone (Sartre's "bad faith," Rich's "lying,"Nietzche's forgetfulness.) Denial can only be the product of human subjectivity, a unique feature of our species of consciousness, the space of neither knowing nor ignorance, awareness nor misinformation. The fact that our psyches abide to varying extents in this twilight zone arena with respect to the war, in the zone bordering powerlessness and denial, does not mean that some of us are not engaged in effective analysis, education, and/or resistance. I argue for the excavation of this phenomenon as an emotion because I believe that the twilight-zone syndrome feeds on our lack of awareness of how powerlessness functions, effects, feeds on, and drains our sense of agency and power as active creators of self- and world-representations. By powerlessness I mean an emotion that is usually silent, and mutates into guilt and denial which gnaw at us; the latter especially are forms of internalized self-hatred, "internalized oppression" in the contemporary discourse -- the poisonous by-products of powerlessness. As one student wrote,
With this war, I demonstrated in an Anti-war rally for the 1st time in my life. I wrote writings and told everyone that this was wrong. But despite all that the war goes on and on. The politicians do not care at all. I have no power whatsoever to change the course of the Persian Gulf War. I am therefore powerless. Powerless to stop an event I think is unjust.
Powerlessness, to me, is a more promising feeling and concept than denial or guilt, for beneath the numbness that often sets in to enforce powerlessness lies a force that can be transformed into an immediate source of power, "immediate vigorous action. "
Numbness is perhaps the most efficacious, postmodern survival strategy.2 What other could possibly work as well to get us through either a glance or thorough reading of a newspaper; our awareness of all the occurrences and issues not represented in that newspaper; the dailiness of our work, its pressures, unexpected blows, and upsets; the massive contradiction of desiring peace and driving a car…need I go on? As I said to my students, "checking out" -- numbness -- is perhaps most poignantly utilized by abuse survivors. The elements of agency involved in numbness indicate that it is an intelligent psychic survival strategy -- and no one can stop one from choosing it! But making this choice without educated consideration of our other options means that, at times, numbness may be the inadvertent effect of cultural illiteracy with respect to translating emotion into knowledge and action.3
What accounts for the construction of powerlessness, and how do we interrupt it within the classroom? As educators, one direction we can turn to understand the twilight zone of the representational-psyche is an analysis of how media contributes to numbness.
Media can function as a repetitive trauma, and successfully so in terms of the fact that one effect of monopolized ideology is isolation and powerlessness. "Repetitive trauma" is generally opposed to "acute trauma." An acute trauma is, for example, a car accident, which may involve all manner of pain, emotional and physical, but observably survivors tend to remember the event quite well. Particularly in relation to memory, however, repetitive trauma has a quite different effects than acute trauma: it appears that a feature of repeated injury -- to the body and/or psyche -- is to forget, repress, and relegate the memory to what I call the twilight zone.
In the case of an event like the Persian Gulf War, the repetition of "safe" images and rhetoric used in manufactured media has a guaranteed numbing effect. The repetition of any oft-repeated image or words might have that effect. But when the selected representation is deeply suspected as a "truth effect," rather than as a trusted source, a sense of repeated betrayal is added to the oversimulation. For example, the de-fusing representation of peace movements created the persistent illusion of isolation and freakishness in one's desire for peace. How do I engage with the classroom of diverse people in productive address of our distinct fears and terrors, when the language provided us consists of pollyannish cartoon images?
Isolation in our moral existence is perpetuated through institutionalized silences as well as our own reluctances to acknowledge and discuss something so extreme as torture or war. Elaine Scarry's suggestions of the interrelations of flesh and language outline one aspect of how media functions as a repetitive trauma which becomes embodied and manifest as powerlessness. In The Body in Pain, she states that this reluctance increases
our vulnerability to power by ensuring that our moral intuitions and impulses which come forward so readily on behalf of human sentience, do not come forward far enough to be of any help….The result of this is that the very moral intuitions that might act on behalf of the claims of sentience remain almost as interior and inarticulate as sentience itself.4
What Scarry calls our sentient knowledge, our embodied emotion, is inextricably intertwined with the negotiation and enactment of justice.5
There is no doubt that the language of displaced meaning, constructed to represent the Persian Gulf War as a benign event set the stage for the twilight zone I encountered in my classroom.6 As a class, we discussed the images and language enough to share a laugh, albeit a painful one, about the irony and ridiculousness not just of consistent understatement, but point of view, for example the speaking voice maintaining fear to be the fear of crazy war resisters here in the United States, rather than fear for the Iraqi casualties, or fear for Israel, or fear for United States soldiers.
Yet the globalized media repetitions cannot be distinguished from their severe local effect; a loss of community, and hence loss of language, within our classroom prevented us from transforming the powerlessness we felt in the face of our government. Even the misnomer, "our" government was revealing: the Filipina women in the classroom knew "our" government also as a presence in their own country. There was no unilateral concept of "our" government, of its concern for who counts as a citizen, or whose families had been transplanted and divided as a result of U.S. foreign military presence.
Indeed there are acute differences in the localized impact of U.S. foreign and domestic policies. During the War I visited a class conducted by Toni Cade Bambara and Buchi Emecheta,7 and I heard two women students speak loud and clear: "Those of you who chose to shut down this university have not struggled to be allowed entrance to an education. Your peace movement is a self-serving product of privilege." And another who tells us that, as horrified as she is by this war, we did not grow up where she grew up; she is used to bullets flying into houses from the street on favorite holidays.
These radically different meanings of signs and events explain in part how identity politics separates us even more acutely in a time of war, when the notion of "us" and "them" is put into sharp relief by national, class, and racial boundaries, and when the question -- what counts as a political crisis? makes visible a multitude of crises, not just overseas. The goal of challenging the psychic twilight zone is deeply threatened by the modes of administrative control available to me within the institution.8 I turn now to an analysis of "pastoral power" to understand the ways in which late-capitalist administrative power positions me in a catch-22.
Foucault defines pastoral power as "an old power technique which originated in Christian institutions" which "the modern Western state has integrated in a new political shape." Pastoral power is most notable for the fact that "[n]ever…in the history of human societies…has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques and of totalization procedures."9 Foucault traces the originary modes of pastoral power in its earlier association of a directly religious nature, and its variations in the modern, secularized form. Both historical modes of pastoral power have in common several features, which relate to the site of education. Pastoral power's objective in its modern form is salvation in this life, salvation meaning "health, well-being…security, protection against accidents." The "official of pastoral power" have multiplied greatly, to include for example educators and social workers.
Within the classroom, pastoral power describes my impotence in the institution. Because this is the form of power available to me in an administrative setting, and because within the instance of war I cannot deliver on the implied promise of salvation, the students rightly adopt a mode of resistance to my critical attempts to situate the war. They bear a relation of resistance to me as the embodiment of an authority that demands that they address "The War," thereby composing their attention to this "real" event as simply another assignment not of their choice. This role sets me up as a figure of authority that the students will resist -- in fact, a positive sign -- but, ironically, in a time of war their constructive resistance simultaneously prevents me from effectively intervening in the media's traumatic impact on their sensibilities.
What does this mean in the classroom? In a "normal" state of affairs, what I assure them as the telos, the state of grace, of this process, are tools for self-reflection and critical analysis. But the Persian Gulf War radically shifted my functionary position as pastor; what assurances could I offer them, after all? Clearly, what I wanted on that fateful morning were some kind of vulnerable confessions (or, I prefer to think, testimonies)10 about their internal knowledge and response to the news. But in this case, the repetitive trauma and consequent numbness that result from media images usurps my pastoral power, and simultaneously castrates my power as it poses me as a pawn for the modern state.11
Thus we must ask, "To what degree do power relations in universities represent domination?"12 If one accepts that the primary tools of power within the university have to with prediction, control, and differentiation (more so than assimilation), as a mode of constituting the normal and deviant, then we are faced with a disturbing answer:
as normalizing technologies, [these strategies] make use of differentiations that are essentially political, not intellectual. Such differentiations tend to support the transformation of power into domination by systematically limiting opportunities for recalcitrance.13
In my classroom, I witnessed increased differentiation of a political rather than intellectual character. The students' primary avenue for recalcitrance was -- rightly -- to resist my invocation of an intellectual and emotional discussion of the Persian Gulf War. Like it or not, I believe that as a pastor of the modern state by virtue of my position of power in the university setting, I enabled the "transformation of power into domination by systematically limiting opportunities for recalcitrance."
This does not surprise me, because for individuals to unite and express opposition to the war outside of the classroom is simpler: that activity resists the totalizing intentions of media and Bush's unilateral offensive. Public demonstration resists the intention to isolate individuals from one another by bringing many bodies together in one location. It underscores the expression of individual differences as well, because in the face of a common enemy there was united resistance yet extensive discussion of different strategies and intentions in resistance.
Why doesn't this mode of resistance translate to the classroom? The facile response is, first, that one must create a space for debate and analysis that calls for more than superficial critique and alternative dogmatic stance. Second, since in the classroom the teacher functions as an authority and pastor of power, there is a secondary resistance to this mode of administrative power that can stymy resistance to the wider net of power relations. It is this that caused my loneliness that fateful morning; I felt us all to be in the same boat, as it were, as a result of our shared "victimization" by the mainstream media. But they did not share that loneliness with me, partly because we had not all read the newspaper that morning, partly because they were not facing the same ethical dilemma as I -- trying to understand my role as teacher during the war; and partly because they entered that room with compulsory footsteps.
The resistance I did witness in the classroom took the form of the student's suspicion of the media's truths. Foucault lists "suspicion" as a central form of resistance to pastoral power.
These struggles are not exactly for or against the "individual" but rather they are struggles against the "government of individualization."
They are an opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualification -- struggles against the privileges of knowledge. But they are also an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations imposed on people.
There is nothing "scientistic" in this (that is, a dogmatic belief in the value of scientific knowledge), but neither is it a skeptical or relativistic refusal of all verified truth. What is questioned is the way in which knowledge circulates and functions, its relations to power. In short, the regime du savoir.14
Although the primary emotional tone I observed among my students was numbness, they also shared the more promising emotion of suspicion as evidenced by their response to reports of a cease-fire declaration.
Well, I am so happy about this little news event. But who knows if we can believe it. They have censored everything up until now. How do we know they aren't lying.Is it really over or is this one of George Bush's schemes….The media makes it seem like they knew all along that we were going to win the war.
The suspicions posed by these eighteen-year-olds reveal a beginning critique of the regime du savoir. Suspicion indicates mistrust; a sense of previous betrayal; possible rational grounds for disbelief. Unlike other feelings, suspicion is linguistically active: it is also a verb, an activity. Suspicion, marking excellent progress from powerlessness, should encourage us to take emotional literacy seriously as part of the work of education.
The classroom, we are implicitly taught, is not a place that teachers should expect to get emotional or political needs met; and few teachers are taught or care to attend to students' emotional literacy as part of the educational agenda. But in fact, teachers' emotional needs are constantly attended to in the classroom; the interactions of authority, the effect of power on one's ego, the complex ways in which teachers take the last word, or use students' questions or insights to develop their own thinking -- all of this cannot be separated from one's emotional needs. In observing classrooms, I see persistent patterns of male instructors, in particular, controlling the sphere of rational discourse as an arena for their own very empassioned emotional articulation.15 Simply stating that one does not express emotion in the classroom when in the role of authority is a culturally-coded form of denial about what counts as "emotion." Even if we are not willing as teachers to risk our own vulnerability, we must re-evaluate what counts as knowledge for our students, and whether or not emotional sensitivity and affective education represent crucial forms of epistemological awareness requisite to a transforming society. For many of these students, their work in our classrooms may be one of their only forums for naming the emotions and the politics related to this war.
"There is a danger run by all powerless people: that we forget we are lying, or that lying becomes a weapon we carry into our relationships with people who do not have power over us."16 Rich here speaks of women's skills of lying to men as a form of survival. I would add that we carry this weapon not only into our relationships with others, but into our relationship with ourselves. This dynamic -- a form of "lying" but more accurately denial -- (and which could be extended to an analysis of silence) is part of what created the moment in my class. One might say that the "dramatic" element of teaching means that a certain kind of "pretense" always takes place. Am I then expected to participate in an institutional acceptance of the war through the pretense that composition and rhetoric makes sense given a threat of nuclear disaster? Yet Rich's quote means something different from my students' perspective. I do have power over them, and this may account for some of their resistance. What form does this power take amidst and within these bodies, such that they refuse to engage in my call for vulnerability and community? They rightly perceive me not as a trusted intimate, but as someone who has the power to fail them.
I am willing to accept the fact that the students and I are not and will never be equals or peers. I understand better, as I continue to teach, and having interviewed a number of professors during the Persian Gulf War about their pedagogies, more and less effective strategies for encouraging debate on current events. I have learned, too, that I am far from alone in my frustration with the ethical crises provoked at that historical moment. But I am not willing to accept that emotional literacy and the aim of challenging powerlessness are not primary goals of education. The history and norms of classroom etiquette do not justify this dysfunction, but merely represent an institutional habit.
Within the rationally-defined agendas of higher education, how is it possible to intervene in trauma, and avoid succumbing to a sense of powerlessness? With respect to the repetitive trauma that constructs powerlessness, Walter Benjamin's straightforward direction for reading visual images is helpful on the issue of subversion. In a speech delivered in 1934, Benjamin addresses precisely how the artist/intellectual can transform or reappropriate the "means of production," as it were, rather than passively participating in the reproduction of the status quo. In his interrogation of the role of the intellectual/writer in relation to class struggle, Benjamin argues for a kind of authorship that transforms the means of production (in service to socialism) simultaneous with its production. He criticizes the New Matter-of-fact photographers, who in one case "succeeded in transforming abject poverty, by recording it in a fashionably perfected manner, into an object of enjoyment."17 He calls this "a flagrant example of what it means to supply a productive apparatus without changing it." Rather, he asserts, "[w]hat we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture the caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary useful value." By teaching skills of self-reflection and critical analysis that are available to students as they move beyond the walls of the university, we can enact Benjamin's suggestion of displacing meanings and shifting our relation to the world.
The second challenge still remains: how to interrupt powerlessness while I am myself somewhat powerlessness as an educator during war, and this brings us to the slippery terrain of language and emotion. We need to recognize, collectively, that numbness constitutes only a very limited notion of choice. One alternative to numbness involves bridging the gaps between the isolated internal life and the external, visible life of our "school-work." Elaine Scarry tells us that to articulate pain is an extraordinary challenge, for
the moment [pain] is lifted out of the ironclad privacy of the body into speech, it immediately falls back in. Nothing sustains its image in the world….From the inarticulate it half emerges into speech and then quickly recedes once more. Invisible in part because of its resistance to language, it is also invisible because its own powerfulness ensures its isolation, ensures that it will not be seen in the context of other events, that it will fall back from its new arrival into language and remain devastating. Its absolute claim for acknowledgment contributes to its being ultimately unacknowledged.18
In relation to the classroom, the ineffability of pain raises the challenge of discussing the "reality" of war effectively. What does a pedagogy look like that takes emotional epistemologies seriously? What does it mean to learn to apply language to the critical articulation of anger, rage, grief, and pain? Scarry's redefinition of "work" may suggest including the articulate embodiment as part of education:
Work and its "work" (or work and its object, its artifact) are the names that are given to the phenomena of pain and the imagination as they begin to move from being a self-contained loop within the body to becoming the equivalent loop now projected into the external world. It is through this movement out into the world that the extreme privacy of the occurrence (both pain and imagining are invisible to anyone outside the boundaries of the person's body) begins to be sharable, that sentience becomes social.19
The public expression of this sentience represents a real risk. The extremely harsh prohibitions against vulnerability in academia circumscribe expression within these hallowed halls. Yet we are constantly engaged in this bridging and transformation of the internal and private into the public, though this process has not been fully legitimated as an educational goal.
To challenge pastoral power successfully involves an integration of structures of feeling with the work of education. The individual and collective work we engage in within academia is deeply etched with felt histories and meanings. We choose whether to turn away from these chasms and pulls to community, or whether to learn to incorporate structures of feeling as the missing element for post-traumatic knowledges. The "controlled discomfort" Scarry describes as constituting some kinds of work is frequently avoided in the classroom, also attributable to the discourses of danger surrounding emotion.
Despite our complicated interactions and relationships fraught with power and desire, despite the longing for impossible connections and shared visions, we can model for students a form of world-transformation and resistance to globalization by showing how pain and powerlessness are constructed and can be displaced into a notion of "work." Whether this means words, essays, collective projects, understandings of our ethical obligations in chemistry and biology, recording dreams -- what this means is, quite, undetermined. However, as long as we agree that this localized site is overshadowed by the ineffability of pain, and surrender to fears inculcated by the danger-discourse surrounding expression of emotion; as long as we continue to embody with docility the norms that appear so innocent and "apolitical," we offer students no better vision of how to transform either their own pain and rage, or how to enact upon the world the alternative visions each carries.
While the Persian Gulf War brought this into sharp relief because of direct and offensive U.S. military action, the myriad versions of U.S. military action both within and outside of the boundaries of this nation easily compel a sense of perpetual crisis that warrant calling educational aims into question at every historic moment. While at times the relation between our interactions in the classroom feel hopelessly disconnected from what occurs halfway around the world, I recognize that this sense of futility intelligently gets enacted through my own very real body. In these bodies called students and teachers, within our very cells, abides an undiminishable source of energy always willing to be transformed into language, into marks upon unwilling walls.
For a response
to this essay, see Levinson.
1. The literatures that inform my research and study of emotion are drawn from several distinct fields. For analyses that combine ethnography with social and cultural critique, see Catherine Lutz and Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Language and the Politics of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); in sociology, see for example Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: U.C. Press, 1983). Within educational studies, a few select analyses relevant to thinking about such issues as war include Shoshana Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, (New York: Routledge, 1992); Jennifer Gore and Carmen Luke, ed., Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1992). On the value of anger, see especially Peter Lyman, "The Politics of Anger: On Silence, Ressentiment, and Political Speech, in Socialist Review 11, no.3, 1991); Naomi Scheman, "Anger and the Politics of Naming," in Women and Language in Literature and Society; in philosophy, see Elizabeth Spelman, "Anger and Insubordination," in Women, Knowledge, and Reality, ed. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989) and Claudia Card, ed., Feminist Ethics (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991).
2. The following student's written response to the cease-fire declaration evidences the double-edged function of numbness. "If you really want to know what I honestly think about this war being over....I have no thoughts, feelings, or reactions towards it....Yah I'm glad, but I really don't care at this point anymore about the war....I'm happy that I know my best friend can come home safe and I don't have to worry about coming home each day and checking my machine to hear that he's dead and his body will be sent back on so and so a date....Other than that I have no feeling about the war being over because I had no feeling toward the war in a very long time."
3. The phenomenon of powerlessness is experienced not only in response to an event such as war, but is an everyday occurrence, and is bred within the walls of the university, as this same student's writing continues on to say: During my Jr. year when I was supposed to write down a classic 5-paragraph essay I did not get the format. I went through all of my notes, and listened to her when I was supposed to. Still, I could not get it together to write a better essay, no matter what I did, I felt powerless. The fact that a writing assignment engenders the same sense of powerlessness as that incurred by George Bush's military regime gives me great pause in my assumptions about liberatory education.
4. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 60.
5. Raymond William's notion of "structures of feelings" permits a bridge between these puzzles of language, and emotion inMarxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
6. In 1958 Hannah Arendt wrote, for example, about the loss of language as a casualty of science's language of mathematical symbols. See The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), 4.
7. An African-American writer and an Nigerian/British writer, respectively authors of The Salt Eaters and The Joys of Motherhood.
8. For further discussion of the relations of domination and possibilities of resistance, see Aimee Howley and Richard Hartnett, "Pastoral Power and the Contemporary University," Educational Theory 42, no. 3 (Summer 1992).
9. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Art After Modernism, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 421. Foucault suggests that "to understand what power relations are about...we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations [of, for example, 'administration to how people live']." (419) Foucault focuses on pastoral power's individualizing techniques that make individuals "subjects," which assists in understanding how isolation and powerlessness get constructed.
10. I explore the difference between confession and testimony as modes of reading histories, and as modes of writing, in two articles: "The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism's Gaze," Philosophy of Education 1994, ed. Michael Katz (Urbana, Ill.: Philosophy of Education Society, 1995); and "Bearing Witness: The Power of Public Feeling," in review.
11. As Howley and Hartnett write, "Pastoral power represented a transaction: the individual revealed the truth about him or herself, and the pastor guaranteed the individual's salvation. By gaining knowledge of individuals in this way, the pastor gained power over them. The pastor exercised this power only insofar as it was necessary to restore individuals to a state of grace -- or, in more contemporary parlance, to the state of being normal." (273)
12. Ibid., 281.
13. Ibid., 282.
14. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 420.
15. In her article "On the Regulation of Speaking and Silence," in Language, Gender, and Childhood (London: Routledge, 1985) Valerie Walkerdine provides an excellent analysis of how children are introduced into the use of white, middle-class rational discourse as the channel for their emotions, particularly expressions of conflict regrading those in authority. See also Kramarae and Treichler, "Power Relationships in the Classroom," in Gabriel and Smithson, ed. Gender in the Classroom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
16. Adrienne Rich, "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), 189.
17. Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," in Wallis, Art After Modernism,304.
18. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 60-61.
19. Ibid., 170.