A Praxis of Presence in Curriculum Theory: Advancing Currere against Cultural Crises in Education 2022006570, 9781032079776, 9781032079769, 9781003212348

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
About the Author
Other Recent Writings
Chapter 1: Currere1
The Method
Complicated Conversation
Autobiography
Cultural Crises
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Presence
Presence
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Study1
Study
Relationship
History, Poetry, Latin
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Individuality
Opposition
Subjective Reconstruction
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Authority1
Relationships
Parrhesia
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Authorship
Reactivation
Nothing Else
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 7: Sadism1
Poverty
Accountability
Stifling Teachers’ Creativity
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 8: Technologization1
Privatization
Place
Pain
Practicality
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 9: Teaching1
The Techno-Nation-State
A Techno-Totalitarian State of Mind
Digital Citizenship
Being Online
Presence of the Human Subject
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 10: Experience 1
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 11: Nineteen Seventy-Two1
That First Year
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 12: Reconceptualization1
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 13: Reactivation1
A Sensual Spirituality
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 14: Absence
Profilicity
Cultural Crises
Notes
Bibliography
Appendix
Currere Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

A PRAXIS OF PRESENCE IN CURRICULUM THEORY

Building on his seminal methodological contribution to the field – currere – here William F. Pinar posits a praxis of presence as a unique form of individual engagement against current cultural crises in education. Bringing together a series of updated essays, articles, and new writings to form this comprehensive volume, Pinar first demonstrates how a praxis of presence furthers the study of curriculum as lived experience to overcome self-­enclosure, restart lived and historical time, and understand technology through a process of regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis. Pinar then further illustrates how this practice can inform curricular responses to countering presentism, narcissism, and techno-­utopianism in educators’ work with “digital natives.” Ultimately, this book offers researchers, scholars, and teacher educators in the fields of curriculum theory, the sociology of education, and educational policy more broadly the analytical and methodological tools by which to advance their understanding of currere, and in doing so, allows them to tackle the main cultural issues that educators face today. William F. Pinar is the Tetsuo Aoki Professor in Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Pinar is former Canada Research Chair in curriculum studies, is past President of the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, and is Editor of the International Handbook of Curriculum Research.

Studies in Curriculum Theory Series Series Editor: William F. Pinar, University of British Columbia, Canada In this age of multimedia information overload, scholars and students may not be able to keep up with the proliferation of different topical, trendy book series in the field of curriculum theory. It will be a relief to know that one publisher offers a balanced, solid, forward-looking series devoted to significant and enduring scholarship, as opposed to a narrow range of topics or a single approach or point of view. This series is conceived as the series busy scholars and students can trust and depend on to deliver important scholarship in the various “discourses” that comprise the increasingly complex field of curriculum theory. The range of the series is both broad (all of curriculum theory) and limited (only important, lasting scholarship) – including but not confined to historical, philosophical, critical, multicultural, feminist, comparative, international, aesthetic, and spiritual topics and approaches. Books in this series are intended for scholars and for students at the doctoral and, in some cases, master’s levels. Curriculum Work and Social Justice Leadership in a Post-Reconceptualist Era Attaining Critical Consciousness and Learning to Become Allan Michel Jales Coutinho Dialogical Engagement with the Mythopoetics of Currere Extending the Work of Mary Aswell Doll across Theory, Literature, and Autobiography Edited by Brian Casemore A Praxis of Presence in Curriculum Theory Advancing Currere against Cultural Crises in Education William F. Pinar The Nordic Education Model in Context Historical Developments and Current Renegotiations Edited by Daniel Tröhler, Bernadette Hörmann, Sverre Tveit, Inga Bostadt Parental Experiences of Unschooling Navigating Curriculum as Learning-through-Living Khara Schonfeld-Karan For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Studies-in-Curriculum-Theory-Series/book-series/LEASCTS

A PRAXIS OF PRESENCE IN CURRICULUM THEORY Advancing Currere against Cultural Crises in Education

William F. Pinar

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 William F. Pinar The right of William F. Pinar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pinar, William F., author. Title: A praxis of presence in curriculum theory : advancing currere against cultural crises in education / William F. Pinar. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Studies in curriculum theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022006570 | ISBN 9781032079776 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032079769 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003212348 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Education--Curricula--Philosophy. | Multicultural education. | Curriculum change. Classification: LCC LB1570 .P551556 2022 | DDC 375/.006--dc23/ eng/20220510 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006570 ISBN: 978-1-032-07977-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07976-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-21234-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

For Madeleine R. Grumet “Look at the lake.”

CONTENTS

Preface ix About the Author xix Other Recent Writings xxi 1 Currere1 2 Presence

13

3 Study

35

4 Individuality

54

5 Authority

73

6 Authorship

87

7 Sadism

106

8 Technologization

123

9 Teaching

138

10 Experience

157

11 Nineteen Seventy-Two

173

viii  Contents

12 Reconceptualization

185

13 Reactivation

194

14 Absence

211

Appendix

228

Index 231

PREFACE

“Presence,” John Kaag suggests, “connotes a particular place and time where something, perhaps something significant or singular, could be done.”1 Like many progressive ideas, this sense of possibility, this call to “change the world,” has been “co-­opted by the rich and powerful.”2 Consider McKinsey & Company’s recruiting materials: “Change the world. Improve lives. Invent something new.” The host of the Davos Conference – the World Economics Forum – tweets “change the world.” A Morgan Stanley ad admonished: “Let’s raise the capital that builds the things that change the world.” In the software engineers it recruits Wal-­ Mart expects an “eagerness to change the world.” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg advises: “the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company.”3 Capitalism incorporates everything: its genius and its curse. One hundred years ago progressivism was also coopted in an effort to incorporate everything. In Italy, in 1919, as Ramsey McGlazer reminds, the educational reformer Giovanni Gentile gave several talks to teachers in Trieste; they were published in the next year as The Reform of Education.4 Gentile distinguished authentic education from mere “instruction,” a term which, for Gentile, represented out-­of-­date instructional practices associated especially with the teaching of Latin, a set of practices that “intrude with violence into the life of the spirit, instruction generates the monstrous culture that we call material, mechanical, and spiritually worthless.”5 Such a culture, Gentile complained, is “fragmentary and inorganic,” and yet “it can grow to infinity without transforming students’ minds or merging with the process of the personality, to which it adheres extrinsically.”6 To breathe life into such culture what was needed, Gentile argued, was “education that was inward as well as integrative” – in a word, “progressive.”7 The “secret” of effective education, Gentile felt sure, is “that the book that is read, or the word of the teacher that is heard, must set our mind in motion and

x  Preface

be transformed into our inner life, ceasing to be a thing … and being transfused into our personality.”8 Whereas Latin class – and the traditional instruction it epitomized – employs “memorization and compels repetition,” Gentile’s reform would form “personalities” and “minds” and ensure “transformation.”9 “Transformation to what end?” McGlazer asks, adding: “And what’s lost when ‘direct instruction’ is replaced by other, kinder and gentler, more efficient and more implicating techniques.”10 Benito Mussolini knew: he appointed Gentile his Minister of Education. In the twelfth of his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci insisted that education does require the direct instruction that Gentile – and so many other Progressives – held in contempt.11 Gramsci’s argument, McGlazer suggests, “implies – again, perhaps scandalously to today’s teaching sensibilities – that education cannot do without a degree of compulsion, or what Gramsci memorably calls … ‘mechanical coercion’.”12 Indeed, Gramsci’s “sobering corrective instead makes education a matter of labor first and foremost: labour driven by a contradiction or ‘coercion’ that knows itself, rather than masquerading as freedom, as in the mystifications of Gentile’s progressive pedagogy.”13 Without direct instruction – even coercion – Gramsci knew there could be no “real study,”14 as “all analyses made by children cannot but be of dead things.”15 “The dead things that Gramsci has in mind,” McGlazer explains, “are words in a dead language, specifically Latin words.”16 In the 1923 Riforma Gentile, crafted by Gentile as Mussolini’s Minister of Education, Latin remained in the curriculum – of the children of the ruling classes.17 For everyone else Latin disappeared.18 Like corporate propaganda today, then, Italian Fascist school reform coopted progressive curriculum theory. That unholy matrimony was what the Marxist Gramsci was condemning in his “apparently ‘conservative’ eulogy for the old curriculum.”19 The Riforma Gentile cemented class privilege by ensuring that only the children of the elite would enjoy (even as they might personally loathe) Latin’s “training in patience and comparison and the practice for critical reflection that, according to Gramsci, alone sustain democracy.”20 McGlazer points out that Gramsci’s Notebooks locate Latin’s value not in the civilizational “myth” attached to it – certainly not Mussolini’s Fascist iteration of it – but “above all,” in Gramsci’s view, “instruction in Latin offers forms of discipline and disinterest,”21 opportunities for subjective reconstruction that distance the young from the propaganda being hurled at them. Refuge from the present, I will argue throughout this collection, is located in the past, no paradise lost, no panacea, but a place to hide, to preserve one’s humanity from the assaults and abuse of those who pretend to take your interest to heart.22 To be progressive is to counter reactionary politics in whatever guise it takes. Today, in America, it takes “progressive” as well as “conservative” forms, the former obvious in the suppression of politically incorrect speech, the latter promulgated by ruthless corporate executives and the reckless revolutionaries associated with America’s Nazi Party: Trump’s Republican Party. To be authentically progressive today means to be

Preface  xi

“conservative,” e.g. conserving the planet and what remains of our humanity, to be “woke” not only to evil past and present but also to oneself, the subjective site of “wide-­awakeness.”23 I part company with Gramsci over privileging process over content,24 when he insists – I’m following McGlazer’s succinct summary still – when he goes so far as to claim that “one does not study Latin in order to learn the language.”25 By emphasizing process over product (e.g. content), Gramsci imagined that the Latin classes functioned as “democratic training camps,”26 not exactly the school subject Dewey had in mind when he imagined the classroom as a laboratory for democracy.27 It was in fact the “mechanical coercion”28 Gramsci associated with learning Latin – “its very compulsoriness, what Gentile would call its violent intrusion into the life of the spirit” – that Gramsci saw as the admittedly “traditional, even retrograde means to a radical end.”29 With this affirmation of end-­means thinking Gramsci joins Gentile in becoming a progressive pedagogue, that despite his conclusion that – as McGlazer puts it – the “co-­optation of progressive pedagogy by the Fascist regime revealed this pedagogy’s inherent limitations, its capacity to sustain a false promise of liberation.”30 Nothing inherently limiting about progressivism or about conservatism I say, but both can be misappropriated, in our era the former by corporations, the latter by fascists. Currere could be too. The risk currere carries concerns the psychological distance between teacher and student. While making a different point, McGlazer asks if “instruction’s very outwardness, its avowal of the compulsory - would this preserve the distance that makes it possible for the student to do something other than what’s imposed, simultaneously: to daydream, to drift and deviate, to cultivate her resources for resistance and refusal.”31 Of course, such distance can also amount to alienation, even drive children mad,32 adrift in fantasy, lost in inner space, vulnerable to virtuality. But McGlazer – and Gramsci – appear unworried about such eventualities, perhaps because they were – are – horrified – by progressivism’s vulnerability to fascism, past, and present. McGlazer notes that Spivak (without referencing Latin or the Riforma Gentile) appreciates the “tough effortfulness”33 that education entails in Gramsci’s thought, affirming “effortness” in the project of preserving “humanist education”34 today. McGlazer’s “refus[al] to leave the past behind” I affirm, his refusal to “abandon, or to graduate from, the past in order to attend to the concerns of the present on its ‘own’ terms,”35 as if those terms could be even formulated without historical consciousness. Like the texts and films McGlazer discusses in his timely and important book, my topics too decline “leaving themselves behind as appropriable pasts, as lessons easily learned.”36 “Instead,” McGlazer continues (referencing the chapters to come in his book), “these texts and film foreground – and compound – the conditions that thwart transmission even while they insist, like Gramsci, on transmission’s crucial important and radical potential. It is as if only a prolonged dwelling in and on obstruction could lead to this blockage’s giving way to something else.”37

xii  Preface

Among the “conditions” that block this order of “transmission” – “pass it on, boys” Hector of The History Boys admonishes38 – is that technology promises total transmission. Not only the transmission of knowledge can be blocked – social media is the unsavory site of fascist and corporate propaganda – so can be the presence of those who participate. Pressed into their profiles, persons can lose their distance from the present, their capacity for non-­coincidence39 that occasions becoming historical. “For to be in and apart is not to deny,” McGlazer knows, “but rather to respond to-­even to “militat[e] ferociously against” – the present.”40 Responding – militating is not impossible – means a “regression from now to back then,” a “kind of self-­imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it.”41 McGlazer characterizes his own effort as “counter-­progressive,” valorizing “backward – rather than forward-­looking texts.”42 I remain proudly progressive.43 I reactivate the past to restart the present, to ensure the future is not what the present portends.44

Organization of This Book Being subjectively present means remembering who one is – has been, wants to be – while acknowledging, testifying to, those who have touched one over time,45 recalling those events now sedimented within one’s self, subjectivity as palimpsest not profile.46 Such remembrance requires recognition47 of relationship48 – with what one studies, with whom one studies, when, where, how. Chapter 1 shows the centrality of relationship in currere; in Chapter 2, I sketch relationship’s embeddedness in subjective presence; in Chapter 3, I survey its scope in study. In Chapter 4, I emphasize one’s relationship to others as well as to oneself,49 the cultivation of individuality construed as an educational project. In Chapter 5, I accent the singular sources of authority, our relationship to it intertwined with traces of childhood dependency; I acknowledge parrhesia as perquisite to one’s emergence as an adult,50 a developmental as well as professional and political possibility – and obligation. My reactivation of the past continues in Chapter 6, where I invoke Pasolini’s project of presence.51 Many attempted to extinguish Pasolini’s presence – he was assassinated in 1975 – but they finally failed: his presence persists, palpable still in his movies, poems, novels, essays. Education itself is assassinated in school reform; in Chapter 7, I call for a Nuremberg Trial of those responsible. There are no specific persons to bring to justice in Chapter 8 where I chronicle the macro-­trend of our time – technologization – one of the three intertwined cultural crises52 currere confronts today. There and in Chapter 9 I face the fact that technologization is totalizing, that whatever recognition of relationship remains possible is now structured by software. Embodied experience can remain unstructured; it is often abrasive, as I acknowledge in Chapter 10, perhaps even a perquisite to educational experience. It is to educational experience I testify in Chapter 11 as I return to my first

Preface  xiii

year as a university professor; I depict my “biographical situation”53 then, including those who figured so prominently as I worked my way into the academic field to which I was increasingly committed, at that time a field falling apart. Its reconceptualization I summarize in Chapter 12. The force of the past – perhaps our only antidote to the contemporary cultural crises in education: presentism,54 narcissism,55 technologization56 – can be felt in Chapter 13 where again I am preoccupied with Pasolini, this time with his reactivation of another great public pedagogue: Jesus of Nazareth. In Chapter 14 I conclude with our own crucifixion on the cross of social media. Originally my title for this collection was That First Year and Other Recent Writing.57 Such phrasing is not uncommon in collections of essays. I entitled my 2006 collection: The Synoptic Text Today and Other Essays: Curriculum Development after the Reconceptualization. The editor at Peter Lang then – Chris Myers58 – allowed this literary precedent to take precedence over a social-­science-­type title or one laden with keywords. Not so the editor at Palgrave Macmillan that year; she insisted I shelve my title – The Body of the Father, the Race of the Son – for a keyword-­rich one: Race, Religion, and a Curriculum of Reparation: Teacher Education for a Multicultural Society. Keywords rule at Routledge too, so I was asked to rethink my title for this book. With keywords in mind I came up with A Praxis of Presence: Against Presentism, Narcissism, and Techno-­Utopianism. That was accepted – the Publication Committee added “in curriculum theory” after “presence” and “in education” after “techno-­utopianism”) but one of the anonymous reviewers pressed against the subtitle.59 I concurred. When the contract came so did my new title.60 It’s an odd fantasy to which publishers cling, that a title filled with keywords will draw – magnet-­like – prospective buyers to the book. Maybe data confirm their belief. What it does ensure is that the author’s subjective presence is blunted.61 Blunted but not blocked, as one can still seep through others’ words. I’ve made a career of it, expressing myself by assembling collages of quoted passages – what can seem an “oppressive allusiveness,” a “wearingly overdetermined referentiality”62 – that enacts my conception of curriculum as complicated conversation.63 Such a communicative aspiration is pedagogical – listening, clarifying, explaining, questioning – as I acknowledge what has been said already while trying to contribute to the conversation, hoping to advance everyone’s understanding of what is stake.64 Certainly this is my aspiration here that my recent writing, my ongoing participation in the complicated conversation that is curriculum studies, contributes to the intellectual advancement of the field – of currere specifically – to our understanding of what is at stake when we ask the canonical curriculum question: what knowledge is most worth? My efforts to answer that question start now.

xiv  Preface

Notes 1 2018, 153. Kaag is here discussing Nietzsche: “The unique existence of anything – what Nietzsche had searched for his entire life – was nowhere to be found. Just repetition, complicity, and frustration.” Fair to say these last three plagued Pier Paolo Pasolini as well: see Chapters 6 and 13. 2 Giridharadas 2018, August 26, SR3. 3 Quoted phrases in Giridharadas 2018, August 26, SR3.” 4 2020, 2. 5 Quoted in McGlazer 2020, 2. 6 Quoted in McGlazer 2020, 2–3. 7 2020, 3. 8 Quoted in McGlazer 2020, 3. 9 2020, 3. 10 Ibid. 11 2020, 4. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 McGlazer 2020, 5. 15 Quoted in 2020, 5. 16 2020, 5. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 2020, 5. 20 2020, 5. 21 2020, 6. 22 “Native survivance,” Vizenor (2008, 1) explains, “is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion,” stories that constitute “renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry” (2008, 3). For settlers too, reactivation of the past can constitute repudiation of the present. 23 Wide-­awakeness is “full attention to life and its requirements” (quoted in Greene 1973, 162), requirements that can cause “disquietude” (1973, 183). The risk is surely worth taking, as – here Greene (1972, 163) quotes Thoreau – “To be awake is to be alive.” Hongyu Wang seeks not civil disobedience but peace. Discussing “Daoist personal cultivation of inner peace as the bridge to achieving outer peace” (2021, 108), Wang affirms that the “site of personhood is where the self relates to others, governs society, and connects to the natural world” ((2021, 109). Wide-­awakeness can be, then, simultaneously subjective, social, and spiritual, as (in Wang’s words) “self-­ consciousness merges into cosmic consciousness, and inner peace and outer peace flow into each other” (2021, 112). 24 Dewey’s (1910, 39) affirmation of process-­ over-­ content concerns consequence: “Accordingly, any subject, from Greek to cooking, and from drawing to mathematics, is intellectual, if intellectual at all, not in its fixed inner structure, but in its function – in its power to start and direct significant inquiry and reflection. What geometry does for one, the manipulation of laboratory apparatus, the mastery of a musical composition, or the conduct of a business affair, may do for another.” John Kaag (2016, 17) summarizes succinctly: “Pragmatism holds that truth is to be judged on the basis of its practical consequences, on its ability to enrich human experience.” 25 Quoted in 2020, 6. 26 2020, 6.

Preface  xv

27 Westbrook 1991, 170, 191, 313, 437. Education must be freed from economic interests, Dewey insisted, focused instead on “social power and insight” (quoted in 1991, 111). 28 Quoted in 2020, 6. 29 2020, 6. 30 2020, 6. Among too many progressives, liberation offered becomes liberation demanded. The “unchosen, unwanted, and compulsory,” McGlazer (2020, 17) knows, “are inescapable in education.” 31 2020, 7. 32 Pinar 1975a; Block 2017. 33 Quoted in 2020, 7. 34 Quoted in 2020, 7. 35 2020, 8. 36 2020, 8. One topic McGlazer and I share: Pasolini. 37 Ibid. 38 “Pass the parcel. That’s sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That’s the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.” https://www.quotes.net/mquote/116014 Accessed 2021/11/17. Transmission, the bugaboo of earlier progressivism, now becomes – in an Age of Ignorance – itself progressive. “At times,” Kaag (2020, 131) comments, “the point of pragmatism might be to transcend it.” 39 Rinpoche (2019, 206) puts it this way: “Individuated consciousness is like the contents of an empty cup. Space exists within the cup but does not belong to the cup.” 40 Ibid. The quoted phrase is Edward Said’s. 41 Quoted in 2020, 9. 42 2020, 10. 43 I am hardly the first progressive to be uneasy over its excesses. Kaag (2016, 203) reports that early twentieth-­century progressives Agnes Boyle O’Reilly, and (her husband) William Ernest Hocking “objected to what they called the ‘yielding morass of progressivism,’ the idea that still holds sway in certain educational settings that children should be given free rein over their intellectual destinies. This freedom, often self-­serving and self-­centered, was, according to the Hockings, no freedom at all. Education was not about satisfying the interests that children already had, but [also] about awakening them to the possibility of pursuing broader and more meaningful ones.” 44 McGlazer (2020, 22) recognizes that psychoanalytic “work requires – that is, both presupposes and prescribes – backward movement in order to advance.” Yet such “working-­through,” he seems sure, is what “progressive education precludes when it compels students to leave the past behind or disavow it.” Not my progressive education, focused as it is “working-­through” what our ancestors have bequeathed us: currere. 45 “Time itself is the precondition of experience,” North (2018, 8) writes (referencing Kant), “not something we think about but something we think with.” For Husserl, North (2018, 9) continues, our “experience of the present spreads out in time, incorporating parts of the past and future.” After Einstein, “simultaneity and therefore the present, is relative, so that the present is really a subjective concept, tied to a particular point of view” (2018, 7). “But if modern physics is correct,” North (2018, 10) adds, “there is no real ‘now’ in objective reality, and if current neural science is on the right track, there may not be any reason to believe in a subjective present.” No neural reason perhaps, but surely an experiential one: being present means being in while not coinciding (or fused) with the present. 46 To that topic I turn in Chapter 14, casting the Moeller-­D’Ambrosio book as my foil (as Gumbrecht’s is in Chapter 2).

xvi  Preface

47 “Study … leads to ethical self-­encounters,” Strong-­Wilson (2021, 155) points out, “conducing to recognition of the reciprocal relation between (implicated) self and other, opening to understanding of a subject matter that is being actively worked through.” 48 McGlazer recognizes relationship too, specifically how it becomes intertwined in content. “Pedagogy” as he defines it, “names a site of transmission and a type of relationship rather than a method for guaranteeing that predetermined contents will be delivered, that particular, substantive lessons will be earned and retained” (2020, 21). 49 “When we think of the relational nature of human life in general and education in particular,” Wang (2021, 45) writes, “we think of the relationships between the self and the other. However, there is another important relational dimension that is often neglected in contemporary education: the self–self-­relationship.” 50 I invoke the overused term in its ordinary dictionary definition, e.g. “behave in a way characteristic of a responsible adult, especially by accomplishing mundane but necessary tasks.” During the Trump administration many worried about there being in the Oval Office no “adult.” In an age of narcissism, adults do seem in short supply. 51 That project required the authorship of art: “The inwardness of life is only realized in its outward manifestations,” Gabriel and Zizek (2009, 77) suggest, adding: “Life is not a mysterious spiritual quality but the activity of expression, of objectification.” Pasolini’s life was materialized in his poems, novels, films, and other forms of art as public pedagogy (see Chapters 6 and 13). 52 “The problem is,” Cohen (2021, 144) acknowledges, “that ‘crises’ have become the new norm.” 53 Pinar 1975b, 2. 54 Presentism is the illusion that there is, is now, that the past is not embedded in the present and the future is not real. This crisis is not new; McGlazer (2020, 72) quotes Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) who wondered: “How could the expression of a thought … be fixed even for the duration of a generation, if in going forward we didn’t face backward from time to time.” Facing backward may be the only way to see what’s ahead. 55 Narcissism is the illusion that all that matters is me, an inability to think and feel outside the confines of one’s own shrunken subjectivity, a self-­centeredness that signals the self is withering away. By reactivating – thereby incorporating – the past into the present, one’s subjectivity expands, becomes self-­knowing as it becomes temporally differentiated, disclosing (however incipient and immediate) the future through the meaning of the past. 56 Technologization is the secularization of (especially Christian) religion that promises that humanity’s salvation can be ensured technologically. No longer prostheses, technological instrumentation structures subjectivity, rendering us no longer human. 57 “There was something I wanted to feel,” Chee (2018, 13) tells us, “and I felt it only when writing.” Writing helps me understand something I already feel as it enables me to experience something I have yet to feel. 58 Now with this own press: https://myersedpress.presswarehouse.com/ 59 That same reviewer critiqued the thematic framing of the essays according to the subtitle. I came to agree and abandoned it. 60 Finally, it doesn’t matter, as – in Zambreno’s (2021, 85) words, “perhaps no one will read, what does it matter, I am already dead.” Stepanova (2018, 57) puts the matter this way: “The printing press keeps turning, but there are no readers left.” 61 In contrast is “the artist [who] can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions” (Cusk 2021, 33). I’m not sure every artist would agree.

Preface  xvii

62 McGlazer (2020, 90) is here quoting Daniel Mendelsohn (who is referencing Ulysses) that leaves McGlazer wondering if Joyce wanted to “turn all of his readers (back) into students,” interpellation McGlazer (2020, 123) also ascribes to Pasolini’s last film Salò. 63 “The formation of the dialogical bond between various interlocutors engaged in study,” Burns (2018, 128) appreciates, “is an act of subjective courage through which we risk speaking our truths and learning the truths of others, a process through which we construct and reconstruct ourselves.” 64 The Canon Project – formalizing our remembrance of the past – I suggested in 2007, one embedded in the Curriculum Studies in Canada project (Pinar 2021).

Bibliography Block, Alan A. 2017. Of That Visionary Gleam. In The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies, edited by Mary Aswell Doll (17–26). Routledge. Burns, James P. 2018. Power, Curriculum, and Embodiment: Re-­ thinking Curriculum as Counter-­Conduct and Counter-­Politics. Palgrave Macmillan. Chee, Alexander. 2018. How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Cohen, Daniel. 2021. The Inglorious Years. The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society. Princeton University Press. Cusk, Rachel. 2021. Second Place. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dewey, John. 1910. How We Think. D. C. Health & Co. Gabriel, Markus and Zizek, Slavoj. 2009. Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism. Continuum. Giridharadas, Anand. 2018, August 26. Merchants of Fake Change. The New York Times, CLXVII, No. 58,066, SR3. Greene, Maxine. 1973. Teacher as Stranger. Wadsworth. Kaag, John. 2016. American Philosophy: A Love Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kaag, John. 2020. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. How William James Can Save Your Life. Princeton University Press. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press. North, Michael. 2018. What Is The Present? Princeton University Press. Pinar, William F. 1975a. Sanity, Madness and the School. In Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists, edited by William F. Pinar (359–383). McCutchan. Pinar, William F. 1975b. “The Method of Currere.” Paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC. https://eric. ed.gov/?id=ED104766 Pinar, William F. 2007. Intellectual Advancement through Disciplinarity: Verticality and Horizontality in Curriculum Studies. Sense Publishers. Pinar, William F. 2021. Curriculum Studies in Canada. Encyclopedia of Educational Innovation. Springer. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-­981-­13-­2262-­ 4_240-­1 Rinpoche, Yongey Mingyur with Helen Tworkov. 2019. In Love With the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying. Spiegal & Grau. Stepanova, Maria. 2018. In Memory of Memory. New Directions. Strong-­Wilson, Teresa. 2021. Teachers’ Ethical Self-­Encounters with Counter-­Stories in the Classroom. From Implicated to Concerned Subjects. Routledge.

xviii  Preface

Vizenor, Gerald. 2008. Aesthetics of Survivance. Literary Theory and Practice. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (1–23). University of Nebraska Press. Wang, Hongyu. 2021. Contemporary Daoism, Organic Relationality, and Curriculum of Integrative Creativity. Information Age Publishing. Westbrook, Robert. 1991. John Dewey and American Philosophy. Cornell University Press. Zambreno, Kate. 2021. To Write As If Already Dead. Columbia University Press.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Frederick Pinar Born in Huntington, West Virginia in 1947, William Frederick Pinar took his B.S. in Education at The Ohio State University, graduating in 1969. He taught English at the Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington, New York from 1969-­1971, returning to Ohio State to finish his M.A. in 1970 and the Ph.D. in 1972. He taught at the University of Rochester from 1972 until 1985, when he relocated to Louisiana State University (LSU), where he served as the St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed Professor through 2005, when he accepted a (Tier I) Canada Research Chair (CRC) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (UBC). The CRC is Canada’s highest academic honor, requiring a year’s vetting by the nominating institution and a second year’s vetting by the federal government which funds the program. After serving the maximum two terms as CRC, in 2019 Pinar was named the Tetsuo Aoki Professor in Curriculum Studies. Pinar has enjoyed visiting appointments at the University of Virginia – where he served as the Frank Talbott Professor during Fall Term 1995 – and at Colgate University – where he served as the A. Lindsay O’Connor Professor of American Institutions during Fall Term 1982. He has lectured widely, including at Teachers College Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University, McGill University, the Universities of Alberta, KwaZulu-­Natal, New Brunswick, Québec, Wisconsin-­Madison as well as the Universities of Chicago, Helsinki, Luxembourg, Oslo, Tokyo and Toronto. In 2000 Pinar received the LSU Distinguished Faculty Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA); in 2004 he received an AERA Outstanding Book Award for What Is Curriculum Theory? In 2015 the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies awarded him the Ted T. Aoki Award for Distinguished Service; in 2021 the International Institute for

xx  About the Author

Hermeneutics (Warsaw, Poland) conferred upon him the Hermes Award for his 2015 Educational Experience as Lived. He has been honored at UBC by the establishment of the William Doll, Peter Grimmett and William Pinar Reading Room. At Oklahoma State University is the William F. Pinar Endowed Curriculum Studies Fund: https://education.okstate.edu/departments-­programs/teaching-­ learning-­educational-­sciences/curriculum-­studies/pinar-­fund.html Pinar was the architect of the 1970s Reconceptualization of the curriculum field, conceiving curriculum as currere (https://www.currereexchange.com/). In 1979 he founded (1) the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing and in 1982 its companion Bergamo Conference (http://www.jctonline.org/conference/), (2) in 1995 the LSU Curriculum Theory Project (https://www.lsu.edu/chse/education/ research_and_outreach/curriculum_theory_project/curriculumtheoryproject. php), (3) the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (https://www.iaacs.ca/) – he served as its first President – and that same year (2001) he founded (4) its U.S. affiliate: the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies http://www.aaacs.org/). Although Pinar is known best for his publications concerning curriculum theory, he has also written on cultural studies, international studies, and queer studies. The proud father of Gabriel Joseph Pinar and grandfather of Olympia, August, and Rhein, Pinar lives with his husband Jeffrey Duram Turner in the woods of Northwest Washington State.

OTHER RECENT WRITINGS

• 2022. Foreword to Curriculum Work and Social Justice Leadership in a Post-­ Reconceptualist Era: Attaining Critical Consciousness and Learning to Become by Allan Michel Jales Coutinho. Routledge. • 2022. Foreword to Lingering with the Works of Ted T. Aoki, edited by Nicole Lee, Lesley E. Wong, and Joanne M. Ursino. Routledge. • 2022. Foreword to Restoring Soul, Passion, and Purpose in Teacher Education: Contesting the Instrumentalization of Curriculum and Pedagogy by Peter Grimmett. Routledge. • 2022. Foreword to Engaging with Meditative Inquiry in Teaching, Learning, and Research, edited by Ashwani Kumar. Routledge. • 2022. Foreword. Engaging Currere Toward Decolonization by Shauna Knox. New York: Routledge. • 2022. Foreword to Curriculum, Environment, and the Work of C. A. Bowers: Ecological and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Audrey Dentith, David Flinders, John Lupinacci, Jennifer Thom (xv–xx). New York: Routledge. • 2021. Foreword. Transnational Education and Curriculum Studies: International Perspectives, edited by John Chi-­Kin Lee and Noel Gough (vii-­ix). London: Routledge. • 2021. Curriculum and the Covid-­ 19 Crisis. Prospects. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11125-­021-­09560-­y

1 CURRERE1

In postmodernity, especially (but not only) in the Global North, we can “forget why we are where we are,” Charles Taylor acknowledges, adding: “In particular, we forget what drove us into modernity. Our grip on who we are becomes less sure, and so we have thinner shallower mode of being.”2 Ramsey McGlazer appreciates that the foreclosures of progress – the mounting pressures of modernization and of capitalist presentism – call for ever more extreme measures and ever more demanding teaching styles, for ways out of the present that are at once more urgent and more immanent than those previously imagined.3 Foreclosed by a pseudo-­now that erases those who are present in 19754 I invoked Latin infinitive of curriculum – currere – to affirm one’s subjective presence, one’s existential experience5 of curriculum,6 its immediacy, the “accuracy of the moment,”7 even when we resist it8: embodied educational experience9 informed by the past10 while focused on the future.11 To study12 such experience13 – study that might encourage self-­understanding,14 even expand the inner15 space of freedom16 because, as Cusk’s character says: “I had to learn to live more in myself ”17 – I devised a method in four steps or phases.18 Also an instructional method19 – especially with oneself 20 – currere is an opportunity to study the “sound of oneself.”21

The Method In the first – the regressive phase – one returns22 to the past23 (or to aspects of it): for instance, one’s school experience, the experience of an influential teacher or DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-1

2  Currere

text, one’s ongoing relationship with an academic discipline, a historical event.24 In the second – the progressive moment – one imagines the future25: personal, social, political (intertwined as these three26 – and time27 – can be). Not only the past but also fantasies of the future structure one’s subjective and social present.28 In the third – the analytic moment – one studies these texts and the experiences they register29 to understand30 what before might have been obscured by one’s submergence in the present.31 Incorporation of repressed or forgotten (or even unknown) events into one’s present understanding encourages an expanded subjectivity,32 with room for – acceptance33 of – whom and what has been rejected or neglected before. In the fourth moment or synthetic phase,34 one gathers oneself, pulls oneself together (for the moment at least), becoming subjectively present, able to act in the private and public worlds in which one finds oneself embedded.35 Such synthesis or subjective coherence becomes the site from which one can again regress to the past. An expanded subjectivity provides a portal to a different future, one inaccessible from one’s previous subject position or identity.36

Complicated Conversation The method of currere emphasizes the lived curriculum but it does not ignore the planned one, as the two are intertwined.37 If only a noun – an object stripped of subjectivity – curriculum can convey a contract, specifying what a student must learn in order to pass a course. While such institutional arrangements are hardly irrelevant, by itself the curriculum-­as-­plan risks erasing the subjective sphere, the focal point through which the social, the cultural, and the political are experienced. Exclusively institutional conceptions of curriculum also constrain our understanding of consequences: while every course concludes, the consequences of academic study are ongoing, as they are, in lived terms, social and subjective as well as intellectual. Outcomes are often immeasurable. The running of the course – currere – occurs through conversation,38 ongoing dialogical encounter among students and teachers in classrooms but also within oneself in solitude, “my own aching and delirious solitude.”39 Acknowledging that the running of the course occurs socially and subjectively through shared and solitary academic study – remembering that sometimes “a certain kind of stillness is the most perfect form of action”40 – currere emphasizes the everyday experience of the individual41 and our capacity to learn from that experience, e.g. to reconstruct experience through thought and self-­reflection in the service of understanding. Such understanding – however partial and provisional42 – can be achieved by working through one’s existential experience,43 informed as that is by culture,44 history,45 and politics.46 Such understanding can, then, reconstruct our own subjective and social lives.47

Currere  3

Autobiography The concept of currere focuses on the individual person.48 Each of us has our own genetic, psychic, social makeup: our own distinctive upbringings, families and caretakers, as well as other significant others, including teachers. We are also different and similar in terms of race, class, culture, and gender, imprinted as these are by place, time, and circumstance. While informed by these and by other homogenizing forces, each of us is distinctive.49 Indeed, the method of currere invites us to cultivate that distinctiveness. We can become not only individuals but individualists, committed to actualizing whatever independence we experience and can muster in order to pursue courses of action (including thinking50) that we know are significant in subjective and social terms. In spiritual terms, the gift of life requires us to understand why we are here, who we are, what we are fitted for. Currere asks teachers to self-­consciously incorporate the past into the present, threaded through one’s lived experience of the curriculum. As an ethical,51 political,52 always intellectual undertaking, currere emphasizes the teacher’s subjective presence in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum.53 The educational point of currere is, then, intensified engagement with study and teaching, supported by the cultivation of a consciousness54 that remembers the past with an eye on the future while focused on but not submerged in the present. Such temporally inflected educational experience enables ethical engagement with ourselves and those in our midst.55

Cultural Crises56 My earlier emphasis upon allegory57 underscored the broader – especially moral and temporal – significance of what we teach, curriculum design I demonstrated in the second edition of What Is Curriculum Theory?58 by teaching the Weimar Republic as an allegory of the present in the United States, one marred by increasing economic inequality, political polarization, and the destruction of democracy. In the third edition59 I invoked the Harlem Renaissance, again reactivating the past – “to reintroduce temporal contradiction into a context of presentist consensus”60 – but this time showing how achievement, creativity, and self-­affirmation can occur even in the midst of outrageous oppression. Here and now, living through intertwined cultural crises61 – narcissism,62 presentism,63 techno-­authoritarianism64 – I advance our understanding of the method of currere by showing it to be a praxis of presence. Stuck inside ourselves we wither, disappear as subjectively present socially engaged persons, losing track of time, trapped inside the devices where we flee the world we are inadvertently destroying. A praxis of presence promises to extricate us from self-­enclosure (against narcissism, a pseudo self-­centeredness), restart lived and historical time (against

4  Currere

presentism and its erasure of history and time), and address the idolatry of technology (against the technologization of everything, specifically ourselves). Through this praxis of presence – the method of currere – the educator can teach as s/he struggles against these cultural crises.65 Threaded through these concepts – technologization, presentism, narcissism – I teach persisting issues in curriculum theory, among them curriculum reform, teaching, authority, authorship, experience, self-­formation through study.66 Assembling previously published essays and other recent writing is itself reactivating the past to become present again, detailing how the past can help us understand what is at stake now. No longer exclusively a noun, curriculum is now also a verb: currere, the Latin infinitive form of curriculum emphasizes one’s existential experience of curriculum,67 what Wang terms the “inner landscape of curriculum.”68 No longer only objectives,69 guidelines and outcomes, curriculum is also a complicated conversation in which students and teachers are not only speaking among and to each other and to themselves but also with those not present, including those past and those not yet here.70 Currere, then, emphasizes self-­formation71 through study and dialogical encounter, rendering the world – including oneself72 – present through academic knowledge.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this preface appeared in Key Concepts in Curriculum Studies, edited by Judy Wearing, Marcea Ingersoll, Christopher DeLuca, Benjamin Bolden, Holly Ogden, and Theodore Michael Christou (50–52). New York Routledge, 2020. Reprinted with permission. Revised in 2021. 2 Quoted in Redhead 2002, 176–177. 3 2020, 23. From a rather different set of assumptions and convictions, Moore (2015, 9), too, suggests “we can – and perhaps must – contemplate some radical curriculum possibilities and changes.” Despite their differences, like McGlazer, Moore (2015, 10) is focused on contemporary “threats to democracy.” 4 Pinar 1975; Pinar and Grumet 2015 (1976). How different (from now) that moment was, including in curriculum studies, as I show in Chapters 11 and 12. Then the subjective presence of students and teachers in the curriculum was suppressed by positivist postulations of professionalism; now it is suppressed by political polarization; for an instance, see Green (2021). 5 “Experience is a painful process of transformation,” Han (2021, 39) asserts, one “that contains an element of suffering, of undergoing something.” Sometimes but not always: transformation can also be pleasant, even fun. Han’s point is well taken, however; experience can be abrasive, as I emphasize in Chapter 10. 6 “Curriculum becomes a place of study,” Casemore (2017, 44) appreciates, “one sufficiently bounded to enable reflection on one’s singular becoming and one sufficiently capacious to enable exploration of obscured histories, social forces, and experiences of otherness. Curriculum, then, emerges as the subjective site of social psychoanalysis.” On that last concept, see Kincheloe and Pinar (1991). 7 Cusk 2021, 161. 8 Even “resistance,” McGlazer (2020, 127) appreciates, “becomes inseparable from the experience of undergoing it.”

Currere  5

9 In Chapter 10 I suggest embodiment and educational experience are reciprocally related; although, I do not doubt that learning online is also possible, at least for university students (see Chapter 9). During the Covid-­19 pandemic many K-­12 children – and more than a few of their teachers – found schooling on screen almost impossible (see Pinar 2021). 10 James P. Burns (2018, 19) quotes James Baldwin’s reverberating insight – “great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us … and is literally present in all that we do” to inform his conceptualization of “curriculum as both a site in which power is effectuated and as a space in which students and teachers, through academic study, might embark on a course to reconstruct themselves and the world they inhabit.” 11 Alex Moore (2015, 4) points out that the “curriculum always has, and always as had, some kind of future orientation.” Bookending the present with past and future enables recognition and experience of time. While the power of the present has probably always been paramount, today presentism cannibalizes the past and the future, a cultural–political crisis the concept and method of currere can address as it reactivates the past to make meaningful the present, thereby bringing the future into view. It is, I suppose, another form of storywork. “The strength of stories challenges me to think,” Archibald 2008, 3, 153) reports, “to examine my emotional reactions … and to reflect on my behaviors and future actions, and to appreciate a story’s connections to my spiritual nature” (2008, 85). She adds: “I believe that Indigenous stories are at the core of our cultures. They have the power to make us think, feel, and be good human beings. They have the power to bring storied life back to us” (2008, 139). 12 I construe study as spiritual as well as intellectual and emotional (see Chapter 3). It is of course political as well. 13 Chee (2018, 202) asks: “What will you let yourself know? What will you allow yourself to know?” These are currere’s questions as well. 14 “[U]nderstanding meaning as a process, not as a given,” as Gardini (2019, 230) perfectly puts it. 15 Rumi writes: “Remember, the/entrance door to the sanctuary is/inside you” (quoted in Barks 2001, 16). 16 “Internal freedom,” Wang (2021, 147) explains, “is about freeing oneself from conformity to social norms and achieving inner peace.” It is not without risk, as returning to the past, like diving deep in the (one’s own) sea, “bottom of our own sea. You could get the bends. You had to take care not to let the past self take over” (Chee 2018, 212). Chee attributes this insight (and the imagery that conveys it) to Annie Dillard. 17 2021, 137. 18 Like Chee (2018, 276), “I needed to teach … students to hold on – to themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future.” 19 There are many exemplary instances, among them Doerr (2004) and Palmer (2019). In her teaching, Hongyu Wang (2021, 167) devotes a month for each of the four phases of currere, discovering, for instance, that “while synthesis is formally conducted in the last step of currere, students’ sudden awareness and insights happen in the graduate process of weekly activities” (2021, 168), even “witness[ing] how students became gentler to others as they learned how to better care for themselves” (2021, 169). 20 Knox (2022) is the exemplary instance here. 21 That lovely phrase comes from Kaag (2018, 151–152): “Silence, the sound of oneself, enables – even necessitates – thinking.” And thinking, Kaag (2020, 101) comments (discussing William James), is “always personal, in other words, subjectively held and experienced.” 22 My suggestion is to use present not past tense, as it encourages one to experience the past as if present. Chee (2018, 208) understands: “I found that writing in the present tense acted as self-­hypnosis. Discussions of the use of the tense speak often of the

6  Currere

effect on the reader, but the effect on the writer is just as important…. It is also the tense victims of trauma use to describe their own assaults.” 23 I can concur with Kaag (2016, 29) that the “task of life is to transcend the past, to never remain where one starts, to find a place of one’s own,” but the past must be present if one is to work through it, if one is to mid-­wife the future, a point with which I suspect Kaag would agree. 24 Including an event that lasted a long time, one such as lynching (Pinar 2001), as the murdered haunt the historical moment in which our individual lives are embedded. “My work,” Baszile (2017, 9) confides, “often calls on me to recognize haunting and to confront ghosts, most particularly ghosts that remind, replay, recapitulate, re-­ present, reproduce the trauma of the very-­present racialized past.” 25 These days, Berardi (2012, 108) notes, the “future is no longer conceived as a promise, but as a threat.” But “by facing our fear of the future,” Rinpoche and Tworkov (2019, 179) knows, “we transform the present.” 26 “Curriculum becomes integrative through the interactions between and among subjectivity, subject, and society,” Wang (2021, 167) explains, adding: “It [currere] is an exemplar of curriculum as integrative curriculum, since it connects subject/academic knowledge, subjectivity, and society – three foci of curriculum – to create new layers of the self for personally and socially sustainable reconstruction.” 27 “Imagine yourself a pool of light and sound altering as all your days run through you, and they pass again and again. From moment to moment, you are every age you have ever been, but in no particular order. Time courses through you, the time you lived, a flume of your days. This was Peter’s dementia.” Chee (2018, 94) is here describing his lover’s dying from AIDS, but is also, however inadvertently, portraying just how intertwined time can be, even for those of us without disease, a reason to parcel it into past, present, future, as the method of currere encourages. 28 And not only fantasies but facts too, as in the case of climate change. Schwartz (2021, June 1, A11) reported that more than one-­third of heat-­related deaths in many parts of the world can be attributed to climate change, according to new research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study, conducted by 70 researchers using data from major projects in the fields of epidemiology and climate modeling in 43 countries, concluded that heat-­related deaths were increased by climate change by an average of 37%. 29 “Language,” Glancy (2008, 279) explains, is “creator” but also a “trickster that robs meaning,” a “conduit” into the “other world” but “imbedded in this one.” Rinpoche and Tworkov (2019, 226) teaches: “At best, words point to something beyond the conceptual mind that the conceptual mind cannot know.” 30 Understanding can create a structural non-­coincidence between the “I” and the “me,” enabling one to “become aware of the space in-­between – the space in-­between our thoughts, our moods, our perceptions, and our breaths,” as Rinpoche and Tworkov (2019, 74) explains. It is also a space in between past, present, and future. 31 “The present,” Kaag (2018, 221) comments, “is but a placeholder where the past and future meet, a fleeting moment where becoming takes place.” 32 The metaphor derives from Lasch’s (1984) appreciation that the beleaguered – narcissistic – self is minimal, shrunken by withdrawal from the public sphere for the sake of self-­survival, a move that shrinks the self, imperiling its survival even more. “The society of survival has no sense of the good life,” Han (2021, 14–15) asserts, adding: “Even enjoyment is sacrificed in the pursuit of health as an end in itself.” An accurate observation, but surely survival is a prerequisite for exploring what a “good life” might be. 33 Rinpoche and Tworkov’s (2019, 219) experience is relevant here: “The effects of this profound acceptance came quickly. Within ten or fifteen minutes, the agitation I experienced began to decompress.” Maybe not so fast with analysis, but acceptance can reduce inner pressure.

Currere  7

34 “While synthesis is formally conducted in the last step of currere,” Wang (2021, 168) reports (describing her own teaching) that “students’ sudden awareness and insights happen in the gradual process of weekly activities.” 35 Commenting on Rumi, Barks (2001, 28) finds that the “most amazing quality of his poetry is that it can also give a sense of the presence our lives occur within.” That “sense” was one on which William James was also focused; he knew, Kaag (2020, 159) points out, that “this ‘vast field’ [quoting James] of reality continually outstrips our attempts to understand it.” Making the attempt is the point. 36 “I was someone who didn’t know how to find the path he was on,” Chee (2018, 46) confides, “the one under his feet.” I devised the method of currere to help those who want to find and follow one’s path. 37 Distinguishing the curriculum-­as-­plan from the curriculum-­as-­lived is one of Aoki’s most important theoretical breakthroughs. He endorsed dwelling in between the two (see Aoki 2005 (1986), 159–161). 38 By the constant citation of others, I attempt to enact such conversation, writing as a pedagogical-­political act, as Carl Phillips (n.d.) appreciates: “How we write seems as valid a way of being political as what we choose to write about.” 39 Zambreno 2021, 76. Referencing Hannah Arendt, Butler (2017, 231) explains that “dialogic encounter within the self ” constitutes an “active and performative dimension of self-­making,” adding: “For Arendt, those who fail to relate to themselves, to constitute themselves, as one does in thinking and judging, fail to actualize as persons.” 40 Cusk 2021, 171. 41 A “ontological” fact not only “Western” in its history – see Siedentop (2014) – but also Indigenous: Ruppert (2008, 288) notes that “many others have commented on the marked enchant for individualism in Athabascan culture; Glancy (2008, 279) describes “Native work” as “tribal yet searching for individualism, unity, and separation.” 42 “Perfect self-­knowledge is methodologically impossible,” Kaag (2018, 122) reminds, discussing Nietzsche’s Genealogy, a book that “entreats readers to look back long enough to understand what they might become.” Not only is self-­knowledge imperfect, Kaag (2018, 221) points out – still discussing Nietzsche – that the “process of self-­discovery requires an undoing of the self-­knowledge that you assume you already have.” Kaag (2020, 64) reminds that “self-­trust has its limits.” 43 Rumi admonishes us: “Work in the invisible world/at least as hard as you do in the visible” (quoted in Barks 2001, 20). 44 Culture can be de-­individuating, even when not monolithic and static, even when dynamic and hybrid. Culture can contribute to provincialism, not only associated with space (the location of culture) but also of time, as T.S. Eliot pointed out in 1944. “What Eliot had in mind,” Holt (2021, February 25, 26) explains, “was provincialism about the past, a failure to think of dead generations as fully real. But one can also be guilty of provincialism about the future: a failure to imagine the generations that will come after us, to take seriously our responsibilities toward them.” The climate crisis brings that point home. 45 We need history,” Nietzsche reminds, “inasmuch as the past swells up in us in hundreds of ways. Indeed we ourselves are nothing other than what we sense at each instant of that onward flow” (quoted in Kaag 2018, 68). “Nietzsche wanted,” Kaag (2018, 80) comments, “to have the past live in the present and in the future both, to have time again vibrate as one.” 46 Cazdyn (2012, 53) appreciates that “disaster is that moment when thinking is cut off from history, while individuals are in psychological disaster when they are no longer able to relate to the world.” The present politics of polarization would seem to be an instance of such a disaster. 47 “To make yourself a better person,” Rinpoche and Tworkov (2019, 104) teaches, “is to make the world a better place.” He adds: “Until we transform ourselves, we are like

8  Currere

mobs of angry people screaming for peace. In order to move the world, we must be able to stand still in it. Now more than ever, I place my faith in Gandhi’s approach: Be the change you wish to see in the world. Nothing is more essential for the twenty-­first century and beyond than personal transformation. It’s our only hope. Transforming ourselves is transforming the world.” 48 A developmental possibility, spiritual obligation, and empirical fact, the individual person is an endangered species. “The individual,” Han (2021, 57) points out, “has been transformed into a data set and exploited for profit.” 49 “You are the only one of you,” Annie Dillard told Alexander Chee and his classmates. “Your unique perspective … is what matters. Don’t worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes that possible” (Chee 2018, 50). 50 Butler (2017, 231) clarifies these concepts: “To think is not necessarily to think about oneself, but rather, to think with oneself (invoking oneself as company, and so using the plural we) and to sustain a dialogue with oneself (maintaining a mode of address and addressability). To act as an individual is to enter into concerted action without fully sacrificing one’s singularity and to act in such a way that dialogue with oneself can be continued, in other words, the maxim according to which I live is that any action I take should support rather than destroy my capacity to keep company with myself (should support the receptivity and audibility of that internal dialogue).” 51 “Awareness,” Wang (2021, 48) reminds, “helps one acknowledge one’s own unconscious shadow so that demonizing others becomes difficult.” In fact, she continues (discussing Jung) “self-­questioning and critiquing social conventions that fragment psychic wholeness are intimately related to cultivating compassion for others” (2021, 52). 52 Carl Phillips (n.d.) knows: “To insist on being who we are is a political act — if only because we are individuals, and therefore inevitably resistant to society, at the very least by our differences from it.” 53 Subjective presence enables attentiveness to others. Wang (2021, 172) appreciates that “curriculum as a complicated conversation cannot emerge without deep listening.” While focused on what students say and write, such listening also acknowledges that, in Wang’s (2021, 182) words, “meanings are more than words and can live on without words.” 54 Such consciousness includes awareness of that which one might not be aware. As Wang (2021, 48) appreciates: “[b]ecoming aware of the unconscious expands consciousness to accommodate what was not accepted previously.” 55 The two are interrelated. Disowning, denying, devaluing oneself prompts the same toward others. If you’re reading this, probably you’re still engaged with yourself, including with the self you used to be. Divorce is possible of course: “Indeed,” Butler (2017, 229) appreciates, “we can perform acts that make us want to cut ties to ourselves, to break with ourselves, to disown and banish the self who committed such a deed. Indeed, we quit speaking to the one who used to be our self and we no longer recognize that one has having anything to do with us.” Currere requires reacquaintance, if only to activate the self – the person – one wants to become. 56 “As they are for the human subject,” Cazdyn (2012, 53) suggests, “crises are built right into the system and daily reveal themselves in between the great disasters and capital ‘C’ crises that consume media attention, as well as individual consciousness. The lowercase ‘c’ crises, the ones that make up the banality of our everyday lives (the ones that don’t even look or feel like crises, but keep the whole system going) consume not only our nonmediatized lives but our unconscious.”

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57 “The new vulgarity and transparency of capitalism,” Cazdyn (2012, 202) suggests, “leaves little to be allegorized, so that allegory seems superfluous; however, this situation itself promotes a false idea that capitalism contains no further secrets, that all has been brought to light. In fact, the cultural question today is what form (if not allegory) can reveal the current secrets of the system, those repressed internal crises that cannot come to the surface.” 58 Pinar 2012. 59 Pinar 2019. 60 Here McGlazer (2020, 126) is discussing Pasolini’s repurposing of “instruction, defined, as in the discourse of progressive educational theory, as a set of painfully inflicted tasks that impose on students’, or viewers’, time. To do this is also to counter the forgetting of the Fascist past and its structural persistence.” McGlazer (ibid.) continues: “In such a context, infliction and imposition become necessary …[because] a teaching style respectful of our space and our spontaneity and rooted in a belief in our freedom (recall that the Fascist Gentile [see preface] claimed to be a greater believer in our freedom), would not forcefully register the survival of the past from which we are not free.” 61 As did the crises of one hundred years ago, in our time too they (as Heidegger – and Benjamin and Wittenstein – knew) constitute a “comprehensive oblivion of Being in modern culture,” then “in modern philosophy, when understood as epistemology” (Eilenberger 2020, 229), in our time in education as predominance of technology follow the substitution of learning theory for curriculum theory (Williamson 2013, 2017). 62 As noted earlier, a shrinking of the self that is due, in part, to a toxic public sphere and consequent social withdrawal, sheltering in place (the pandemic here a metaphor for the sense of social threat) morphs into becoming a shut-­in, self-­enclosed, fixated on our phones. Francis (2021, September 23, 60) points out that “phones, because they are carried everywhere, have the potential to make us obsess over our own image in a way that mirrors or photographs never could…. Narcissus had to find a pool to gaze into; we just pull out our phones.” 63 Cause and consequence of narcissism and our submergence in screens, “presentism” (or “now-­ism,” a form of “temporal narcissism”: North 2018, 2) has replaced “historicism” (Cohen 2021, 133). Referencing Federic Jameson, North (2018, 2–3) acknowledges that “the present defined by modernity still had a measure of value because it retained a certain content, but the present characteristic of the postmodern period no longer qualifies as such because it is empty and anonymous.” 64 Technologization is itself ideological, inadvertently authoritarian, one might even say (at the risk of hyperbole) fascistic. “Data-­driven persuasive technologies,” Williamson (2017, 130) points out, “are therefore ideal means to confer upon citizens particular ways of thinking and behaving— in other words, for educating citizens to participate in the dominant governing styles of society.” Williams calls that educating; others call it colonizing (see Chapter 9). 65 “What matters,” Rumi writes, “is how quickly you do what your soul wants” (quoted in Barks 2001, 36). 66 “As in Freudian psychoanalysis, or indeed Wittgenstein’s philosophy as set out in the Tractatus,” Eilenberger (2020, 229–230) explains, “the objective of describing the subject’s situation (in the broadest sense) in the most precise and structurally revelatory manner goes hand in hand with the subjective transformation of the conduct of his life.” 67 The idea derives from any sources, including from Heidegger who decoded Dasein – being here, subjective presence – as “understand[ing] itself more or less expressly in its Being,” including “Dasein’s relationship with itself ” (Eilenberger 2020, 228, 229). Currere constitutes ethical self-­encounter with oneself (see Strong-­Wilson 2021).

10  Currere

68 2021, xiv. 69 “If the goal [objective] is the sole point of orientation,” Han (2017, 37–38) appreciates, “then the spatial interval to be crossed before reaching it is simply an obstacle to be overcome as quickly as possible. Pure orientation towards the goal deprives the in-­between space of all meaning, emptying it to become a corridor without any value of its own.” 70 “Speak to your dead,” Chee (2018, 277) admonishes us. “Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable…. And when war comes – and make no mistake, it is already here – be sure you write for the living too.” And, I add, for those not yet alive. 71 The concept of self-­ formation implies not only self-­ engineering but also self-­ engagement and understanding, projects important in themselves but also in service to subjective presence, being present for one’s life and in the lives of those in one’s midst. In this sense, currere becomes, as McGlazer (2020, 13) phrases something similar, a “kind of refuge, letting students take distance from demands for individual self-­ realization and collective identity.” 72 “It’s time now to live naked,” Rumi writes (quoted in Barks 2001, 32).

Bibliography Aoki, Ted T. 2005 (1986/1991). Teaching as Indwelling Between Two Curriculum Worlds. In Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki, edited by William F. Pinar and Rita L. Irwin (159–165). Lawrence Erlbaum. Archibald, Jo-­ann (Q’um Q’um Xiiem). 2008. Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit. University of British Columbia Press. Barks, Coleman. Ed. 2001. The Soul of Rumi. HarperOne. Baszile, Denise Taliaferro. 2017. Haunting Revelations. In The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies, edited by Mary Aswell Doll (8–16). Routledge. Berardi, Franco. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e). Burns, James P. 2018. Power, Curriculum, and Embodiment: Re-­ thinking Curriculum as Counter-­Conduct and Counter-­Politics. Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, Judith. 2017. Arendt: Thinking Cohabitation and the Dispersion of Sovereignty. In Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis, edited by George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek (220–238). Duke University Press. Casemore, Brian. 2017. Curriculum as the Place of Study. In The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies, edited by Mary Aswell Doll (42–49). Routledge. Cazdyn, Eric. 2012. The Already Dead. The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Duke University Press. Chee, Alexander. 2018. How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Cohen, Daniel. 2021. The Inglorious Years. The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society. Princeton University Press. Cusk, Rachel. 2021. Second Place. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Doerr, Marilyn. 2004. Currere and the Environmental Autobiography: A Phenomenological Approach to the Teaching of Ecology. Peter Lang. Eilenberger, Wolfram. 2020. Time of the Magicians. Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy. Penguin. Francis, Gavin. 2021, September 23. Scrolling. The New York Review of Books, LXVIII (14), 60–62. Gardini, Nicola. 2019. Long Live Latin. The Pleasures of a Useless Language. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

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Glancy, Diane. 2008. The Naked Spot: A Journey toward Survivance. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (271–283). University of Nebraska Press. Green, Erica L. 2021, October 11. After Note on Racism, School District “Imploded.” The New York Times, CLXXI (59), 208, A1, A10–A11. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2017. The Scent of Time. A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering. Polity. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2021. The Palliative Society. Polity. Kaag, John. 2016. American Philosophy: A Love Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kaag, John. 2018. Hiking with Nietzsche. On Becoming Who You Are. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kaag, John. 2020. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. How William James Can Save Your Life. Princeton University Press. Kincheloe, Joe L. and Pinar, William F. Eds. 1991. Curriculum as Social Psychoanalysis: The Significance of Place. State University of New York Press. Knox, Shauna. 2022. Engaging Currere Toward Decolonization: Negotiating Black Womanhood through Autobiographical Analysis. Routledge. Lasch, Christopher. 1984. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. Norton. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press. Moore, Alex. 2015. Understanding the School Curriculum. Theory, Politics and Principles. Routledge. North, Michael. 2018. What Is The Present? Princeton University Press. Palmer, Leslie L. 2019. Intern Teachers Using Currere. Discovering Education as a River. Peter Lang. Phillips, Carl. n.d. A Politics of Mere Being. Poetry Magazine. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/91294/a-­politics-­of-­mere-­being Pinar, William F. 1975. “The Method of Currere.” Paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC. https://eric. ed.gov/?id=ED104766 Pinar, William F. 2001. The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison Rape, and the Crisis of Masculinity. Peter Lang. Pinar, William F. 2012. What Is Curriculum Theory? (2nd edition.) Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019. What Is Curriculum Theory? (3rd edition.) Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2021. Curriculum and the Covid-­19 Crisis. Prospects. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11125-­021-­09560-­y Pinar, William F. and Grumet, Madeleine R. 2015 (1976). Toward a Poor Curriculum. Educators’ International Press. Redhead, Mark. 2002. Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity. Rowman & Littlefield. Rinpoche, Yongey Mingyur with Helen Tworkov. 2019. In Love With the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying. Spiegal & Grau. Ruppert, James. 2008. Survivance in the Works of Velma Wallis. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (285–295). University of Nebraska Press. Schwartz, John. 2021, June 1. Study Ties Over 1/3 of Heath Deaths to Climate Change. The New York Times, CLXX, No. 59, 076, A11. Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual. The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard University Press. Strong-­Wilson, Teresa. 2021. Teachers’ Ethical Self-­Encounters with Counter-­Stories in the Classroom. From Implicated to Concerned Subjects. Routledge.

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Wang, Hongyu. 2021. Contemporary Daoism, Organic Relationality, and Curriculum of Integrative Creativity. Information Age Publishing. Williamson, Ben. 2013. The Future of the Curriculum. School Knowledge in the Digital Age. The MIT Press. Williamson, Ben. 2017. Big Data in Education. The Digital Future of Learning, Policy and Practice. Sage. Zambreno, Kate. 2021. To Write As If Already Dead. Columbia University Press.

2 PRESENCE

In the method of currere the first step is the regressive. Regression into – reactivation of – the past is more than recalling what happened before, an exercise conducted from one’s present positioning. Regression is instead returning to an earlier moment, immersing oneself in it, in its tone, mood, ambiance, its specificity.1 Through their etymological association with “mind,” the English words “remembrance” and “reminiscence” imply that memory2 “brings something back to mind,” a point Hans-­Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio make to contrast these English words with the German one for remembrance: Erinnerung.3 It is a term, they tell us, that means making something past “one’s own and to possess it … internalizing elements of history, thereby shaping one’s identity.”4 While I do not want to “possess it,” I do want to work to re-­experience the past, entry (such as it can be) that can be accomplished through memory, but mostly through what others have left us.5 When one returns, the present – one’s present – becomes activated, including its call to us to be present in it. Not only the past pulls at one, so does the future: the progressive phase of the method of currere invites us to fantasize our – individual, collective (intertwined as these are) – futures. After analysis of what we discover, we synthesize, pull ourselves together, become mobilized in the moment. This is a praxis6 of becoming subjectively present: in one’s own life, with and for others, in the world that unfolds before and within us. Subjective presence takes different forms in different moments in one’s life, with different people, with non-­human life, with objects, in different places.7 In our place, in our time, in our academic field, William E. Doll, Jr.8 makes my point. Hongyu Wang deems him a “professor of presence,” precisely because his “presence as a person who is genuinely interested in students as persons created a pedagogical bonding that remained unique and powerful for many of his students.”9 Wang – who herself becomes subjectively present in her testimony DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-2

14  Presence

to him – makes the profound point that “to be present to oneself, one needs the help of others,” adding: “In this sense, a pedagogy of presence means not only to be present to students but also to be present to the self, and often these two aspects are intertwined.”10 In Bill Doll’s “pedagogy of presence,” Wang explains, “relationality lies at the heart of teaching and learning,” evident in his “pedagogical companionship” that created a “culture of sharing in which students not only feel free to explore ideas but also feel supported in exploring their own pathways.”11 Very much present herself while in his presence, Wang testifies that Doll was “present personally with students in their adventure, intellectually and socially.”12 As a consequence of his pedagogical presence, his “students have also become more present to one another.”13 Wang knows that the “teacher’s presence in teaching calls upon students’ presence in learning.”14 Another person of our time15 – the philosopher John Kaag16 – serves as another exemplary instance of what I mean, as his scholarship is the philosophical personification of what sixty years ago François Truffaut imagined to be the future of film: “The film of tomorrow appears to me as seen more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary…. The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it.”17 William James and Friedrich Nietzsche are Kaag’s companions on his quest to understand, to love, to simply survive, but they are not always so separate from him, as their thoughts seep into his. Kaag’s quest becomes theirs, and theirs his. The abandoned library where he finds first editions of philosophical classics is also the world that has abandoned philosophy.18 Kaag’s scholarship can be construed as kind of currere, as his academic study informs his self-­understanding as he teaches us what is at stake being alive, being present to oneself. These three current cultural crises19 – technologization, presentism, narcissism – structure my own lived experience. I struggle against disappearing into the black hole that is screen at which I stare now. In front of the screen much of the day time recedes; ritual rescues me. To hold on I structure my day: ninety minutes for writing20 and, later, for reading,21 no more than sixty minutes for email, a thirty-­minute workout, a protein shake, my two-­mile walk,22 then – yes – back to the screen. Without these arbitrary divisions of the day time fades and I become submerged in what remains of a self. My path ahead disappears before my very eyes. I look for it within what others write, on pilgrimages of their own – precious in their own right but also as they point the way for me, an ongoing instance of academic study as self-­formation. As in American pragmatism – Kaag’s concern – consequences matter: does what we see on our screens distract us from ourselves or – however occasionally, inadvertently, indirectly – reactivate what is missing, traces of a past that can function as clues to decipher and thereby surpass the present? Keeping conscious in the desert – that haunting image in Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema – feeling the (quick)sand on which we walk, the searing heat through which we move, our parched lips and souls, such embodied acknowledgement of actuality can crush

Presence  15

but also inspire us to engage in the praxis of presence. Despite the promise of meditation23 and other methods – including currere – presence cannot be conflated with procedure or any other means of its production.24 Presence depends upon an attunement to embodied experience25 – however mediated through the prism of perception, reconstructed through rationality – from which we learn to discern what we must do next, how our presence must be materialized. Referencing Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s The Production of Presence – what I will position as my foil – Madeleine R. Grumet pointed to Gumbrecht’s discussion of the phenomenological concept of Erleben (lived experience), moments of compelling intensity that go beyond pure perception because they are followed by experience (Ehfahrung), reconstructed as the “result of acts of world interpretation.”26 Such experience, Grumet points out, “carries us beyond ourselves.”27 She continues: I am resorting to this language analysis to point to this tension in currere, a process that calls us to feel and name the sensuous place we live…. Situated thus, between here and there, now and then, anguish and maybe, we may bring our humanity, particular in every moment we breathe to our work as scholars and as teachers.28 That “work” constitutes a praxis of presence that can encourage the best of what we are and can become.29 To unpack that proposition I turn to Gumbrecht.

Presence Hans Gumbrecht defines “presence” as denoting not a “temporal” but a “spatial relationship” to the “world,”30 as if being present did not occur in time as well as in place.31 Yes, being present is in its most obvious sense a matter of space, taking up space, occupying it, although even these everyday terms quickly connote other less everyday less obviously spatial ones. Being present also means being attentive, alert, and not only to those in one’s physical presence but also to those who aren’t, those who may be present in memory,32 as in loved (and loathed) ones who have died. There are those – I am thinking of our parents – who may be here no longer but who are present not only in one’s memory but also in one’s personality, in one’s flesh.33 Think of what used to be a common expression of relatives or friends of children’s parents who, upon seeing the child, might remark: “I see so much of your mother in you.” That inheritance can be physical and/or psychological, one’s manner and body an indirect presencing of someone else, someone significant, the persons who conceived you (and not only physically). And one might make present someone not necessarily genetically linked: my husband reminds me that in certain of my manners and expressions he sees Paul Klohr – my Ph.D. mentor – coming out of me. I see that too, and in my old age, each of my parents, separately and together, present in me, as I see myself – as well as his mother – in my son and in his children.

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Which brings me to another non-­spatial but psychic sense of being present: allowing oneself, including those separate and fused others one has internalized and now embody, to be here, not necessarily expressed verbally or gesturally, but psychologically present, at the ready, at hand we might say.34 Like others on (or just below) the surface, one’s distinctive self can also be present when hiding behind a mask,35 even a white one when one’s Black self is remains under cover.36 Trying to hide behind a public persona – like identity, that interface between inner and outer worlds – one can still be present, watching, poised to act, attuned to self and others. In a tough situation (we say), she showed up, he rose to the occasion: being (t)here, being present, made all the difference. There are those meanings of presence that denote a person or thing not seen but felt.37 In fiction and film characters become aware of a (sometimes strange) presence in the room, possibly a poltergeist or spirit or specter, a revenant: a person who has returned, perhaps from the dead or, conceivably, from the future.38 The singularity and self-­expressivity of certain poems allows one who – the subject of the poem and/or the poet – is absent to become present again through their words and actions, certainly when the poem is read aloud but when read silently too.39 I’m speaking with you now – even though you’re not here – so this moment, this place, this person can be felt again, presented through the prism of these words, printed in this book, composed by someone who is no medium but a would-­be teacher who attempts to keeps himself present through academic study. In this sense study can be a spiritual practice, as one becomes present to oneself through the prism of the ideas of others.40 Against presentism study can affirm reality as temporal, for humanity ­historical, history a narrative disclosed to and created by us to make meaning of time. Not only meaning and time disappear into the illusion of all-­that-­is-­is-­ now, so does presence, as place becomes space (nowhere in particular), a person becomes a statistic, a datum, profile, username, password (computer generated). By ­reactivating the past – one’s own but also others41 – one can create cleavage42 in this pseudo present, degrees of separation from what subsumes us in the deafening din of the moment. In that space of non-­coincidence with what is, one’s subjective presence – one’s bearing, comportment, carriage, conduct, one’s character – changes, as one’s presence alters one’s demeanor, possessed by a present now infused by the past, permitting what is now to become passage to the future. Gumbrecht starts with two sweeping claims. His first is that the history of the West represents a “progressive abandonment” of presence; second, he suggests that “communication technologies” erode and stimulate a “desire” for presence.43 Early on Gumbrecht bifurcates “meaning” and “presence,” as if the two were not or could not be interwoven; he underlines our “oscillation” between presence and meaning “effects,” the former of which is “exclusively” associated with the “senses.”44 I don’t see why, as the mind as well as the heart can become the medium through what the senses report becomes intelligible. Refraction45 does require apprehension, itself a matter of the senses but also of attunement,

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followed by interpretation, but at the start Gumbrecht splits off presence from “interpretation.”46 But then he demurs, insisting that challenging the hegemony of interpretation does not he mean he is actually against interpretation,47 a practice he sometimes seems to associate with “constructivism.”48 Gumbrecht prefers to think that what he imagines is those “more sober” practices of “description” he associates with the “sciences.”49 For George Grant,50 if the ethical ideals West have gone missing – are no longer present – the culprits are likely science and its handmaiden, technology, as the first reduces our significance to species (if now self-­immolating), the second to technicians (following what software specifies), and it is the machines that interface – who are present to – each other, not us, only appendages it sometimes seems, present secondarily, virtually.51 Again Gumbrecht hedges his bets, allowing the possibility of a “productive tension” 52 between the two, as presence can require interpretation, which he explains as excavating (exegetically) the “material surface” to see what’s underneath it.53 In this presumably premodern understanding, the human subject discerns divine revelation; in modernity54 we tell ourselves we constructed it, tempting us to “hide” or “manipulate” what we know.55 It is in this shift from medieval to modern understanding where Gumbrecht locates the genesis of “ideology.”56 The “core ritual” of medieval culture, Gumbrecht tells us, was the Eucharist, not only a “commemoration” of the Last Supper but also a ritual through which the ancient event could be made “present again,” although Gumbrecht deems the term “present” – by the rise of Protestantism – as referring to no “temporal” transubstantiation but only a spatial one, e.g. Christ incarnate in bread and wine.57 Surely the two are intertwined, as what is being experienced – for Christians at least – is an actual reactivation of the past, returning from the present to the past through the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. In so doing He lives inside us. Postmodernity58 begins in the genocidal twentieth century, but Gumbrecht locates modernity’s immolation as underway earlier, even in the middle of the eighteenth century,59 leading in our time to a “crisis” of “representation,”60 against which Gumbrecht cites efforts to restore presence to meaning, among them the poets of the symbolist school (including Verlaine and Rimbaud in the nineteenth century), efforts to insert “meanings” inside the “sound structures” of their “texts,” an effort Richard Wagner made as well, inserting “meaning” into “orchestral music.”61 During the final decades of the nineteenth century, philosophers, scientists, and writers undertook their own experiments dedicated to “reconnecting experience” with “perception,”62 consummated (Gumbrecht suggests) in Heidegger’s replacement of the subject/object split with the concept of “being-­in-­the-­world.” 63 In the shadow of Heidegger Gumbrecht asserts that Being is not “conceptual,” no substitute for “truth” but materialized by what “happens,” a “double movement” of “unconcealing” and “hiding,”64 what might be summarized as “revelation.” Still discussing Heidegger, Gumbrecht decodes the occurrence of

18  Presence

truth in art as the materialization of Being, subsuming art into the category of “things,”65 nothing I would dispute but a fact I would modify by adding it is hardly confined to “things,” that the occurrence of truth in art (or elsewhere) exceeds what is material; it is immanent. In iconographic art, it is transcendent.66 But Gumbrecht insists Being has the “character” of a “thing,” as having “substance” and thereby “occupying space.”67 Then Gumbrecht locates “things” outside humanity, outside culture.68 Really? How can there be “things” outside “culture,” as our very apprehension of a “thing” occurs through apparatus of perception, itself in part a product of culture. To put the matter differently: A thing is what we mortals can see and touch,69 but it is only a refracted remnant of a (possible) Totality that exceeds our capacity to comprehend, as by definition Totality is what in which we are embedded. Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, Gumbrecht reminds, is not synonymous with subject or subjectivity, at least insofar as these concepts are embedded in a subject/object epistemological paradigm.70 He repeats Heidegger’s reinsertion of human being-­in-­the-­world but insists that our existence is “always already” in “spatial” and “functional” relation to the world.71 Yes, but not only spatial and functional: Heidegger’s affinity for mysticism has been definitively documented by Sonya Sikka.72 Gumbrecht then turns to Heidegger’s characterization of Dasein’s capacity for “unconcealment” as “composure,” e.g. that capacity to allow things to “be,” a state of being “outside” – or is it in-­between – “activity” and “passivity.”73 Gumbrecht seems certain that Dasein sidesteps manipulation, transformation, or interpretation of the world,74 but it’s not obvious to me why these must morph into absolute or eternal prohibitions just because art (for Heidegger) is a “privileged site” of truth, that is, for the “unconcealment” and the “withdrawal” of Being.75 Again: whatever is “unconcealed” becomes apprehended – and whatever is withdrawn – is noticed through the prism of perception, the all-­too-­human spheres of biology and culture. To become intelligible, what is unconcealed and withdrawn must be interpreted. Gumbrecht associates Being with presence: both, he says, imply “substance,” “space,” and “movement.”76 Okay, but surely no conception of presence or Being can be confined to the material or even the animate, if only because we are not standing outside but are instead very much embedded within Being, with what is “unconcealed” (and withdrawn), in movement, surely a temporal as well as spatial concept. Even that preposition “within” implies interpretation, as humanity’s emplacement inside the Totality ensures our dependence upon interpretation of those refracted images we “see” through our eyes – and our mind’s eye. Presence is amplified and intensified by Being’s “unconcealment” within us – I concur that “composure” can be one prerequisite to perception of the extra-­material or the supernatural77 – but modernity’s materialism and instrumentalism can quickly convert that possibility into a developmental demand. Non-­coincidence with modernity does require composure – George Grant emphasized receptivity, humility, piety78 – but a praxis of presence is no promise of it. Presence – being here, now79

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(that ever-­shifting and porous demarcation between the past and the future) – occurs according to the singularity of one’s lived experience, prompted by psychic, social, political premonitions, being called – and repelled – by the presence of others: their material presence (as bodies, suffering, in hunger, in danger, in desire) as well as their extra-­material presence, what Gumbrecht reduces to “mind.”80 He bifurcates experience into mind and body, the former linked with interpretation and subjectivity, the latter with materiality even cosmology.81 It seems obvious the two are reciprocally related, if in (to repeat) refracted fashion. Subjective presence is the person’s “being (t)here” in one’s singularity and attunement, however (mis) informed82 by Being. The same bifurcating move between mind and Mind (or Being or Totality) Gumbrecht makes concerning “knowledge” which, in a “meaning culture,” is “produced” in acts of “world-­interpretation,” in contrast to a “presence culture,” wherein “knowledge” is “revealed.”83 Knowledge is revealed alright, but over time84 and refracted through the prism of human perception, requiring reason – interpretation – to try to make sense of it. To emphasize his point, Gumbrecht goes so far as to assert – again invoking Heideggerian terminology – that “events” of “self-­unconcealment” never come from the “subject,” adding that once they happen, the “effects” of revelation and unconcealment cannot be “undone.”85 Oh yes they can: education is exactly such undoing.86 Consider God’s appearance in Christ, an “event” that was – is – “undone” by the Church. Transcendence was turned into organization and (too often) a vicious and corrupt one at that. Such facts appear to elude Gumbrecht, who tells us that knowledge “can be substance that appears,” requiring no “interpretation” for us to know what it means.”87 Tell that to two centuries of theologians. In a presence culture, Gumbrecht continues, humanity inscribes itself in its “surrounding cosmology” whereas in a meaning culture we install “transformation” of the world as our “main vocation,”88 a distinction George Grant also makes, although Grant sees the latter as the secularization of the former, thus interrelated not utterly distinct.89 Pasolini comes to mind when Gumbrecht writes that “action” in a meaning culture was “magic” in a presence culture, e.g. making things appear and disappear,90 a conjuring trick Pasolini achieves through the “magic” of cinema. Whereas “parliamentary discussions” are for Gumbrecht a core ritual for meaning cultures, the “Eucharist” remains a “prototypical” practice of presence cultures.91 For present purposes substitute curriculum-­as-­ complicated-­conversation for parliamentary discussion, but (to my mind) both resonate with the concept (although not the practice) of the Eucharist as both reactivate the power of the past92 in efforts to work through the present. Pondering the future of the humanities if they become “based” on a “new epistemology” (and I thought he was reactivating an ancient one), Gumbrecht begins his answer by invoking aesthetics, history, and pedagogy.93 History seems paramount, especially when understood as “presentification” of the past, a program that is for Gumbrecht also aesthetic.94 In his sequencing teaching comes

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third, perhaps because he is “convinced” that neither aesthetics nor history experience recommend individual or collective “action.”95 That conviction detaches teaching from politics and/or ethics; stripped of these teaching can become only technical; Gumbrecht asserts that the educator’s “preeminent” obligation is confronting our students with “intellectual complexity,” meaning that we must point to “occasional condensations” of such complexity.96 Such a pedagogical emphasis positions the concrete (“occasional condensations”) in service to the abstract (“intellectual complexity”), draining its existential intensity and, with it, its material density, something I thought Gumbrecht prized. I affirm the primacy of the particular – the irreplaceable individual, the unanticipated event – that, by its very singularity, recasts the complexity in which it first appears, decontextualizing itself as it recontextualizes what preceded it and what will follow. Epiphany, presentification, and deixis97 – paralleling aesthetics, history, and pedagogy – are the concepts by which Gumbrecht structures “future forms” of “practice” in the arts and humanities, suggesting that their “convergence” will enable educators to emphasize presence in aesthetic experience, including in the study of History,98 with the effect of freeing us from any “obligation” of “providing ethical orientation.”99 While I prefer no preacher as my teacher, I do want “ethical orientation” to be ever-­present, however implicit even subliminal. Each of the great public pedagogues I have studied – Jane Addams, Frantz Fanon, George Grant, Alain Locke, Robert Musil, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ida B. Wells – each personified and enacted “ethical orientations.” While I agree that there is nothing necessarily “edifying” in moments of “intensity,”100 there could be. We do agree that there is no dependable way of producing them or extending their duration when they occur.101 Gumbrecht prefers to speak of “intensity” rather than “experience” as he considers that term as harboring some sense of interpretation or meaning making,102 although surely “intensity” or “epiphany” are experiences. Never mind that his book makes meaning of “presence.” While presence cannot be pedagogically produced, it can be taught: currere. Gumbrecht suggests that we encourage our students to remain “open” and “concentrated.”103 For a man who has so assiduously avoided making promises of pedagogically producing presence this advice – with its implicit logic of “if/then” – suggests he might not-­so-­secretly think otherwise. Finally, Gumbrecht declares that presence and meaning “always appear together,” if “always” in “tension,”104 to which I add – after Aoki105 – that tension can be generative. Gumbrecht acknowledges that thinks a “framework” is needed in order to experience “productive tension,” rather than simply suspending presence, as he thinks we tend to do in “our so very Cartesian everyday lives.”106 In fact, Gumbrecht affirms that there is a “dimension” of experience that requires “interpretation” in order to be “redeemed,” alluding here to poetry that that “demands our voice.”107 Voice singularizes presence as subjective – subjective but also social in music, which Gumbrecht thinks forefronts presence.108

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Juxtaposing “presence” and “meaning,” Gumbrecht emphasizes the “effects” of each, one being “epiphany,” by which he is not referring to “feeling” that is “ephemeral.”109 Then he quotes Heidegger: “Art then is the becoming and happening of truth.”110 Neither would seem to have any obvious political import, as Gumbrecht again insists that there is nothing necessarily “edifying” in art, a claim he contradicts when he then valorizes “getting lost,” engendering “oscillation” between the two.111 Such oscillation can end in “serenity” he thinks, defined as “being in sync with the things of the world,” suggesting that serenity may be what self-­unconcealment is “all about,”112 a teleological interpretation that also positions Gumbrecht as somehow outside the phenomenal world. From teleology to engineering, Gumbrecht promises that apprehending the “preconceptual thingness” of things will “reactivate” a sharpened sense of the “spatial dimension” of “existence.”113 So much for there being nothing edifying about art. Gumbrecht acknowledges that the “present” is expanding as time slows down.114 He thinks this represents a “desire” for “presentification,”115 but I would say such desire has nothing to do with it. Truth is we’re submerged in a pseudo present, one without end, emptied of the past and in denial about the future. (What we desire is satiation, stuffed with sensation like a hog for market.) Lasch attributed presentism to narcissism (and vice versa), Pasolini attributed both to what he termed the new fascism, e.g. compelled consumption, including of one’s own and others’ bodies, compulsory hedonism, yes progressive desublimation and endless distraction too. Like other critics of technology, I add to this list the screen – specifically our fusion with it – that sucks the time out of us as we stay still and sometimes satiated, virtually, immersed, in Gumbrecht’s phrasing, in a “sphere” of “simultaneity.”116 Precisely because the past has dissolved into a never-­ending temporally vacuous now117 of all-­consuming consumption the reactivation of the past – if only to restart historical time again – becomes ethically, pedagogically obligatory. The “presentifying” of the past for Gumbrecht contrasts with “learning from” the past,118 plausible if his sense of “presentifying” means making the past another object of (in this case, conceptual) consumption in the pseudo-­present. That he seems to do, as Gumbrecht emphasizes (yet again) “space,” as he imagines being in the past as spatial rather than temporal, even “touching objects” associated with the past.119 This “spatialization” he suspects represents a “trend” that promises to recast “historiography,” as “texts” and “concepts” are no longer the most appropriate medium – relying on interpretation and meaning as they do – for the “business” of “making” the past “present.”120 Rather than learning from the past, its presence provokes us to wonder about our physical – apparently not intellectual –relationship with past “objects.”121 How questions of relationship can exclude matters of meaning escapes me, unless, of course, these questions are entirely entrapped with the self-­enclosure narcissism designates. Rather than calculating how we might benefit from such an object, Gumbrecht suggests we might “simply enjoy” touching it.122 Why enjoyment is not a calculation of

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benefit I don’t know. What I do know is that narcissism and presentism intersect when we reduce the past to things and the tactile pleasure that might afford us. Gumbrecht wonders how “historical presentification” and “aesthetic epiphanies” will alter pedagogy, especially in the humanities and arts.123 He locates his conception of pedagogy in a tradition he associates with Wilhelm von Humboldt, one characterized by the “free interplay” between teachers and students as they attend to “unresolved problems,” and only secondarily dedicated to “knowledge.”124 Really? Is knowledge of global warming or COVID-­19 of secondary importance? Certainly “free interplay” focused on “unresolved problems” is laudatory but does it remain so when it becomes formulaic? Shall we allow “free interplay” between pedagogues and students studying the Holocaust? His endorsement of “real classroom presence”125 one can hardly oppose, but by that he means something spatial, asking “how could anybody be strictly against teaching face-­to-­face?”126 Again Gumbrecht endorses “complexity,”127 unmindful (it would seem) of complexity theory and its already elaborated implications for curriculum and pedagogy.128 If “encounters” with complexity are uninterpreted, they can become “events,” indeed “decisive” for student–teacher “interaction.”129 Surely students will get onto his game, giving him his “events” in order to placate him. To be only unpredictable is to become predictable. There’s no breakthrough in pedagogical theory when he advises us to remain “alert,”130 but no harm either. However, his insistence on being “absolutely open” to “others”131 seems a recipe for disaster. Is it ethically obligatory to remain “absolutely open” to a Nazi or homophobe or racist? But then Gumbrecht’s idea of pedagogy – that it is a matter of “intellectual good taste” to find “topics” impervious to “quick” or “easy solutions” – communicates his conformism, even when he demurs from defining the educator as a “catalyst” of “intellectual events.”132 Would not valorizing “good taste” constitute a catalyst? Gumbrecht asserts that the teaching profession has “always been about real presence,”133 a statement you might think I would endorse but hesitate to do so, as it risks reinstalling instrumental rationality.134 Gumbrecht considers both profession and presence to be under threat; to secure their “future” requires “commitment.”135 To be committed to presence – to be here, now – means (to my mind) being self-­reflexively inside yet also apart from a temporally alive moment, simultaneously a historical and biographic moment,136 a double consciousness here not associated with racism or colonialism, but with subjective coherence and psychic survival.137 To protect against submergence in the stream of consciousness one must come up for air, regularly, remembering oneself as separate and singular as well as connected and alike. I share Gumbrecht’s sense of “how hopeless” it is for the humanities – education too, I’d add –to rationalize their significance by claiming some “social function” or “political yield.”138 But then “presence” is no elixir either. While our extinction may be inevitable – unless George Grant was right about there being, au fond, a human nature that is not endlessly alterable, that is to say, that

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our human nature, even with its built-­in capacity for inhumanity, can become (to invoke a thoroughly discredited concept) “civilized”139 – yes, by becoming educated –however vigilant humanity must always remain, knowing what resides within: our continuing capacity for being inhuman. While not risking the wrath of the Left (by reaffirming “civilization”), Gumbrecht (in no openly Arnoldian way) references “culture” (both “at large” and as “literature”), if to reiterate his affirmation of presence as “not only … “meaning”140 as he finally admits that “presence” without “meaning” is imperfect.”141 Indeed: “[I] could not be ‘there’ in the full sense of my existence, if meaning were completely out of the question.”142 I’d go farther: without meaning I am not here, even if taking up space. To be human is to make meaning, to be meaningful. To live a life without meaning is to live a life of quiet desperation.143 In the “intense quietness” of “presence,” Gumbrecht imagines “redemption,” a “state” not of but after ecstasy as then (with quietude, composure?) can come “presence-­in-­the-­world.”144 He advises focusing on “strong individual feelings,” like “joy” or “sadness,” then “letting them push the distance between us (the subject) and the world (the object) … into an unmediated state of being-­in-­the-­ world.”145 Really? Why must one “push” to experience an epiphany? I thought truth “happened.” And why is “unmediated” what we’re after? How could one recognize “unmediated” unless one mediates? What Gumbrecht seems to seek here is symbiosis, a pre-­individuated state of fusion with the (maternal?) body, something as an adult achievable – on occasion – sexually, including homosexually. What I aspire to is no return to the womb but being-­present-­in-­the-­ world: physically of course but more importantly psychologically, intellectually, emotionally. That includes being-­present-­to-­myself, perhaps the prerequisite to being-­present-­in-­the-­world. Epiphanies are powerful yes, but insight – maybe more mundane – is necessary too. Surely the wrong question is “What do I get out of presence?” Yet Gumbrecht asks it, answering that it “reconnects” us with the “social” – I thought we were eschewing any claims to “social function” or “political yield” – although he (paradoxically) claims such connection frees us from the “permanent obligation” to respond (can we actually avoid responding?) to the “never-­ending ‘historical’ changes imposed upon us,” as well as any “self-­imposed … to ‘surpass’ and transform ourselves.”146 Impotential, Agamben calls it.147 When compulsory, self-­overcoming isn’t what it purports to be; it’s running in place. True one ought not be compelled to “surpass” oneself, but then why wouldn’t one choose to affirm the gifts one has been given, an obligatory process of self-­ discovery and subjective reconstruction perquisite to presence? Why wouldn’t the question be: What have you done with your life? Not how can you profit from presence? Surely Gumbrecht is right when he writes “we run the risk of no longer even missing what we have lost.”148 He attributes the loss to “floating images” on screens that can function as a “barrier” separating us from the “world,” but, he adds, “those same screens” may provoke “desire” for we’ve

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lost.149 And it’s not only our relation to the world that is lost, he suggests, it’s our relation to time, as we are unable to “pause for more than moments of presence.”150 Oddly he appears to reduce presence to enjoyment,151 surely one essential experience of being alive, but hardly the only point of being here, as if being present provided insulation from the abrasiveness of embodied experience.152 Au contraire: isn’t that one reason we flee, to protect ourselves from abrasion, from being hurt, as if looking the other way or denying what we want and must do would ensure safety? Insulating oneself from hurt insulates one from joy, too. Positioning Gumbrecht’s brilliant book as only a foil was finally overstatement, as he comes round, realizing that presence and interpretation are not either/or but also – as Aoki always reminded – “both this and that, and more.”153 I share Gumbrecht’s skepticism concerning rationalizing our – he references the humanities; I add education – presence by our “social function” or “political yield.” Of course both the humanities and education have both, but to install either as our raison d’être ensures the evisceration of both. Gumbrecht appears to fall victim to instrumental rationality when he asks how we can profit from presence, as if selling something or showing that we’re here is an investment that will pay off. Being here can be excruciating as well as exquisite (and all points in-­between); it is, I suggest, obligatory, the risk one is yes duty-­bound to take (over and over again) to honor the gift – the riddle – of one’s life. There is no reward for doing so, no pay off or take-­away: in fact one may rue the day one was born, even throw away the gift one has been given, as suicide is always on the table.154 But being alive can be its own reward. Even when one lives in apparently impossible circumstances – psychological, political, economic – one can experience epiphanies. One can resolve to remain. Not as a bet on the future but a determination to see it through.155 What is involved in such a decision? The decision to remain – become – subjectively present is no instrumental calculation. Rationality is required but it is insufficient. Clarifying here is Eilenberger’s discussion of Heidegger’s concept of the LEAP – derived from Kierkegaard – that implies no “purely logical, argumentative, or even only rationally motivated choice” but instead a “decision … that demands something more and something different.”156 That “something” is not “based primarily not on reasons, but on will and courage, and above all on concrete personal experience, comparable to that of a religious transformation: a vocation.”157 Comparable but not the same, as Heidegger had renounced religion,158 but for “Benjamin, every decision worthy of the name refers to the transcendent sphere of the Beyond, because ‘choice is natural and can even belong to the elements; decision is transcendent.’ There is in decisions always more at stake than we want and are capable of.”159 If that is the case, the curriculum question – what knowledge is of most worth? – takes on spiritual as well as academic significance. This we see in Chapter 3.

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Notes 1 Until time travel is possible – I’m not suggesting it ever will be – regression will be imperfect, especially when unwanted memories are in play, or when one was not present for the event one wants to re-­experience. In both categories the imagination is both friend and foe, enabling one to recreate a setting where one had not be present but maybe masking what happened as well. For past events at which one was not present and for those where one was physically there, facts matter more than imagination. 2 “Memory,” Stepanova (2018, 86) knows, “brings the past and present into confrontation in the search for justice. This passion for justice, like the obsessive scratching of a rash, tears any system from the inside, forcing us to seek and demand retribution, especially on behalf of the dead – for who will defend them, if not us?” My motive is more reconciliation than retribution, more self defense than the defense of the dead, although these are interrelated. 3 Moeller and D’Ambrosio 2021, 100. Walter Benjamin’s conception of memory – Eingedenken – is, Rebecca Comay points out, “no longer strictly inward and no longer strictly thought. It announces, rather, a mindfulness or vigilance which refuses to take in (or be taken in by) a tradition authorizing itself as the continuity of an essential legacy, task or mission to be transmitted, developed for enacted…. Eingedenken marks the impasse or ‘standstill’ of thought as such: the ‘flow’ of inference is interrupted…. In ‘blasting open’ the continuum, Eingedenken inaugurates repetition as the return of that which strictly speaking never happened …. Such repletion arrests the apparent continuity of inherited power relations by remembering precisely what official historiography had to repress” (quoted in McGlazer 2020, 84). Singularizing memory – as Stepanova does – starts the working-­through of the repression that not only “official historiography” must suffer. 4 Ibid. Italics added. The Moeller-­D’Ambrosio analysis of identity I discuss in Chapter 14. 5 For First Peoples, what others have left – continue to leave – is devastation. Discussing Native fiction and Vizenor’s conception of survivance, Helstern (2008, 164) formulates a notion of “Deep Memory,” which designates the “development of profound emotional/psychological connection with the transpersonal traumas of Native history in order to render them a source of personal strength.” Helstern distinguishes “Deep Memory” from “Perfect Memory” – this latter term recalling Adorno’s “exact imagination,” e.g. memory that is “configurational, or the compact of elements and episodes, rather than creative,” the “details” and “arrangements” of which are “endorsed by imagination, the actual configuration of material and experience that reveals the inseparable and yet tricky connection of objective and subjective reality” (quoted in 2008, 166). I suggest the former rests upon the later. 6 “Praxis,” Cazdyn (2012, 31) explains, “denotes the ceaseless movement between thinking, understanding, experimenting, acting, and changing.” 7 Subjective synthesis may feel settled even static but that’s temporary: truth is it’s lava-­like. 8 Study his representative works in Donna Trueit’s superb collection (2012). A close colleague and dear friend, Doll died in 2017. Bill is brought to life in Hongyu Wang’s scintillating study, from which I quote here. Because Hongyu’s book was published while Bill was still alive, she uses the present tense, a tense I leave intact. 9 Wang 2016, 46. Although Wang titles her chapter “Pedagogy of Presence,” she (ibid.) also discusses the “dynamics between absence (to allow students to work out problems on their own) and presence (to help students to work through difficulties).” 10 2016, 49. 11 2016, 50. 12 2016, 51. Wang (2016, 51) emphasizes that “Doll’s sense of responsibility is tied

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to his sense of presence. One must be there to meet the other and respond to the other.” 13 Ibid. 14 2016, 65. 15 Several persons not of our time – Jane Addams, Frantz Fanon, George Grant, Alain Locke, Robert Musil, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ida B. Wells – also testify to the power of presence, as I have depicted in essays on each. For my studies of Addams, Fanon, Musil, and Wells, see Pinar (2015); for Locke, see Pinar (2019a); for Grant, see Pinar (2019b); for Pasolini, see Pinar (2009) as well as Chapters 6 and 13 in this book. 16 See Kaag (2016, 2018, 2020). 17 Quoted in Rascaroli 2014 (2009), 110. Truffaut’s point is also evident in the artistic accomplishment of Pier Paolo Pasolini: see Chapters 6 and 13. 18 Like the Hocking Library he explores, Kaag’s accounts are “spacious but intensely intimate” (Kaag 2016, 32). 19 “The meaning of ‘crisis’ is no longer based on the word’s Greek etymology,” Cazdyn (2012, 46–47) appreciates, “in which krisis refers to an inescapable decision, a turning, that must be made immediately. But now crisis is extended, rolled out flat all the way to the indefinite ‘long term.’ And there is the meantime, now permanent, thus permitting the present to fully colonize the future.” 20 An idea from an earlier era, but one Chee (2018, 274–275) makes timeless: “To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it.” For Glancy (2008, 272) “writing is an act of survivance,” a term she defines as “formulating survival on one’s own terms,” the “weapon we bear as we go into the new world we did not want” (2008, 278). 21 “I have come to see that it is more important to be a reader than a writer,” Zambreno (2021, 34) reports, “even though society places more status on writing, on producing consumable objects, than on reading, which is an ephemeral, solitary activity.” There is, Zambreno continues, “humility” in “being a reader … more of a moral project to be a reader” (ibid.). She quotes Fernando Pessoa: “Seeing is so superior to thinking, and reading is superior to writing! I may be deceived by what I see but at least I never think it’s mine. What I read may depress me, but at least I’m not troubled by the thought I wrote it.” I see their point; I see Chee’s too. Both are moral projects, or can be: that depends on what’s read and what’s written. What knowledge is of most worth? 22 John Kaag (2016, 69) reminds us that Hendry David Thoreau thought “there was something sacred in walking,” certainly the case for me. On another occasion, Kaag (2018, 27) quotes Jean-­Jacques Rousseau: “I never do anything but when walking, the countryside is my study.” and two pages later, Nietzsche: “All truly great thoughts, are conceived while walking.” Quoting Emerson, Kaag (2018, 29) makes clear that walking also has its metaphoric significance: “Each soul, walking in its own path, walks firmly, and to the astonishment of all other souls, who see not its path.” As Kaag (ibid.) knows, it can be “difficult to keep one’s footing.” 23 See Kumar (2013); Kumar (2022). 24 An apparently odd term here but not inappropriate: Gumbrecht titles his study – to which I attend momentarily –Production of Presence. 25 “Attunement is meditative, relational, and holistic,” Wang (2021, 183) knows. “Curriculum attunement,” she continues, “also means that the teacher is attuned not only to the students’ world but also to the spirit of the subject matter as well as to the context of the classroom in order to call students’ potential into existence” (2021, 185). Such teaching, Wang adds, is “not only about teacher/student relationships, but also about students’ relationships among themselves and the degree to which the pedagogical conditions are set up for them to mutually enrich each other” (2021, 183). 26 Gumbrecht (2004, 100); quoted in Grumet (2017, 82).

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27 Grumet (2017, 82). 28 Ibid. that work – to “experience the sublime in the mundane” in Kaag’s (2016, 70) fine phrasing – I will suggest (contra Gumbrecht) requires reconstruction (including interpretation), dialogue within oneself but also with others. “It’s a truism,” Stepanova (2018, 173) writes, “that the ‘dough’ of comprehension only rises to its shape in the moment of telling, and in this telling it then sags and subsides.” Before or even without comprehension, the past “still suffuses our daily lives with its soft glimmer” (2018, 207). 29 As Jales Coutinho (2022) eloquently reminds, becoming subjectively present is embedded in struggles for justice. 30 Gumbrecht (2004, xiii). 31 For me “place” denotes a cultural, historical, subjectively meaningful even spiritual location while “space” implies a “blank slate,” existentially extant but not necessarily meaningful. 32 Memory” can be like a “wake for a disappearing world,” Stepanova (2018, 229) suggests. “Memory, in fact, is spirit,” Gardini (2019, 187) adumbrates. 33 “My relatives,” Stepanova (2018, 325) tells us, “were there (a person is always there, in close proximity to the death of others and one’s own death), and it turns out I didn’t need to hear any of this from them. The knowledge has lived within me.” 34 Etymologically, the term “presence” derives from the Latin praesentia “being at hand.” 35 Chee (2018, 72) knows: “Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask.” 36 Fanon (1967). 37 “Belief in only the visible, in a single visible identity,” Madsen (2008, 75) writes, “is a terminal creed promoted by the culture of dominance.” In addition to this Indigenous critique, there is as well a Western, specifically European, critique of ocularcentrism; see Brennan and Jay (1996); Jay (1993); Levin (1993). 38 Think of Caitriona Balfe’s character Claire Randall in Outlander (2008). 39 “Poetry,” Ghosh (2019, 18) suggests, “speaks to a sense of listening that is irreducible to hearing as a mere sense faculty. The experience of mood as a kind of tonality is not a question of translating emotions. It is not about something: it merely is, the presence of presence.” 40 In Chapter 3, I show how study occurs within relationship. 41 “Now to make the dead speak,” Stepanova 2018, 77) suggests, “we have to give them space in our bodies and minds, carry them inside us like the unborn.” 42 Defined as the act of cleaving or splitting: the state of being cleft. https://www. google.com/search?client=firefox-­b-­1-­d&q=define%3A+cleavage accessed September 29, 2020. 43 Gumbrecht 2004, xv. 44 Gumbrecht 2004, xv. 45 Reality itself is refracted through the prism of perception: Pinar (2019b, 226). Refraction represents the “interface” between “meaning” and “materiality,” as Gumbrecht (2004, 12) nicely phrases it. So does “identity,” as I suggest in Chapter 14. 46 2004, 2. 47 2004, 1–2. He is here invoking Sontag (1966). 48 Making stuff up is more properly the sphere of the imagination, not interpretation. I tend to share his skepticism toward constructivism and the “vertigo” (2004, 6) that can accompany it. That he misunderstands interpretation is clear when he associates the “culture” of “interpretation” with “intellectual relativism” (2004, 7). Narcissism would have been the better target here, as it deprives the human subject of knowledge outside itself, depriving it of subjective presence as well. 49 2004, 7. 50 Pinar (2019b, 223).

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51 Francis (2021, September 23, 60) reminds that “virtual” means “almost,” and the word was “hijacked as a descriptor of the digital world because it was once taken for granted that the creations of Silicon Valley aren’t quite real. Many people now are less sure of the distinction between virtual and actual.” 52 2004, 19. 53 2004, 25. 54 Construction – constructivism? – replaces revelation, diverting our attention from the meaning of what we experience to its utility, the present only an opportunity to exploit, not a riddle to resolve. “Modernity,” North (2018, 2) confirms, “values the present over the past,” adding: “Thus it is a commonplace that modern writers and thinkers, and perhaps modern people in general, have a concern for the immediate, for the now, that is different in kind from the version of concern that may have prevailed in earlier times.” 55 Gumbrecht (2004, 27). 56 2004, 27. 57 2004, 28. The Eucharist as a meaningful event (in contrast to a “presence-­effect”) Gumbrecht attributes to (post-­ medieval) Protestantism (2004, 29) and to John Calvin specifically (2004, 30), as temporal distance became “unbridgeable” given modernity’s conception of historical time as comprised of utterly distinct moments. Politics replaced the Eucharist as the “emblematic ritual” of modernity (2004, 35). Science and politics became the arenas wherein heaven could be brought to earth. 58 Referencing David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, North (2018, 2) reports the idea that “the postmodern lies at the end of a long process of acceleration and compression that has continued until the present is all that remains.” It is a present shrunken, “empty and anonymous” (Ibid.) 59 2004, 35. 60 2004, 37. 61 2004, 41. I am reminded of Gumbrecht’s (2013, 313) depiction of Friedrich Kittler’s texts as being compelling due to their “aesthetic properties,” not their use of “scientific” methods or “argument.” 62 2004, 41. 63 2004, 46. “Being and Time is based on an insight that is specific to its times,” Han (2017, 64) insists, “that the loss of historical meaningfulness leads to the decay of time into an accelerating sequence of isolated events, that because of a lack of gravitation or an anchoring in meaning time rushes off without hold or aim. Heidegger’s strategy regarding time consists in a re-­anchoring of time; in giving it significance, a new hold; enframing it again within a historical line, so that it does not disperse into a meaningless, accelerating succession of events. Against the threatened end of history, Heidegger emphatically invokes history itself.” That’s my game too, affirming “becoming historical,” a phrase I borrowed from Toews (2008). 64 2004, 67. Given that capital “b” Being references Totality, it seems to me a secular version of the term “God.” Either escapes our capacity to comprehend it; what we can glimpse of it – what is revealed or “unconcealed” – occurs through our perceptive apparatus – mind, body, senses – and thus is inevitably singular, refracted, reduced, and immeasurably so. That kernel is what we have, what we have to work with: it will have to do – until we alter our perceptive apparatus. 65 2004, 68. 66 So can the curriculum be: Pinar (2019b, 288). 67 2004, 68. 68 2004, 70. Perhaps, like Fredrich Kittler, Gumbrecht imagines himself a “seismographer recording Being as it revealed itself ” (2013, 325). 69 What I’ve suggested (Pinar 1975) Gumbrecht also allows, associating apprehension not with consciousness (as I did) but with “composure” (not an altogether different concept) and the historical (and, I would add, biographical) moment (2004, 70).

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Regarding the latter, Gumbrecht reminds us that Heidegger imagined that ancient Greeks were more likely to achieve presence than we moderns (2004, 70). So did George Grant: Pinar (2019b, 97). 70 2004, 71. Subjectivity doesn’t “belong” to a paradigm; it is what is distinct from a world of things, the world Gumbrecht if not inhabits wants to valorize. 71 2004, 71. 72 1997. 73 2004, 71. 74 2004, 71. The “presence” of Dasein, Gumbrecht (2013, 325) writes, “belongs to the necessary conditions for the self-­unconcealment of Being, Yet Dasein remains external to the event.” Non-­coincidence I coin it. 75 2004, 71. If art is such a site, surely interpreting reality, transforming materials, even manipulating them, constitutes the artist’s “contribution” to “unconcealment.” 76 2004, 77. 77 George Grant’s D.Phil. thesis on John Oman’s theology concerned this concept: Pinar (2019b, 112, n. 27). 78 Pinar (2019b, 179). 79 North (2018, 34) suggests that “the whole truth” of “now” (“the present” is his term) is that it is “a point of access to something beyond it, something that is also present but in a different sense in that it is timeless.” In this sense, “the present is not just a scientific issue but also a moral and ethical one” (2018, 64). It is simultaneously a subjective one. 80 2004, 80. 81 2004, 80. 82 Misapprehension of Being – inculcated in children by caregivers, even installed genetically – renders right conduct aspirational, as one’s attunement to what informs one is distorted or even blocked. In this sense, perpetrators (and their victims) can be said to be victims of misinterpretation. 83 2004, 80. 84 For Han (2017, 41), “knowledge is made possible by a temporal gathering which enframes the present with past and future. Such extended time characterizes truth as well as knowledge.” 85 2004, 81. 86 Education as subjective and social reconstruction that is: currere. 87 2004, 81. 88 2004, 82. 89 Pinar (2019b, 145). 90 2004, 82. 91 2004, 85. 92 That power is hinted in Gumbrecht’s (2004, 85) explanation of the Eucharist as a practice that “not only maintain[s] but [also] intensif[ies] the already existing real presence of God.” In other words, the power of the past is its intensification of the presence of God in the world, enabling us to be present to participate in the revelation that is the world. 93 2004, 93. 94 2004, 94. I, too, position History as paramount (see Chapter 3), a curricular contradiction of historical amnesia, rendering the present a moment in time. 95 2004, 95. 96 2004, 95. 97 Recall that deixis is the pointing or specifying function of some words (such as definite articles and demonstrative pronouns) whose denotation changes from one discourse to another. 98 2004, 95. 99 2004, 95–96. 100 2004, 98.

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1 01 2004, 99. 102 2004, 100. 103 2004, 103. While discussing East and West, Aoki’s point seems pertinent here: “So understood, the tensioned space of both ‘and/not-­and’ is a space of conjoining and disrupting, indeed, a generative space of possibilities, a space where in tensioned ambiguity newness emerges” (Aoki 2005 [1996], 318). 104 2004, 105. Such tension could be generative, not conflictual, as Gumbrecht (2004, 107) suggests (he uses “productive” rather than “generative”). 105 “And now,” Aoki (2005 [1996], 317) explains, “I am drawn into the fold of a discursive imaginary that can entertain ‘both this and that,’” “neither this nor that” – a space of paradox, ambiguity and ambivalence. 106 2004, 107. While writing more than a decade before Trump, Gumbrecht had witnessed the theft of the 2000 election, and the ascendancy of the infantile George W. Bush, all events impossible if the majority of Americans led “Cartesian” not narcissistic lives. 107 2004, 107. John Ciardi famously emphasized “how” not “what” a poem means, implying a secondary even supplmental role for interpretation. 108 2004, 109. Meaning was not excluded from music, at least not for Gustav Mahler who, McGrath (1974, 121) explains, was well aware “of the difficulty of expressing metaphysical concepts in musical terms, or of expressing verbally the content of his music; it is perhaps because of this realization that he succeeds as well as he does at both.” In a June 1909 letter written to his wife, Mahler registered “reason” (the prism permitting perception to morph into meaning) “as the limited but necessary means for communicating with the phenomenal world” (1975, 124), explaining that “the rational, that is to say, that which can be analyzed by the understanding, is almost always the inessential and actually a veil which disguises the form. But insofar as a soul needs a body – there is nothing that can be said against that – the artist must pick out his means for presentation from the rational world.” 109 2004, 111. 110 2004, 112. While the gerunds in the Heidegger passage assume ephemerality, his sentence does not seem (as Gumbrecht implies) to emphasize that aspect but the fact (potential) of art to act as a revelation of reality. 111 2004, 116. This phrase – and the educational experience it names – reminds me of George Grant’s “epiphany” (specifically his conversion experience) that (in his words): “I am not my own” (quoted in Pinar 2019b, 111, n. 23). In secular and political terms I am also reminded of “self-­shattering” to be deployed in service to Whites’ anti-­racist education: Pinar (2006, 180–183). 112 2004, 117. 113 2004, 118. Is everything in the world a “thing”? If Gumbrecht had used “thereness” rather than “thingness” I could concur – if acknowledging that is what is “there” often exceeds our understanding. 114 2004, 121. Both the past and the future disappear into the narcissistic temporally empty present). 115 2004, 121. 116 2004, 121–122. 117 “The totalization of Here and Now,” Han (2017, 37) knows, “divests the in-­between spaces of any meaning.” 118 2004, 123. 119 2004, 123. This would explain, he adds, the “growing popularity” of the “institution of the museum” and the “historical subdiscipline of archeology” (2004, 123). None of this is new, as Stewart (2020) details. 120 2004, 123. That last phrase is telling. Making the past present is what restarts time as lived. 121 2004, 124.

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122 2004, 125. Touching is hardly “conjuring up the past” (2004, 124) but reducing it to an instrument of self-­pleasuring or distraction, another image on the screen, in this digital era the device of perceptual (de)mediation. 123 2004, 125. Not a good sign that he places the humanities and arts in quotation marks. 124 Quoted in Gumbrecht 2004, 129. 125 2004, 130 126 2004, 130. 127 2004, 130. 128 See Trueit 2012. 129 2004, 130. 130 2004, 131. 131 2004, 131. 132 2004, 131. 133 2004, 132. 134 Not that I’m inalterably or always opposed to instrumental rationality – I keep working to refine mine – but given its pervasiveness in contemporary curriculum theory I feel obligated to complain. If it were nowhere to be found, count on me to endorse it endlessly. 135 Ibid. 136 Discussing Heidegger, Han (2017, 64) explains that “historical traction now originates from the emphasis on the self,” as “it is the self that provides the direction.” The “constancy of the self,” this “essence of authentic historicity,” he adds, “is duration, which does not pass. It does not elapse. The one who exists authentically has time always, so to speak. He or she always has time because time is self, and does not lose time because of not losing him-­or herself” (2017, 64–65). 137 Psychic survival is not only a solitary challenge; it can be cultural and national, as Margaret Atwood (2012 [1972], 8) reminds: “The central symbol for Canada – is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance,” adding: “For French Canada after the English took over it became cultural survival, hanging on as a people, retaining a religion and a language under an alien government. And in English Canada now while the Americans are taking over it is acquiring a similar meaning” (2012 [1972], 9). “Native survivance is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion,” Gerald Vizenor (2008, 1) explains, adding: “Survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry.” 138 2004, 133. 139 “A recivilizing process in interpersonal relationships,” Cohen (2021, 143) appreciates, “has become indispensable.” 140 2004, 134. 141 2004, 137. 142 2004, 137. 143 Thanks Thoreau. 144 2004, 137. 145 2004, 137. 146 2004, 138. 147 Phelan (2015, 29) points out that “the instrumentalization of potentiality is dehumanizing because, unlike other living beings that are capable of their specific potentiality, it is only human beings who re capable of their own impotentiality, that is, the capacity not to be.” Phelan concludes: “By pointing toward impotentiality, Agamben helps us to recognize how the predominance of a teleological notion of human nature arranged in terms of desires, intentions, and purposes conceals the more fragile, contingent, and precious capacity that is also an incapacity: our impotentiality.” 148 2004, 138.

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149 2004, 139. There is also the idea that North (2018, 4) articulates, that “the technological need for speed actually provokes something like the opposite response, an attentive stillness in which the present comes to be fixed in time.” If it’s “fixed,” time has been emptied from it. 150 2004, 141. “[Walter] Pater’s response to the awful flight of time,” North (2018, 33) points out, “is to seize the moment and by sheer concentration make it yield in intensity what it lacks in extent.” Such concentration can yield insight – even epiphany – but risks instrumentalism, casting the present as means to an end. 151 Gumbrecht 2004, 143. “For what, after all, would be the point of politics and potential transformations without a vision of a more enjoyable life?” (Ibid.) 152 I make my case in Chapter 10. 153 Aoki 2005 (1993), 299. 154 Study can speak to that. There are “authors, Kaag (2020, 4) teaches us, who “can help us survive, so to speak, by preserving and passing on what is most important about being human before we pass away,” adding: “I think William James’s philosophy saved my life” (2020, 5). “James wrote for our age” Kaag (2020, 5) continues, “one that eschews tradition and superstition but desperately craves existential meaning; one that is defined by affluence but also depression and acute anxiety; one that valorizes icons who ultimately decide that the life of fame is one that really ought to be cut short prematurely. To such a culture, James gently, persistently urges, ‘Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact’” (Ibid.) Credo ut intelligan. 155 Resolve is required (Pinar 2015, 180), given that “for the first time in human history,” Cohen (2021, 146) “the number of suicides exceeds the number of deaths on the battlefield.” 156 2020, 51. 157 Ibid. 158 2020, 152. 159 2020, 153.

Bibliography Aoki, Ted T. 2005 (1996). Imaginaries of “East and West”: Slippery curricular signifiers in education. In Curriculum in a New Key, edited by William F. Pinar and Rita L. Irwin (313–319). Lawrence Erlbaum. Atwood, Margaret. 2012 (1972). Survival. A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. House of Anansi. Brennan, Teresa and Jay, Martin. Eds. 1996. Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. Routledge. Cazdyn, Eric. 2012. The Already Dead. The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Duke University Press. Chee, Alexander. 2018. How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Cohen, Daniel. 2021. The Inglorious Years. The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society. Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2. The Time-­Image. University of Minnesota Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Weidenfeld. Francis, Gavin. 2021, September 23. Scrolling. The New York Review of Books, LXVIII (14), 60–62. Ghosh, Ranjan. 2019. The Agonizing Agon. In Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives, edited by Ranjan Ghosh (1–12). Columbia University Press.

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Glancy, Diane. 2008. The Naked Spot: A Journey toward Survivance. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (271–283). University of Nebraska Press. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford University Press. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2013. Media History as the Event of Truth: On the Singularity of Fredrich A. Kittler’s Works. In The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, edited by Friedrich A. Kittler (307–329). Stanford University Press. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2017. The Scent of Time. A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering. Trans. by Daniel Steiner. Polity. Helstern, Linda Lizut. 2008. Shifting the Ground: Theories of Survivance in From Sand Creek and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (163–189). University of Nebraska Press. Jales Coutinho, Allan Michel Jales. 2022. Curriculum Work and Social Justice Leadership in a Post-­Reconceptualist Era: Attaining Critical Consciousness and Learning to Become. Routledge. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-­Century French Thought. University of California Press. Kaag, John. 2016. American Philosophy: A Love Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kaag, John. 2018. Hiking with Nietzsche. On Becoming Who You Are. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kaag, John. 2020. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. How William James Can Save Your Life. Princeton University Press. Lasch, Christopher. 1984. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. Norton. Kumar, Ashwani. 2013. Curriculum as Meditative Inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan. Kumar, Ashwani. Ed. 2022. Engaging with Meditative Inquiry in Teaching, Learning, and Research. Routledge. Levin, David Michael Ed. 1993. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. University of California Press. Madsen, Deborah L. 2008. On Subjectivity and Survivance: Rereading Trauma through The Heirs of Columbus and The Crown of Columbus. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (61–87). University of Nebraska Press. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press. Moeller, Hans-­Georg and D’Ambrosio, Paul J. 2021. You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. Columbia University Press. North, Michael. 2018. What Is The Present? Princeton University Press. Phelan, Anne. 2015. Curriculum Theorizing and Teacher Education: Complicating Conjunctions. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2006. Race, Religion, and a Curriculum of Reparation. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2009. The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education. Passionate Lives in Public Service. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2015. Educational Experience as Lived. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019a. What Is Curriculum Theory? Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019b. Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology. University of Ottawa Press. Rascaroli, Laura. 2014 (2009). The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. Wallflower Press.

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Sikka, Sonya. 1997. Forms of Transcendence. Heidegger and Medieval Mystical Theology. State University of New York Press. Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation. Octagon Books. Stepanova, Maria. 2018. In Memory of Memory. New Directions. Stewart, Susan. 2020. The Ruins Lesson. Meaning and Material in Western Culture. University of Chicago Press. Toews, John. 2008. Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-­Century Berlin. Cambridge University Press. Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Harvard University Press. Trueit, Donna. Ed. 2012. Pragmatism, Postmodernism, Complexity Theory: The Fascinating Imaginative Realm of William E. Doll, Jr. Routledge. Vizenor, Gerald. 2008. Aesthetics of Survivance. Literary Theory and Practice. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (1–23). University of Nebraska Press. Wang, Hongyu. 2016. From the Parade Child to the King of Chaos: The Complex Journey of William Doll, Teacher Educator. Peter Lang. Wang, Hongyu. 2021. Contemporary Daoism, Organic Relationality, and Curriculum of Integrative Creativity. Information Age Publishing. Zambreno, Kate. 2021. To Write As If Already Dead. Columbia University Press.

3 STUDY1

What knowledge2 is of most worth?3 The canonical curriculum question4 requires contextualization, as “worth” is an ongoing determination we make as individuals, groups – even as a species – that alters according to ideals and circumstances. In an era structured by technology, that is to say in a time of apparently totalizing instrumentality, the past and the future fade, replaced by preoccupations in the present. If we cannot think beyond our preoccupations our only chance may be to think before them. Roger Simon5 has written eloquently about the moral and educational necessity of remembrance, referencing the Holocaust and other genocides. “[W]itness,” he reminds, is “a form of collective study.”6 With legal, scientific and even spiritual connotations, by witnessing I attest to what I experience.7 I testify to the subjective8 necessity9 of remembering the catastrophes to come if we remain on the course of technologizing everything, including ourselves. The massacre of our fellow creatures10 is well underway. There are the genocides11 – we continue to commit as we kill whatever offends, whatever gets in our way. While there was no golden era behind us, the capacity to murder each other spiritually as well as materially seems an indelible mark of modernity.12 I am hardly original in making this point, as figures as diverse as Virginia Woolf, George Grant, and Pier Paolo Pasolini also noticed that humanity seems have embarked on a course of self-­immolation.13 The mass murders of modernity occur, then, even where there is no military war. The almost universal commodification of humanity as human capacity means, as Tyson Lewis appreciates, that “self-­knowledge and self-­study devolve into forms of self-­management and self-­governance within an overall biotechnological framework concerned with optimization of life-­resources.”14 Human capital theory15 – now intensified through neoliberalism, “ultraliberalism” in DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-3

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Tzvetan Todorov’s term16 – translates “learning” as “the putting to work of potentiality in the name of self-­ actualization and economic viability,”17 the former in service to the latter. Now, Han observes, “subjugation takes places through self-­optimization and self-­realization.”18 Nowhere is this self-­exploitation19 made clearer than in Williamson’s depiction of the “curriculum of the future,” curriculum “concerned with students’ future employment,” predicated on what he terms “the flexible correspondence model that flexible learning = flexible labor.”20 Such conflation of learning with employability does not limit itself to those “skills, knowledge, and attitudes” demanded by the “global marketplace,”21 the future of curriculum itself, Williamson tells us, “is subject to a new form of professional psychological expertise that acts to shape students as creative souls through reshaping curriculum.”22 Spirituality becomes conflated with creativity, both subsumed within economistic conceptions of curriculum in service to the entrepreneurial exploitation of the Earth.23

Study Just as spirituality can be contained within ritual,24 creativity can occur within constraints, but the singularity of each can require (at least a relative) freedom from both ritual and constraint. Study as sacred and singular requires release from objectives and outcomes, at least on occasion. Within the free play25 of imagination, amidst materials one has oneself assembled, one can communicate26 within constraints through composition. Conditions are crucial but so is the state of the creature27 creating. Georg Simmel, Axelrod reminds, “locate[d] the grounds of the highest intellectual achievement [in] the unique unity of the individual.”28 In education for employability, the individual person becomes the casualty, as conformity29 (commanded in compulsory collaboration30) contracts the sphere of subjectivity, now funneled outward to produce profitability. Instrumentalism and calculation can be compensatory responses to vulnerability, to cynicism concerning the public sphere, two precipitations of subjective contraction, what Lasch termed the minimal self,31 now also dissipated by social media not as universal at the time of his analysis as it is today. Focused on study, Lewis noticed a similar result: “Rather than producing a subject within a meaningful world of actions, apparatuses of learning result in a special kind of desubjectification.”32 While employing a different vocabulary, Lewis’s recommendation – “not doing”33 – resonates with mine, at least insofar as both decline uncritical cooperation. My recommendation – “intransigence,”34 a term associated with those who plotted Hitler’s assassination – does, however, involve “doing,” as in, in this instance, dissimulation.35 “Something opens up with this extinction of the possible,” Jason Smith affirms: “We no longer feel compelled to act, that is, to be effective. Our passivity almost seems like a release, a refusal, a de-­activation of a system of possibles that are not ours.”36 I think the three of us have the same

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totalizing regime in mind, namely “technologism,”37 with its links to World War II and, specifically, to Nazi Germany, as Friedrich Kittler has demonstrated.38 Lewis’ “not-­doing” seems less a matter of strategy than of (shall we say) ontology, as, regardless time and place, he argues against the realization of one’s potential.39 “Im-­potentiality,” he explains, “means one has potential but prefers not to actualize it in any specific form.”40 Unlike “intransigence,” animated as it is by ethics, self-­consciously situated in the historical moment, driven by politics, Lewis affirms “impotential” as an “ontological openness to new possibilities.”41 Indeed, “it is im-­potential that enables freedom to flourish,” he suggests.42 That depends on what “new possibilities” one’s “openness” encounters, no? Freedom43 is exercised within the space of subjective non-­coincidence with what is. As such, one can choose to be open and/or closed, often somewhere in-­between. A systematic commitment to cultivate and sustain non-­coincidence, study is an ongoing ethical engagement with alterity. For Lewis, impotentiality “is projected outward onto the radical other.”44 That “other” is not necessarily personified, and it is also within.45 “Every sense of self,” Lewis concurs, “is always already a sense of otherness within the self.”46 Such a spacious and self-­ conscious structure of subjectivity – one of cosmopolitan non-­coincidence with itself, enabling “undertaking a labor on ourselves”47 – is what seems eviscerated in our era of “desubjectification.” What is left of us we must manipulate to “get ahead” – or is it to just survive?48 It is this capitulation – that is not exactly the right the word as it requires a human subject capable of capitulating – this fusing with what is demanded of us that Lewis critiques as “self-­construction,” complaining it has become almost “metaphysical” in a “biotechnological age of learning.”49 In contrast, he affirms “poiesis” as an “exposure of the self to the open affordances of the world – to the possibility of letting objects shine forth as meaning-­r ich.”50 Shining51 sounds in sync with the receptivity, the luminosity, of self-­suspended openness to the world, including what eludes our cognitive capacities for apprehension.52 “In other words,” Lewis asserts that “poiesis is beyond the individual, subjective, intentionally guided will.”53 Poiesis may be “beyond” but surely study includes “the individual, subjective, intentionally guided will.” In the method of currere, the first two moments move beyond the will (even as they are initiated and sustained by it) as one returns to – reactivates – the past and visits the future (in fantasy of course), but self-­understanding and subjective reconstruction require the will,54 itself eviscerated by submersion in social media. Study becomes the “work of cultivating a particular place for subjectivity.”55 For Lewis, study opens us up to the “profane,” what is “no longer within the logic of technological enframing and yet not outside of it either.”56 There may be no “outside” anymore – except where the Internet is not accessible – but how are we to live inside technology? Lewis reminds us that: “To study is to care for the indeterminate potentiality of potentiality itself.”57 But is it possible “to care”58 without a subject, or with a desubjectified one? Apparently “study” occurs before subject

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formation or subjective reconstruction, as Lewis tells us: “To experience study is to experience the moment before either instrumental or existential meaning orients us in the world.”59 Study acknowledges the extra-­discursive sphere that extends beyond our capacity to apprehend it, but study also enables us to articulate what before we could not, yes always in the shadows of what we cannot, but maybe more acutely aware of our embeddedness in the world we inhabit and labor to understand and reconstruct. As “profane,” study is a form of worldliness. That is no simplistically empirical world, as it is culturally and historically layered and temporally deferred. “To study is precisely to bear witness to the remnant of the unfulfilled,”60 Lewis knows, acknowledging (inadvertently perhaps) the capacity of the everyday to reactivate the past.61 But to bear witness – at least in a self-­conscious sense – does require the human subject conscious of its contingency, its temporality.62 If study is a “form of life,”63 as Lewis suggests, that life is human and requires a subject, threatened as the human subject is. That human subject can come to form through study.

Relationship To say that study – not teaching64 – is the site of education and that subjectivity is the site of study is to affirm that space of non-­coincidence65 within which thinking occurs, wherein I experience as experience. It is within this inner space the “I” can react – even reconstruct – lived experience. Non-­coincidence also occurs intersubjectively, as in relationship.66 This “intermediacy,” Nancy Luxon suggests, referencing the psychoanalytic67 encounter, “offers a space for self-­ cultivation not driven explicitly or implicitly by political program.”68 Absent a “third-­party perspective,” she continues, “patients are obliged to trust themselves precisely because there is no outside to which to turn.”69 She appreciates that the intermediacy of this space facilitates enactments … whose transposition of past into future is more than a voluntarist indulgence or entirely the product of fantasy and imagination. The self-­cultivation that results has the potential to be more deeply rooted than political posture.70 While I would temper self-­trust with skepticism – self-­deception seems so often in play – the concept of self-­cultivation does point to the capacity of study to increase that space71 of non-­coincidence, the “intermediacy” wherein one can learn from one’s experience. Such educational experience, Luxon continues, “enables us to articulate how cultural intermediaries” – among these she lists educators – “come to have a formative effect and how this formation can be revised, undone, superseded.”72 Assessing these “intermediaries” upon one’s “biographic situation”73 and transference relationships74 enables us to take up residence in that in-­between space, so that this formation – the human subject we are and aspire to become – can

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be reconstructed through study. Because this subject is embedded relationally with others, past and present, and within cultural traditions, historical legacies, and political structures, subjective reconstruction implies social reconstruction, although that relationship is not necessarily programmatic or predictable.75 One point of solitary study can be subjective reconstruction, as Luxon appreciates, as such self-­understanding of what has happened to us (and with whom) enables us “to develop those enactments that carry words and deeds from personal to public spaces.”76 Like psychoanalysis (but without its terminology and therapeutic mission) and autobiography (including the method of currere), study can help us to “understand just how and when certain moments of personal history matter.”77 This inner-­focused form of “becoming historical”78 can support the cultivation of “historical consciousness”79 more generally, acknowledgment that we work within a biographical–historical situation not the clean slate or level playing field implied by the concept of “educational environment.” This latter term derives from the tabula rasa Locke imagined while the former appreciates that the present moment is pregnant with the past, with what sometimes exceeds our capacity to apprehend it. Although inevitably80 but not always exclusively solitary, study is embedded in historical time. Relationship – to knowledge, cultural traditions, to self and others, to specific texts81 – structures study. Madeleine Grumet characterized as “fundamental” the fact “that knowledge evolves in human relationships.”82 Dwayne Huebner knew that: “Every mode of knowing is also a mode of being in relationship.”83 Luxon concurs with these curriculum theorists when she points out that ethical selfhood is not displayed through a solitary confrontation of self and other. Instead, selfhood emerges through personal r­elationships ­toward others, relationships that gain in cultural significance as they are refracted through symbolic authority such as doctors and educators. Sometimes these relationships cause harm. But, under certain c­ onditions, they nourish.84 What are these “certain conditions”? They are specific – to particular persons in particular places at particular times, to class, culture, and to the curriculum. Engaging in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum requires regular reconsiderations of its intellectual histories and present circumstances.85 “I love to read Talmud for its method,” Alan Block tells us, a method structured by questions of clarification and origin.86 “[T]wo of the most common questions I find in Talmudic discourses are: ‘Why did the rabbis say this?’ and ‘Where did this idea come from’? Questions do not require replies or even conclusions: ‘many opinions are offered though few are disclaimed’,” he explains.87 “In Talmud,” Block emphasizes, “the conversation is paramount.”88 Conversation attests to relationship with the text, but its character is alterable. That fact is underscored

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when Block notes that, in Talmud, any subject can be related to another matter by internal textual association.89 This is a complicated conversation, but “[i] ts practice,” Block specifies, “must lead only to ethical living.”90 While I affirm ethical living, in secular study the “must” can be reconsidered and renegotiated, as where study leads cannot always be commanded. There are occasions when it is preferable for there to be no “must,” except insofar as one is chosen within negotiated relations of institutionalized authority and moral obligation, including to oneself. The self–self relationship can be sacred.

History, Poetry, Latin “[W]e must reassert a sense of the sacred,” Tyson Lewis urges, noting that “the sense of the sacred is not something we have power or control over.”91 In fact, “to experience the sacred” – he defines it as “the possibility of meaning-­r ich lives defined by focal practices that orient our actions and decisions” – is to “experience that which supersedes the will.”92 Samuel Rocha appears to agree, affirming “volition does not rule the day when it comes to the art of study.”93 Referencing William James – as does Rocha,94 for whom education is itself a “most sacred thing”– Lewis suggests that the “sacred is not in another, transcendental world beyond the flesh and blood world of lived social relations but is being-­in-­the-­ world itself.”95 Such is the immanence of worldliness.96 Alan Block also locates the sacred in the world. “Judaism is always about being holy by practicing holiness,” he asserts, emphasizing “holiness is an activity in this world and not a state of being in preparation for the next one.”97 At the “center” of Judaism, he continues, is the “love and study of text – of Torah.98 This study is not theoretical but practical, reverential but critical, even erotic.99 “At the center of Judaism,” Block emphasizes, “is practical study.”100 Such practical study in the world includes the classroom. Block insists that “study is the equivalent of prayer and that the classroom must be considered a sacred place.”101 Indeed, Block suggests that “we need, I think, a ritual in our classrooms that sacralizes study.”102 Does ritual enable passage from this world to another? Or does it consecrate – to use a Christian term – the everyday?103 “We live admist daily miracles,”104 Block affirms; study “sacralizes the mundane.”105 “[T]here is more to the world than we will ever know,”106 he reminds, adding: When we pray and when we study, we take a stance in awe and humility, and we actively acknowledge [quoting Heschel] that ‘our lives take place under horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life, or even the life of a generation, a nation, or an era’.107 Even eternity occurs to us within the experience of contingency and temporality. In our temporally eviscerated time, potential is tethered to employability, and that desecration threatens the species as it promises higher profits. How to

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change the course of History?108 How can curriculum contribute? Questions beginning with “how” are surely embedded in instrumentality, ensuring that the future can be only extensions of the present. If there is going to be a future, we cannot get there from here. The future is not in front of us, but in back.109 Consequently, History110 – not STEM111 – becomes the subject of the day,112 not History taught to imitate the professional practices of historians113 as much as to reactivate the past, in Toews’ terms, “becoming historical.”114 Second might be poetry,115 understood expansively, as, in Berardi’s phrasing, the “language of non-­exchangeability,” the “return of infinite hermeneutics, and the return of the sensuous body of language.”116 For Glancy, “poetry is dreaming while awake.”117 For Gardini, “poetry (carmen, or ‘song’) represents the human word in its most powerful form; something even supernatural.”118 Third might be Latin,119 to be studied not because it represents a form of “democratic training” (as Gramsci imagined),120 but, as Gardini reminds, “for one fundamental reason: because it is the language of civilization; because the Western world was created on its back,” meaning that “inscribed in Latin are the secrets of our deepest cultural memory, secrets that demand to be read.”121 Nietzsche knew, Kaag reminds, that to “flourish in the present, one must first come to grips with the distant past.”122 Not just repudiate the inglorious past – ah, were eradicating racism so simple as condemning the West’s horrific history – but to work it through, intertwined as History is with our own individual life histories. Two topics, two tasks – they fuse as they can free us: “To enter into contact with the ancients,” Gardini explains, “requires a transcendence of oneself, as clearly indicated by the Latin preposition trans: this is an effort to understand historically, to step out of one’s individual identity and approach the other.”123 Gardini continues: “[S]tudying Latin and the ancients teach us, and must teach us, the fundamental importance of historical distance, without which we lose our temporal and cultural sense of place.”124 Any hint of instrumentalism disappears when he affirms the subject’s intrinsic importance: “Latin is beautiful,” adding: “Beauty is the face of freedom.”125 These subjects – History, Poetry, Latin – position the arts and humanities as central to the curriculum of the future. The social and natural sciences are ancillary: significant but secondary. Acknowledging that no one curriculum can suit everyone, I suggest a series of ever-­shifting six-­week electives addressed to the topics of the day, informed by all the academic disciplines, selected by teachers in consultation with (K-­12 and university) colleagues, students, administrators, curriculum experts, and parents. I like the Noddings’ list – “Self-­Understanding”; “the Psychology of War”; “House and Home” (not to be confused with Home Economics [although that subject is obviously important too]); “Other People”; “Parenting”; “Animals and Nature”; “Advertising and Propaganda”; “Making a Living”; “Gender”; “Religion”126 – but courses could sometimes be more specific, even specialized, clustered on the student’s transcript according to the academic disciplines (to satisfy university admissions requirements), course offerings altered according to educators’ professional judgment, the curriculum

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development work conducted (in large part) by specialists provided by ministries of education (and in the United States – state departments of education). Whatever knowledge we deem of most worth, study is central, an ancient concept and experience whose loss our predecessors – Robert McClintock127 primary among them – lamented. Dwayne Huebner knew that the significance of the word “study” has been destroyed. Students study to do what someone else requires, not for their own transformation, a way of “working” on their own journey, or their struggle with spirit, the otherness beyond them. Just as therapy is work, hard work, but important for the loosening of old bonds and discovering the new self, so too should education as study be seen as a form of that kind of work.128 In our time, in this place, that is knowledge is of most worth.

Notes 1 In Reconceptualizing Study in Educational Discourse and Practice, edited by Claudia W. Ruitenberg (97–109). New York: Routledge, 2017. Reprinted with permission. Revised: 2021. 2 A private as well as public possession, Crow and Dabars (2020, 43) remind us that “knowledge is a public good,” a “commons” (2020, 193). For an intellectual history, see Willinsky (2017). 3 “Before there can be a rational curriculum, Spencer (1884, 13–14) advised, “we must determine the relative values of knowledges.” Such a project is informed by “the essential question,” namely “How to live?” (1884, 14) Sounding like a twentieth-­ century progressive Spencer (1884, 15) advises: “It behooves us to set before ourselves, and ever to keep clearly in view, complete living as the end to be achieved; so that in bringing up our children we may choose subjects and methods of instruction, with deliberate reference to this end.” What knowledge is of most worth? For Spencer, it was science (1884, 79). Alex Moore (2015, 68) disdains the “what knowledge question,” as it is “too easily elided to a what information/what facts question, and leading to curriculum as a list of skills and knowledge to be ‘taught and acquired’,” favoring instead what he terms a “learning-­based curriculum concerns itself more with a set of questions around what learning is and how learning is developed.” Apparently, it doesn’t matter what we teach or what students learn as long as “learning” occurs. 4 For Moore (2015, 136) the “Big Question” is “What, principally, is the curriculum for?” Both the Right and the Left answer the question with what Moore (ibid.) characterizes as the “deficiency” or “repair” mindset, if with different destinations in mind. I call this mindset instrumentalism, sidestepping the ethical and spiritual dimensions of the curriculum question in favor of producing a society or economy one fantasizes as ideal. 5 “At stake,” Simon (2005, 5) teaches, “is whether one is able to realize the responsibilities of an ethical relation to past lives, traced through that testament of disaster that does not efface its own historical disfiguration.” Historiographical reconstruction – the “alterity of the past” (Simon 2005, 112) – can, in my terms, reactivate the past, encouraging us to re-­experience some sliver of it. “Practices of remembrance,” Simon (2005, 32) knows, “work on and through us.” Such work “on”

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and “through” us promises not always welcomed “subjective reconstruction” (Pinar 2015, 191–219), as “for groups constituted by historical injury, the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it” (Love 2007, 3). 6 Simon 2005, 14. 7 “I believed in what I saw,” Jack Kerouac told Steve Allen: https://www.npr.org/ transcripts/11709924 Accessed March 26, 2021 8 The two terms blur, at least for Jane Addams who, Christopher Lasch (1965, xviii, emphasis added) tells us, “never ceased to insist on the subjective necessity of social reform, and it was her awareness of the complexity of her own motives that saved her from the reformer’s habitual self-­r ighteousness.” Likewise, there is, in the present moment of technological totalization and the distraction (see Pinar 2015, 231) from what is important that it enforces, there is, I suggest, a subjective necessity of study, not as cramming of course, but as self-­initiated, self-­chosen, self-­disciplined exploration of self, others, the world. 9 With McGlazer (2020, 17) I am acknowledging the “unchosen, unwanted, and compulsory are inescapable in education,” no rationale for authoritarianism but an acceptance of obligation, yes even “necessity,” in academic study. 10 “The hard data tell us,” Smith (2014, B6) reports, “that what is happening to animals right now is part of the same broad historical process that has swept up humans: We are all being homogenized, subjected to uniform standards, domesticated.” 11 I am thinking here not only of the Holocaust, but of the cultural genocide upon which Canada and other countries were constructed (Pinar 2015, 51), the African genocides (Pinar 2015, 175), and those modernity itself has effected, as the great Canadian public intellectual George Grant appreciated (Pinar 2015, 66). In an interview with Lucia Pallavicini, Piero Paulo Pasolini (she reported) excoriated the “violence” of industrialization and American-­style consumerism, to which he thought Italy was “defenseless,” a victim of “what he does not hesitate to call cultural genocide” (quoted in Schwartz 1992, 6). In another interview, Pasolini provided an example: “For example, in Rome, I found myself in a borgata where there was one of those cultures I spoke to you about, typical enough and exceptional enough as well; you see, when I go there, I do not find living beings but I find cadavers: they were killed” (quoted in Schwartz 1992, 623). The technological destruction of humanity intensifies during the digital era, as Brad Petitfils (2015, 59) appreciates: “This governing system of hyperreality renders us helpless: because we have become seduced by simulated experience, we leave behind our pre-­digital traditions and fully (blindly) embrace the signs of simulated happiness.” 12 “The idea of modernity,” Heather Love (2007, 5) points out, “with its suggestions of progress, rationality and technological advance – is intimately bound up with backwardness. The association of progress and regress is a function not only of the failure of so many of modernity’s key projects but also of the reliance of the concept of modernity on excluded, denigrated, or superseded others.” 13 And Daniel Paul Schreiber before them. “For Schreiber,” Maggi (2009, 200) reminds, the human race is “extinct.” What Schreiber sees instead are “fleeting-­ improvised” men, that is to say, souls “temporality given human shape by divine miracle.” Schreiber was central to my study of the religious and gendered elements of racial subjugation: Pinar 2006. Samuel Rocha (2015) sees extinction still ahead of us, not behind: “human persons are something of an endangered species.” 14 2013, 4. Han (2017a, 21) qualifies Lewis’ analysis: “Biopolitics is the governmental technology of disciplinary power. However, this approach proves altogether unsuited to the neoliberal regime, which exploits the psyche above all. Biopolitics, which makes use of population statistics, has no access to the psychic realm.” 15 For an intellectual history, see Moghtader (2021). 16 Todorov (2014, 93).

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17 Lewis (2013, 5). 18 2021, 10. 19 Williamson 2013, 49. Han (2017a, 6–7) writes: “Now, under the neoliberal regime of auto-­exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-­aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution as much as depression.” 20 Williamson 2013, 49. “One effect of flexibility,” Todorov (2014, 114) points out, “is that the social network constructed day by day is weakened, and with it the very identity of the individual. We forget that a job is not just an abstract task, but also a living environment made of human relations, common rites, obligations and prohibitions.” The curricular consequences are not dissimilar; see Tirado (2011, 182–184). 21 2013, 75. “[G]lobal competition is overrated as a factor in labor markets,” Paul Krugman (2015, A19) concludes, “and the evidence that technology is pushing down wages is a lot less clear than all the harrumphing about a ‘skills gap’ might suggest.” 22 Ibid. 23 “The organic body of the Earth,” Berardi (2012, 66) complains, “and the entropy inherent to human life, has been despised, concealed, and segregated.” Environmental degradation and auto-­exploitation are reciprocally related. 24 Han (2020, 1) explains that “rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.” He continues: “Today, the world is not a theatre which roles are played and ritual gestures exchanged, but a market in which one exposes and exhibits oneself. Theatrical presentation gives way to a pornographic exhibition of the private” (Han 2020, 21). 25 Imagination – see Kaag (2014) for a study of its enmeshment within thinking – can be too free of course and take wicked turns (as I point out in reference to lynching: Pinar 2011, p. 58), but within an individual’s oeuvre, it can mean, as Axelrod (1979, 37) notes (referencing Georg Simmel) “work [that] is unbounded, fragmented, unsystematic.” For admirers of Simmel, these were words of praise; for detractors, terms of criticism. 26 And by communicating possibly breakthrough constraints, as Axelrod (1979, 22) suggests (referencing Freud), “break through the repressive rules of inauthentic speech in order to acquaint each speaker with his own authentic autobiography.” Quoting Simmel Axelrod (1979, 46) specifies the point: “Perfection can be obtained here by the individual student only in the subjective sense that he communicates everything he has been able to see.” 27 Santner (2006, xix) invokes “creatureliness” to “signify less a dimension that traverses the boundaries of human nonhuman forms of life than a specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonism in and of the political field.” It is a field of spiritual genocide, what he terms a “dimension of undeadness, the space between real and symbolic death … the ultimate domain of creaturely life (2006, xx).” 28 1979, 42. 29 “Throughout American history,” Roth (2014, 18) reminds, “calls for practicality have really been calls for conformity – for conventional thinking.” W.E.B. Du Bois, Roth (2014, 70) reminds, argued against vocationalism in part to protect African Americans from “conformity to white America.” Roth (2014, 70) quotes Du Bois: “It is industrialization drunk with its vision of success to imagine that its own work can be accomplished without providing for the training of broadly cultured men and women to teach its own teachers, and to teach the teachers of the public schools.”

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30 “The group member is always a fragment of the individual,” Axelrod (1979, 41) writes (referencing Simmel). “For Nietzsche as well as for Simmel, Axelrod (1979, 42) reports, “the collectivity does not constitute the fulfillment of the higher human qualities, but of the lower.” 31 1984. Narcissism follows, as I unable to become subjectively present – present myself – to others. 32 2013, 6. Later Lewis (2013, 15) asserts that “studying redeems desujectivation.” In different, perhaps more political terms, Koopman (2013, 207) finds “sufficient room for resistance to power in the deep complexity of the desubstantiated subjectivities we inhabit.” After acknowledging that “life is accommodation and conformity,” James Penney (2014, 196) posits “a partisan commitment to pursue desire to the point where the law becomes suspended; to remain faithful to the real of the Idea and the transformative consequences it presents to the world in which it intervenes.” Seems a little single-­minded to me, but in the service of regression – reactivating the past to enable presence in the present – such faithfulness to “the real” can fuel the self-­shattering required. 33 2013, 7. 34 2012, 237–238. 35 Working from the Sartrean conception of pour-­soi in which human beings are condemned to be free, Maxine Greene (1973, 86) emphasized “being able to exert one’s will freely, of being free to choose not to – as well as to do – certain things.” Intransigence depends on such inner freedom, as must “impotentiality,” even if both “inner freedom” and “will” have, as concepts (and, chillingly, as experiences), have fallen out of fashion. 36 2009, 10. 37 Wieseltier (2015, 15). 38 2013, 84. 39 There was a time when “potential” was not construed as human capital, when, in fact, to develop one’s potential meant contesting capitalism and conformity with what is. “The teacher who believes in stimulating and developing potential,” Maxine Greene (1973, 92) wrote, “will be challenging, at least implicitly, the inhumanity of credentialing systems, which sort and rank people according to market demand. He will be challenging the depersonalization of a society that offers fewer and fewer opportunities for people to use their initiative, to put their vital energies to work, to find their own voices and their own skills.” 40 2013, 7. 41 2013, 8. Technologism – or, as I prefer, technologization as “ism” implies ideology (which it surely is) and overlooks its ongoing even accelerating velocity – has left me suspicious of “the new,” and “possibility” seems more frightening than alluring in an era of drones, identity theft, and cyber-­bullying. What Santner (2006, 12) calls “creaturely life … is a product not simply of man’s thrownness into the (enigmatic) ‘openness of Being’ but of his exposure to a traumatic dimension of political power and social bonds whose structures have undergone radical transformations in modernity.” The political becomes present for Lewis (2013, 15) when he acknowledges Agamben’s work as “an invitation to think through the ontological, temporal, spatial, aesthetic, and political dimensions of study.” 42 2013, 7. 43 “Freedom allows us to act as responsible agents,” Kaag (2018, 192) cautions, “but it also allows us to do otherwise.” 44 2013, 9. 45 As if inspired by the Quaker proverb – “It is the not-­me in thee that is to me most precious” (quoted in Young-­Bruehl 1996, 1) – Hongyu Wang (2004) works through her own inner alterity by studying Kristeva, Foucault, and Confucius. This

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cosmopolitan enactment of currere is for me a paradigmatic instance of subjective presence through academic study. 46 2013, 137. 47 Smith 2009, 19. 48 “In order to survive,” Han (2021, 60) asserts, “humans are abolishing themselves. They may succeed in becoming immortal, but only at the expense of life itself.” 49 2013, 28. 50 2013, 28. 51 Does this image derive from Heidegger? “Such a shining forth,” Martin Jay (1993, 147), reminds, “took place in what Heidegger came to call a Lichtung or forest clearing, in which Being discloses itself.” 52 Rocha quotes Taylor’s observation that “living in a disenchanted world, the buffered self is no longer open, vulnerable to a world of spirits and forces which cross the boundary of the mind, indeed, negate the very idea of there being a secure boundary.” Rocha (2015, 103) advises: “We cannot ignore Taylor’s demand for a theological turn.” 53 2013, 28–29. Reminiscent of Doll’s 4Rs (see Trueit 2012, 27–28), Lewis (2013, 55) notes that the “rhythm of poiesis is simultaneously projective and recursive.” These movements may on occasion be beyond the “subjective will” but they still occur within subjectivity. 54 One’s “will” may not prove sufficient, however, and I suggest a rehabilitation of “habit” to provide the force needed to reconstruct one’s subjectivity: Pinar and Grumet 2015. 55 Casemore 2017, 47. 56 2013, 34. Kittler (2013, 318) judges an “interface” between humanity and machines (specifically computers) “naïve” and “dangerous”; he demands that we admit that our technological age represents nothing less than a “suicidal disempowerment” for the species (2013, 319). 57 2013, 36. 58 For Nel Noddings (2008, 135), to “care” is also gendered: “The second experience that inspired my work on caring was motherhood.” (The first was her first job teaching, in self-­contained sixth grade class: see 2008, 135). Regarding the gendered character of teaching see Grumet (1988); Miller (2005); regarding the gender of knowing see Hendry (2011). For considerations of self-­care and caring-­for-­others, see Jung (2016); Moghtader (2015). 59 2013, 45. 60 2013, 44. 61 As Dabhoiwala (2021, July 1, 62) underscores, “to envisage a better future, we must start by looking properly at the past.” She is discussing the West’s imperial past. 62 “The point is,” Cazdyn (2012, 17) explains, “that when contingency is removed from the present and the unknown (including the potential termination of the present) is eliminated from the future, we have devolved into a military state, one that in order to reproduce itself must shrink the imagination and squeeze dry the experience of time.” 63 2013, 94. 64 Pinar (2015, 11). 65 Associated is Robert Musil’s concept of negativity, denoting, as Jonsson (2000, 151) summarizes, the “power to negate, deny, distantiate, and dissolve the weight of being.” Such a structural space of non-­coincidence can be theorized as itself social as well as subjective: “The inaugurative scene of interpellation,” Butler (1997, 197) posits, “is one in which a certain failure to be constituted becomes the condition of possibility for constituting oneself.” 66 “Only through intense relationships do things become real in the first place,” Han (2017b, 47) knows, adding: “But meaning consists in relationships” (2017b, 81).

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67 There are, of course, multiple traditions and practices of psychoanalysis; for a history of its influence in (especially American) education, see Taubman 2011. 68 2013, 89. 69 2013, 89. 70 2013, 89. 71 Having room to move – as we once said in the vernacular – follows from an expansive subjectivity structured by enabling relationships with others, with texts, and with existential experience. It bears remembering that subjective spaciousness can also follow from non-­academic study, as Eiland and Jennings (2014, 296, emphasis added) tell us, describing Walter Benjamin’s experiments with drugs: “He [Benjamin] considered hashish intoxication itself a peculiarly intense form of study, at once dangerous and full of charm, a simultaneous expansion and concentration of the powers of perception.” Intensity of study – academic or not – is possibly epiphanic but not, of course, sustainable, and the importance of its quiet daily habitual character ought not be understated. I write from experience: Pinar (2006, 43). 72 2013, 90. 73 Pinar and Grumet 2015 (1976), 27. Maxine Greene (1973, 131) also acknowledges “biographical situation.” 74 The 2005 Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines the term transference relationship as designating those aspects of the patient-­analyst relationship involving the patient’s previous object-­relationships transposed onto the analyst (that is, the transference). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-­3435301505.html accessed February 9, 2015. Those “objects” are often persons – especially parents and other caregivers – but they can be memories, including of the historical past. Discussing his conception of being touched by the past, Simon (2005, 149) suggests: “This requires a focused conversation within which one is enabled to work with and through the dialogical and transferential relations evoked by the transitive demands of testimony.” While focused on trauma of the past and one’s experience of studying them in the present, testimony enables reconstruction not only of the past but one’s present, one’s self, as Stone (1994, 50) notes in her discussion of Pasolini’s pedagogy: “The end of successful pedagogy, as of Freudian analysis, is the metaphorical immolation of the transference relation – the teacher/analyst/crow [in Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows] turned to ashes. More than a gesture of Hegelian sublation, this cure consists of self-­invention through the Other.” 75 Virginia Woolf (2014, 16) knew: “And when human relationships change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.” 76 2013, 90. 77 2013, 92. 78 “Becoming historical,” Toews (2008, 438) explains (discussing Kierkegaard and Marx), “involved a historical reconstruction of the current forms of self-­identification … as a specific product of human practices in time. The goal was to experience the self that was simply given as a self that was historically particular and contingent.” As particular and contingent, the self was not only determined by circumstances but capable of changing them, in the present context through renegotiation and repair. 79 “In attacking nineteenth-­century historical-­mindedness,” Roberts (1995, 59) notes, “Nietzsche was not simply shifting the focus from public to private, from historical copying to individual self-­creation, from historical consciousness to some subjective time consciousness or concern with one’s personal past. It was the relationship between these two levels – the public-­historical and the personal-­individual – that he found decisive.” Referencing the influence of psychoanalysis, Rauch (2000, 52) concludes: “The ‘object’ of history is thus a relationship between the past and the present, a relationship that characterizes historical consciousness as the reality and efficacy of past events and experiences.”

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80 Walter Pater, McGlazer (2020, 54) reminds, “writes of utter and ineluctable solitude as constitutive of experience,” the “radical isolation” of which Pater responds by making a commitment to the “expansion of the ‘individual mind’” (2020, 55). 81 Drawing a distinction with Christian exegesis, Block (2004, 21) emphasizes that “meaning for the Talmudic scholars is not in the text, but may be made with the text.” Whether “in” or “with,” relationship remains relevant. 82 1988, xix. 83 1999, 349. 84 2013, 8. 85 An instance of which I am now engaged: http://curriculumstudiesincanada.ca/ 86 2004, 52. 87 2004, 52–53. 88 2004, 55. 89 2004, 55. 90 2004, 84. 91 2013, 26. 92 “There are,” Lewis (2013, 25) notes, “explicit connections between the rise of technology and an understanding of the human as willful subject,” a point George Grant made fifty years ago. In Grant’s terms, technology materializes the human will to power, precipitating the “violence of an undirected willing of novelty” (2001 [1969], 56). 93 2015, 73. 94 2015, 61. 95 2013, 31. 96 Pinar 2009, ix. 97 2004, 176. 98 2004, 58. Burke and Segall (2017, 11) point that “the word ‘Torah,’ the Hebrew word for the first five books of the Old Testament, stems from the same root as ‘moreh,’ the Hebrew word for teacher,” and that “the words ‘teach,’ ‘teacher,’ or ‘teaching’ appear 261 times in the Bible. Words such as ‘learn’ and ‘learning’ appear 244 times.” Boyarin (1999, 70) tells us that “God has meant the teaching of Torah to be a private, internal activity for the Jewish people in a hostile world, a ‘hidden transcript,’ and not a matter of provocation and defiance.” 99 Boyarin (1997, 153) asserts that “Torah study was understood to have a powerful erotic charge.” 100 2004, 58. 101 2004, 83; see also Block 2015. 102 2007, 219. “What we undertake in the classroom,” Block (2004, 3) cautions, “is merely a hint of all that exists outside it.” 103 “Rituals produce a distance from the self,” Han (2020, 7) suggests, “a self-­ transcendence.” He warns: “When there are no rituals to act as protective measures, life is wholly unprotected” (Han 2020, 15). 104 2004, 2–3. 105 2004, 3. 106 2004, 3. 107 2004, 3. 108 The capital H has been replaced by a small-­case “h” then pluralized, quite progressive and accurate but dangerous too, as the “Western Myth,” Cohen (2021, 28) points out (citing Lévi-­Strauss) is “History with a capital H, which leads us to believe in a better future, or, at the very least, in the idea that history obeys a logic.” However a secularization of Christian eschatology it is, however a “master-­narrative” the concept has been, it is, more than ever, indispensable for us – with our very different histories – to carry on, to change the course of History, our life together on Earth.

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109 To “move beyond – by returning to a time before” implies a “critique of historicism as well as a critique of progress,” McGlazer (2020, 20) suggests, describing the topics he treats in his important book. His “understanding of the present” as “heterogenous and shot through with ‘survivals’ from the past” I affirm, but not his conception of the past as “resource” (ibid.) That concept, long critiqued in ecological studies, risks reducing the past to its utility for us in the present. Reactivating the past may prove important to us in working our way through the morass of the present, but ethical obligation – not utility – is the rationale. That said, I return to McGlazer’s (2020, 52) analysis of Pater, specifically his point that the past “should be studied: neither fully internalized nor ‘engrafted,’ but rather read, reread, recited, and valued for its difference from the present … going back over it again, mechanically.” For me, the “mechanical” is best kept confined to study, excluded from teaching, except as a contrarian counter-­modernist move to demonstrate what discipline, ritual, repetition (with a difference) can mean. Teaching remains the leading, the inauguration, the animating of conversation among pilgrims each on her own path, albeit together. Confined to study, mechanicity – for me setting times to read, to take notes, to write, to walk – structures my self–self-­relation, the instantiation, the force of, habit, self-­discipline and scrutiny, juxtaposed with self-­abandon, as the building of character incorporates both the Apollonian and the Dionysian dimensions of lived experience. 110 “Through the passionate study of antiquity,” Gardini (2019, 10) explains, “the present discovers its own historicity and attempt to moor itself against time’s ruinous momentum.” (Or, in our case, time’s disappearance into a temporally-­vacuous virtual now.) “Literature,” Gardini (2019, 12) adds, is the “space in which we express spiritual nobility through linguistic excellence.” 111 One hundred forty years ago – to confront ecclesiastical dogmatism – I might have sided with Spencer, although not conferring upon science a kind of “ecclesiastical” status, as when he writes: “Necessary and eternal are its truths, all Science concerns all mankind for all time” (1884, 80). For Spencer, scientists were the new priests: “[O]nly the genuine man of science, we say, can truly know how utterly beyond, not only human knowledge, but human conception, is the Universal Power of which Nature, and Life, and Thought are manifestations” (Spencer 1884, 79). Today, historical amnesia requires even science to be taught, at least in part, historically, emphasizing climate change, species extinction, as well as other emergencies of the day, including the politicization of science, especially under the Trump Administration. “We know that there were blatant attempts to distort, to cherry pick and disregard science – we saw that across multiple agencies,” Jane Lubchenco, the Biden-­appointed deputy director for climate and the environment at the White House science office, said in an interview (quoted in Friedman 2021, March 30, A15). During the COVID-­19 crisis, Trump’s politicized disavowal of science was evident in his attempts to belittle masks and dismiss the need for social distancing to ward off Covid-­19; he declared cold snaps to be evidence against global warming. Trump and his top political officials also “sidelined researchers who worked on issues the administration disliked, like climate change, disregarded studies that identified serious health risks from certain chemicals and meddled in scientific decision making, particularly around the response to the COVID-­19 pandemic” (Friedman 2021, March 30, A15). 112 As it was for Dewey: Westbrook (1991, 171) reminds that “the subject to which he devoted most attention was not the sciences but history, because he believed that history was ‘the most effective tool’ for moral instruction.” 113 Peter Seixas (2004, 12) might characterize my critique as “misconstrued,” as he insists that in his “model, the relationships among history in everyday life, history in academia, and history in the classroom are mutual and interpenetrating.”

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114 Richter (2007, 9) writes that “to articulate the past historically means to activate the historicity of our objects of study.” For the early nineteenth-­century Europeans Toews (2008, xix) studied, “to become historical in the sense of recognizing that personal and communal identity were historically constituted was also to take upon oneself the obligation of constituting oneself, personally and collectively, in historical action.” Locating each of the structuring relationships of educational experience – self–self, self-­other, self-­text, self-­world – in historical time can provide passage to “becoming historical” in social and political life. 115 In Berardi’s sense fiction must be appended to poetry, as – in Gardini’s succinct summary – “literature is life” (2019, 11), depictions of being (t)here, obvious when oral: “native stories/scenes of presence” (Vizenor, quoted in Breinig 2008, 53). For Breinig (2008, 48), Indigenous “oral talk” constitutes an “active presence.” 116 2012, 139–140. “Poetry opens the doors of perception to singularity,” Berardi (2012, 147) appreciates, adding (maybe too exuberantly): “poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.” 117 2008, 272. 118 2019, 146. 119 No doubt an even more contrarian suggestion than history and poetry, long absent as a mainstay of public-­school curriculum in the United States but, as McGlazer (2020, 189 n. 41), still taught in many in Italian secondary schools. 120 McGlazer 2020, 6. See preface. 121 2019, 5. By “to be read” Gardini (2019, 8) means something specific, akin to what I mean by reactivating the past: “By reading, we are not just living today: we are living in history, transcending our biographies and entering a much broader chronology.” 122 2018, 122. I suspect Alex Moore (2015, 27) doesn’t have Latin in mind when he posits the “idea of a [r]evolutionary curriculum: a curriculum, that is, that keeps itself open to development and change,” but I am suggesting that – against the cultural crises I have named – Latin constitutes precisely such a curriculum, a “[r]evolutionary curriculum … open to development and change.” Endorsing Latin – and poetry and history – over STEM engages me in what Moore (2015, 124) appreciates is “the real battle,” that “between a curriculum that affirms and reproduces and a curriculum that challenges.” The “curriculum that challenges,” he explains, “does not confine itself to challenging existing orthodoxies related to the relative value of different knowledges; it also challenges orthodoxies concerning the hierarchisation of cultures, and orthodoxies concerning ways of understanding ourselves (individually and collectively)” (ibid.) All of that is in play when one becomes preoccupied with the curriculum question: what knowledge is of most worth? 123 2019, 10. 124 2019, 234. 125 2019, 5. 126 Moore (2015, 152) is citing Noddings’ chapter headings in Critical Lessons (2006). 127 1971. First reading it during graduate school the year it appeared, I reworked my way through McClintock’s seminal essay in 2004, a study reprinted in my 2015 collection, pages 12–24. 128 1999, 411.

Bibliography Axelrod, Charles David. 1979. Studies in Intellectual breakthrough. University of Massachusetts Press. Berardi, Franco. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e).

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Biesta, Gert. 2003. How General Can Bildung be? Reflections on the Future of a Modern Educational Ideal. In Educating Humanity: Bildung in Postmodernity, edited by Lars Løvlie, Klaus Peter Mortensen, and Sven Erik Nordenbo (61–74). Blackwell. Block, Alan A. 2001. Ethics and Eurriculum. JCT 17 (3), 23–38. Block, Alan A. 2004. Talmud, Curriculum, and the Practical. Peter Lang. Block, Alan A. 2014. The Classroom: Engagement and Encounter. Palgrave Macmillan. Boyarin, Daniel. 1997. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. University of California Press. Boyarin, Daniel. 1999. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford University Press. Breinig, Helmbrecht. 2008. Native Survivance in the Americas. Resistance and Remembrance in Narratives by Asturias, Tapahonso, and Vizenor. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (39–59). University of Nebraska Press. Burke, Kevin J. and Segall, Avner. 2017. Christian Privilege in U.S. Education: Legacies and Current Issues. Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford University Press. Casemore, Brian. 2017. Curriculum as the Place of Study. In The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies, edited by Mary Aswell Doll (42–49). Routledge. Cazdyn, Eric. 2012. The Already Dead. The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Duke University Press. Cohen, Daniel. 2021. The Inglorious Years. The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society. Princeton University Press. Crow, Michael M. and Dabars, William F. 2020. The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Dabhoiwala, Fara. 2021, July 1. Imperial Delusions. The New York Review of Books, LXVIII (11), 59–62. Eiland, Howard and Jennings, Michael W. 2014. Walter Benjamin. A Critical Life. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Friedman, Lisa. 2021, March 30. Inquiry to Study Trump-­Era Meddling in Science. The New York Times, CLXX, No. 59,013, A15. Gardini, Nicola. 2019. Long Live Latin. The Pleasures of a Useless Language. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Glancy, Diane. 2008. The Naked Spot: A Journey toward Survivance. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (271–283). University of Nebraska Press. Grant, George. 2001 (1969). Time as History. University of Toronto Press. Greene, Maxine. 1973. Teacher as Stranger. Wadsworth. Grumet, Madeleine R. 1988. Bitter Milk. Women and Teaching. University of Massachusetts Press. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2017a. Psycho-­Politics. Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2017b. The Scent of Time. A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering. Polity. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2020. The Disappearance of Rituals. Polity. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2021. The Palliative Society. Polity. Hendry, Petra Munro. 2011. Engendering Curriculum History. Routledge. Huebner, Dwayne E. 1999. The Lure of the Transcendent. Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Jay, Martin. 1993. Sartre, Merleau-­Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight. In Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by David Michael Levin (143–185). University of California Press. Jonsson, Stefan. 2000. Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity. Duke University Press. Jung, Jung-­Hoon. 2016. The Concept of Care in Curriculum Studies. Routledge. Kaag, John. 2014. Thinking Through the Imagination: Aesthetics in Human Cognition. Fordham University Press. Kaag, John. 2018. Hiking with Nietzsche. On Becoming Who You Are. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Koopman, Colin. 2013. Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Indiana University Press. Krugman, Paul. 2015, April 3. Power and Paychecks. New York Times CLXIV, No. 56,825, A19. Lasch, Christopher. 1984. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. Norton. Lewis, Tyson E. 2013. On Study. Giorgio Agamben and Educational Potentiality. Routledge. Love, Heather. 2007. Feeling Backward. Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard University Press. Maggi, Armando. 2009. The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade. University of Chicago Press. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press. McClintock, Robert. 1971, December. Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction. Teachers College Record 73 (2), 161–205. Miller, Janet L. 2005. The Sounds of Silence Breaking and Other Essays: Working the Tension in Curriculum Theory. Peter Lang. Moghtader, Bruce. 2015. Foucault and Educational Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan. Moghtader, Bruce. 2021. Human Capital Theory of Education. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Moore, Alex. 2015. Understanding the School Curriculum. Theory, Politics and Principles. Routledge. Noddings, Nel. 2006. Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach. Cambridge University Press. Noddings, Nel. 2008. A Way of Life. In Leaders in Philosophy of Education: Intellectual Self-­ Portraits, edited by Leonard J. Waks (135–144). Sense Publishers. Penney, James. 2014. After Queer Theory. The Limits of Sexual Politics. Pluto. Petitfils, Brad. 2015. Parallels and Responses to Curricular Innovation: The Possibilities of Posthumanistic Education. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2001. The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in American: Lynching, Prison Rape, and the Crisis of Masculinity. Peter Lang. Pinar, William F. 2006. The Synoptic Text Today and Other Essays: Curriculum Development after the Reconceptualization. Peter Lang. Pinar, William F. 2009. The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate Lives in Public Service. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2012. What Is Curriculum Theory? (2nd edition). Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2013. Curriculum Studies in the United States. Intellectual Histories, Present Circumstances. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2015. Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity. Routledge.

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Pinar, William F. and Grumet, Madeleine R. 2015 (1976). Toward a Poor Curriculum (3rd edition). Educator’s International Press. Richter, Gerhard. 2007. Thought-­Images. Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford University Press. Rocha, Samuel D. 2015. Folk Phenomenology. Education, Study, and the Human Person. Pickwick Publications. Rocha, Samuel D. 2020. The Syllabus as Curriculum: A Reconceptualist Approach. Routledge. Roth, Michael S. 2014. Beyond the University. Why Liberal Education Matters. Yale University Press. Santner, Eric L. 2006. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. University of Chicago Press. Seixas, Peter. 2004. Introduction to Theorizing Historical Consciousness, edited by Peter Seixas (3–20). University of Toronto Press. Simon, Roger I. 2005. The Touch of the Past. Remembrance, Learning, and Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Jason. 2009. Soul on Strike. Preface to Franco Berardi’s The Soul at Work (9–19). Semiotext(e). Smith, Justin E.H. 2014, May 9. The Great Extinction. The Chronicle Review, B6–B9. Spencer, Herbert. 1884. What Knowledge Is Of Most Worth? J.B. Alden. Stone, Jennifer. 1994. Pasolini, Zanzotto, and the Question of Pedagogy. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (40–55). University of Toronto Press. Schwartz, Barth David. 1992. Pasolini Requiem. Pantheon. Taubman, Peter M. 2009. Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education. Routledge. Taubman, Peter M. 2011. Disavowed Knowledge. Routledge. Tirado, María Concepción Barrón. 2011. Professional Education in Mexico at the Beginning of the Twenty-­First Century. In Curriculum Studies in Mexico: Intellectual Histories, Present Circumstances, edited by William F. Pinar (181–206). Palgrave Macmillan. Toews, John. 2008. Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth Century Berlin. Cambridge University Press. Trueit, Donna. ed. 2012. Pragmatism, Postmodernism, Complexity Theory: The Fascinating Imaginative Realm of William E. Doll, Jr. Routledge. Wang, Hongyu. 2004. The Call from the Stranger on a Journey Home: Curriculum in a Third Space. Peter Lang. Westbrook, Robert. 1991. John Dewey and American Philosophy. Cornell University Press. Wieseltier, Leon. 2015, January 18. Among the Disrupted. The New York Times Book Review, 1, 14–15. Willinsky, John. 2017. The Intellectual Properties of Learning. A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke. University of Chicago Press. Woolf, Virginia. 2014. Virginia Woolf: Essays on the Self. Notting Hill Editions Ltd. Young-­Bruehl, Elisabeth. 1996. The Anatomy of Prejudices. Harvard University Press.

4 INDIVIDUALITY1

“To be educational,” Anne Phelan explains, “teacher education must be primarily concerned with the teacher’s subjectivity, that is, with the teacher’s freedom of expression, thought, and action.”2 In saying so, she is “not arguing that subjectivity can or ought to be produced through teacher education.”3 On that point, Phelan breaks4 from a long line of educational theorists who felt otherwise, including the American5 pragmatist William Heard Kilpatrick,6 whose project method is the subject of this theoretical reflection on teacher education: what is at stake, when, and why? While it hardly harmonizes answers to those questions, attuning ourselves to time and place can prompt our replies to them, theoretically and practically, even when what Phelan calls a “culture of objectification”7 disables us from discerning the links between what we think and feel – and (do not) know.8 Those links can be obscure of course, and not necessarily causal, but even in correlation or free association we can learn from our experience – a constant, I suggest – in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum.9 I juxtapose Kilpatrick with Phelan to continue the ongoing conversation between teacher education and curriculum theory that Phelan has made explicit.10 In her conception of teacher education, Phelan foregrounds the teacher’s freedom, and in terms Kilpatrick would embrace – “individuality, that is, originality, creativity, and the capacity for dissent” – and she emphasizes that such freedom is “always relational – at once socially structured and historically primed.”11 As we will see, Kilpatrick too appreciated the power of social structure and the necessity of historical attunement; his emphasis upon individuality was associated with the project of democratization, e.g. the production of citizens with democratic subjectivities, subjectivities that recognized others as human beings, not racialized others.12 Phelan characterizes “subjectivity” as an ongoing “event rather than a project of completion,”13 language Kilpatrick did not use but an idea – that the “teaching DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-4

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subject is always in ‘a state of becoming’ and never fully realized”14 – he would appreciate. Such subjectivity, Phelan adds, “is only possible in a world of plurality and difference.”15 It was such a world that racism denied and against which Kilpatrick’s “individual” would be positioned. No isolated creature, Kilpatrick’s “individual” came to form relationally, working with others, engaged in projects that, while teacher-­led, were also collectively determined – curriculum, in Phelan’s Arendtian phrasing,16 as “a space of freedom where the newcomer can reveal her singularity through speech and action, be witnessed by others, and thus make her appearance in the world.”17 In such a conception of curriculum, Phelan points out, the “ethical” is paramount, as is “the political.”18 The two become blurred in Kilpatrick’s embrace of education as the laboratory of democracy, a Deweyan conception the great philosopher had pretty much abandoned19 by the publication date of Kilpatrick’s “The Project Method” (1918). That article “caused such an immediate sensation that the Teachers College Bureau of Publications was obligated to distribute an astounding 60,000 reprints.”20 Those reprint requests were not confined to the United States. In Canada, the “project method” is credited with being “the basis for so-­ called enterprise teaching, whereby the curriculum was organized around units of study, or enterprises… widely advocated across Canada”21 In the United States, the project method inspired numerous progressive experiments, as Diane Ravitch – before her conversion to anti-­school-­reform activism22 – complains.23 In South Korea, the concept was introduced some five decades ago.24 The concept remains relevant in China’s contemporary reform’s encouragement of a “curriculum of life-­inquiry,”25 as Kilpatrick’s concept emphasizes lived educational experience and not only in schools.26 When “The Project Method” appears in 1918,27 the Great War is ending, but Kilpatrick, like many of his fellow progressives, remained embattled, determined to replace “traditional” education28 – instruction dominated by recitation and learning by memorization – with “progressive” education devoted to the formation of democratic citizens. Kilpatrick summarizes traditional education as a “regime of coercion”29 that meant meaningless learning, what he ridiculed as “aimless dawdling” – a term that has disappeared from everyday English usage today but means idle, wasted activity30 – that presumably produced “pupils” who became “selfish individualists.”31 That is the crucial consideration: the consequence of curriculum for the subjective shaping of those who undergo it.32 Recall that Dewey – Kilpatrick was an admirer – had retreated from his faith that the classroom could be a laboratory for democracy, that (in my terms) through subjective reconstruction social reconstruction could occur (and vice versa).33 Key for Kilpatrick was “purpose,” indicated in the subtitle of his 1918 article: “The Use of the Purposeful Act in the Educative Process.” By “project” Kilpatrick meant “purposeful act,” emphasizing “action, preferably, wholehearted vigorous activity.”34 Such activity, he tells us, is structured by “the laws of learning” and “the ethical quality of conduct,” by which he references both “the

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social situation as well as to the individual attitude.”35 He wonders if “all of these [can] be contemplated under one workable notion.”36 This question leads him to consider “fundamental principles.”37 Confessing to skepticism of formulating “fundamental principles,” Kilpatrick finds himself wondering: could there be “another way of attaining unity?”38 He points to the concept of “method,” in contrast to “concrete procedure,” wherein such “unification” might reside, a “unit of conduct” that could be “as it were, a sample of life, a fair sample of the worthy life and consequently of education?”39 The “unifying idea I sought,” he reflected, “was to be found in the conception of wholehearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment, or more briefly, in the unit element of such activity, the hearty purposeful act.”40 Emphasizing the adjective, Kilpatrick christens his concept of “project,” hyphenating it to underline that it conveys “something pro-­jected,” thereby emphasizing purposeful action.41 Both individual and groups may engage in such purposeful action, and these “projects” are not necessarily academic: “It is clear,” he writes, “that projects may present every variety that purposes present in life.”42 What is “essential” – and not necessarily “observable,” he adds – is the “presence of a dominating purpose.”43 And this “dominating purpose” is no narrow or obstinate expression of one’s will or cognitive calculation, as Kilpatrick declares that only those “activities” into which a student “puts his ‘whole heart’” qualify.44 That qualification would seem to make educational activity more a matter of emotion – specifically of sincerity and authenticity45 – and he does characterize the project as “essentially psychological in character.”46 But, he qualifies, it demands “the social situation both for its practical working and for the comparative valuation of proffered projects.”47 Purposeful activity – not merely “drifting” (recall that “dawdling” was his earlier word choice for purposelessness) – is, Kilpatrick asserts, “the typical unit of the worthy life.”48 He allows that “not that all purposes are good,” but he insists “the worthy life consists of purposive activity.”49 It is the worthy life in “a democratic society” that is, and even (more specifically) of a worthy American50 life, as he asserts: “We of America have for years increasingly desired that education be considered as life itself and not as mere preparation for later living. The conception before us promises a definite step toward the attainment of this end.”51 But it is not only national identity52 and style of governance that frames Kilpatrick’s conception of the project; referencing Thorndike,53 he writes that it is its “utilization of the laws of learning.”54 Are these “laws” intrinsically democratic and American, as his assertion implies?55 One such “law” is learning’s encouragement of new learning. “Any activity,” Kilpatrick teaches, “which does not thus ‘lead on’ becomes in time stale and flat. Such ‘leading on’ means that the individual has been modified56 so that he sees what before he did not see or does what before he could not do.”57 Indeed, he asserts that “the value of any activity – whether intentionally educative or not – [is] its tendency directly or indirectly to lead the individual and others whom

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he touches on to other like fruitful activity.”58 How Kilpatrick would distinguish such “fruitful” engagement from, say, sheer busyness is not obvious, except we cannot rely (as noted earlier) on observation. It could be the intensity or sincerity or authenticity – indicated earlier by the invocation of “wholehearted” – and the scale of the project that provides guidance, as he implies: “It is the special duty and opportunity of the teacher to guide the pupil through his present interests and achievement into the wider interests and achievement demanded by the wider social life of the older world.”59 While at first blush we could say he is endorsing a cosmopolitan outlook, is he not also flirting with Bobbitt’s conception of curriculum as composed of adult activities?60 The conformism Bobbitt’s model threatens seems absent from Kilpatrick’s project, however, not only due to the latter’s association of the concept with democracy but also with morality. “Speaking for myself,” Kilpatrick tells us, I consider the possibilities for building moral character in a regime of purposeful activity one of the strongest points in its favor; and contrariwise the tendency toward a selfish individualism one of the strongest counts against our customary set-­tasks sit-­alone-­at-­your-­own-­desk procedure.61 Working with others was, then, for Kilpatrick and for other US progressives, not only democratic but also moral: “moral character is primarily an affair of shared social relationships; the disposition to determine one’s conduct and attitudes with reference to the welfare of the group.”62 Hedging his bets, however, he allows that “in the school procedure here advocated children are living together in the pursuit of a rich variety of purposes, some individually sought, many conjointly.”63 So, either alone or together, purpose is to prevail; it is purposeful activity that expands one’s subjectivity through projects into the world.64 In these subjectively expressive and socially focused projects, Kilpatrick positions the teacher as crucial. It is she (or he) who emphasizes one or the other, helping children to cultivate their capacities for judgment by deciding the project’s form: not only working alone or in a group but presumably concerning the matter of topic, too. “Under the eye of the skillful teacher,” Kilpatrick advises, the children as an embryonic society will make increasingly finer discriminations as to what is right and proper. Ideas and judgment come thus. Motive and occasion arise together; the teacher has but to steer the process of evaluating the situation. The teacher’s success – if we believe in democracy – will consist in gradually eliminating himself or herself from the success65 of the procedure.66 Today, however, with predatory corporations67 eager to remove the teacher altogether, in my reactivation of Kilpatrick I de-­emphasize this destination. It’s true: independence of thought and action is laudable, but such ideals are always in

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context, embedded in activity, structured by ethical commitments to some and by political demands made by others.68 Nor does it require the elimination of the teacher: my Ph.D. mentor,69 while not shy in expressing skepticism toward my projects, never discouraged me, and it was within that almost forty-­year-­ long relationship that my ongoing efforts toward independence, originality, and purpose proceeded.70 Kilpatrick does acknowledge matters of structure, physical ones such as “room furniture and equipment,” even “school architecture,” as well as changes in more immediate implements, among them a “new type of text-­book,”71 but not only material and artifacts. He also wants a “new kind of curriculum and program, possibly new plans of grading and promotion, most of all, a changed attitude as to what to wish for in the way of achievement.”72 Kilpatrick knew that all is for naught unless educational evaluation changes.73 Curriculum reformers in China – and Canada – know that, too.74 Kilpatrick’s claims for his project method were several and sometimes inflationary, speculating that what “this type of procedure means for democracy” is nothing less than providing “better citizens, alert, able to think and act, too intelligently critical to be easily hoodwinked either by politicians or patent-­ medicines, self-­reliant, ready of adaptation to the new social condition that impend.”75 Like China’s curriculum reform, Kilpatrick’s project method – he knew – would provoke “opposition” from multiple sources: from “tradition” and “taxpayers,” as well as from “unprepared and incompetent teachers,” from “the absence of a worked-­out procedure” and “problems of administration and supervision.”76 “All these,” he concludes, “would suffice to destroy the movement were it not deeply grounded.”77

Opposition Not among the opponents Kilpatrick anticipated were other Progressives. On occasion, Kilpatrick could seem anti-­intellectual, asserting at one point that “we must stop thinking of education as merely book knowledge and school skills authoritatively handed down. Books and skills at best are but means.”78 His qualification of that devaluation – “books and skills will be needed and in the end will be more fully mastered than now” – did not go far enough, many thought, as he seemed sure that they “are but means and thus quite secondary to the enriching of life.”79 Such statements allowed Cremin to write: in his unrelenting attack on subject matter ‘fixed-­in-­advance,’ [Kilpatrick] ultimately discredits the organized subjects and hence inevitably shifts the balance of Dewey’s pedagogical paradigm toward the child. The resultant child-­centered emphasis calls to mind the very position Dewey himself rejected, first in The Child and the Curriculum (1902) and later in Experience in Education (1938).80

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From being at odds81 with Dewey, later students of the Progressive Era in the United States are even harsher, alleging that the project method “may have caused more damage to progressive education, particularly to its image, than virtually any other curricular or instructional innovation.”82 Casting Kilpatrick reservation about “book knowledge” an “unrelenting attack on subject matter” is aggressive, but the Kridel–Bullough allegation seems entirely excessive; they offer no evidence.83 In the United States, then, the controversy over the project method centered on the centrality of the school subjects in the curriculum. Robert Westbrook judges that it was Kilpatrick’s “privileging” of the children’s “purposes” and the subsequent “subordination of subject matter to them” that “troubled Dewey.”84 Westbrook adds that Dewey “agreed” with Kilpatrick that learning begins with children’s interests; he worried that any unmediated pursuit of those interests risked trivializing the curriculum. Dewey had no objection to the “project method,” Westbrook clarifies, but he “insisted that projects must have as one of their goals the child’s mastery of organized subjects.”85 Which “organized subjects” is my question.

Subjective Reconstruction “How is individuality built?” Kilpatrick asks. His too-­brief answer invokes art, not engineering: “a back and forth process between artist and situation in which both undergo transformation. As the artist molds the situation into new form he re-­builds also himself ”86 Here is acknowledgment of the reciprocity of self and situation, as Madeleine Grumet so succinctly phrased it.87 Grumet knows that duration is one prerequisite for reciprocity; one must stay in a relationship or situation in order to participate in its reconstruction. Projects may have no set timeline, but in both Kilpatrick and Grumet is acknowledgment that self-­ formation through academic study takes time. It is the “absence” of individuality “which we now so much deplore,” Kilpatrick complained.88 “A sameness rules” is to blame, he continued, as “the meanings of things have been merely copied. Integration has been exactly overlooked.”89 That term “integration” has many meanings, but in the context of individuality the relevant one is “the process of coordinating separate personality elements into a balanced whole,” a concept similar to “synthesis” in the method of currere.90 Here Kilpatrick is discussing individuality to his audience at the University of North Carolina in 1928, and so “integration” could imply not only subjective coherence, but interracial harmony, two projects that can be considered in tandem.91 “The building of such an individuality,” Kilpatrick knows, “is task enough to call forth all latent endeavors.”92 Science is no friend of individuality, dedicated as it is to nomological laws, and within education standardizing protocols – so-­ called “evidence-­ based” determinations of “what works” – stipulate sameness.93 Within such conceptions of “science” and “education” there is, Kilpatrick knew, a “small place [that]

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seems left for individuality.”94 That “place” was, he felt sure, the educational project, through which children could express their uniqueness, discover their classmates’ individualities, and shape reciprocities among caring, concern, and learning.95 “We are in all of this,” he emphasized, “concerned with building persons, masterpieces of individuality, persons that ever grow themselves, persons that always respect a like growing in others.”96 Subjective and social reconstruction are reciprocally related.97 Projects are not propaganda, Kilpatrick pointed out, two years before the Counts controversy.98 “The needed education,” he emphasizes, “must aim rather more and better self-­direction,” by which he means not the self-­promoting instrumentalization of subjectivity but its reconstruction, “self-­direction which rusts meanings.”99 In Kilpatrick’s conception, then, self-­direction tackles its legacies critically, as reparation requires. To a group of Southerners listening to these words in 1928, their coded meaning is clear. For race to “rust,” racist subjectivity must be shattered, from which new forms of human being can be fashioned. Those forms are to be more cosmopolitan, Kilpatrick makes clear, enabling us “to act in the light of meanings sought and found itself ever more broadly considered, meanings which change our ways of thinking to more adequate ways and so direct our efforts along more fruitful lines.”100 That adjective is ambiguous, but it can imply social justice as well as creativity, even increased productivity. Students – as well as American culture generally, and Southern culture specifically – could become increasingly capable of creative and socially just inquiries, Kilpatrick felt sure, by learning what would extend the range of what they know and can appreciate. “It is this whole, the very self of the learner,” Kilpatrick felt, “that is involved in every act.”101 It is this very “growing” of student’s “self, its present actual growing with the greatest possible promise of future growing”102 that for him must concern the teacher more than anything else. Herein lies Kilpatrick’s conception of teacher education, I suspect. In the teacher’s commitment to the student’s self-­formation,103 the teacher necessarily dedicates herself to her own.104 Kilpatrick’s conception of curriculum includes one “unit element,” the “unit of life, the experience.”105 He underlines the educational significance of time, asserting that growth itself requires experience that “comes connectedly out of the past and leads more and more connectedly into the future. Otherwise,” he warns, “the individual lacks depth and bearing.”106 The project method is, in this sense, a method for reconstructing “selfish individualists” into socially engaged persons. Such people are prerequisite not only for social progress but, Kilpatrick posits, for the survival of democracy itself. “The excellence,” Kilpatrick asserts, “if not the very existence of our civilization is at stake. We cannot refuse. We must carry on.”107 Can curriculum content and structure encourage such subjective and social reconstruction? Perhaps – by studying Kilpatrick for starters – but not predictably so: to count on it – as Phelan appreciates – reinscribes the instrumentalism

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that devalues lived experience, wherein educational experience devolves into a means to an end, experience that is important in itself. Kilpatrick would question my invocation of “important in itself,” associating that idea with what he and other early twentieth-­century Progressives dismissed as “traditional education,” a series of school subjects (like Latin) and instrumental methods (recitation and memorization) that were, in Progressives’ assessment, anything but intrinsically important. Like Phelan,108 I endorse study as important, and not only (although especially) in the context of a pervasive instrumentalism in service to a predatory capitalism, education as only employability.109 Yes, context is crucial, as it structures one’s sense of what must come next, but there are activities – such a study – that are educationally important no matter where and when they occur. What and how to study vary, but the existential experience of study remains crucial. What varies and what remains? While Kilpatrick’s historical moment differs dramatically from ours, but the present is always temporally heterogeneous110 and there are through-­lines between then and now. Both Kilpatrick and Phelan attempt to teach against conformity, in Kilpatrick’s time against authoritarian teaching, unquestioned classroom rituals, and profoundly anti-­democratic forces at home and abroad, including racism. Then, like now, as Phelan notes, “teacher education does little to harness the thought, idealism, and enthusiasm of teacher candidates toward participation in the public sphere.”111 That infinitive – “harness” – can mean “to yoke,” but it can also mean, Phelan points out, “to make use of (natural resources), especially to produce energy.”112 It seems we have not abandoned altogether the educational project of producing subjectivities, in our time and place aspiring to become “teachers [who] are able to stand alone, together.”113 Concrete, actually existing individuals – alone and together – remain our last resort in anti-­cultures of intensifying technologization, narcissism, presentism. “Whatever else education does,” Kilpatrick knew, “it must work to build individuality.”114 Kilpatrick’s project remains as relevant today as the day he devised it.

Notes 1 In Encounters in Theory and History of Education 16, 112–128, 2015. Copyright is authored owned. Revised: 2021. 2 2015, 4. 3 Ibid. 4 Evidently, the programmatic production of subjectivity is not completely out of the question, as it implied (if negatively) in another passage: “Something tremendously important is lost in the process of objectification,” Phelan (2015, 14) writes, “and it relates to the kind of person that is produced.” And one subheading implies a causal (if complex and perhaps reciprocal) relation between teaching and subjective formation: “Teaching subjects, shaping subjectivities” (2015, 67). 5 It matters that Kilpatrick was an American, as his embrace of individuality represented not only his immersion in the early twentieth-­century progressive movement in America (for a history, see Cremin 1961), but also, I suspect, a contradiction of

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individuality’s obliteration in the racism of the American South, where Kilpatrick was born, came of age, and taught in the public schools (see Endnote 6). As Phelan (2015, 75) knows, place and time matter; she laments “the poverty of place in teacher education,” and she situates her case studies in specific places – for example, Austria, Canada, and Ireland – and in specific historical moments. 6 Born in 1871 in Georgia, Kilpatrick majored in mathematics at Mercer University in Macon, where he also studied Latin and Greek. After graduate study at Johns Hopkins, he returned to serve as a teacher and principal in the public schools of Georgia. Then, after a few years as professor of mathematics and acting president at Mercer – from which he resigned after being accused of atheism – Kilpatrick went to Teachers College, Columbia University, where he taught for 27 years, attracting more students than any other professor, some 35,000 (Ravitch 2000, 178; Westbrook 1991, 504). 7 2015, 13. 8 One consequence of objectification is “presentism,” an incapacity to experience time. Historical study is an antidote (see Chapter 3, also Bruno-­Jofré and Johnston, 2014, 4; Pinar, 2012, 225). 9 See Pinar 2015b, 109–125. Learning from experience requires non-­coincidence with what is – Phelan (2015, 85) focuses on “estrangement” (also enabling subjective freedom, positive and negative), on what she characterizes as “quintessentially educational,” namely “a concern with the freedom associated with self-­formation (imbricated in the social and historical) through knowledge and experience” (2015, 9). Invoking a different vocabulary, Kilpatrick commits to the same set of ideals. 10 See 2015. 11 2015, 1. 12 This is my language here; subjectivity is not a term with which Kilpatrick worked but one which he would not be, I think, unhappy. And while he doesn’t explicitly link individuality (or democratic subjectivity) with anti-­racism, it seems to me implied, as racism trades on stereotype, the opposite of individuality. 13 2015, 3. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Phelan’ phrasing is more poetic than Judith Butler’s but the two see the same: In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Butler (2017, 220) points out, “Arendt begins to formulate many of the most important philosophical questions that preoccupied her in the subsequent years: what is thinking, what is judgement, and even what is action? But even more fundamentally, perhaps, who am I, and who are we?” 17 Ibid. Phelan’s affirmation of singularity is profoundly political act as – in Berardi’s (2012, 146–147) phrasing – “Singularity is forgotten, erased, and cancelled in the erotic domain of semio-­capitalism. The singularity of the voice and the singularity of words are subjected to the homogenization of exchange and valorization.” Singularity can be social, as when Berardi (ibid.) suggests that the “singular vibration of the voice … can create resonances, and resonances may produce common space.” 18 2015, 5. 19 Westbrook 1991, 192. 20 Kliebard 1986, 159. 21 Tomkins 1986, 142. The curriculum for the 1907 Bachelor of Pedagogy degree at Queens University, Bruno-­Jofré and Cole (2014, 77) report, “fully embraced the pedagogical tendencies of the time, while having a degree of eclecticism. It included John Dewey and William James, thus highlighting pragmatism, William Kilpatrick in the line of Dewey, but also Herbert Spencer and Edward Thorndike.” Kilpatrick and other pragmatists’ representation in Canada’s teacher education curriculum then spread westward. “The method took firmest hold in Alberta during the 1930s,”

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Tomkins (1986, 142) tells us; but, he adds later, even “by 1922, Saskatchewan normal school students were receiving instruction in W. H. Kilpatrick’s project method, the most publicized pedagogical innovation of American progressivism during the inter-­war years,” and “the centerpiece of curriculum revision during the 1930s” (1986, 190). For an in-­depth study of progressivism’s reception in Ontario, see Christou 2012. 22 See Pinar 2012, 198ff. 23 In Ann Arbor, Michigan, for instance, elementary schools were converted into “activity schools in which pupil experience rather than subject matter was emphasized. The transformation was led by Edith Baker, a progressive supervisor who had studied at Teachers College in the early 1920s… She believed in joint teacher-­pupil planning of the day’s activities. Under leadership, academic subjects were integrated, textbooks were eliminated, and even reading classes were discontinued for a time because reading was taught in ‘situations’ rather than in specific classes” (Ravitch 2000, 243). Ravitch also references Kilpatrick-­inspired progressive experiments in California and New York City (2000, 243, 249). At one point, Ravitch qualifies her critique: “When used by teachers who saw activities as a better way of teaching subject matter rather than as a way of avoiding it – as means to an end rather than ends in themselves – the activity program was valuable. But in the hands of teachers who lacked subject matter knowledge, the activities became ends in themselves” (2000, 244). For Kilpatrick, it was not either/or; for him working with and through the school subjects, educational activity could contribute to the formation of individuality. 24 In the early 1960s, the Deweyan theory of “education as experience” was “officially adopted in South Korea, and curriculum was defined as ‘all learning activities which students experience under the guide of the school.’ William Kilpatrick’s Project Method was introduced to teachers, and peer group problem solving was encouraged to meet students’ individual differences. However, curricular decisions were still made by the central government, and classes still focused on entrance examinations” (Lee 2003, 546). Here, we see the tension between progressive practice and standardized assessment, evident also in China (see Pinar 2014). 25 Zhang Hua, quoted in Pinar 2014, 14. The project method was “intended to serve Dewey’s social purpose by creating a school environment more nearly typical of life itself than that of the traditional curriculum.” (Tomkins, 1986, 190–191, emphasis added). Regarding his students at Teachers College, Taba (1962, 160) quotes Kilpatrick as insisting that “they learn what they live.” 26 For some enthusiasts, Kilpatrick focused on schools overmuch. Caroline Pratt (1926, 332), for instance – while acknowledging that “we seem to be working out a ‘project’ method, perhaps” – drew an “essential difference between our method and any project method with which I am familiar.” For her and her colleagues “it is a method which can be applied to adult social undertakings and is often applied to informal undertakings. It is a method of learning to live and work together” (Ibid.) 27 That is the date of publication, but Harold Rugg (1926, 99) claimed that the idea preceded Kilpatrick’s formulation of it: “In other words, the essential basis of the so-­called ‘educational project’ was in effective operation in the F. W. Parker School, as it was in the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, for years before the development of the systematic philosophy of the project method.” 28 Kilpatrick acknowledges that by 1918 traditional education had been replaced in some schools, including in child-­centered schools of which he was also critical: “Some in reaction [to traditional education] have resorted to the foolish humoring of childish whim. The contention of this paper is that wholehearted purposeful activity in a social situation as the typical unit of school procedure is the best guarantee of the utilization of the child’s native capacities now too frequently wasted” (1918, 18).

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29 1918, 18. 30 1918, 18. The concept of activity became associated with the project method, itself widely practiced and widely criticized, including by Kilpatrick’s student Hilda Taba (1962, 280): “Unfortunately, this principle of active learning was in practice often reduced to manipulative activity, such as making clay animals in connection with the farm unit, building a grocery store in connection with the grocery unit … Such ‘activity programs’ have often failed to produce any ‘doing’ except following directions and often have forgotten that one purpose of the ‘activities’ is to provide the conditions for reflective thought, and further, that reflective thought itself is active learning. Recently the principle of active learning has been restated under the term of learning by discovery.” Taba’s concern is audible in Gramsci’s critique of Fascist school reform; Gramsci argued – as McGlazer reminds – to “liberate the school from mechanism” prompted Fascists to fantasize a student who was in fact more passive and mechanical, not less, than the student in traditional schools: “The more the new curricula nominally affirm and theorize the pupil’s activity,” Gramsci complained, “the more they are actually designed as if the pupil were purely passive” (quoted in McGlazer 2020, 217 n. 95). 31 Probably he does not mean here narcissists (those who are self-­absorbed but not individuated), but he would include contemporary entrepreneurs who affirm “individualism” for the sake of social and economic exploitation. Kilpatrick (1930, 38) associated “selfish individualists” with the past, “the remnants of frontier individualism which left each man to shift for himself.” Being an individual requires relationships, a fact Kilpatrick does not emphasize in “The Project Method” but does so on other occasions. In his 1928 lecture at the University of North Carolina, for instance, he affirmed “we are in fact all members one of another” (1930, 94). Relationality acknowledged, Kilpatrick issued what he termed a “plea … for the creation and preservation of individuality. Such a conception of individuality as here used may be asserted either of a person or of a group (at the best it requires both together). Moreover, this individuality must be born of its relation to the environment” (1930, 11, 12). That “environment,” and the topic of his talk, was the American South. “The South,” Kilpatrick told his listeners, “must do justice to the Negro” (1930, 36). 32 Establishing causality not merely correlation remains a challenge in educational research, as it has in social science generally (for one example, see Young-­Bruehl 1996, 57ff.). The 15 April 1940 issue of Frontiers of Democracy (formerly The Social Frontier) featured an article by Harlem Renaissance figure and philosopher Alain Locke who called for “intercultural studies,” arguing that students needed a broader curriculum that would “promote tolerance, democracy, and humanity” (Watkins 2006, 224). Locke acknowledged, however: “The school, after all, cannot alone create democracy or be primarily responsible for it” (quoted in ibid.). (Locke is the central figure in my invocation of the Harlem Renaissance as an allegory of the present: Pinar 2019, 40ff.) The faith or aspiration or “scientific” expectation that teaching and/or curriculum can produce predictable (or even yearned for) consequences remains, as we see in Phelan’s demurral in the opening paragraph of this essay. 33 Evidently there were occasions – among some Indigenous peoples – when the project method functioned as a continuation of cultural practices, rather than their contradiction or reconstruction. In a 1944 article, Ruth Underhill declared that Papago children traditionally “learned through activity, in a system surprisingly like our modern project method” (quoted in Reyhner and Eder 2004, 223). A 1948 article on day school methods for Sioux students by the Indian Service’s associate supervisor of education, Gordon MacGregor, noted: “The project method is exceptionally well suited to educating the Dakota because it follows their own method of learning by doing and following the example of others. By bringing the children to

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52

participate and to share in the work and the responsibility for completion of a project, this method also reinforces the training for cooperative work already begun in the family” (quoted in Reyhner and Eder 2004, 223). Reyhner and Eder report that through the 1990s, the project method was “still recommended for Indian students” (2004, 224). 1918, 3. This is also key concept for William E. Doll, Jr. See Trueit 2012, 7. 1918, 4. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 1918, 321. (In the copy I purchased, the pagination skipped from 4 to 321, 322, 323.) Jay (2005, 95) reports that nineteenth-­century European Romantics “stressed the importance of something called Leben, or ‘life,’ against the mortifying implications of excessive rationation, impersonal legalism, and mechanical causality.” Does Kilpatrick’s invocation of “life” represent a trace of nineteenth-­century European Romanticism, even if animated by American determination to reconstruct self and society? 1918, 322. Ibid. Two modes of being Moeller and D’Ambrosio (2021) declare passé; see Chapter 14. 1918, 322. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Certainly, there have been those for whom an educational emphasis upon “experience” – “meant here both novel experimentation and learning valuable lessons from the past to be imaginatively applied to the future” (Jay, 2005, 266) – has been claimed as exceptionally American. Historians of the American Revolution, Jay notes, have documented how the rhetoric of “experience” animated the discourse of the Founding Fathers, quoting Patrick Henry: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging the future but by the past” (2005, 171). Jay also quotes the philosopher John J. McDermott, who characterized America a “culture of experience,” and he also cites John E. Smith, who claimed experience was “America’s philosophical vision” (2005, 266). Today, and not only in America, embodied lived experience – however nationally inflected – may be in danger of being erased by virtuality, by staring at screens (Pinar 2015a, 179–182). Sagely, Bruno-­Jofré and Johnston (2014, 8) question “the educational need” for “attention” to technology in teacher education. Indeed, the curricular “attention” I accord technology is primarily critical and historical, evident in Chapters 8–10. 1918, 323. On education as life Kilpatrick was in accord with Jane Addams whose method, Lasch (1965, xxvi) reminds, was “essentially autobiographical,” as (he continues) the “virtues” and “defects” of her work are those associated with writing from one’s experience. If “experience” is defined expansively – incorporating academic study, for example – experience is all one has, defects and virtues included. Kilpatrick’s affirmation of America was no expression of nationalism, at least if we accept his statement – made ten years later – that: “The spirit of nationalism … becomes … increasingly ill adapted to the needs of an interdependent world” (Kilpatrick 1930, 26). Not only ill-­adapted, nationalism – when regionalized in the American South – is poisonous, as Kilpatrick makes clear: “Fundamentalism”

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and “the Ku Klux movement” are “manifestations of excessive nationalism” (1930, 33). In his opposition to anti-­democratic forces, he was not – in contrast to George Counts – tempted to indoctrinate: “Democracy, to be itself, cannot indoctrinate even itself ” (Kilpatrick quoted in Perlstein 2000, 62). 53 On occasion, Kilpatrick references Thorndike (1918, 7) and uses stimulus-­response language (1918, 13) – contradictory conceptions for me, but one that Tomkins (1986, 190) manages to align: “The essence of the [project] method was the reorganization of the curriculum in to a succession of projects which, by emphasizing ‘purposeful activity’ consonant with the child’s own goals, would enhance learning through using Thorndike’s concept of positive reinforcement.” Harold Rugg (1926, 103) too seemed to see continuity not contradiction: “Professor Kilpatrick has exerted a widespread influence on the vitalizing of elementary-­school instruction… He has integrated into a systematic philosophy of educational method the essential ideas of biological evolution and of dynamic psychology as developed by James, Thorndike, Woodworth, and others.” Later, in his foreword to Hilda Taba’s The Dynamics of Education, he seems to shift his position. “The stimulus-­response conception is reinterpreted,” Kilpatrick (1932, xvi) writes, referring to what Taba achieves in her book, “so as to give it a still useful but distinctly subordinate position. Learning is conceived in far more useful fashion, relating it on the one hand to the essential purposiveness of conduct and on the other to an all-­pervasive structure building.” In that text, Taba (1932, 172, n. 1) suggests an even broader shift had occurred in his thought: “Dr. Kilpatrick has since modified his position on purposive learning considerably.” 54 1918, 7. 55 I have argued otherwise (perhaps most adamantly in 2012), as has Peter Taubman (2009, 191–192). 56 I acknowledge the genesis of my concept of “subjective reconstruction” in Progressive thought, but it does not remain there, as it is influenced by psychoanalysis, especially by variants formulated by the Frankfurt School. 57 1918, 12. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. Dewey emphasized that not all projects were equal and that the teachers’ professional judgment is crucial: “it is the business of the educator to study the tendencies of the young so as to be more consciously aware than are the children themselves what the latter need and want. Any other course transfers the responsibility of the teacher to those taught” (quoted in Ravitch 2000, 246). 60 “There is a strong drift in public education toward this project-­method of organization,” Bobbitt (1918, p. 30) records. He and Kilpatrick seem close when Bobbitt proclaims: “Knowing and doing should grow up together” (1918, 31). 61 1918, 13. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Or, as I phrase it, private passion is reconstructed into public service: Pinar 2009, 153, n. 11. 65 Success is not only indicated by the teacher removing herself – meaning, I suppose, that the children are self-­propelled, focused on their projects – but also by the duration of their interest. “In connection with this ‘maturing,’” Kilpatrick (1918, 15) explains, “goes a general increase in the interest span, the length of time during which a set will remain active, the time within which a child will – if allowed – work at any given project.” Both intensity and duration become indicators of success. The role of developmentalism in Kilpatrick’s thinking at this point isn’t obvious to me, as in the conclusion he asserts “that the child is naturally active, especially along social lines” (1918, 18), implying that his “procedure” is the glove that fits the

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hand, rather than presenting a challenge that will change children as they rise to the occasion. But, clearly, he has that possibility in mind too, as he adds (in that conclusion): “With the child naturally social and with the skillful teacher to stimulate and guide his purposing, we can especially expect that kind of learning we call character building” (Ibid.). 66 1918, 13. Given the distinction he draws elsewhere between “method” and “procedure,” it is interesting that he here characterizes the project method as a procedure. Well under way by 1918 was the (American) effort to conceptualize curriculum development as procedural, rendered later a “basic principle” by Ralph Tyler. It’s not clear to me in what sense the project method is procedural, given that for only one of the four types of projects Kilpatrick identifies does he specify steps. That type is “Type 1, where the purpose is to embody some idea or plan in external form, as building a boat, writing a letter, presenting a play” (1918, 16), and its protocol is: “purposing, planning, executing, and judging” (17). He concludes this list by advocating “that the child as far as possible takes each step himself ” (Ibid.). 67 K-­12 Inc. qualifies (Pinar 2013, 24–28). For the network of predators, see Spring 2012. 68 While not specifying these mediating and contextualizing elements, Kilpatrick (1918) would seem to agree: “The continual sharing of purposes in such a school offers ideal conditions for forming the necessary habits of give and take” (1918, 13). I would resist making “give-­and-­take” a habit, as that implies an automaticity that compulsory “collaboration” already aggravates. Purposefulness implies sometimes declining to “give-­and-­take,” but, instead, holding one’s ground, something Kilpatrick himself bravely did when he lectured on race in 1928 at the University of North Carolina. At one point, he accused the South of “mental sloth … moral cowardice, and intellectual dishonesty” (Kilpatrick 1930, 32). 69 My mentor in graduate school– Paul R. Klohr – remains influential for me, as does Donald R. Bateman (Pinar 2015b). 70 There have been other intellectually influential relationships in my life – certainly my relationship with Madeleine Grumet, to whom I’ve dedicated this book – but none was as imprinting as Klohr’s (Pinar 2015a, 4). “Under the proper guidance,” Kilpatrick (1918) allows, “purpose means efficiency, not only in reaching the projected end of the activity immediately at hand, but even more in securing from the activity the learning which it potentially contains” (p. 18). Notice that Kilpatrick detaches “learning” from the “activity” itself, a move I worry supports the separation of skill from knowledge, a move Rocha (2020, 96 too seems to make: “Skills refer to the general abilities that come from philosophy and the humanities: how to write clearly, how to think logically, how to construct arguments that follow, how to read closely and directly, how to anticipate objections, how to talk about and dispute ideas with generosity and wit. This outcome strikes me as being more important than the previous outcome [learning content], especially since it more widely applicable.” Once skill is totally detached from knowledge, we have the world Williamson (2013, 108) foresees, a “future” wherein teachers and knowledge are supplanted by “a DIY self-­driven culture, learning becomes endless, lifelong, and lifewide across the entire life cycle, as individuals seek out new experiences and hence more learning. Learning is repositioned by digital media culture as a lifestyle choice rather than an institutionalized process of schooling.” 71 1918, 17–18. 72 1918, 18. 73 “Let us cease,” Kilpatrick (1930, 108) pleads, “to think of education as acquiring subject-­matter, with examinations as the goal and test of the process.” Later, he laments “that the scientific development of tests and measures has so largely tended to maintain the traditional and unsatisfactory types of objectives” (1930, 113). It is

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74

75 76 77 78

79 80 81

82 83

84 85

long-­past time to abandon “objectives” altogether. The curriculum question – what knowledge is of most worth? – should suffice to start and redirect the complicated conversation that is the curriculum. During the project “Curriculum Studies in China” (see Pinar 2014) there were numerous acknowledgments that standardized examinations undermine, if not block altogether, China’s curriculum reform. A similar tension between experimentation and examination obtains in Canada: “Canadian educators are now witnessing a generation of education reform,” Phelan (2015, 155) observes, “that calls for seemingly more progressive approaches to teaching and learning (e.g. Ontario’s full-­day Kindergarten (FDK) and Open Minds, Healthy Minds (OMHM) policies and British Columbia’s Education Plan) yet retains previous commitments to accountability and high student achievement.” 1918, 18. In whatever form it has taken, education has not spared humanity from being “hoodwinked … by politicians.” 1918, 17. Ibid. 1930, 107. In this he sounds similar to Gramsci’s vision for Latin (see Preface). He also sounds similar to Herbert Spencer (1884, 45–46) who, while complaining that the school curriculum does not prepare children to become parents, casts books not instrumentally (as Kilpatrick does in this sentence) but almost as substitutes: “Not recognizing the truth that the function of books is supplementary – that they form an indirect means to knowledge when direct means fail – means of seeing through other men what you cannot see for yourself; they [parents] are eager to give second-­ hand facts in place of first-­hand facts.” For both men, books seem supplementary. Ibid. Cremin 1961, 220. Cremin is writing after a decade of backlash against Progressive education (for a summary, see Pinar 2019, 54–57). Tomkins (1986, 190) tells the same tale: “Although Kilpatrick’s emphasis on educative intellectual and moral experiences, which was designed to develop character in the interests of group welfare, was fully consistent with Dewey’s philosophy, his excessively child-­centered stance and his denigration of extrinsic ‘fixed in advance’ subject matter put him at odds with the great philosopher.” Kridel and Bullough 2007, 30. There is an endnote following the claim, but the references seem general, not specific in support of their allegation. Even the great curriculum theorist Dwayne E. Huebner (1999, 250) feels no obligation to offer evidence or argument when it comes to this issue, assuming that readers will agree that Kilpatrick was guilty of “romanticizing the child.” It should be clear from my copious quotation of Kilpatrick that he was determined to shape the child through activity into what he or she was not: an individual. There is no romanticizing the child in that conception. On the contrary, it seems a secular version of Christianity’s proclamation of original sin and salvation through good works. 1991 504. 1991, 505. So Ravitch (2000, 182) is not wrong but she still exaggerates the differences between Kilpatrick and Dewey when she insists that for Dewey “projects and activities were devised to achieve a curricular purpose.” As Westbrook notes, mastery of subject matter was one but not the only purpose of projects. Taba (1932, 253–254) cautioned “proponents of the child-­centered school and of the project method … that by tearing down the structure of segregated subjects and by reorganizing educative experience around the units of work or centers of interest, learning is not necessarily made dynamic, in the sense that all that is learned becomes effective in the conduct of the learner and can be put to use in further learning.” Not the mastery of the school subjects but continued growth was criterion by which Taba judged the success of projects.

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86 1930, 12. 87 See Pinar et al. 1995, 377–378. 88 1930, 16. 89 Ibid. 90 Pinar 2012, 46. “Harmony is first a work from within,” Wang (2021, 108) writes, “so I discuss the self–self relationship to examine the Daoist personal cultivation of inner peace as the bridge to achieving outer peace, and then discuss peacebuilding in society.” (See also Wang 2014.) Wang (2021, 164) acknowledges that “currere contributes to subjective and intersubjective transformation.” 91 If one’s subjective coherence includes racism, then self-­shattering must follow: see Pinar 2006, 183. 92 3 Latent content too, as is repressed or forgotten material – “lost language” (Pinar 1994, 253) – hence the necessity of regression in the method of currere. 93 “The new prestige of science,” Jay (2005, 40) recounts, “also meant jettisoning Montaigne’s preoccupation with introspection and self-­discovery; to be worthy taking seriously, experience had to be public, replicable, and verified by objective instruments.” 94 1930, 70. Rocha (2020, 186) is just wrong when he writes: “The inward turn of education is personal but never individualistic. All for all.” If all there is, is “all,” who is Sam Rocha? Whom or what am I quoting? In order to think and act collectively one must become an individual – as Kilpatrick knew – not personalize everything: that is narcissism. 95 The canonical reference here is Noddings 1992; see also Jung 2015. 96 1930, 93. 97 See Pinar 2012, 207ff. 98 See Perlstein 2000; Pinar et al. 1995, 126. Soon after Counts issued his challenge, Kilpatrick analyzed “the social crisis” by comparing the capitalism to classrooms that “stressed extrinsic motives and individual successes” (Ravitch 2000, 223). In contrast, in progressive classrooms children would work because education was satisfying. Calling for a new society with a new philosophy of life, Ravitch overstates – sensationalizes might be the more precise predicate – Kilpatrick’s commitment to life inquiry through the reorganization of school subjects, declaring that Kilpatrick believed that the “first step in building a new society would be to get rid of academic subjects and use the schools to analyze life’s problems” (2000, 224). 99 1930, 95. 100 Ibid. 101 1930, 113. 102 Ibid. 103 This conception resonates within German traditions with which Kilpatrick would have been familiar: “Bildung is understood as a qualification for reasonable self-­ determination, which presupposes and includes emancipation from determination by others. It is a qualification for autonomy, for freedom for individual thought, and for individual moral decisions. Precisely because of this, creative self-­activity is the central form in which the process of Bildung is carried out” (Klafki, 2000, 87). Can we associate this conception of “self-­activity” with Kilpatrick’s? Certainly, he viewed “projects” as “creative self-­activity.” Phelan also references Bildung (see 2015, 85). 104 There are gendered legacies and expectations at play here – specifically, culturally ingrained demands for nurturance – demands teachers of all genders must confront and, in situationally specific ways, enact, but which are embedded in life-­long commitments to cultivate – in part through caring (see Jung 2016) – one’s subjective formation as a teacher, as a person (see Miller, 2005, 74–75), and as a citizen (Phelan, 2015, 155).

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105 1930, 116. The starting point of curriculum construction for Kilpatrick “was to learn what children were interested in and know how to stimulate these interests,” not with “subject matter selected in advance” (Ravitch 2000, 181). The centrality of subject matter in curriculum does distinguish Kilpatrick from Dewey, as noted earlier. 106 1930, 116. 107 1930, 118. 108 2015, 31. 109 Pinar 2015b, 11–24. 110 See Dinshaw 2012, 183, n. 129. 111 2015, 155. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 1930, 101.

Bibliography Berardi, Franco. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e). Bobbitt, Franklin. 1918. The Curriculum. Houghton Mifflin. Bruno-­ Jofré, Rosa and Cole, Josh. 2014. To Serve and Yet Be Free: Historical Configurations and the Intersections of Faculties of Education in Ontario. In Teacher Education in a Transnational World, edited by Rosa Bruno-­Jofré and James Scott Johnson (71–95). University of Toronto Press. Bruno-­Jofré, Rosa and Johnston, James Scott. Eds. 2014. Teacher Education in a Transnational World. University of Toronto Press. Butler, Judith. 2017. Arendt: Thinking Cohabitation and the Dispersion of Sovereignty. In Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis, edited by George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek (220–238). Duke University Press. Christou, Theodore Michael. 2012. Progressive Education: Revisioning and Reframing Ontario’s Public Schools, 1919-­1942. University of Toronto Press. Cremin, Lawrence A. 1961. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-­1957. Alfred A. Knopf. Dinshaw, Carolyn. 2012. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Duke University Press. Hirsch, Jr., E. D. 1999. The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them. Anchor Books. Huebner, Dwayne E. 1999. The Lure of the Transcendent. Lawrence Erlbaum. Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. University of California Press. Jung, Jung-­Hoon. 2016. The Concept of Care in Curriculum Studies. Routledge. Kilpatrick, William Heard. 1918. The Project Method. Teachers College Record, 19(4), 319–335. [Pages are missing from the Bulletin and there are, in their place, photocopied pages from the original TC Record article. Citations to pages 321, 322, and 323 refer to the original article.] Kilpatrick, William Heard. 1930. Our Educational Task: As Illustrated in the Changing South. University of North Carolina Press. Kilpatrick, William Heard. 1932. Foreword. In The Dynamics of Education by Hilda Taba (xi–xvi). Harcourt, Brace and Company. Klafki, Wolfgang. 2000. The Significance of Classical Theories of Bildung for a

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Contemporary Concept of Allgemeinbildung. In Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition, edited by Ian Westbury, Stefan Hopmann, and Kurt Riquarts (85–107). Lawrence Erlbaum. Kliebard, Herbert M. 1986. The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-­ 1958. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kridel, Craig and Bullough, Jr., Robert V. 2007. Stories of the Eight-­Year Study: Reexamining Secondary Education in America. Foreword by John I. Goodlad. State University of New York Press. Labaree, David F. 2004. The Trouble with Ed Schools. Yale University Press. Lasch, Christopher. 1965. Ed. The Social Thought of Jane Addams. Bobbs Merrill. Lee, Yong Whan. 2003. Politics and Theories in the History of Curricular Reform in South Korea. In The International Handbook of Curriculum Research, edited by William F. Pinar (541–552). Lawrence Erlbaum. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press. Miller, Janet L. 2005. The Sounds of Silence Breaking and Other Essays: Working the Tension in Curriculum Theory. Peter Lang. Moeller, Hans-­Georg and D’Ambrosio, Paul J. 2021. You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. Columbia University Press. Noddings, Nel. 1992. The Challenge to Care in Schools. Teachers College Press. Perlstein, Daniel. 2000. ‘There Is No Escape … from the Ogre of Indoctrination’: George Counts and the Civic Dilemmas of Democratic Educators. In Reconstructing the Common Good in Education: Coping with Intractable Dilemmas, edited by Larry Cuban and Dorothy Shipps (51–67). Stanford University Press. Phelan, Anne. 2015. Curriculum Theorizing and Teacher Education: Complicating Conjunctions. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 1994. Autobiography, Politics and Sexuality. Essays in Curriculum Theory 1972-­1992. Peter Lang. Pinar, William F. 2006. Race, Religion and a Curriculum of Reparation. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2009. The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate Lives in Public Service. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2012. What Is Curriculum Theory? (2nd edition). Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2013. Curriculum Studies in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. Ed. 2014. Curriculum Studies in China. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2015a. Without Experience Is Teacher Development Possible? In Autobiography and Teacher Development in China: Subjectivity and Culture in Curriculum Reform, edited by Zhang Hua and William F. Pinar (179–192). Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2015b. Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019. What Is Curriculum Theory? (3rd edition). Routledge. Pinar, William F., Reynolds, William M., Slattery, Patrick, and Taubman, Peter M. 1995. Understanding Curriculum. Peter Lang. Pratt, Caroline. 1926. Curriculum-­Making in the City and Country School. In The Twenty-­Sixth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. The Foundations and Technique of Curriculum-­Construction. Part I: Curriculum-­Making: Past and Present, edited by Guy Montrose Whipple (327–332). Public School Publishing Company. Ravitch, Dianne. 2000. Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. Simon and Schuster.

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Reyhner, Jon and Eder, Jeanne. 2004. American Indian Education: A History. University of Oklahoma Press. Rocha, Samuel D. 2020. The Syllabus as Curriculum: A Reconceptualist Approach. Routledge. Rugg, Harold. 1926. Curriculum-­Making in Laboratory Schools. In The Twenty-­Sixth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. The Foundations and Technique of Curriculum-­Construction. Part I: Curriculum-­Making: Past and Present, edited by Guy Montrose Whipple (83–112). Public School Publishing Company. Spencer, Herbert. 1884. What Knowledge Is Of Most Worth? J.B. Alden. Spring, Joel. 2006. Pedagogies of Globalization: The Rise of the Educational Security State. Lawrence Erlbaum. Spring, Joel. 2012. Education Networks: Power, Wealth, Cyberspace, and the Digital Mind. Routledge. Taba, Hilda. 1932. The Dynamics of Education. A Methodology of Progressive Educational Thought. Foreword by William Heard Kilpatrick. Harcourt, Brace and Company. Taba, Hilda. 1962. Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Taubman, Peter M. 2009. Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education Routledge. Tomkins, George S. 1986. A Common Countenance: Stability and Change in the Canadian Curriculum. Prentice-­Hall. Trueit, Donna. Ed. 2012. Pragmatism, Postmodernism, Complexity Theory: The Fascinating Imaginative Realm of William E. Doll, Jr. Routledge. Wang, Hongyu. 2014. Nonviolence and Education: Cross-­Cultural Pathways. Routledge. Wang, Hongyu. 2021. Contemporary Daoism, Organic Relationality, and Curriculum of Integrative Creativity. Information Age Publishing. Watkins, William H. 2006. Social Reconstruction in Education: Searching out Black Voices. In Social Reconstruction: People, Politics, Perspectives, edited by Karen L. Riley (211–233). Information Age Publishing. Westbrook, Robert. 1991. John Dewey and American Philosophy. Cornell University Press. Williamson, Ben. 2013. The Future of the Curriculum: School knowledge in the Digital Age. MIT Press. Young-­Bruehl, Elisabeth. 1996. The Anatomy of Prejudices. Harvard University Press.

5 AUTHORITY1

“What is it to lead?” Ted Aoki asks.2 Educational leadership involves (even as it cannot be reduced to) the exercise of authority3 (not only institutionally conferred) to enlist faculty and students in realizing educational objectives, often institutionally conceived and now almost everywhere quantified. This profound depersonalization of education does not eradicate the personal character of curriculum conceived as complicated conversation, the leadership of which is enacted not only by policymakers and administrators but also by parents, students, and, especially, teachers.4 Such “complicating conjunctions”5 of curriculum and leadership acknowledges educational processes of recognition, summoning, Bildsamkeit6, as Michael Uljens and Rose Ylimaki underscore.7 These occur within relationships to authority8 and its exercise educationally. Ted Aoki’s insight that one instance of an education leader – the “principal”9 – once meant principal teacher, reminding us that authority can be exercised pedagogically. So understood, the exercise of authority becomes the ongoing opportunity to engage colleagues in complicated conversation that renders experience within professional relationships educational.10

Relationships I emphasize relationships because moving curriculum online threatens to destroy11 them, not only students’ relationships with teachers, parents, and other significant others, but students’ relationships among and to themselves, as well as to what they study, and how they work. Relationships are forever fragile; they occur over time rest (relative) trust and intimacy. They are structured according to circumstances: time, place, and point (pedagogical, professional, erotic) constitute “circumstance” but also does each participant’s relationship history DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-5

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(including the history of the specific relationship itself), one’s private situations and states of mind, themselves not unrelated to school climate, curriculum content, and teachers’ conduct. Relationships are specific to those engaged in them, and they shift in scale and significance according to the specificities of situations and the singularities of those involved. Today there is much emphasis on relationality – Sam Rocha terms it “irreducible”12 – but too often it remains an abstraction to which we pledge allegiance, not a concrete reality structuring our lives. To appreciate the specificity of relationality we might study autobiographically the history of our relationships, with school subjects, with ideas, with teachers and others in authority, with ourselves.13 Over the twentieth century, not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world, predominant forms of “professionalism” seem to have stripped the personal14 from student–teacher relationships, rendering them almost anonymous, even when cordial. Intimacy has become suspect, due more to rare if sensationalized abuses of authority – such as pedophilia – than to fears of the corruption of assessment.15 Even when stripped of specificity, the relational bond between teacher and student can be emotionally charged, even exploited.16 Students too have been stripped – sometimes strip themselves – of singularity, no longer acting as students but as customers or clients, e.g. schooling as shopping.17 For teachers and students, anonymity may be requested, even required, but to preclude the formation of relationship – especially when requested or advised – seems, well, unprofessional, as it would be easy to assemble anecdotal evidence for the significance of teachers and other educational leaders in students’ lives.18 There can be imprinting qualities to especially early relationships.19 Such imprinting portends – if unpredictably – forms of relationships later. The work of political theorist Nancy Luxon – focused on Freud and Foucault – suggests as much.20 Referencing psychoanalysis – wherein intimacy is encouraged by the authority of the analyst and the dependency of the patient – Luxon is interested how in the “repeated recurrence” of “rupture” and “repair” within the “transference” relationship21 “prepares” persons for the complexities of relationships in “other domains of activity.”22 Those “other domains of activity” include public domains, and Luxon is suggesting that, as in psychoanalysis, political life – I add educational life – is structured personally.23 “Political theorists,” she judges, “missed the turn to ‘relationships’ among practicing psychoanalysts to orient a self-­formation over-­determined neither by trauma nor dominant social conventions.”24 These three categories of formation – relationship, trauma and convention – are intertwined. Within object relations theories – those summarized and extended by Nancy Chodorow25 and Jessica Benjamin,26 for instance – the internalization of those early life relationships becomes refracted through gender and race, two structuring forms of possible “trauma” and decidedly “dominant social conventions” that Luxon references. Structuring yes, but sources too for “subjective and social reconstruction,”27 within relationships, including within oneself as well as

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with others. “Uniquely,” Luxon writes, emphasizing the point, “psychoanalysis privileges the relationship, not the roles, of analyst and patient.”28 Privileging relationship over roles seems prescient for a professionalism to be structured, in part, by relationality, wherein institutional roles inform but do not definitively define relationships, including within the exercise of authority. Not only in psychotherapy do such personal relationships of authority and dependency –and their ongoing renegotiation29 through complicated conversation – matter. Family life can underline how “dominant social conventions” and even “trauma” can be the beginning, not the end, of the story. How parents and other caregivers, including teachers (including the “principal teachers” upon whom institutional authority has been conferred), bond with children matters to their formation as persons, students, and as citizens. Political and cultural conservatives have emphasized “character,”30 but such platitudes depersonalize relationships as they overestimate predictability. Character is no template to be installed; it is to be threaded through the specificities of relationship, study, and circumstance, including the affective as well as material conditions that prevail at home, school, and society.31 For children character becomes constituted within the accumulation of experience.32 Through its reconstruction one can convert private passion into public service.33 Luxon emphasizes this point: The attention to relationships, however, signals that for all that our ethical institutions rely on individual responsibility in different ways, they further contain an expressive dimension – one that touches on courage, generosity, solidarity, among other qualities – inseparable from commitment to public context.34 Specifically, Luxon points to the “culturally salient figures of psychoanalyst and truth-­teller” – I would add teachers – as the “nodal points” that “bind self-­and political governance.”35 These scales of governance are not the opposite ends of a spectrum, but subjectively intersecting, as Foucault notes: “There is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself.”36 Like many of Foucault’s ideas, this one is ancient, reminiscent of MacIntyre’s reminder that “Aquinas says that we only learn adequately when we are on the way to becoming self-­teachers.”37 Such a pedagogical mode of self–self relationality reminds us that experience becomes educational only when we manage to learn from it. One studies and learns not necessarily to realize one’s potential – at least when that potential is construed only as human capital38 – but for the sake of self-­formation that the process of study itself supports: an openness to alterity that grappling with whom and what one does not know or understand can encourage. Ethical self-­formation39 may not be predictably related to specified structures of pedagogical relations, but even the suggestion of a reciprocal relationship resonates with traditions of liberal learning in the United States, as Michael

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Roth makes clear. A “liberal” education has been considered “liberating,” Roth reminds, because it both requires “freedom to study” and aspires to “freedom through understanding.”40 In that sense, liberal education is also “useful,” he suggests, as the “free pursuit of knowledge” encourages the formation of “free citizens.”41 Historically at least, the emphasis upon utility has been less intense in Canada, but similar ideas have been in play, as George Tomkins documents.42 “Nobody is capable of free speech,” Northrop Frye believed, “unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at.”43 While “free speech is cultivated speech … cultivating speech is not just a skill,” Frye emphasized: “You can’t cultivate speech, beyond a certain point, unless you have something to say, and the basis of what you have to say is your vision of society.”44 Reciprocity is implied in Frye’s pronouncement, relationship between the personal and the public, between self and society.45 Frye’s “subject” was “the educated imagination.”46 Accordingly, he emphasized education as “something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn’t just train the mind: it’s a social and moral development too.”47 Not only in North America but also in North Europe do these definitions circulate (if differently), as Michael Uljens and Rose Ylimaki reference.48 Gert Biesta traces self-­formation to southern Europe, to ancient Athens and Rome, defining Bildung as “the cultivation of the inner life, that is, of the human soul, the human mind and the human person; or, to be more precise, the person’s humanity.”49 Contrary to twentieth-­century Progressivism, “content” was key, as it was constitutive of the process.50 In the vernacular one might say you are what you know. Since Herder and Humboldt, Biesta asserts, “Bildung has always also been self-­Bildung.”51 That may be so, but “always” took different forms in different historical eras.52 In our time, potential tethered to employability threatens to end any such education, except as a form of self-­exploitation.53 In such circumstances what forms can the exercise of authority take?

Parrhesia “Simply,” Nancy Luxon explains, “parrhesia is frank speech irreducible to power or interest.”54 While a form of truth telling, such speech is not necessarily equivalent to truth,55 nor is it independent of time, place, and relationship. While no panacea, parrhesia might provide a passage through the present. For Freud in fin-­de-­siècle Vienna, Luxon notes, parrhesia encouraged the cultivation of interpretative skills that might stabilize patients facing psychic “disintegration”; for Foucault almost one hundred later in Paris, its “potential” was the contrary: disrupting an “over-­ stabilized self.”56 The “link,” Luxon suggests, is “their insight that self-­formation results from a confrontation with authority, under certain conditions, even as this confrontation simultaneously negotiates and rewrites the terms of authority.”57 Parrhesia is communication that can reconstruct the circumstances in which it occurs: complicated conversation in service to subjective and social reconstruction.

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The emphasis on what Luxon characterizes as the “irreducible relationality of parrhesia” enables her to posit that people can be “subordinated subjects” and “yet nonetheless become authorial agents of change.”58 It is within networks of relationality – including relations of subordination – that one, through truth telling (even if only to oneself), participates in subjective and social reconstruction, even through institutional reorganization.59 For Luxon, the point is that the cultivation of “liberty” occurs within “personal relationship to authority.”60 No doubt she would also acknowledge that anonymous authority depersonalizes; intense or extreme personal authority can crush. One prerequisite of leadership, then, is an institutionally encouraged willingness to work through in relationship the educational situation one faces. For Luxon “risk” – intensified in situations of unequal power – can become articulated as engaging with a specific “authoritative interpretation” rather than resisting “all authority,” suggesting how the “broader relations of political hierarchy” could “come to be re-­interpreted, challenged, and exploded from within.”61 Those “broader relations” can also be reconstructed, I add, even when apparently accepted, through acts of dissimulation and intransigence Luxon does not here allow. For Foucault, Luxon points out, parrhesia implies both a kind of “speech” and a “set of practices,”62 not mutually excluding categories I should think. For Foucault, Luxon continues, parrhesia “encompasses a broader set of personalized ethical practices that finish by constructing relationships to oneself, to authority, and to truth.”63 Crucially, she concludes, parrhesia “aims at truthfulness rather than at persuasion or entertainment.”64 The relationship is not only or even primarily about itself, but about the truth of the educational situation in which the relationship is embedded. Truth is, in part, what in curriculum studies we have characterized (too often dismissively) as “content.” In Luxon’s reading, Foucault associates the practices of parrhesia with “context” and “manner of speech, rather than in the matter, or content of that speech.”65 Surely content is as least as important as context and manner, a point driven home by the civil rights patina of No Child Left Behind.66 Of course context and manner matter, but so do the facts.67 As style and substance, parrhesia is a medium of subjective and social reconstruction that, as Luxon notes, an “obligation one bears to oneself, absent any reinforcement from political context; while parrhesia can occur in a democracy, in a monarchy, or in a dictatorship, it cannot be compelled.”68 Monarchies and dictatorships are surely more restrictive than many – maybe not all, especially in this age of accountability and surveillance – schools, a point of comparison that could discourage teachers and other educational leaders from claiming institutional climate as disabling parrhesia altogether. In authoritarian regimes, intransigence relocates parrhesia to the private sphere where private plotting replaces public planning. Luxon’s final point in the quoted passage above – that parrhesia cannot be compelled – acknowledges agency. For parrhesia to be experienced subjectively as ethical obligation implies a wedding of relationships. Let’s call it a commitment

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ceremony that becomes public however private its history, invisible its participants, and singular its subjective formation. Whoever, wherever, and whatever comprises the present circumstances in which one works, fidelity69 to those no longer physical present informs – indeed may structure – one’s engagement in the present, including those persons occupying it. Autobiography provides one means to issue invitations, register who is present, what vows are made, and how they might be honored. While one is wedded to others, fidelity is finally personal. The “ethical” obligation of parrhesia,” Luxon acknowledges, “draws on the speaker’s capacities to bear alone the burden of speaking truthfully.”70 Such subjective coherence71 is prerequisite for the struggle – social and subjective – that speaking frankly can entail, “life lived in relation to truth,” as Luxon summarizes the matter.72 It is truth constantly uncovered, critiqued, and reasserted, truth “underwritten by relations of care,”73 care for others and oneself through care for truthfulness.74 While relations of care can structure speech within classrooms and with colleagues, including figures of authority, it also inspires engagement with persons no longer present, with ideas past as well as present, and with oneself. Noting that the practices of parrhesia enable us to rethink conceptions of “free speech,” “democratic contestation, and “rhetorical persuasion,” Luxon points out that “these” are not the practices Foucault invokes.75 Rather, she continues, Foucault’s parrhesia “schools” one to recast “these practices from within.”76 Working from within77 implies, as Luxon appreciates, that “freedom” is to be “exercised rather than attained.”78 Such exercise is less in the service of getting it right as much as it is, Luxon notes, about the “shakiness” accompanying efforts to “orient” and “steady oneself ” within relationships with “oneself, to others, and to truth-­telling.”79 For parrhesia to inspire “ethical self-­governance,” Luxon continues, its “practices” must contribute to the formation of “coherent subjects,” without “objectifying the individual into a ‘body of knowledge’,” or, I might add, a “role-­defined” professional.80 Roles are contractually specified, but learning and leadership are personal.

Conclusion Relying on Luxon’s linking of Freud and Foucault, I have worked to “rethink” the relationships between “ethical self-­governance” and “political governance” as threaded through “personal relationships.”81 The scale, intensity, and intimacy of such relationships alter according to time, place, and circumstance, but in each instance affect is acknowledged, singularity affirmed while privacy is to be protected. Working through the complicated conversation of classrooms – saturated as such conversation is with class, culture, and the unconscious82 – requires personal enactments of expressivity, parrhesia, tempered by professional discretion and animated by psychological courage. By situating individuals within relationships, Luxon reminds, Foucault made relationships the domain of “ethical experience,” provoking “action” as they provide “structural constancy” supporting “stable ethical norms binding one

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individual to another.”83 Indeed, she adds the “dynamics” of specific “personal relationships” can “educate individuals to the arts of ruling and being ruled.”84 These terms –“ruling” and “being ruled” – may seem overstatements in schools in democratic societies, but such words are also unadorned instances of parrhesia, frank speech that, recontextualized within discussion of leadership, spells out the subjugation educators risk when leadership is reduced to administration or management.85 In our era of compulsory collaboration, leadership practiced instrumentally in the service of implementation can become an Orwellian dissimulation of enforcement. Exercising authority transparently, within acknowledged relationships, relationships with histories and characterized by candor, committed to truth telling, enables “principal teachers” to demonstrate leadership as itself seeking the truth of the present situation. Seeking and articulating what is found affirms the relationships through which ethical governance – of oneself with others – can recast those patterns of professionalism our predecessors have produced and that we might summon the courage to reconstruct.

Notes 1 In Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik, edited by Michael Uljens and Rose Ylimaki (395–408). Gewerbestrasse, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG, 2017. Reprinted with permission. Revised: 2021. 2 2005 (1987), 350. 3 An important topic in curriculum studies with which the legendary feminist curriculum theorist Joanne Pagano (1988) wrestled. 4 “[U] derstanding educational leadership [i]s a multi-­level project,” Michael Uljens and Rose Ylimaki (2015, 2) acknowledge. 5 As Anne Phelan (2015) subtitles her important study of curriculum theorizing and teacher education. 6 While in English the term – defined as plasticity or malleability – implies liability to undue influence, Roth (2014, 168) opposes the two: “Conformity is the enemy of learning because in order to conform you restrict our capacity for experience; you constrict our plasticity.” What Roth is terming plasticity I would characterize as self-­ directed reconstruction, the phrase underscoring one’s capacity – often associated with the concept of agency – to remake what others have made. Such movement – from being imprinted by significant others (persons, ideas, events) to subjective and social reconstruction through academic study – constitutes the process of education. 7 See Uljens and Ylimaki (2015). 8 “I’ve often wondered about where authority comes from,” Cusk’s (2021, 113) character admits, “whether it’s the result of knowledge or character – whether, in other words, it can be learned. People know it when they see it, yet they still might not be able to say exactly what it’s composed of or how it operates.” She adds: “Only tyrants want power for its own sake, and parenthood is the closest most people get to an opportunity for tyranny” (ibid.). 9 “A principal of a school at one time,” Aoki (2005a [1987], 350) reminds, “was understood as the principal teacher, a leading teacher. In this sense, the principal was a specially recognized teacher, but first and foremost, a teacher. How the word ‘principal’ became detached and turned into a noun is a bit of a mystery. But we can see how the separation was a prelude to the linking of ‘principal’ to ‘administration,’ a term au courant in the world of business.” Here Aoki was referencing the managerial discourse

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that continues to influence educational leadership, a discourse that depersonalizes teaching by reducing it to its organizational functions. 10 “As is often the case,” Chee (2018, 174) admits, “I was teaching what I also needed to learn.” 11 In addition to replacing face-­ to-­ face embodied encounters, moving curriculum online can destroy relationships by failing to protect students’ privacy. There are “widespread lapses in student data protection across the education technology sector,” Singer (2015, B7) reports. “Insecure learning sites, apps and messaging services could potentially expose students, many of them under 13, to hacking, identity theft, cyber-­ bullying by their peers, or even unwanted contact from strangers,” Singer (2015, B7) warns. 12 Not only do “we arrive, at birth, in relationship, covered in blood,” Rocha (2015, 100) writes, but subjective singularity is always already a multiplicity: “the human person is a public onto herself, from womb to tomb.” 13 Almost fifty years ago Madeleine Grumet and I (2015 [1976]) argued for making curriculum technologically “poor” in order to forefront subjective presence and thus experience from which one could learn, e.g. that could be educational. 14 “The classroom,” Bryant Keith Alexander (2005, 251) points out, “is a space in which the personal is magnified, not diminished.” 15 The fear of teacher bias in grading has been replaced by fears – justified on occasion – that teachers may alter results on standardized tests. Among the most infamous instances of this corruption of assessment occurred in Atlanta. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or Fair Test, Fausset (2014, A19) reported, announced that manipulating scores of standardized tests has occurred in “at least” 39 states and Washington, D.C. “Unfortunately, Atlanta is just the tip of a test cheating iceberg,” the organization’s public education director, Bob Schaeffer, said in a statement (quoted in Fausset 2014, A19). For additional details regarding the scandal in Atlanta, see Severson and Blinder (2014, A9); Blinder (2015, April 2, A12). 16 “Manage” is the verb Labaree (2004, 12) uses, but the distinction is lost on me, as his specification of using an “effective” and “authentic teaching persona” to “manage” a “complex and demanding emotional relationship” ridicules both concepts: “relationship” and “authentic.” 17 On this point I am able to cite Labaree appreciatively. “An even bigger problem with the market-­based economic solution to the organizational problems in American education,” Labaree (2004, 121) notes, “is that it is radically antisocial. By making education entirely subject to the demands of the individual consumer, it leaves no one looking out for the public interest in public education.” 18 I am excluding correlational studies of teachers and student test scores, less a matter of relationship than of outright manipulation and misrepresentation. See Pinar (2013, 17) for an egregious instance of correlation misrepresented as causality. 19 Relationships can be imprinting in negative ways of course. Beginning in 2002, two economists – Victor Lavy of the University of Warwick in England and Edith Sand of Tel Aviv University in Israel – studied three groups of Israeli students from sixth grade through high school, concluding that in math and science their teachers “overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls’, and that this had long-­term effects on students’ attitudes toward the subjects” (Miller 2015, A10). Ignoring the small and very specific sample size, ignoring how such a variable (such as “estimating”) could conceivably function independently of other variables (such as home, religion, class, culture, gender), ignoring their confusion of correlation with causality, Lavy assured the reporter that “similar research had been conducted in several European countries and that he expected the results were applicable to the United States” (Miller 2015, A10). I am thinking of “imprinting” in more subtle and individualistic senses, as psychoanalytic practice demonstrates.

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20 Efforts to link early experience with later forms of public conduct – from political dispositions to forms of prejudice – have failed to provide definitive empirical evidence. Dewey, for instance, abandoned his faith that public-­school classrooms could be laboratories of democracy. “By the eve of World War I,” Robert Westbrook (1991, 192) reminds, “Dewey was more fully aware that the democratic reconstruction of American society he envisioned could not take place simply by a revolution in the classroom, that, indeed, the revolution in the classroom could not take place until the society’s adults had been won over to radical democracy.” Thirty years later imprinting became focused on prejudice, first on anti-­Semitism (after the Holocaust) and soon, in the United States, on what was termed racial prejudice. “Attributing prejudice to social learning or mislearning makes it seem a superficial matter,” Young-­Bruehl (1996, 12–13) points out, “spread across all cultures in somewhat the same way that perceptual illusion and historical misinformation are. It normalizes prejudice. The obvious next step is to conclude that proper education can eliminate prejudice and that tolerance can be taught. Just say no to prejudice. Just say yes to the historically victimized. Or, as many social scientists said – ‘let them all learn social science!’ This hope epitomizes the confident ‘just fix it!’ attitude of many American educators since the 1950s. The attitude has been able to perpetuate itself because it has dictated the instruments for measuring prejudice – the statistically analyzable questionnaire and the opinion poll – and for judging the results of educational programs.” 21 The transference, Sarup (1992, 9) explains, “poses a problem for the analyst, since such repetition or ritual re-­enactment of the original conflict is one of the patient’s unconscious ways of avoiding having to come to terms with it. We repeat, sometimes compulsively, what we cannot properly remember.” 22 2013, 126. 23 Freud, Luxon (2013, 128) reminds, noted that one’s “first experience with authority is a personal, and not obviously political, one.” It was Freud who explained how relationships with others – to “family, teachers, perhaps even a nation” – can have lasting “significance” and “obligation” (2013, 128). For a review of Freud’s significance to education, see Britzman 2011; for a history of psychoanalysis in American education, see Taubman 2011. 24 Luxon (2013, 12). While socialization theories have been eclipsed by more specialized determinisms, “relationship” remains undertheorized in education too. For exceptions, see Dimitriadis (2003); Waghid (2010), Handa (2011). 25 “Women’s mothering in the isolated nuclear family of contemporary capitalist society” Chodorow (1978, 181) argued, “prepares men for participation in a male-­dominant family, and society, for their participation in the capitalist world of work” (1978, 181), a world that exploits the nurturance of women to perpetuate men’s dominance. (Grumet [1988] documents this history in her study of women and teaching.) “It is politically and socially important” Chodorow (1978, 214) insisted, “to confront this organization of parenting…. It can be changed.” The organization of professional relationships – specifically the exercise of educational leadership – can likewise be changed. 26 “Owning the other within,” Benjamin (1998, 108) advises, “diminishes the threat of the other without so that the stranger outside is no longer identical with the strange within us – not our shadow, not a shadow over us, but a separate other whose own shadow is distinguishable in the light.” Anti-­racism, hospitality, cosmopolitanism: a series of historically and professionally urgent concerns cannot be reduced to attitudes or virtues, as they are embodied in singular individuals formed through relationships (as I demonstrate: Pinar 2009). 27 Pinar 2012, 207. 28 2013, 70. 29 “[N]egotiation is not a bargaining across clearly defined positions,” Luxon (2013, 42) explains, “but a ‘working-­through’ that proceeds any real change to belief, value, or practice.”

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30 After Trump’s 2016 election the matter was (unsurprisingly) dropped. I reclaim the concept of “conservative” in the third edition of What Is Curriculum Theory? (Pinar 2019) – clearly Trump and his henchmen were not conservative but reckless revolutionaries – thereby re-­stake my claim on “character” as an affirmative and progressive concept (Pinar 2011). 31 See Pinar 2011, 9–12. Anderson (2006, 48) defines Bildung as “the self-­reflexive cultivation of character.” 32 Lived embodied experience that is, not virtualized, as while staring at screens (see Pinar 2015a). 33 Regarding the relationship, see Pinar (2009, 153). 34 2013, 292. 35 2013, 16. 36 Quoted in Koopman (2013, 173). 37 2011, 11. Here MacIntyre is raising the question of the “relationship between character formation, being able to learn from experience, and being open to political and moral argument” (Ibid.) The self–self relationship – specifically the capacity for educational experience and the subjective reconstruction that follows – makes every relationship at least a ménage-­a-­trois. 38 The almost universal commodification of humanity as human capital means, as Lewis (2013, 4) appreciates, that “self-­knowledge and self-­study become forms of self-­management and self-­governance within an overall biotechnological framework concerned with optimization of life-­ resources.” See, too, Phelan (2015, 28–30); Moghtader (2021). 39 For one explication of the concept, see Moghtader (2015). 40 2014, 3. 41 2014, 33. 42 Practicality was not taken for granted, as Tomkins (1981, 160) records: “Thus the issue of curriculum differentiation was joined in the form of policy debates about the relative emphasis to be given to the traditional academic curriculum and a more practical education suited to a new age.” That “practical education” was decoded as “American.” As a result, “All these trends [occupational and vocational demands on the curriculum] developed more slowly in Canada, and curriculum differentiation occurred at a slower pace,” Tomkins (1981, 163) tells us. Even Sputnik sounded differently in Canada, as Canadian educators reacted in a “similar, albeit characteristically cautious and typically derivative, manner” (1981, 164). 43 2002 (1963), 93. 44 2002 (1963), 93. I wouldn’t limit my “vision” to “society” nor my apprehension of the world to that one sense. Attunement is an auditory metaphor, but as important as listening is, touch can be even more profound, as lovers know. 45 Reciprocity includes tension, which can be generative as Aoki (2005b [1995], 310) noted. On this point (if in a different context) Tomkins (1974, 16) quotes Frye: “The tensions between this political sense of unity and the imaginative sense of locality are the essence of whatever the word ‘Canadian’ means.” 46 2002 (1963), 95. 47 Ibid. 48 2015. For a detailed study of the convergences of North European and North American traditions, see Autio (2006). I devote a chapter to the topic too (Pinar 2011). 49 2003, 62. 50 “After all,” Biesta (2003, 66) comments, “Herbert Spencer’s famous question ‘which knowledge is of most worth?’ suggests that the criterion for decisions about what to include in the curriculum is the quality of knowledge.” For me, that “quality” is also (but not exclusively) a matter of relevance, personal and historical, themselves not necessarily separate domains.

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51 2003, 62. 52 Writing in 1934, Robert Musil (1990, 259) complained that “classicism’s ideal of education [e.g., Bildung] was largely replaced by the idea of entertainment, even if it was entertainment with a patina of art.” Almost ninety years later Musil’s observation remains spot-­on. 53 “As an entrepreneur of himself, the neoliberal achievement-­subject,” Han (2017, 27) alleges, “engages in auto-­exploitation willingly – even passionately. The self-­as-­a-­ work-­of-­art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains in order to exhaust its resources entirely.” 54 2013, 133. 55 “ A contemporary example of the pejorative sense of free-­spokenness,” Burns (2018, 129) reminds, “is the equation of free speech with uninformed opinions that carry no truth and contribute nothing to intellectual discourses, but to which people feel entitled to speak.” In its affirmative sense – the sense Luxon emphasizes – parrhesia – here Burns (2018, 129–130) quotes Foucault – “is a way of being which is akin to a virtue, a ‘mode of action’ rather than rhetorical technique that might conceal one’s meaning.” 56 Ibid. Certain academic knowledge – systematized parrhesia – in the service of self-­ shattering could, I argued, disrupt – even destroy – the white racist self (Pinar 2006, 181). 57 2013, 134. 58 Ibid. 59 Despite drawing a sharp distinction between reconstruction and reorganization (Pinar 2011, 87–90), I am acknowledging here that reconstruction can conceivably occur through reorganization, provided the latter enables – rather than substitutes for – the former (as it so often did in the Eight-­Year Study). 60 2013, 136. 61 2013, 141. 62 2013, 141. 63 2013, 142. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. emphasis added. 66 While claiming to include all, especially poor, children in the upward mobility schooling in America presumably promises, what NCLB achieved was the reduction of black bodies to their economic potential, realizable only when children complied with an authoritarian regulation of their education through test-­taking (see Chapter 7). 67 Of course they can be intertwined as well as distinct, as Luxon (2013, 149) points out: “Parrhesia stages and so attests to an individual’s relation to truth and the political field that enables or constrains this relationship.” The great public pedagogue and anti-­ lynching activist Ida B. Wells is an exemplary instance, as she combined calm (against white audience expectations of “Black” in the late nineteenth century) with facts (Black men were not raping white women) to persuade the British public to protest the “peculiar” American practice of castrating then killing young black men (Pinar 2015b, 137–151). 68 2013, 155. Nor is it always an unmitigated good, as “democracy,” Burns (2018, 130) points out (working from Foucault’s analysis of ancient Athenian democracy), “is incapable of ethically differentiating between discourses that are useful and harmful to the city.” The failure to suppress fascism during the Weimar Republic was its fatal flaw, as I explain in my pre-­Trump but admittedly prescient allegory of the present (Pinar 2012). 69 Luxon (2013, 179) emphasizes that: “Solitary individuals are not to be taken as starting point; the relations that bind them to one another are.” 70 2013, 156.

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71 Luxon (2013, 191) prefers a “steadiness,” but our point seems the same. “Yet if agency is pried away from any strong sense of self,” Luxon (2013, 176) cautions, “then the only political engagement possible is resistance from within the field of power.” Non-­ coincidence is cause and consequence of such subjective coherence (see Pinar 2015b, 113–116). 72 2013, 164. 73 2013, 175. 74 ‘The parrhesiastic promise,” Luxon (2013, 177) explains, “is that through a relationship to a truth-­teller, students of parrhesia develop their own authorial capacities” that “care” for the “self ” as well as “others.” Regarding the relationship between the two, see Jung-­Hoon Jung (2016). 75 2013, 180. 76 Ibid. 77 That idea is a constant theme in my professional-­personal life (see Pinar 1972). 78 2013, 159. The two can be reciprocally related. 79 2013, 177. 80 Ibid. 81 2013, 186. 82 Psychic material – the sphere of the personal – includes sexual content, as Gilbert (2014, x) affirms: “There can be no education without the charge of sexuality; love, curiosity, and aggression fuel our engagements with knowledge.” 83 2013, 186–187. 84 2013, 187. Also working from Foucault, Burns (2018, 133) suggests that “ethical ­parrhesia” – a form of self-­care [see Burns (2018, 146) and Jung (2016)] – and “political parrhesia co-­constitute each other.” 85 “Self-­government without authority is a sham,” David Berliner and Bruce Biddle (1996, 339) observe, “and site-­based management programs can be a hoax when it comes to enchanting professionalism.”

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Block, Alan A. 2004. Talmud, Curriculum, and the Practical. Peter Lang. Britzman, Deborah P. 2011. Freud and Education. Routledge. Burns, James P. 2018. Power, Curriculum, and Embodiment: Re-­ thinking Curriculum as Counter-­Conduct and Counter-­Politics. Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford University Press. Chee, Alexander. 2018. How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Chodorow, Nancy J. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering. University of California Press. Cusk, Rachel. 2021. Second Place. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dimitriadis, Greg. 2003. Friendship, Cliques, and Gangs: Young Black Men Coming of Age in America. Teachers College Press. Fausset, Richard. 2014, September 30. Atlanta Trial Opens in School Cheating Scandal. The New York Times CLXIV, No. 56,640, A19. Frye, Northrop. 2002 (1963). The Educated Imagination. Anansi. Gilbert, Jen. 2014. Sexuality in School. The Limits of Education. University of Minnesota Press. Grumet, Madeleine R. 1988. Bitter Milk. Women and Teaching. University of Massachusetts Press. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2017. Psycho-­Politics. Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso. Handa, Yuichi. 2011. What Does Understanding Mean for Teachers? Relationship as a Metaphor for Knowing. Routledge. Jonsson, Stefan. 2000. Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity. Duke University Press. Jung, Jung-­Hoon. 2016. The Concept of Care in Curriculum Studies. Routledge. Koopman, Colin. 2013. Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Indiana University Press. Labaree, David F. 2004. The Trouble with Ed Schools. Yale University Press. Lewis, Tyson E. 2013. On Study. Giorgio Agamben and Educational Potentiality. Routledge. Luxon, Nancy. 2013. Crisis of Authority. Politics, Trust, and Truth-­Telling in Freud and Foucault. Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2011. How Aristotelianism Can Become Revolutionary. Ethics, Resistance, and Utopia. In Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism (11–19), edited by Paul Blackledge and Kevin Knight. University of Notre Dame Press. Miller, Claire Cain. 2015, February 7. How Teacher Biases Can Sway Girls from Math and Science. The New York Times CLXIV, No. 56,770, A10. Moghtader, Bruce 2015. Foucault and Educational Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan. Moghtader, Bruce. 2021. Human Capital Theory of Education. University of British Columbia, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Pagano, Joanne. 1988. The Nature and Sources of Teacher Authority. JCT 7 (4), 7–26. Phelan, Ann. 2015. Curriculum Theorizing and Teacher Education: Complicating Conjunctions. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 1972. Working from Within. Educational Leadership, 29 (4), 329–331. Pinar, William F. 2006. Race, Religion and a Curriculum of Reparation. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2009. The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate Lives in Public Service. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2011. The Character of Curriculum Studies. Bildung, Currere, and the Recurring Question of the Subject. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Pinar, William F. 2012. What Is Curriculum Theory? (2nd edition). Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2013. Curriculum Studies in the United States. Intellectual Histories, Present Circumstances. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2015a. Without Experience Is Teacher Development Possible? In Autobiography and Teacher Development in China: Subjectivity and Culture in Curriculum Studies, edited by Zhang Hua and William F. Pinar (179–192). Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2015b. Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019. What Is Curriculum Theory? (3rd edition). Routledge. Pinar, William F. and Grumet, Madeleine R. 2015 (1976). Toward a Poor Curriculum (3rd edition). Educator’s International Press. Rauch, Angelika. 2000. The Hieroglyph of Tradition: Freud, Benjamin, Gadamer, Novalis, Kant. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Roberts, David D. 1995. Nothing but History: Reconstruction and Extremity after Metaphysics. University of California Press. Rocha, Samuel D. 2015. Folk Phenomenology. Education, Study, and the Human Person. Pickwick Publications. Roth, Michael S. 2014. Beyond the University. Why Liberal Education Matters. Yale University Press. Sarup, Madan. 1992. Jacques Lacan. University of Toronto Press. Singer, Natasha. 2015, February 9. Uncovering Security Flows in Sites for Schoolchildren. The New York Times CLXIV, No. 56,772, B1, B7. Severson, Kim and Blinder, Alan. 2014, January). Test Scandal In Atlanta Brings More Guilty Pleas. The New York Times CLXIII, No. 56,374, A9. Simon, Roger I. 2005. The Touch of the Past. Remembrance, Learning, and Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan. Stone, Jennifer. 1994. Pasolini, Zanzotto, and the Question of Pedagogy. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (40–55). University of Toronto Press. Taubman, Peter M. 2011. Disavowed Knowledge. Routledge. Toews, John. 2008. Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-­Century Berlin. Cambridge University Press. Tomkins, George. 1974. National Consciousness, the Curriculum, and Canadian Studies. In National Consciousness and the Curriculum: The Canadian Case, edited by Geoffrey Milburn and John Herbert (15–29). Institute for Studies in Education. Tomkins, George. 1981. Foreign Influences on Curriculum and Curriculum Polic Making in Canada: Some Impressions in Historical and Contemporary Perspective. Curriculum Inquiry 11 (2), 157–166. Uljens, Michael and Ylimaki, Rose. 2015, April. Discursive Curriculum and Leadership theory: A General Framework for an International Dialogue. A paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Waghid, Yusef. 2010. Toward Authentic Teaching and Learning in Post-­Apartheid South Africa: In Defense of Freedom, Friendship, and Democratic Citizenship. In Curriculum Studies in South Africa: Intellectual Histories, Present Circumstances, edited by William F. Pinar (201–220). Palgrave Macmillan. Young-­Bruehl, Elisabeth. 1996. The Anatomy of Prejudices. Harvard University Press.

6 AUTHORSHIP

The Italian filmmaker, novelist, poet – preeminent public intellectual – Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) knew that fascism was not dead, only dressed differently now,1 perhaps in white shirts and ties, spouting platitudes and clichés, pretending to be religious, “conservatives” they call themselves but – as Pasolini appreciated – simply another set of Right-­wing thugs if posing as populists. Not confined to others2 however: Pasolini knew – as Adorno also suspected – that fascism resided within, including within some of us on the Left,3 enacted in Pasolini’s youth by his fellow Communists, expelling him from the Party for his homosexuality. The authoritarian personality – as Adorno’s 1950 study disclosed – does not always correlate with the Left–Right spectrum in politics. Like the early twentieth-­century fascism of Mussolini, the new fascism – including contemporary American fascism – requires allegiance, outwardly to one’s “dear leader,” but also to identity, by which we are not only recognized but are too often reduced. Pasolini resisted – indeed repudiated – the alluring temptation of minoritarian status, the repressive tolerance of (il)liberal democracies that places us, in Derrida’s famous phrase, “under erasure.”4 The presentation of self in everyday life – Goffman’s famous dramaturgical model of social life5 – is now, in our fascistic moment, absent the self. Yes, all the world remains a stage but role-­playing has morphed into an all-­consuming online profile production; for the faithful there is no longer – again invoking Goffman’s theater analogy – a backstage, a private place where we shed the roles we play, the profiles we maintain and update, that place where we can again become our authentic selves. As Moeller and D’Ambrosio allege, there is no authenticity remaining in a world where “impression management” predominates.6 What happens when we disappear into our identity? I think of Paula Salvio’s concern for “emotional white-­out,” a “camouflaging of [those] emotions that are DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-6

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incompatible with dominant perceptions and values.”7 The concept of “camouflage,” she continues, “refers not only to altering our appearance, but to concealing ourselves from the enemy by making us appear to be part of the ‘natural surroundings’.”8 When the camouflage – the role, the profile – is all there is, we are erased, “already dead,” what Cazdyn calls a “subjectivity that is specific to the contemporary moment.”9 Pasolini knew that we live in an era of “apocalyptic erasure of what is natural and mythic.”10 To position himself – he was not dead yet – outside the calamitous moment he lived, Pasolini emphasized his status as outsider: a queer communist, faithless mystic, clairvoyant critic. A clairvoyant magical realism informed his public pedagogy, decrying the genocide not only of Aboriginal peoples but of European civilization itself as humanity had become, he insisted, soulless. A former schoolteacher, Pasolini’s lifelong pedagogical engagement with Italian society defined his pedagogical efforts in film, theater,11 poetry,12 and prose,13 reactivating the ancient, his art an invocation of the sacred to protest the profanation of normality. Pasolini’s recourse was to bear witness through language and its “consecration,” no objectification of reality but a searing testimony to the tragedy of humanity’s spiritual self-­immolation. Pasolini’s dialectic of abjection and sublimity sought the resurrection of solitary and collective life. For those of us with smaller fish to fry, his aspiration means curriculum as complicated conversation wherein the classroom is alternately, sometimes simultaneously, a civic square and a room of one’s own. Currere is the concept that calls us to juxtapose the two in a generative tension that amplifies, intensifies, the reality of each, as disappearing into either means erasure of both. Reactivating Pasolini reminds us of what can happen when back stage is moved to the front, when the role one plays is the person one is, not static or monolithic but dynamic and multiplicitous, still somehow subjectively coherent. That coherence connotes the singularity of self, a singularity Pasolini personified. “Probably Italy’s major intellectual of the twentieth century,”14 Pier Paolo Pasolini was an artist as well as essayist and educator, these three modes d’être intertwined, his subjective synthesis15 reconstructed from its Catholic-­Communist sources.16 The form such synthesis took was authorship,17 as Annovi explains, the “center of his artistic and intellectual practice.”18 Such an assertion can sound suspicious to the postmodern (and its subspecies, the post-­human), as Benedetti acknowledges: “For some time the word author has had a suspicious ring to it. To some it calls up the ‘obsolete realm’ of the subject, made up of states of mind, intentions, goals, responsibilities.”19 When inflated or isolated, those can become caricatures of a human being, a being who can hardly be human without them, however, each one of which, not incidentally, is embedded in relationships with others, including non-­human others. Embedded was the case with Pasolini. He invited audience members to participate in his (especially his theatrical) art, akin to the classroom teacher who invites (or even requires) students to say what they think, words possibly

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permeating interpersonal boundaries, imprinting themselves (not only) within the teacher’s and student’s subjectivity. However impersonal professionalism encourages teachers to be, relationships are formed, expressed through subject matter (double entendre intended). The endlessly repeated relational character of the person does not erase the person: after all, what is to be related if not our individual selves and those of other creatures with whom we share the planet? “Pasolini feels the need to address the reader,” Annovi notes, “not merely to provide information”20 but also to establish and maintain a “direct relationship with his audience, an intellectual dialogue aimed at producing new forms of knowledge and agency.”21 For Pasolini, that relationship to those in his midst – informed by those who were not, including the dead and the not-­yet born – was “real, personal, and almost physical.”22 Pasolini took others in, not only politically but also viscerally, to whom he replied pedagogically. To enact public pedagogy required that he become a speaking subject, the author of his own subjective presence, his participation in the public sphere structured by what was absent: love and happiness. Pasolini brought to his public pedagogy not only his life history but also his nation’s history, the state of European civilization after the Holocaust, itself both a specific event as well as a metaphor for the spiritual immolation Fascism had inflicted – inflicts still – upon us all. Pasolini, Duncan points out, was “the most autobiographical of writers,” as “his investment in and identification with what he produced was total,”23 making “the material into an expression of his own personality,”24 as Gordon puts it, “a recurrent pattern of self-­inscription in his work.”25 In such subjective presence, “art [becomes] bound up with the director’s personal expression; it is precisely his unique personality that gives the work organic unity.”26 For such an artist, art “must express – at every level – the author’s absolute individuality.”27 Annovi adds: “the author, like the viewer, is a corporeal, material being, not just an abstract function,”28 as “Pasolini linked authorship and homosexuality,”29 both performative reconstructions of subjectivity and materiality, addressed pedagogically to his “students,” e.g. his contemporaries in Italy and everywhere. Like the subjectively present teacher, Pasolini inscribed himself in the content he created: the poem, the play, the novel, the film. Perhaps that sense of “indirect” or, as Annovi phrases it, “authorial”30 subjectivity – “to turn actively towards the exterior, without fearing to lose itself in this”31 – accounts for his refusal of identity32 – including “gay”33 – his dismissal of minoritarian sexual politics generally.34 For a place at the table Pasolini substitutes the promiscuity of a sexualized spirituality: “this is my body given to you, do this in remembrance of me.”35 Homosexual desire, as Gordon notes, operates for Pasolini as “desire for essential, ontological plenitude.”36 As he did in La Ricotta (1963), Castelli explains, Pasolini uses “religious/mythic imagery … to ground a political critique.”37 He told an English journalist:

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[T]he ‘opposite’ of religion is not communism (which, despite having taken the secular and positivist spirit from the bourgeois tradition, in the end is very religious); but the “opposite” of religion is capitalism (ruthless, cruel, cynical, purely materialistic, the cause of human beings’ exploitation of human beings, cradle of the worship of power, horrendous den of racism).38 Sexual promiscuity among men, including among men of different generational and class locations, was, for Pasolini, conceivably sacred. For Pasolini, Castelli notes, religion remained the site of “the revolutionary power of human solidarity, a bulwark against the materialist noise of bourgeois culture.”39 In silent night solidarity was cemented, in the alleys of the borgata of Rome, where Pasolini roamed, searching for sexual consecration. Religion can be an experience of decentering that encourages non-­coincidence not only with intrasubjective but also intersubjective experience. Despite the (absolute?) gap between here and eternity, one can become attuned to what is and might be beyond the material world.40 Such attunement is not automatic; it is a medium of spiritual discipline, in which one labors to translate into a communicative – artistic, curricular – medium what one has experienced spiritually and intrasubjectively. “It is not only the criterion of immanence to the text that distinguishes the artist’s deep self from the worldly self,” Benedetti explains, but more importantly the deep self ’s involvement in the act of creation, with its obscure and tortuous labor, with its itinerary of sufferings and disappointments, things that succeeding criticism and theory have altogether excluded from their discourse. The thematics of reception have replaced those of creation.41 An exclusive emphasis on reception – including uncritical attunement to the transcendent – to the exclusion of self-­critical creation renders translation an imitative undertaking, risking coincidence (e.g. coinciding) with what is: conformity.42 Annovi notes that Pasolini associated “authorship” – I would also associate teaching – “with a radically antagonistic stance toward all forms of artistic, social, and intellectual conformity, identifying conformism with social and cultural oppression.”43 Antagonism can be subtle, even civil, but it does not mistake what is for what should be. Contesting conformity – political, artistic, sexual – Pasolini emphasized “authorship” as a “revolutionary subject” position – contra the death-­of-­the-­ author, the-­death-­of-­the-­subject discourse.44 Pasolini knew that Power – in our time materialized as techno-­capitalist-­authoritarianism45 – imposed “a single model and destroys the differences between the peasantry and proletarian, so that the latter aspire to become petit bourgeois.”46 Such a homogenous universal state47 means that “all transgressive acts, whether linguistic or formal, will in

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turn become normalized,”48 disappearing into “the void of a normality without memory.”49 Not only subjectivity is eviscerated, so is the body in “the assimilating power of mass consumerism, which concede[s] a form of false sexual tolerance in order to control, violate, and use the body’s innocence.”50 Even homosexual desire – so precious for Pasolini as an element of the “body’s innocence” – evaporates as capitalism’s repressive tolerance terminates queer desire by ghettoizing it into identity.51 “Repressive tolerance” is Pasolini’s phrasing, “permissive power” he also termed it, as the “consumerist incitement to desire” accomplishes “social speaking, a political form of control which a repressive fascism itself could never accomplish.”52 For Pasolini, then, as McGlazer succinctly summarizes, “far from delivering the freedom that it promised, capitalist modernity entailed a destruction of older forms of life and led to a foreclosure of possibilities for thought and action, imagination and memory.”53 What Pasolini called neo-­capitalism and neo-­Fascism – that is, capitalism in its post-­World War II “consumer-­driven, global guise – is more totalizing, more pernicious, and in fact more Fascist than Fascism itself.”54 Mussolini’s regime had ruled through “a superficial, scenic form of regimentation,” but now regimentation is “real,”55 now internalized, occupying “hearts and minds as well as bodies.”56 Contemporary fascism, Pasolini postulated, is “a fascism which is indistinguishable from a brutal command to enjoy.”57 This fusion of superego and id dissolves the ego as independent, agentic, self-­reflexive, ensuring the “impossibility of meaningful action.”58 Video games – not historical action – become the order of the day. This visually stimulated fusion of satiation and deprivation produces, as Pasolini put it, “bourgeois entropy,”59 which, Castelli points out, “he rather presciently predicted would overwhelm modern society and render the peasant and the worker invisible.”60 Such entropy eradicates “authenticity,”61 flattening the speech of immediacy into information exchange, evident, Pasolini thought, in “the horrendous language of television news, advertising, official statements,” and of course consumerism, all of which he called “a genuine anthropological cataclysm.”62 Images, objects, ideas, human beings: all are reduced to competing products on store shelves, spread across webpages on computer and smartphone screens. Due to this “civilizational destiny,”63 the actually existing author represents “a living protest,”64 declining any static identity65 (including that of “author”) that, by its collectivist conformist structure, can become quickly incorporated into the status quo.66 “He wanted,” Annovi observes, “to remain essentially unrecognizable to power.”67 Gordon explains: By being unrecognizable – elusive, in permanent movement, present in and through the past and future, positive and negative, apocalyptic and integrated – the “radical” Pasolini delineates a position as a subject which, for the first time since the 1950s, is one of limited control and centrality, at least within the ambit of the homologizing system.68

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Within our predatory predicament, any possibility of that – remaining unrecognizable to power, in private as well as public – is pretty much impossible,69 even despite “continuous struggle” through “permanent invention” and “constant self-­ reinvention.”70 Despite its futility, ongoing inventiveness – authorship – was “part of [Pasolini’s] lifelong endeavor to intervene in the culture of his moment.”71 Introducing (and promoting) a new conceptual product – our take on inventiveness (or “innovation” as we prefer to call it) – is not intervention. How to furtively peek underneath the endless displays of distraction to discern the truth of the situation is not only a subversive maneuver behind enemy lines – a form of “intransigence”72 – it is a temporal act that carves lived distance between oneself and the present moment, what used to be called historical consciousness: a felt and thought-­through sense of being present through time. Preserving the past renders the present present. In the West it is now late or postmodernity, often portrayed as decline, evident in the corruption of democracy,73 and not only in the United States. Subjective freedom – that inner capacity to not coincide with, indeed transcend, what is, including oneself – has been traded for comfort and convenience. Consumption constructs freedom not as spiritual or political but as consumer choice of what’s available for purchase on the shelf or screen. Freedom becomes an empty signifier in such a space of exchange, agency reduced to clicks, movements of fingers on devices substituting for thought and action in their even early modern senses of instrumental intervention. “In every field,” Benedetti notes, “modernity has always moved to the cry of ‘Long live freedom!’”74 Like the compulsive celebration of the new, that “cry” confirms that its contrary is the case. We late-­moderns are neither free nor new. We’re enslaved to contingency – historical, now ecological, always subjective – as were our predecessors, if now even more materially. Perhaps “thinking what has never been thought before” was always unlikely, but now – without a “now,” without historical time or subjective presence – all that can be thought is what has been thought already.75 As I’m doing here. “The modern epoch has produced two great terminal myths,” Benedetti declares, “the death of art and the death of the author.”76 To which I add a third: the death of historical time. Indeed, “no longer progressive,” Benedetti continues, history “piles up around one in an unwieldy heap,”77 heavy almost crushing so that one slips to the side, struggling to say something distracting, something new. “Late-­modernity’s bereavement,” she concludes, “is over the impossibility to create; it perceives itself as a terminal culture.”78 It is the end-­time, perhaps not eschatologically or (not yet) climate-­wise, but culturally, as human life is replaced by technology. Technology is now a sinkhole swallowing subjectivity, spitting out its digital remains: avatars, profiles, keywords, identities. The death of art “[h]as already happened,” Benedetti observes, “and without any tragedy. All art is felt as posthumous; its current products are nothing but relics.”79 Relics but not religious icons, not even an idol exhumed from the alien past, art – like education – is stripped of immediacy and import, leaving only survivors, and those who are not.

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For almost all of us only what is material matters. Convenience, comfort, and the conformity to which they commit us seem small change. Whatever, we say; it’s just another lifestyle: there is nothing exceptional to experience when stripped of its abrasive embodiment.80 Dismayed at the replacement of “lived experience” by “lifestyle,” Pasolini again and again decried consumer capitalism, specifically its conversion of everything81 into objects of exchange, e.g. the installation of a homogenous pseudo-­society in which tolerance translates into repression.82 Such tolerance became, in Gordon’s phrasing “a false and monovalent force which conceals coercion and actually reinforces difference and prejudice.”83 While the old fascism – that of Mussolini and Pasolini’s youth – was “reactionary and pernicious,” Pasolini allowed, “the new fascism … is more insidious, elusive and destructive … [it] assimilates and homologizes all – including previous forms of anti-­fascism – through consumerist leveling, and through neo-­capitalist development, which has no regard for the more pluralistic and experiential progress.”84 Progress, even incremental and experiential, is relegated to the dustbin of history, another one of those malevolent metanarratives our evil ancestors invented to enslave. Not unlike Narcissus – in love with his own reflection in a pool of water – young and old alike can stare endlessly into their devices, apparently extricated from History, granted a second life, a simulated sphere of amusement, assault, avatars, and avarice. Pasolini was fixated on those he loved and came to loathe. “Today,” Pasolini lamented, “youth are nothing but monstrous and ‘primitive’ masks of a new sort of initiation (negative in pretense only) into the consumerist ritual.”85 In 2018, many Italian youth and their elders, enraged by their economic or social or political exclusion raised their fists in salute to the new old fascism.86 Amnesia accompanies the presentism of consumerism.87 “From Friuli to the Roman ‘borgate’ and then to the Third World,” Duncan suggests, “Pasolini’s poetics and politics sought authentic spaces not yet enveloped by the consumerist ethic he found so pervasive in mainstream Italian culture,” adding that: “In the end, what he seems to have discovered was that there was nowhere left to go.”88 This flight from (and, in our era, into) space meant for Pasolini reactivating the past, that “anachronistic presence”89 of what he prized (and loathed), palimpsests of pre-­modernity. For Pasolini, pre-­modernity is the modernist’s move, as it rejects the temporally evacuated presentism90 of consumer capitalism, that “ahistorical fracture,” as Gordon phrases it, which leaves Pasolini at a loss as to how to sustain subjectivity-­within-­history, e.g. when history has turned in on itself (what he calls “the new prehistoric age” in his poetry), inscribing only commodified, reified, subjugated subjects.91 Re-­inscribing – reactivating – the human subject, becoming present in historical time, requires fleeing the temporally empty present for the historical past. Rejecting the postmodern demand to “make it new,” Pasolini reactivated the old, re-­inscribing in a temporally reactivated now what had been before repressed,92 making “forms in experimentalism – or of pastiche or eclecticism – a potent vessel for subjective plenitude.”93

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These “patterns of self-­inscription,” Gordon notes, etched through affirmations of nostalgia and regression, also “inform Pasolini’s evolving notion of education, or pedagogy.”94 Gordon describes a teacher who “stimulates curiosity through scandal, revelation and drama, and becomes a ‘means not an end of love’ for the students,” love that “oscillates between the Platonic and the erotic, reclaiming the subjective by precluding the model of teacher as object or model or fetish.”95 Subjectivity spills out through the teacher’s self-­inscription in the curriculum, the teacher’s relationship to what and who is being taught, relationship at once personal, political, spiritual, as through “love” the teacher aspires to set students free: from the teacher, from themselves, from the late modern moment sure to consume them.

Reactivation “The collapse of the present implies also the collapse of the past,” Pasolini knew.96 Because time disappears in postmodernity – all there is, is a temporally empty “eternal present”97 – there can be no subjective threading of the past through the present. Without memory there is no subjective coherence98 –and the self, like the concept of “author,” disappears – precisely “because he or she is revealed to be an empty instance, without psychological referent.”99 Without life history – or History – the timeless present moment is all there is, filled with fantasies and distractions, even altogether dissolved by the screen. When we are fused with what is – what is on the screen in front of us loses its abrasive specificity and becomes a silky envelope in which we can become sealed – we may not find our way out. This inability to extricate ourselves from what not only surrounds us but is also inside us is emblematic of late modernity. “Whatever we do,” Benedetti asserts, “we remain prisoners to the already-­written or the already-­thought.”100 No longer living in the embodied actuality (abrasive, frustrating, fragile, for Pasolini also sacred) but instead suspended in simulation – in a “parallel universe” Benedetti suggests – “neither originality nor repetition exist since every word is citation…. It is a tomb-­world, where everything that happens has already happened, and where nothing can happen ever again.”101 Again: this essay is surely an instance, yes of my own entombment. Submerged in the screen, what we require, Benedetti suggests, is a “little fissure that grants us a viewpoint external to the universe in which we are locked.”102 In psychic separation from devices one might notice something not on the screen, even become capable of carving a space of non-­coincidence wherein one might think “something that has not already been thought.”103 Certainly separation – a “fissure” in Benedetti’s conceptual architecture – might allow air into the room, the “tomb-­world” of the screen – but thought, even an actually “new” idea, won’t open the window. Nose to the “new” ensures suffocation. “Compulsion for the new” animates “modern artistic logic,”104 Benedetti laments, with its obsessive even frenzied “critique of conventionality, the idea that convention is

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something ridiculous.”105 Enter the so-­called “creative destruction” of convention. “If all is dead,” Benedetti proclaims, “everything is possible again.”106 That satire could become serious if we change “is” to “seems,” implying not the naïve, infantile destruction of what is but the reactivation of what is lost. In raising the dead we ourselves might be disinterred. If you’re still reading you know I have one dead man very much in mind. “Like a specter,” Annovi knows, “Pasolini seems to wander through the ruins of a present unrecognizable to him or to us.”107 Is that because we are not only among but are ourselves the ruins?108 We are no longer here because “here” is no longer here: only the ruins remain. Without emplacement we lost souls wander in the Cloud, circulating inside the screen, a flicker, a finger, an image. Closing the screen, shutting down the machine, one faces one’s own screen memories,109 through which one sidesteps to feel the chair on which one is sitting, the floor on which one might be standing, know the place where one is, what time it is. In place, with time, in remembrance, through study, one might experience what Pasolini termed “the scandalous revolutionary force of the past.”110 Pasolini imagined the past – in its “profoundly unsentimental authenticity”111 – as a “counterweight to bourgeois conformism,”112 constantly changing, updating to stay the same, as Wendy Chun appreciates.113 “Downdating” breaks the spell: Pasolini rewrote premodern myths to eject the viewer from the empty space of consumption. It is “retrospection” – as Gordon knows – that “is now strategically deployed in an effort to grasp and transform the present.”114 Pasolini relied on a “literary strategy of affabulazione (fable-­making, mythmaking),” Castelli affirms, “to address the question of temporality through recourse to myth.”115 Myth could seem an odd even self-­contradicting choice but through its allegorizing of contingency, re-­placing the apparently isolated instant into a narrative (e.g., a temporal continuum), one might re-­experience the actual while being discouraged from coinciding with it, creating a space in-­between what is and what it might mean.116 Especially Pasolini’s “theologically inflected films,” Castelli notes, “stage a confrontation between two incommensurate systems of value.”117 In a capitalist secular society in which all relations are reduced to their exchange value, Pasolini mounted a “vigorous defense of the religious and the sublime … against the dominant forms of power and cultural value.”118 While mechanical reproduction erases time, it creates the illusion of the new by altering design and function. Pasolini critiqued the adoration of absolute difference too, each moment distinct and different from its preceding ones, preventing us from understanding anyone or anything not immediately available to us. In Saint Paul,119 Castelli points out, Pasolini addresses himself to two different sets of tensions: his conviction that temporal difference is, at its root, illusory – that there is no difference between then and now – and his consistent worrying over the separation between the historical and the religious, the real and the ideal.120

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Castelli recalls a poem Pasolini composed in 1969 while filming Medea in Turkey, the year after his drafting of the Paul script. Entitled “Tarsus, from a Distance,” Pasolini wrote: “Of course, if a thing changes/ it still remains what it was first…. Of course, the egg-­shaped form of time connects everything.”121 Michael North concludes something similar: “All the nows are still here. What links them together is that elementary sense of presence we get by looking at where we are now, which is where we will always be, as long as we are.”122 Maybe that “elementary sense of presence,” being here now, can also become a conveyance beyond both. Due to the profanity of the present, Pasolini embraced reality as sacred.123 Like a religious icon, reality imprints itself through its immanence and, for the spiritual, its capacity to incarnate transcendence. Incarnation, Pasolini avowed, structured the sphere of the sexual. Making love one can become both temporal and transcendental, rendering, as Gordon explains, “praxis as mystical, transcendent and revolutionary.”124 Praxis for Pasolini, Gordon continues, exhibits a “dual dynamic,” as it is “both retrogressive … and … progressive and revolutionary,” a “dual-­projected … ethics of actions” that, significantly, is “coterminous with an attempt to resist the dehistoricization brought about by neo-­capitalism, to salvage us from bourgeois conservatism”125 what Pasolini knew to be “the sacredness of the past.”126 Drink this in memory of me.

Nothing Else Pasolini confessed: “Sex, death, political passion/My life/has nothing else.”127 “Arching across the chronological history of Pasolini’s public work,” Gordon summarizes, “alternatively both its cause and effect, there is a series of archetypal roles or vocations which persistently attach themselves to and embody Pasolini’s public figure.”128 Each, he continues, functions as a “filter” – perhaps as identity could – between “self and reality, and between self and public.”129 Each enjoys, Gordon suggests, a similar trajectory, “from an all but mystical visceral origin, to a consciously elaborated, self-­imposed mask, and then to a debased, ironic residue of that mask.” From the mystical to the debased and ironic, those vocations – “the self as poet, the self as teacher, and the self as outsider”130 – synthesize into one.131 At first teaching was a calling to which Pasolini replied poetically, enabling him, Gordon suggests, “to connect the self, in its core being, to the cluster of absolutes that organizes Pasolini’s philosophy – reality, history, vitality, the body, form – and to protect the self from categorization by its slippery elusiveness and mystery.”132 In a series of 1947–1948 articles for Il Mattino del Popolo, Pasolini described teaching (in Gordon’s summary) “as an act of love for the child and for the world, an initiation into ethical and ideological awareness through a mixture of Platonic and erotic and therefore ‘scandalous’ affinity.”133 Such an “affinity,” Gordon continues, represents “an embryonic form of collective consciousness.”134 Pasolini “insists on anchoring the ideological validity of an intellectual

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position in an operation of subjective introspection, in an elusive quality of disavowed selfhood.”135 Such humbling decentering attunement to the children he taught, enacted through the curriculum, is perhaps what Gordon has in mind when he postulates in Pasolini a “balance between authority and submission.”136 That balance, he continues, has “its source in this role of the self as teacher,”137 a balance akin (it seems to me) to Taubman’s conception of the “right distance”138 between teacher and student, separate even individual relationships that shift according time, place, and circumstance. For Pasolini, this “balance” is in the service of “love,” if a “scandalous” one, an “undercurrent” to which is the “father-­son dyad that gradually comes to dominate Pasolini’s entire late oeuvre.”139 It is not confined there, as Pasolini’s pedagogy and his oeuvre overall have their origin in “love for the world,” which, Gordon is sure, “sets them apart, gives them that privileged relationship with truth.”140 Through such reverence the world itself becomes iconographic, testifying to what lies beyond the visible. Supplication, self-­abjuration, and renunciation provide passages into time. In a 1949 speech Pasolini declared: [W]hat we ask of the intellectual is neither easy nor comfortable: it is a question of a renunciation. Let him too, by all means, carry out that introspective, inner, diaristic enquiry that is indeed the vital gymnastics of mankind […]; but let him strive, in his work of his, to be more objective, and more, why not say it, Christian: let him find his place in human history.141 Renunciation runs on “diaristic inquiry,” autobiography in the service of stripping oneself of preoccupations one projects onto the world. Preoccupations might remain – certainly they (sex, passion, politics) did for Pasolini – but no longer reduced to a narcissistic lens through one (mis)perceives the world. One puts those glasses down, discerning the world as a clairvoyant can, with extra-­ sensory even mystical clarity, an openness to what is. Through self-­engagement, through subjective reconstruction, that is: “I hate naturalness. I reconstruct everything,”142 Pasolini proclaimed. Through art, through sex, through study, one works one’s way into the world, into time, into one’s place in history, however opaque that place must be (awaiting definitiveness until death, as Pasolini often emphasized). Working from within one is able to shed one’s subjective skin and walk naked in the desert of our time, like the father143 in Pasolini’s Teorema, shattered but free after being ravished by the handsome young man144 who seduces each member of the family: maid, mother, son, daughter, father. The Christian antecedent has its Communist consequence: social equality, the abandonment of greed, as the father gives away his factory to its workers. A passionate life in public service: such was the subjective presence of one Pier Paolo Pasolini, a man for whom sex was not only sensual but also mystical and political, endless acts of self-­dissolution in sacred service, ethical action in

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the inhuman temporally vacuous world of late modernity. For the early Pasolini – through the 1970s Trilogy of Life145 – the “self becomes an emblem of the real,”146 just as the “body becomes a site for historical action,”147 but by the end – evident in his great unfinished novel Petrolio – his emphasis shifts to humanity’s capacity for self-­mutilation, our determination to destroy the world.148 That capacity inheres within “us,” once upon a time (the 1960s) people (like Pasolini) who pledged allegiance to experimentation – subjective, sexual, intellectual – for the sake of cultural revolution, but now (if partnered) settling for matrimony and biological reproduction or, if single, fast cars, fast money, grinding our way through website after website. Our moment mutilated, we wait for the catastrophe to come.149

Notes 1 Discussing Salò, McGlazer (2020, 10) notes that Pasolini’s “punishing insistence on the survival of outmoded powers compels viewers to reckon with a past that they would abandon and thus deny.” 2 His murderers may have been neo-­ Fascists: https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2014/aug/24/who-­really-­killed-­pier-­paolo-­pasolini-­venice-­film-­festival-­ biennale-­abel-­ferrara 3 Lacan knew, shouting at students (at the Université de Vincennes) during the May 1968 student-­worker revolt: “I am anti-­progressive. As revolutionaries, what you aspire to is a Master. You will have one” (quoted in Cohen 2021, 27). 4 In Grammatology (1967), indicated by the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place, signifying that a word is inadequate yet necessary. While referencing the inadequacy of language to convey meaning, I am invoking the phrase here to register that human life without meaning – persons without subjective presence – are not persons at all, in effect, zombies. In a 1956 letter to Ernst Jünger, Heidegger explained – referencing Being – “Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it left legible.” 5 https://www.thoughtco.com/dramaturgical-­perspective-­definition-­3026261 6 https://www.thoughtco.com/the-­presentation-­of-­self-­in-­everyday-­life-­3026754 7 1998, 48–49. Salvio cautions the condition is tantamount to erasure, but that qualification she might alter under current conditions of profilicity, as I detail in Chapter 14. 8 1998, 49. 9 2012, 163. 10 Maggi 2009, 113. 11 Along with painting, one of Pasolini’s lesser known achievements: Pasolini 1994a (1968). 12 Start with the Sartarelli collection (2014). 13 Including theory (Pasolini 2005 [1972]) as well as journalism. 14 Duncan 2006, 83. The former schoolteacher – in September 1943 Pasolini started “a peripatetic school for local children whose education had been interrupted by the war” (Gordon 1996, 33) – became a nationally acclaimed novelist, poet, and filmmaker. “In an unpublished interview,” Castelli (2014, xxiii) reports, “the famed Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci called Pasolini a saint.”

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15 “The endless osmosis between Pasolini’s various works,” Annovi (2017, 59) explains, “is one of the mechanisms that reinforces the sense of coherence within his body of work, which becomes almost a closed world, navigable only if one yields to the author’s instructions.” 16 Badiou (2014, vii) points out that the “Christian reference” was “primary” in the intellectual “formation” of Pasolini’s thought, “despite (or because of) the sexual and transgressive violence that inspired his personal life and bestowed a particular coloration on his communist political choices.” Of course violence structures the “eschatology” of both, the so-­called Great Tribulation associated with Christianity, the proletarian revolution prophesized by Marx. 17 Pasolini pronounced: “Style is something inner, hidden, private and above all individual” (quoted in Gordon 1996, 36). Despite the dismissal of individualism, including the death of the author, Annovi (2017, 17) asserts that: “The author matters today and not simply from the culture industry’s commercial point of view,” adding: “The author matters, more importantly, for those in nondominant positions – feminists and queer and antiracist activists, among others – who engage with creative practices in which the discourse of authorship may have positive political effects.” 18 2017, 4. Even while still a member of the Communist Party (PCI), Pasolini positioned agency, structuring his formation as a public intellectual; he was, Gordon (1996, 39) notes, “a bourgeois prepared to betray his social class.” 19 2005, 58. 20 2017, 9. 21 2017, 9. In so doing, she adds, “Pasolini offers a distinct approach to the intersection of creativity, socio-­political commitment, and subjectivity” (Ibid.). 22 2017, 24. 23 2006, 84. Over time, Gordon (1996, 107) suggests, Pasolini’s “autobiographical impulse” becomes “pastiche, often a pastiche of the very forms of self-­narration,” adding that “it takes on a cacophony of other voices instead of reformulating a single voice” (1996, 110). 24 This phrase – describing the concept of auteur – is François Truffaut’s (quoted in Annovi 2017, 86). Annovi (2017, 87) adds that “the idea of auteur is key to the construction of Pasolini the author.” Its sexual correlate – desire differentiated according to the distinctiveness of person, place, moment – is adamantly anti-­heteronormative, but also anti-­homonormative insofar as the latter uncritically accepts heterosexual models of marriage, monogamy, and reproduction. 25 1996, 26. 26 Annovi 2017, 86. 27 2017, 87. 28 2017, 133. 29 2017, 143. 30 2017, 6. 31 Badiou 2014, ix. 32 ‘For [James] Baldwin,” Posnock (1998, 227) points out, “identity is closer to being possessed than to being in possession.” 33 Pasolini was not alone. Baldwin admitted: “The word ‘gay’ has always rubbed me the wrong way,” adding, “one’s sexual preference is a private matter” (quoted in Posnock 1998, 327). “Like many of his generation,” Posnock adds, “he had no interest in gay liberation movements” (Ibid.). 34 Pasolini was, Castelli (2014, xxii) notes, “an anti-­clerical Catholic.” Likewise, he was an anti-­gay lover of especially heterosexually-­identified young men (see Duncan 2006, 85). He was, Duncan (2006, 95) notes, “never very keen on the term ‘homosexuality,’ and, throughout his life in fact, preferred the term ‘different,’ or ‘difference,’ to point to his sense of indefinite otherness with respect to bourgeois society.”

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Being “different” cast homosexual desire into a consciousness oppositional to capitalism. It was also an expression of “friendship” even “love,” Duncan (2006, 96) continues, but sometimes “passion” and even “evil.” Now homosexual desire is simply another dish served at Café Capitalism. 35 Luke 22:19. 36 1996, 213. 37 2014, xxix. 38 Castelli 2014, xxxii. Nietzsche knew: “What was once done for the love of God is now done for the love of money” (quoted in Kaag 2018, 17). 39 Ibid. “Now,” Berardi (2012, 74–75) points out, “the old bourgeoisie has no power anymore, having been replaced by a proliferating virtual class (a deterritorialized and pulverized social dust), rather than a territorialized group of people).” And the proletariat? Berardi (2012, 75) believes that “labor is undergoing a parallel process of pulverization and deterritorialization.” 40 Subjects with which I grapple in Moving Images of Eternity: Pinar (2019). 41 2005, 58. 42 Discussing Daoist aesthetics, Wang (2021, 147) asserts: “Internal freedom is about freeing oneself from conformity to social norms and achieving inner peace.” Not sure how much “inner peace” Pasolini experienced, but “internal freedom” from conformity he did. 43 Annovi (2017, 7). “The pressure to conform and reach consensus intensifies,” Han (2021, 1) observes, a “surrender to systemic compulsion” (2021, 2), resulting in a post-­democratic palliative-­performance society, a “society of the like” (2021, 3). 44 “[T]oday,” Benedetti (2005, 7) observes, “wherever one turns, people now talk only of texts, hypertexts, intertexts, and metatexts, of readers who dialogue with the texts, and of texts that dialogue with other texts. The author who longer exists; or rather, we speak as if that were the case.” She adds: “The author obviously has not disappeared, and her function has never been as strong and central as it is in today’s literary communication” (Ibid.) “[T]he theoretical concept,” Benedetti (2005, 60) continues, “will always remain bound to the real person by way of the negation.” 45 With its not so subtle gendered subtext, as Burns (2018, 103) appreciates: “In the neoliberal era of capitalist-­militarist globalization, all social, political, and economic institutions remain firmly controlled by white heteropatriarchal power and reflect patterns of corporate masculinity.” 46 2017, 33. 47 Grant 1969, 33. In their dystopian visions of the future, the Canadian Christian Platonist and the Italian Communist Queer intersect. 48 2017, 11. 49 2017, 95. 50 2017, 127. For Pasolini, Annovi (2017, 131) notes, “the bodies of the Roman subproletariat are outside of history, or, rather, they belong to the metahistorical dimension of the outcast.” 51 That fact makes “Pasolini remains central to any theorization of ‘queerness’,” as Angelo Restivo (2002, 150) appreciates. 52 Blanton 2014, 117. 53 2020, 119–120. 54 2020, 120. 55 Quoted in 2020, 120. 56 2020, 120. 57 Blanton 2014, 119. 58 Gordon 1996, 180. 59 Quoted in Castelli 2014, xxviii. 60 2014, xxviii.

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61 Authenticity and sincerity replaced by profilicity, as I decry in Chapter 14. 62 Quoted in 2014, xxviii. 63 The phrase is George Grant’s (quoted in Potter 2005, xliii). “It has been made clear by both Grant and Heidegger,” Nicholson (2006, 333) explains, “that technology is not the mere assembly of machines and devices that we make use of; beyond that, it is the form taken on by reality itself in the modern age, that reaches right into ourselves and so comes to constitute our way of thinking as well as acting.” 64 Annovi 2017, 128. 65 As a moniker for singularity, identity can facilitate inner movement at crucial moments, as in “coming out,” but it binds singularity to what is projected in public. As public figure – identity is the interface between private and public – Pasolini complained about his own “mystification” by the Italian public, the actual “agent” of which, Gordon (1996, 54) explains, was “Industrial power and its corollary, state and political conformism.” In Barthes’s “euphoria over the author’s dispersion,” Benedetti (2005, 54) detects “the anxiety of being watched, the uneasiness over an identity constructed by the readers, which comes back to haunt the writing subject, trapping him in an unwanted image, heavy and tiresome.” Does the public side of sexual identity ensure the same? Is that white picket fence surrounding the gay family also a set of prison bars? 66 For Pasolini, under current conditions of neo-­Fascism, “[e]very effort to break with norms” fails, McGlazer (2020, 125) explains, as there is an “automatic conversion of disobedience into its opposite,” evident when tells Pasolini the young: “you obeyed disobeying!” 67 Ibid. For Pasolini, McGlazer (2020, 126) being unrecognizable to power meant “illegibility,” as “legibility” might mean “foreclosure.” 68 1996, 74. 69 Impossible because, for Pasolini, Annovi (2017, 34) notes, “power has become absolute and omnipresent so that it is everywhere.” 70 Annovi 2017, 125. 71 Castelli 2014, xxii. 72 Pinar 2012, 237–238. The reference is to Hitler’s would-­be assassins; I invoke the concept to encourage non-­compliance with conformity, retaining inner freedom, remembering what was and should be. 73 “The Nazis applied the term Lügenpresse (lying press) to the mainstream press,” Sunstein (2018, June 28, 65) reminds; U.S. President Trump referred to the “FAKE NEWS media,” which, he said, “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” The phrase is not the exclusive property of authoritarian rulers; it is now depicts the “post-­truth” culture widely available online. Timothy Snyder, a historian of the Holocaust, cautions that “post-­truth is pre-­fascism” (quoted in Darnton 2018, June 28, 72). 74 2005, 181. 75 As this essay demonstrates. 76 2005, 188. 77 2005, 200. 78 2005, 202. 79 2005, 190. 80 In late-­modern capitalism, Berardi (2012, 104) knows, “information takes the place of things, and the body is cancelled from the field of communication,” and “more information means less meaning” (2012, 105). 81 Including ourselves, as Cazdyn (2012, 15) knows: “Capitalism is both the inside and outside of our being, informing even its (capitalism’s) own undoings, its resistances, its alternatives – its unthought and unacted.” 82 Restivo 2002, 150.

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83 1996, 70. 84 Ibid. Cazdyn (2012, 61) suggests that the “end of the world is a more likely scenario than the end of capitalism.” 85 Quoted in Blanton 2014, 119. 86 See, for example: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/its-­ the-­r ight-­wings-­italy-­now/562256/ accessed 2018-­07-­16. 87 And of standardized testing, implied in Salvio’s perceptive discussion of curriculum’s capacity to censure the past: see 2014, 275. 88 2006, 100. 89 2006, 100. 90 “More than an erasure of the past,” Maggi (2009, 336) suggests, “we should speak of a metamorphosis of the past. Human beings, Salò tells us, have metamorphosed into monsters of an eternal present. Their monstrosity lies in a denial of time; they have changed into beings who do not change.” 91 1996, 54. 92 “What gets repressed is not the lost object,” Benedetti (2005, 202) asserts, “but the fact that it constitutes a loss.” 93 Gordon 1996, 46. 94 1996, 38. Gordon cites Pasolini’s professional activity as at teacher between 1944 and 1949, as well as four articles for Il mattino del popolo in November 1947 and July 1948. 95 1996, 38. 96 Quoted in Gordon 1996, 73. 97 Benedetti 2005, 22. 98 A fact to which Maria Stepanova so movingly testifies. 99 Benedetti 2005, 51. 100 2005, 208. 101 2005, 211. 102 2005, 212. 103 Ibid. 104 2005, 115. 105 2005, 113. 106 2005, 190. 107 2017, 3. 108 As Susan Stewart (2020) so carefully chronicles. 109 The Freudian phrase denoting, in Britzman’s (2006, 108) definition, “vivid details of insignificant content, that serve as a place holder for the forgotten.” More aggressively phrased, screen memories cover up what the subject wants not to remember. 110 (Quoted in Castelli 2014, xxviii). The phrase, Castelli (2014, xxviii) explains, “comes from the closing lines of Pasolini’s documentary Le mura di Sana’a (The Walls of Sana’a), which he made as a plea to UNESCO to preserve the cultural legacy he encountered in Yemen,” now almost destroyed, a pawn in Middle East warfare politics. 111 Castelli 2014, xxix. 112 Ibid. 113 See (2016). 114 Gordon (1996, 95). 115 2014, xxix. 116 As Mary Aswell Doll demonstrates, see Pinar (in press). 117 2014, xxix. That confrontation occurs in every scene in Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew, as I point out in Chapter 13. 118 Ibid. 119 Pasolini (2014).

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1 20 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 1 37 138 139

1 40 141

1 42 143 144 145

2014, xxxiv–xxxv. 2014, xxxv. 2018, 177. Annovi (2017, 62). 1996, 66. 1996, 66. Quoted in 1996, 66. Quoted in 1996, 174. 1996, 75. Ibid. All quoted passages from 1996, 75. 1996, 77. 1996, 75. 1996, 77. Ibid. 1996, 39. 1996, 78. “In Pasolini’s model,” Stone (1994, 45) notes, “teacher and disciple oscillate, and the best students will teach their teachers.” Ibid. Taubman (1990). 1996, 78–79. In contrast, for Pasolini, Gordon (1996, 79) suggests, “the role of the poet casts the self as an innocent (often a mother’s son).” Ryan-­Scheutz (2007, 4) reminds: “While numerous male figures were central to the expression of his world view, women and the female sphere were equally and uniquely important for understanding and solving the dilemma he perceived.” 1996, 81. Quoted in Gordon 1996, 83. And for Pasolini, “every man has only one epoch/in life” (quoted in Gordon 1996, 108). That era imprints one character, a key element of one’s individuation, separating subjectivity. In “A un ragazzo,” Gordon (1996, 169) notes, “the melancholic tone derives in part from an acknowledgement that the poet is divided from the boy by his experience of history, and can only communicate as a father-­figure, not a brother, nor as a desiring subject.” Quoted in Gordon 1996, 191. Performed by Massimo Girotti: 1918–2003 Performed by Terence Stamp: 1938–. The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights, semi-­pornographic celebrations of the body, specifically (in Pasolini’s words: 1994b [1973], 247) of “sexual relations [that] are sources of inspiration in their own right, because I see in them an incomparable fascination, and [thus] they seem to me to be of such high, absolute importance, to warrant the dedication of far more than one film to them.” He continues: “[I] regret the liberalizing influence that my films may eventually have upon the sexual customs of Italian society. In fact, my films have contributed, in practice, to a false liberalization, actually desired by the new reformist and permissive, power, which is also the most fascist power in history….Having achieved sexual freedom (a freedom conceded to them, not earned), young people – bourgeois, and mainly proletarian or subproletarians (if such distinctions are still possible) – have quickly and fatally transformed it into an obligation….The conformist anxiety of being sexually liberated transforms the youth into miserable and neurotic erotomaniacs, eternally unsatisfied (precisely because their sexual freedom is received, not struggled for and gained) and therefore unhappy. In this way even the last place in which reality resided, that is, the body, or better in the popular body, has disappeared” (Pasolini 1994b [1973], 248).

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1 46 147 148 149

1996, 242. 1996, 249. 1996, 289. Of course it’s already come: the Holocaust has happened, the planet is polluted, the nuclear arsenal awaits the mistake that removes any remaining remnants of humanity.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., Frenkel-­Brunswick, E., Levinson, D., and Sanford, N. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. Harper and Row. Annovi, Gian Maria. 2017. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Performing Authorship. Columbia University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2014. Foreword. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s St. Paul. A Screenplay (vii–xi). Verso. Benedetti, Carla. 2005. The Empty Cage. Inquiry into the Mysterious Disappearance of the Author. Cornell University Press. Berardi, Franco. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e). Britzman, Deborah P. 2006. Novel Education: Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and Not Learning. Peter Lang. Burns, James P. 2018. Power, Curriculum, and Embodiment: Re-­ thinking Curriculum as Counter-­Conduct and Counter-­Politics. Palgrave Macmillan. Castelli, Elizabeth A. 2014. Introduction. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s St. Paul. A Screenplay (xv– xlii). Verso. Cazdyn, Eric. 2012. The Already Dead. The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Duke University Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2016. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. MIT Press. Cohen, Daniel. 2021. The Inglorious Years. The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society. Princeton University Press. Darnton, Robert. 2018, June 28. The Greatest Show on Earth. The New York Review of Books, LXV (11), 68, 69, 72. Derrida, Jacques. 1976 (1967). Of Grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press. Duncan, Derek. 2006. Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality. Ashgate. Gordon, Robert S. C. 1996. Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity. Clarendon Press. Grant, George. 1969. Technology & Empire. Anansi. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2021. The Palliative Society. Polity. Kaag, John. 2018. Hiking with Nietzsche. On Becoming Who You Are. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Maggi, Armando. 2009. The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade. University of Chicago Press. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press. Nicholson, Graeme. 2006. Freedom and the Good. In Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy, and Politics, edited by Ian Angus, Ron Dart, and Randy Peg Peters (323–340). University of Toronto Press. North, Michael. 2018. What Is The Present? Princeton University Press. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1994a (1968). Manifesto for a New Theatre. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (152–170). University of Toronto Press.

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Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1994b (1973). Tetis. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (243–249). University of Toronto Press. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 2005 (1972). Heretical Empiricism. New Academic Publishing, LLC. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 2014. St. Paul. A Screenplay. Verso. Pinar, William F. 2012. What Is Curriculum Theory? (2nd edition). Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019. Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology. University of Ottawa Press. Pinar, William F. in press. Inscape. In Dialogical Engagement with the Mythopoetics of Currere: Extending the Work of Mary Aswell Doll across Theory, Literature, and Autobiography, edited by Brian Casemore. Routledge. Posnock, Ross. 1998. Color & Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Harvard University Press. Potter, Andrew. 2005. Introduction to the 40th Anniversary Edition of George P. Grant’s Lament for a Nation (ix–lxviii). McGill-­Queen’s University Press. Restivo, Angelo. 2002. The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film. Duke University Press. Ryan-­Scheutz, Colleen. 2007. Sex, the Self, and the Sacred: Women in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini. University of Toronto Press. Salvio, Paula. 1998. On Using the Literacy Portfolio to Prepare Teachers for “Willful World Traveling.” In Curriculum: Toward New Identities, edited by William F. Pinar (41–74). Garland. Salvio, Paula. 2014. “Cities and Signs.” Understanding Curriculum Studies in Italy. In International Handbook of Curriculum Research, edited by William F. Pinar (269–277). Routledge. Sartarelli, Stephen. Ed. 2014. The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini. A Bilingual Education. University of Chicago Press. Stepanova, Maria. 2017. In Memory of Memory. New Directions. Stewart, Susan. 2020. The Ruins Lesson. Meaning and Material in Western Culture. University of Chicago Press. Stone, Jennifer. 1994. Pasolini, Zanzotto, and the Question of Pedagogy. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (40–55). University of Toronto Press. Sunstein, Cass R. 2018, June 28. It Can Happen Here. The New York Review of Books, LXV (11), 64–65. Taubman, Peter 1990. Achieving the Right Distance. Educational Theory 40 (1), 121–133. Wang, Hongyu. 2021. Contemporary Daoism, Organic Relationality, and Curriculum of Integrative Creativity. Information Age Publishing.

7 SADISM1

Preceding and now extending beyond the demise of No Child Left Behind2, Louisiana’s testing3 regime remained in place.4 Did Louisiana officials fail to read Dale Johnson and Bonnie Johnson’s damming account5 of accountability in one north Louisiana6 public school, a school they renamed “Redbud”? If they did read it, did they take pride in accountability’s apparent universality? After all, Redbud represented a “microcosm,”7 Johnson and Johnson suggest, of what was underway nationally after No Child Left Behind became law in 2001. If Louisiana8 was ever a microcosm of anything, it is no longer, as in late 2015 in New York State, for instance, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo – “facing a parent’ revolt against testing” – announced its intention to reduce the testing of students and the role test scores play in teachers’ evaluations.9 In October 2015, President Barack Obama acknowledged that his educational policy – Race to the Top10 – had contributed to a “flood” of “new” and “sometimes pointless tests.”11 The President pledged to release states from obligations that had led to excessive testing, promising to press Congress for legislation limiting testing to no more than 2% of classroom time.12 Obama’s Secretary of Education – Arne Duncan13 – seemed less apologetic, admitting only the administration “had pushed a lot, fast” and that “we haven’t gotten everything right.”14 He promised to uphold high standards ensured, he said, by testing, but he also acknowledged the necessity of fostering “a joy for learning.”15 Duncan, it seemed, could not help but patronize America’s schoolteachers. Had Duncan or Obama studied only one book – High Stakes: Poverty, Testing, and Failure in American Schools16 – they might have proceeded differently. As are America’s students17 under regimes of accountability, should Duncan and Obama also be held accountable for their ignorance? Like Johnson and Johnson,18 I too am angry, and not only at the state bureaucrats and politicians who mandated DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-7

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Louisiana’s absurd accountability system but also with President Barack Obama and former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Should they not too be held accountable for the suffering students and teachers underwent as a result of their policies? Reviewing their year teaching in north Louisiana, Dale Johnson and Bonnie Johnson identify three major themes: 1) the “grinding effects” of “acute poverty,” 2) the “negative consequences” of “accountability” in the schools, and 3) the “unreasonable demands” imposed on “teachers, stifling their “creativity” and “enthusiasm” and ushering their “exodus” from the profession.19 In respect for their project – who among us education professors has returned to the public school classroom? – and for the sake of organizing their diary-­like account, I will organize my synopsis20 around these three themes, providing contextualization and commentary on the damning testimony they provide.

Poverty21 Veteran22 teachers told Johnson and Johnson23 that for many children the school breakfast and lunch are the only meals they eat all day. Not only food is food scarce at home, so is sleep, as Johnson and Johnson discover when they read to their classes, usually just before lunch: several students fall asleep, and so soundly that awakening them for lunch is “difficult.”24 In addition to insufficient food and sleep, peacefulness too is in short supply, as “violence” seems a constant threat.25 During the year a murder is committed; the victim was the grandmother of a student.26 Poverty was also evident in the conditions in which students attempted to study: Johnson and Johnson report combatting cockroaches in their classrooms each morning;27 one day during a heat wave the school gym reached 120 degrees.28 Life-­endangering heat alternated with life-­threatening cold: just before winter vacation at least one classroom had no heat.29 That deep freeze continued for several days: Johnson and Johnson report that despite wearing coats, hats, and gloves they and the children remained so cold that concentrating on teaching and learning was impossible.30 School-­building security suffered too: during Thanksgiving vacation, the building was vandalized,31 and not only then.32 “We are becoming immune,” Johnson and Johnson admitted, to the “filth” and “odors” in which “we work,” noting that the student teachers comment “frequently” on the condition of the school building.33 Another effect of poverty is evident when the children read the storybooks that the school adopted. These narrate family vacations taken away from home, summer camps, music lessons, and other “activities” with which “most” have had “no experience.”34 Despite their best efforts, Johnson and Johnson acknowledge they cannot possibly compensate for “lost experiences” and “large deficits” in “linguistic maturation.”35 They “wonder why” those who create accountability systems act “oblivious to” or “disinterested” in the “correlation” between “poverty” and “low test scores.”36 The fact is long-­established and has been reported

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repeatedly.37 Standardized tests deepen these “deficits,” a fact evident during the children’s completion of a questionnaire concluding the Iowa test. Johnson and Johnson note that several questions concern 1) computers38 in students’ homes (few have them), 2) calculators (largely absent), 3) library use (Redbud had no library), and 3) attitudes toward art (largely absent at Redbud).39 “This is one section of the Iowa,” Johnson and Johnson write, in a rare expression of (sardonic) humor, that “all” children can complete “confidently.”40 Despite being forced to buy art supplies from their own funds, Johnson and Johnson did manage to teach art; they found that art-­making had a “soothing effect” on the children.41 They wanted to recommend all their students for art, but only fifteen students of the 611 enrolled in Redbud Elementary were judged eligible.42 They spent the final few days of the school year doing art projects with their classes.43 Advocates of school choice, Johnson and Johnson suggest, are evidently unaware that many private schools do “not want” poor children as students.44 Not every adult, they note, welcomes working with children who have not bathed in days, wear unwashed clothes, show skin disorders, and bleed from their gums. Even more serious difficulties lie below the surface of the skin; children’s experience of trauma complicates educators’ efforts to become “emotionally close” to students.45 But the bottom line for private (and charter) schools is test scores, as those children who might lower schools’ overall test scores are denied admission or, if they have somehow slipped in, expelled.46 But the issue is moot in Louisiana, as admission for children of poverty to private schools is unlikely, given that the proposed amount of a school voucher there – $1,500 – cannot come close to covering school tuition and other costs. Johnson and Johnson wonder who will make up the difference.47 They know the answer to that question; the voucher system is designed to keep poor children segregated, away from the children of the middle and upper classes. Not only are poor children generally but Black children specifically are kept from mixing. Middle-­and upper-­class children are often white, especially in Louisiana and across the former slave states. In northwest Louisiana the children of the affluent attend the private Deerborne Academy where the annual tuition (in 2000) was $3,000 to $4,000 per child per year.48 Like Deerborne, nearby Shady Lake Christian School enrolled mostly white children, as few African American parents could afford tuition. Safely segregated, students attending Deerborne Academy – or any private school in Louisiana – were spared the LEAP test,49 another outrageous instance of separate and unequal.50 Economically excluded by private schools, poor Black children are left to their own devices, evident in the case of Yolande who, Johnson and Johnson tell us, missed the first seventy – ninety overall – days of school, including three of the five LEAP test days and the two makeup days.51 The State Department of Education ruled that Yolande’s “zero” score on the LEAP test must be included when calculating the overall rating of Redbud Elementary School. Despite dire circumstances, what “struck” Johnson and Johnson was the “humanity” of their

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students and their parents.52 The assertion of humanity in conditions of material deprivation testifies to the spiritual and psychological courage of children and those who teach them. For those in power who can correct poverty but refuse to do so, for those who intensify poverty by installing standardized testing regimes that ensure the academic failure, there must be accountability.

Accountability “None” of these tests is necessary, Johnson and Johnson conclude.53 But at Redbud there is only “continual” acknowledgment of the upcoming LEAP test.54 At one after-­school meeting a consultant tells teachers that whatever will not appear on the LEAP is “not worth teaching – it is just fluff.”55 While catastrophic for children and their teachers, school reform has been good for business, as the “test-­grading” industry has boomed.56 If the funds spent on testing, test scoring, and bureaucratic monitoring were rerouted to the schools – reducing class size, hiring paraprofessionals, increasing teacher salaries – the future of Louisiana, Johnson and Johnson suggest, could be “rosy.”57 Admirable it is that well into that emotionally excruciating year that Johnson and Johnson could express such confidence. “If only more money” has been educators’ mantra forever, but I say fully fund the schools not because Louisiana’s – or the nation’s – future will become “rosy,” but because doing so is ethically obligatory. Make no promises, my fellow educators. Too many other factors – historical factors, as I have hinted in the endnotes – are in play that promise Louisiana no rosy future, at least not for poor children of the state. In one instance of money misspent Johnson and Johnson describe all third-­and fourth-­grade teachers attending a four-­hour session after school (from 3:30PM to 7:30PM), a session designed to train them to use a “new complex computer program” that would “pinpoint” their students’ “needs” and then provide “computerized instruction addressing those needs.”58 The district spent $85,500 for this software. Redbud’s teachers have been working with their children for six weeks, Johnson and Johnson point out, and “what they need” big data could not possibly identify let alone provide: what children need is “more personal interaction,”59 in my terms, subjective presence, enabling authentic – that is to say, self-­disclosing – dialogical encounter. The reciprocity and particularity of human relationship – especially crucial for children – cannot be provided by software.60 Not only in Louisiana (but there outrageously so) does money mysteriously find its way into the pockets of the powerful, rewards for misspending public funds, starving schools and miseducating – through enforced test prep – the children enrolled in them. One morning Redbud teachers read in the Shreveport newspaper: “State Education Superintendent Cecil J. Picard gave 18 of his top state Education Department administrators raises of up to 12 percent.”61 Johnson and Johnson report that teachers were “struck” by the “irony” of rewarding those who “heap busywork” on the “lowest-­paid” educators in the United States.62

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On occasion (as noted earlier) Johnson and Johnson express humor, as when they note that “finally something” is accorded more attention than the LEAP test.63 What could that be? It was a football game. The excitement and competitiveness often associated with sports school officials wanted to reroute to test-­prep, and so they sanctioned “pep rallies” to intensify students’ concentration on what awaits them.64 There was to be a class cheering competition – for tests, not football – to be judged by the Redbud High School cheerleaders. First, second, and third graders perform cheered for success on the Iowa test; fourth graders performed cheers for victory over the LEAP. The winning cheers were to be performed at the all-­school “test rally” the week following.65 As the actual test draws near, this LEAP test “frenzy” intensifies.66 The name of the school should be changed, Johnson and Johnson lament, to “Redbud Test Preparation Center.”67 As LEAP test loomed large, the academic curriculum shrank. Oral language activities disappeared; social studies and science could only be taught on occasions; all were replaced by the two subjects the high-­stakes tests emphasize: writing and math.68 At one of many after-­school meetings, a consultant advised teachers: “Well, the word is, you should really only teach reading and math because of the LEAP test.” What about science, social studies, and the arts? “Well, just integrate everything through reading,” the consultant replied.69 When Johnson and Johnson wrote this remembrance, Louisiana was the only state in the United States where failing a standardized test meant failing the grade.70 In 2000, more than one-­third of fourth and eighth graders in Louisiana failed the test. Recall that an absent Yolande also failed the test, as did several special education students who were unable to read.71 Even for those able to read, Johnson and Johnson wonder if the tests are developmentally appropriate.72 Psychological tensions become somatic. A healthy student, Dario, complains of a “bad” stomach ache; Carlonna also reports feeling unwell.73 The children were exhausted from the “skill-­and-­drill overkill.”74 No longer their “usual ebullient selves,” the children have grown “jittery” and they seldom “smile.”75 There are more arguments, even “physical confrontations.”76 The teachers too begin to buckle.77 When testing finally began, one child – Kelvin – vomits.78 Another, Gerard, starts crying. Teachers were unable to respond to the children’s distress as they were restricted to reading aloud only those words printed in boldface in the administrator’s manual. After the day’s testing concluded, a test coordinator collected the tests; teachers signed their names to testify to the event. After five days of LEAP testing – but still facing three days of Iowa testing – the children, Johnson and Johnson report, are in a “bad mood.”79 Somehow the ordeal wouldn’t end, as the state of Louisiana then required two days of LEAP test “field testing.”80 The rationale for this sadism was to ascertain items to include on the LEAP test for year following. Now the waiting began. “When will we hear about the LEAP test results?” Verlin asks each day.81 Like the period of preparation, the month after the test

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was stressful for both children and teachers.82 When the waiting game was finally over, Johnson and Johnson learn that fifty-­four of their 118 fourth graders have failed; they must attend summer school.83 Then they can retake the test; if they fail again they will have to repeat the fourth grade. Fourteen of the fifty-­four children who failed were non-­readers. Reminding readers that this “trauma” does not occur in private schools, Johnson and Johnson describe the scene: “most of the children are crying. Those who passed are hugging those who failed and are comforting them.”84 It is a “pitiful scene.”85 Quietly86 they conclude that the LEAP ought to be “examined more closely – not the children and teachers of Louisiana.”87 The school year came to a crushing close. There was one final insult. For rest of the nation, Johnson and Johnson note, Memorial Day is a holiday marked by ceremonies, parades, and picnics – but not at Redbud Elementary, where a full school day had been scheduled.88 At the last minute that was changed to half-­a-­ day, “in recognition” of “improved” LEAP test scores.89 When they had taught children years before, Johnson and Johnson recall, schools used standardized tests to “see how well they were doing.”90 There was, the recall, “no mania surrounding them,” as they were “used as indicators of progress.”91 They recall that then no one taught for the test; nor would have it occurred to any teacher to do so.92 During the brief period – 1969–1971 – I served as a high-­school teacher of English, I recall the same. So much for “progress.”

Stifling Teachers’ Creativity93 I also recall never writing lesson plans. I made notes to myself regarding the next class, but never did I face what teachers faced at Redbud, e.g. the whole panoply of paralyzing and pointless demands made by administrators, bureaucrats and parents too. When parents devolve from caretakers to consumers, they project “unreasonable demands” on teachers.94 These parents tend not to be those of children at risk of failing the test: those parents are absent.95 Truth was that parents of any description were largely no-­shows: at PTO meetings there were more teachers than parents in attendance.96 When parents did show up, unreasonable demands followed and school officials quickly capitulated. On Halloween, for instance, Redbud enjoyed no parties or costume parades because a few parents protested on so-­called religious grounds,97 but many of these same parents had no objection to their children watching “violent, gory movies” on television, the plots and details of which the children reported to the Johnsons.98 Early in the school year Johnson and Johnson received a “packet” of materials, among them a forty-­two-­page “curriculum grade book spreadsheet” on which were listed “326 objectives,” followed by “Days 1–30.”99 Teachers must track what they teach and when they teach it. Not only were these returning professors of education surprised; many teachers were themselves “stunned” as became inescapable the realization that “school is no longer for education.”100 School

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had devolved into a test prep center as all classes must incorporate Iowa/LEAP preparation.101 In the teacher handbook were recorded the “many” rules that regulated the daily conduct of teaching.102 Aside from sadism, what could be the rationale such pathetic panopticism? Did officials imagine that specifying codes and benchmarks ensures that students will learn?103 All that fantasy amounts to is soul-­busting “busywork” for the teacher.104 Like all teachers, Johnson and Johnson need time to prepare “useful instructional activities,” especially for those nonreaders who seem stymied.105 “Instead,” they rue, “our time will be spent looking up the codes for standards, benchmarks, activities, modifications, and assessments and attaching these codes to instructional plans”106 It is not obvious from their account when in fact they found time for this busywork, as they were obligated to attend what seems like innumerable after-­school meetings.107 Even the teaching schedule is structured sadistically, as teachers are ensured no time to reflect and rest in solitude.108 Teachers’ “only break” occurred during the twenty-­five minutes when their students took music or physical education.109 Only ten minutes were scheduled for free time; it turns out this time was not free at all but allocated to visiting what must be a busy restroom.110 Do prison inmates face such restroom restrictions?111 This sadistic assault on teachers never stopped. At yet another after-­school meeting, teachers were informed “new lesson plan formats” were on their way, each “two pages in length,” each following a uniform format to prevent teachers from recording their plans in “different ways.”112 At a session entitled “Teacher Collaborations” held during a “professional development day”113 session, presenters insulted teachers “nonstop.”114 Teachers were informed that they “do not possess sharing skills … equate avoiding collaboration with avoiding conflict, and [that they] view it [collaboration] as little more than window dressing.”115 Aside from the conformity that accompanies enforced collaboration, this assertion shows how little “data” informed the scapegoating of teachers. Only teachers were required to make evidence-­based instructional decisions; school “reformers” employed fantasy and greed. Teachers’ alleged ineptitude did not end not with their inability to collaborate. In fact, it was evidently endless, as students were asked after each of the four subject-­matter LEAP tests to complete a fifteen-­item multiple-­choice questionnaire concerning their teachers’ professional practices. One question asked if students had received comments from their teachers regarding their writing, including specific suggestions for improving it; another asked how often their teachers explained in writing how their social studies work would be graded. The state of Louisiana, as Johnson and Johnson put it plainly, forces children “to snoop on teachers.”116 Is it any wonder there is a teacher shortage117 in Redbud and elsewhere in Louisiana?118 Johnson and Johnson were “struck” that the professional judgment of teachers who, they point out, worked with the children 176 days (1,232 hours) during the course of a school year, was simply “ignored.”119 They ask the obvious question of which the state is evidently

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oblivious: who could evaluate a student’s efforts better than a certified, experienced on-­site teacher who observes all aspects of a child’s academic work?120 Teachers knew their students better than any standardized test could.121 Bureaucrats must issue no more “administrative pronouncements” that stifle teachers’ creativity.122 Teaching requires academic freedom; indeed, without liberty we cannot teach.123 Even when these prerequisites are met – as they were when I taught high-­school English fifty-­three years ago – teaching is “so intense” that even twenty-­two-­year-­olds tell Johnson and Johnson that they “fall asleep” as soon as they reach home after school.124 Certainly I did. Hiring lunchroom supervisors and paraprofessionals, as Johnson and Johnson suggest, would help, but ending so-­called school “reform” is paramount.125 There was no sign of that, at least not in Louisiana when Johnson and Johnson returned to the school for a visit; they learned that teachers had to use a “scripted program” instead of “balanced reading” to teach children to read.126 The district had hired “coordinators” to monitor this presumably “teacher-­proof ” instruction.127

Conclusion Consistent with the dispassionate tone of their remembrance, Johnson and Johnson make nine sensible recommendations.128 I make a supplementary recommendation that is not so dispassionate, one made in the spirit of “never again.” School “reform” – at its most ugly in the school where Johnson and Johnson taught – represented nothing less than a crime against children, and as such, a crime against humanity. I am not suggesting a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but something more akin to the Nuremburg Trials. Officials ought to be brought to account for their sadism against children, their scapegoating of teachers, their self-­ empowering often self-­ profiting complicity with corporations,129 and, I would add as a former high-­school English teacher, their Orwellian destruction of the language. As the phrase “no child left behind” makes explicit, many politicians endorsed reform – and standardized testing – to end, they said, the cycle of poverty. Dropping their dispassionate tone, Johnson and Johnson point out that “this is nonsense.”130 “We think politicians should be held accountable,” Johnson and Johnson agree.131 It is politicians who “create the circumstances under which teachers must teach and children must learn”132 No other set of professionals are held as accountable as teachers are.133 Unless proven guilty of malpractice, physicians are not held accountable for patients who fail to recover from their illnesses. Lawyers who fail to protect their clients from prison (or injury or rape or death in prison) are not held accountable, Johnson and Johnson note. They think of social workers who are not held accountable for clients unable to find work. Johnson and Johnson also think of dentists: are they held accountable for patients who develop cavities or gum disease? I think of priests and preachers: are they

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held accountable when parishioners fail to find the Lord? Schools are threatened with closure if standardized test scores are insufficient; why not close churches, synagogues and mosques whose members fail those tests of moral conduct demanded in holy books? Teachers represent an “easy target,” Johnson and Johnson know, and “teacher-­bashing” is “all too common.”134 When schools are targeted, so-­called “failing schools” are often those, Johnson and Johnson point out, with the “greatest needs.”135 Like all scapegoating – the United States has a long history of scapegoating Africans, Asians, Indigenous peoples, Jews, LGBTQ2, Mexicans, Muslims, women – this version of scapegoating is also false, as Johnson and Johnson testify: “We saw dedicated teachers work small miracles with their pupils every day we were on the faculty at Redbud Elementary School.”136 They add: “Would it hurt the people in power to say, ‘teachers, you have done an excellent job bringing these children along as far as you have’?”137 Here their understatement – that dispassion, as noted earlier – is rhetorically effective, as its humility underscores the sadism of those to whom the question is posed. More pointed questions follow, as Johnson and Johnson ask how many lawmakers, state superintendents of education, or members of a state board of education or department of education have ever taught full time in one of the elementary schools under their jurisdiction?138 Have policymakers and lawmakers ever taught in underfunded schools? Have they have spent any significant amount of time in schools such as Redbud where they could listen to those incarcerated there?139 Have executive directors and officers of associations such as NCATE ever have taught in the public schools? If so, when? Under what conditions did they teach? When and for how long? “It is high time,” Johnson and Johnson conclude, these officials abandon their “well-­appointed, air-­conditioned offices,” suspend “their expense accounts” and junkets and teach full time in public schools for a year “so that they can acquaint themselves with life in schools today.”140 These questions are the right questions to ask, but they seem to me to imply that only ignorance disables officials from appreciating the realities Johnson and Johnson report. Ignorance of the law is no excuse in courts of law. I suggest those education officials – state and federal, including Arne Duncan himself – who directed “school reform” be subpoenaed to answer questions concerning what they knew when. If school reform represents a crime against children – as Johnson and Johnson make acutely clear it is – should not the World Court or the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child141 initiate if not a Nuremberg-­style trial, then an investigation that results in if not fines and imprisonment, at least public shaming? Do not the children Johnson and Johnson describe – a relative few given the numbers of poor children suffering under school “reform” – deserve justice? Do children’s lives matter?

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Notes 1 In Alternatives to Privatizing Public Education and Curriculum, edited by Steven Farenga and Daniel Ness (3–16), published by Routledge in 2017. Reprinted with permission. Revised slightly in 2021. 2 No Child Left Behind was passed with “overwhelming bipartisan support in 2001,” but, Rich (2015, November 20, A21) reported, had become “an albatross” that had led to “overly punitive” standardized testing. The law expired in 2007 but Congress had been unable to come to agreement concerning its replacement. Employing the same Orwellian language as Congress had in 2001, the law’s successor was named the Every Student Succeeds Act (Kirp 2015, December 10, A35). 3 “[I]n the … often uselessly painful tests enforced by the school,” Franco Moretti points out, “the individualized socialization of Western modernity seems to collapse back into archaic initiation rituals” (quoted in McGlazer 2020, 88). For two other examples – also involving sadism in school, these rituals eroticized – see Pinar 2015, 164-­173; Musil 1955 (1906). 4 See http://www.louisianabelieves.com/resources/library/practice-­tests Accessed 12.31.15. I lived in Louisiana from 1985 to 2005, seventeen years in Baton Rouge, three in New Orleans (on the edge of the French Quarter: somehow I survived), all the time teaching at LSU. 5 There is a tradition of such damning autobiographical accounts: see, for instance, Kozol (1991); Holt (1969). 6 While living in Louisiana, I became very aware of the cultural and political divide between North and South, including north and south Louisiana. Interstate 10 seemed the dividing line: north was Mississippi and Arkansas, south a catholic often cosmopolitan culture that was as much Caribbean as it was mainland America. Lynching, for instance, was more common north than south, among them that of W. C. Williams, nineteen years old, lynched in broad daylight on October 13, 1938, near Ruston, with hundreds of enthusiastic spectators (Fairclough 1999, 29). Between 1889 and 1922, the north Louisiana parishes of Caddo, Ouachita, and Morehouse, “all overwhelmingly Protestant,” Fairclough (1999, 9) notes, witnessed more lynchings than any other countries in the nation. Over half the lynchings that occurred in Louisiana between 1900 and 1931 took place in seven parishes, all of them mainly Protestant, and all but one in the northern part of the state.” 7 2006, xix. 8 While Louisiana’s cultural distinctiveness is widely celebrated, its role as “projective screen” for the rest of the nation is less discussed, however obvious it is during Mardi Gras, when holiday revelers imagine Louisiana as a place where they can conduct themselves as they dare not anywhere else. From the outset, Americans have been projecting onto Louisiana opportunities of numerous kinds. In slaveholding Virginia, for instance, the Louisiana Purchase aroused interest within the legislature; in 1804 and 1805 both houses adopted resolutions removing all those of African descent (Jordan 1974, 211). The latter resolution instructed Virginia’s congressmen to “press for a portion of the Louisiana Territory for settlement of Negroes already free, freed in the future, and those who became dangerous to society” (1974, 212). The conjunction of those three categories – Black, free, and dangerous – represent projections themselves, fantasies Virginians were evidently eager to relocate geographically. 9 Taylor 2015, November 26, A29. 10 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/issues/education/k-­12/race-­to-­the-­top For a critique, see Pinar (2012, 16). 11 Zernike 2015, November 13, A20. 12 A recent study made by the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) documented

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13

14 15

16 17

18 19 20

21

that the “typical” student in 66 of the country’s large urban districts takes about eight standardized tests a year, two of which are required by the federal government. On average, students are required to take 112 standardized tests between prekindergarten and 12th grade. The CGCS report found that more test time does not result in improved learning as measured by student performance on the federally backed math and reading exam known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (The New York Times 2015, October 29, A30). Duncan was replaced (as Acting Secretary of Education) by John B. King, Jr., the deputy education secretary and a former commissioner of education in New York State (Harris and Rich 2015, October 3, A11). As of this writing – 2021 – the U.S. Secretary of Education is Miguel A. Cardona. Cardona’s personal background and career – a sharp contrast to that of his predecessor Betsy DeVos, a billionaire private-­ school champion (for details, see Pinar 2019, 131, n. 7) – drew wide praise upon his confirmation by the U.S. Senate The son of Puerto Rican parents, he grew up in public housing in Meriden, Conn., attending public schools where struggled as an English-­language learner. Still speaking in both English and Spanish, Cardona became an elementary-­school teacher, an award-­winning principal, an assistant superintendent in that school system and Connecticut’s first Latino commissioner of education (Green 2021a, March 2, A16). Quoted in Zernike 2015, November 13, A20. Quoted in Zernike 2015, November 13, A20. Duncan made these remarks on November 12, 2015, in Boston in a speech at Jeremiah E. Burke High School, a once “failing school” in one of the city’s “most troubled neighborhoods” (Zernike 2015, November 13, A20). The recipient of both Race to the Top money and a so-­ called School Improvement Grant in 2011, the school test scores have improved. How that happened – some schools expel academically weak students just before testing – and what it means – what does standardized testing have to do with learning? – was not addressed. Johnson and Johnson (2006). The lack of “background knowledge,” Johnson and Johnson (2006, 72) point out, penalize students on standardized tests. Their students could pronounce the word harp, but they had no reason to know what the word means. Happily, the dictionary provided an illustration. There were other words with which their students had had no occasion to know: Johnson and Johnson (2006, 73) reference “recital” and “opera.” 2006, 166. 2006, xviii. Synopsis has played a primary role in curriculum studies, as it enacts not only that abridgement teachers are expected to make when teaching topics; the concept also encourages teachers’ and students’ commentary on the topic, encouraging expressivity and emphasizing communication (see Pinar 2006). The former Confederate states cover up the enforced continuation of economic inequality with concepts such as “pro-­g rowth,” concepts that rationalize low taxes to high-­incomer earners and tax waivers to “encourage” business. The total estimated costs of tax waivers to the Louisiana school systems of Louisiana, Berliner and Biddle (1995, 84) reported twenty years ago, was one billion dollars; for the public schools in each of the sixty-­four parishes of the state, this amounts an average loss of tax revenues of about 1.5 million dollars per year. Berliner and Biddle (1995, 84–85) remind that Louisiana was ranked last among the fifty states in its number of high school graduates, forty-­ninth in its poverty rate, forty-­seventh in its rate of adult illiteracy, and forty-­six in its rate of teen pregnancy. It was rated fourth in the nation for hazardous waste generation, seventh in crime rate, ninth in rate of bridges that need repair, and forty-­fifth for health coverage.

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22 The use of this term – often associated with military personnel – is not inappropriate given the moral courage and psychological-­physical stamina required to engage in what too often feels like a losing battle. “Each morning when we arrive at school,” Johnson and Johnson (2006, 109) note, “we see the cars of the veteran teachers … [who] can work no harder than they now do.” 23 2006, 23. 24 2006, 26. 25 2006, 33. 26 2006, 33. 27 2006, 47. 28 2006, 29. 29 2006, 92. 30 2006, 94. 31 2006, 81. 32 2006, 87. 33 2006, 100. 34 2006, 100. 35 2006, 131. 36 2006, 78. 37 “Different upbringings,” Miller (2015, December 18, A1, A3) reports – as if this were still “news” – “set children on different paths and can deepen socioeconomic divisions, especially because education is strongly linked to earnings.” She quotes said Sean F. Reardon, a professor at Stanford University: “Early childhood experiences can be very consequential for children’s long-­term social, emotion and cognitive development. And because those influences educational success and later earnings, early childhood experiences cast a lifelong shadow” (quoted in Miller 2015, December 18, A3). “The real task facing America,” Berliner and Biddle (1995, 59) knew, “is to find ways to improve the education and lives of America’s poorest and most neglected citizens.” 38 Evidently there were school computers, but these remained unconnected to the Internet until five weeks before the end of the school year (2006, 150). 39 2006, 136. 40 2006, 136. 41 2006, 148. 42 2006, 104. 43 2006, 175. 44 2006, 109. 45 2006, 109. 46 Charter schools’ practice of expelling students who might impact negatively test scores was even acknowledged in the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign. At a town meeting in South Carolina in November 2015, candidate Hillary Clinton complained about charter schools that expelled children who proved difficult to educate (Layton 2015, November 12, 7A). “Thankfully,” she said, the public schools “take everybody, and then they don’t get the resources or the help and support that they need to be able to take care of every child’s education” (quoted in Layton 2015, November 12, 7A). 47 2006, 110. 48 2006, 10. 49 2006, 10, 162. LEAP is an acronym for Louisiana Educational Assessment Program, a state-­wide criterion-­referenced test administered in the state of Louisiana. Grade 4 and Grade 8 students sit for this exam which covers Mathematics, English Language Arts (ELA), Social Studies and Science.

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50 Separate and unequal has a long and continuing history in the United States, including in Louisiana. In 1940, for instance, the amount allocated for each Black child amounted to 24% of the amount allocated to Whites; Black teachers were paid, on average, 64% less than White teachers; the average school year in Black schools was thirty-­seven days shorter than in White schools (Fairclough 1999, 36). “The crowded conditions in these schools is appalling,” noted a 1939–1940 survey of the Baton Rouge Black community. “In many rooms there were more than sixty pupils, all under the direction of one teacher” (Fairclough 1999, 36). 51 2006, 118, 137. 52 2006, 147. 53 2006, 28. 54 2006, 31. 55 Quoted in 2006, 32. 56 2006, 37. U.S. public Schools have long been targeted to serve non-­educational interests. Invoking Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning to the nation, James B. Macdonald (1995 [1971], 41) wrote: “Thus, the schools are directly serving the military-­ industrial complex in our social system. A careful examination of this allegation suggests that it is overly simple, yet how can many of our reporting, grading, and testing practices, our authoritarian relationships, and our prizing of docility, punctuality, and attendance be more readily explained?” The military element has faded from public view, but the current emphasis on technology is not only for profit-­driven “innovation” – as Williamson’s (2013) analysis suggests – but also for defense, given the growing threats of international hacking and internet-­based terrorism. 57 2006, 39. 58 2006, 44. 59 2006, 44. 60 Cohen (2021, 122) comments: “Empathy, which is supposed to be the exclusive realm of humans, has not prevented emotional robots from caring for the elderly in Japan.” He predicts: “When it is necessary to act beyond the confines of a protocol, a human being is more suitable than a machine. By that argument, everything that can be codified by rules will fall to robots, everything that is discretionary would be the responsibility of humans” (2021, 125). Professionalism must now pivot from standardization – “best practices,” for instance – to affirm particularity, ethically informed but situationally specific expressions of expertise. 61 Quoted in 2006, 65. 62 2006, 65. 63 2006, 74. 64 2006, 114. 65 2006, 126. 66 2006, 103. 67 2006, 104. 68 2006, 131. Writing taught only as a skill – a technology of information exchange – can be de-­individuating; Berardi (2012, 21) knows that “we have to start a process of de-­automating the word, and a process for reactivating sensuousness (singularity of enunciation, the voice) in the sphere of social-­communication.” And “mathematics is not the law of reality, but a language whose consistency has nothing to do with the multilayered consistency of life” (2012, 21). 69 Quoted passages in 2006, 50–51. 70 2006, 115. 71 2006, 112. 72 2006, 117. 73 2006, 126. 74 2006, 131.

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75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Ibid. 2006, 132. 2006, 132. 2006, 133. 2006, 137. 2006, 145. Quoted in 2006, 151. 2006, 151. 2006, 162. “Why take away the children’s summer,” Johnson and Johnson (2006, 167) ask, “and make them sit through the test again when the results mean nothing?” 84 2006, 167. 85 2006, 168. 86 On occasion their dispassionate tone disappears, as when describing one in-­service program as “nonsense” (2006, 20). 87 2006, 162. 88 2006, 173. 89 2006, 173. 90 2006, 177. That is a dangerous phrase, as it implies that standardized testing actually reflects what students learned. Worse, it implies that the quality of teaching depends on the extent to which students learn what is taught. The throat-­constricting grip of the objective-­outcomes nexus remains. My concept of study – forefronting curiosity, interest, and autonomy – loosens it (see Chapter 3; Pinar 2015, 11–24). 91 2006, 177. Again, I dispute any association between testing and student “progress.” 92 2006, 177. 93 “Creativity,” Wang (2021, 3) explains, “is a whole-­being engagement in which meditative embodiment, aesthetic attunement, and improvisational action come together to breathe vitality into teaching, learning, and curriculum.” 94 2006, 39. 95 2006, 43. 96 2006, 64. 97 2006, 64. 98 2006, 69. 99 2006, 30. 100 2006, 31. 101 2006, 12. 102 2006, 13. In her superb study of the teaching of William E. Doll, Jr., Hongyu Wang (2016, 6) reports that “Later when Doll was headmaster in Baltimore, he took away teachers’ manual so that they could not rely on them in teaching, but had to build relationships with students who were interacting with subjects and the world around them.” That relationships matter is affirmed in the Johnson and Johnson account. 103 2006, 15. 104 Ibid. 105 2006, 26. 106 Ibid. 107 2006, 27. 108 2006, 22. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid. 111 In Louisiana, Johnson and Johnson (2006, 106) report, there are teachers would rather teach inside a prison than inside a public school. 112 2006, 96. 113 Other euphemisms were used too, such as “professional growth folders” (2006, 54). 114 2006, 119.

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115 Quoted in 2006, 119. I’d use a different metaphor: compulsory collaboration closes windows, openings where one can breathe and see what’s outside this Louisiana version of Pasolini’s Salò. 116 2006, 136. 117 Johnson and Johnson (2006, 219) report that only three of the ten third-­and fourth-­ grade teachers were still teaching at Redbud Elementary; administrators also took jobs elsewhere. Now with tenure gone (see Dillon 2008, November 13, 4), teaching’s political devaluation only intensified, evident in Louisiana’s insistence that science teachers be permitted to question evolution (McWhirter 2012, April 6, A3). 118 2006, 160. 119 2006, 168. 120 2006, 168. 121 2006, 168. 122 2006, 181. 123 Pinar 2009, 54. 124 2006, 182. 125 Ibid. 126 2006, 219. 127 Ibid. 128 2006, 188–191. 129 2006, 135. 130 2006, 168. 131 2006, 173. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 2006, 181. “Perhaps this is because they are easy targets that lack the means of fighting back” (Ibid.), a likely explanation why other categories of scapegoating are also targeted. 136 2006, 173. 137 Ibid. 138 2006, 187. 139 As if in disbelief, Johnson and Johnson (2006, 102) wonder why politicians, state department officials, and high-­level administrators fail to “listen” to teachers, pointing out that teachers are the ones working with children five days a week. It is teachers who could convey to them the superfluous stress created by tests: preparing for them, taking them, suffering the consequences of failing them. Teachers know that the “curriculum has been gutted of meaningful learning experiences such as art, oral expression, and other aspects of an education that can’t be measured with a paper-­and-­pencil test” (2006, 102). 140 2006, 187. 141 I would add teachers’ professional associations and unions but they have these past six decades demonstrated little moral or political courage in combatting so-­called school reform. Curriculum reform cognizant of racial justice may yet occur: under the leadership of National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle, the organization published a Racial Justice in Education Resource Guide, advising teachers how to address issues such as white supremacy, encouraging teachers to investigate how race influences what and how they teach. During the summer of 2021, the union’s representative assembly voted to spend $675,000 to “eradicate institutional racism” in public schools (quoted in Green 2021, December 13, A8). To address widespread protests against teaching students about the legacy of systematic racism, which conservative groups condemn with the umbrella term “critical race theory,” the union undertook an “Honesty in Education” campaign that supports teaching

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“truthful and age-­appropriate accountings of unpleasant aspects of American history” (quoted in Green 2021, December 13, A8). Erica L. Green also reports that the NEA pledged more than $56,500 to research so-­called conservative groups that are “attacking educators doing anti-­racist work” (quoted in 2021, December 13, A8). Right-­wing assaults over so-­called critical race theory – and Covid-­19 related mask mandates – have taken a toll, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten acknowledged: “What you hear from teachers is that it has been too much,” she said. “And they’re trying the best that they can” (quoted in Heyward 2021, December 10, A13). Right-­wing assaults, mask-­mandate controversies, school shootings, and mental health issues combine to leave many teachers “hanging by a thread” (quoted in Ebrahimji and Zdanowicz 2021, December 17).

Bibliography Berardi, Franco. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e). Berliner, David C. and Biddle, Bruce J. 1995. The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. Perseus. Cohen, Daniel. 2021. The Inglorious Years. The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society. Trans. by Jane Marie Todd. Princeton University Press. Dillon, Sam. 2008, November 13. A School Chief Takes on Tenure, Stirring a Fight. The New York Times online: http://www.nytmes.com/2008/11/13/education/13tenure. html?emc Accessed on June 1, 2010. Ebrahimji, Alisha and Zdanowicz, Christina. 2021, December 13. “I’m Hanging by a Thread.” Teachers Say School Shootings and Mental Health Struggles Have Made This Year Their Hardest Yet. https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/17/us/teachers-­school-­ violence-­pandemic-­burnout-­trnd/index.html Accessed December 17, 2021. Fairclough, Adam. 1999. Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-­ 1972. University of Georgia Press. Green, Erica L. 2021a, March 2. Biden’s Education Nominee Is Confirmed as Challenges Loom for Reopening Schools. The New York Times, CLXX, No. 58,985, A16. Green, Erica L. 2021b, December 13. New Chief Spurs Teachers’ Union to Take on Social Justice Role. The New York Times, CLXXI, No. 59, 271, A8. Heyward, Giulia. 2021, December 10. Parents Scrambling Again as School Doors Shut. The New York Times, CLXXI, No. 59, 268, A13. Holt, John. 1969. The Underachieving School. Pitman. Johnson, Dale D. and Johnson, Bonnie. 2006. High Stakes: Poverty, Testing, and Failure in American Schools. Rowman & Littlefield. Jordan, Winthrop D. 1974. The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. Oxford University Press. Kirp, David L. 2015, December 10. Left Behind No Longer. New York Times CLXV, No. 57,076, A35. Kozol, Jonathan. 1991. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. Crown. Layton, Lyndsey. 2015, November 12. Clinton Enters Schools Debate. The Bellingham Herald, A7. Macdonald, James B. 1995 (1971). The School as a Double Agent. In Theory as a Prayerful Act: The Collected Essays of James B. Macdonald, edited by Bradley J. Macdonald (37– 47). Peter Lang. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press.

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McWhirter, Cameron. 2012, April 6. Tennessee Is Lab For National Clash Over Science Class. The Wall Street Journal Vol. CCLIX, No. 80, A3. Miller, Claire Cain. 2015, December 18. Class Divisions Growing Worse, From Cradle On. The New York Times CLXV, No. 57,084, A1, A3. Musil, Robert 1955 (1906). Young Törless. Pantheon. New York Times. 2015, October 29. Dialing Back on School Testing. The New York Times CLXV, No. 57,034, A30. Pinar, William F. 2006. The Synoptic Text Today and Other Essays. Curriculum Development after the Reconceptualization. Peter Lang. Pinar, William F. 2015. Educational Experience as Lived. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019. What Is Curriculum Theory? (3rd edition) Routledge. Rich, Motoko. 2015, November 20. Negotiators Reach Agreement to Revise No Child Left Behind. The New York Times CLXV, No. 57,056, A21. Taylor, Kate. 2015, November 26. Cuomo Is Said To Shift View On Tests’ Role In Evaluations. The New York Times CLXV, No. 57,062, A29–30. Wang, Hongyu. 2016. From the Parade Child to the King of Chaos: The Complex Journey of William Doll, Teacher Educator. Peter Lang. Wang, Hongyu. 2021. Contemporary Daoism, Organic Relationality, and Curriculum of Integrative Creativity. Information Age Publishing. Williamson, Ben. 2013. The Future of the Curriculum. School Knowledge in the Digital Age. MIT Press. Zernike, Kate. 2015, November 13. Departing Education Secretary Extols Improvement in Schools. The New York Times CLXV, No. 57,049, A20.

8 TECHNOLOGIZATION1

Modernity depends on education, or so it would seem from Daniel Tröhler’s panoramic history2 of those terms, summarized in the concept of “educationalization.” Tröhler chronicles how the concept expanded over time, incorporating the “educationalization of social problems” and, now, “the world.”3 The educationalization of the world, Tröhler emphasizes, is “not limited to solving social problems,” but is also “connected to the process of modernization itself, brought about by the modern sciences and the ideas of freedom.”4 These concepts converge in our time in technologization,5 another expansive term that incorporates product development and the “creative destruction” of culture it encourages, including shifts in subjectivity, politics, and schooling.6 The Canadian political philosopher and theologian George Grant (1918– 1988) saw these shifts coming, decrying them, and providing historical contextualization.7 Grant saw science as the secularization of Christianity, with its religious-­like faith in progress, if now to be achieved through a solely material form of incarnation: technological development.8 Nowhere is that eschatology resounding louder than in education, wherein the promise of technology has expanded to promise progress in what was once accepted as the human condition. “The design of educational technologies by learning scientists,” Williamson notes, “has been described as a method for ‘designing people’ through ‘engineering’ particular forms of learning, actions, and dispositions.”9 Fuelled first by the Cold War10 and the space race, and now especially by the lure of profits,11 educationalization has expanded from applications of science in tools, including conceptual tools, into a pervasive STEM state of mind.12 Like the scientific ambition to produce nomological laws, technology promises to predict, indeed produce, outcomes. There can be collateral damage, Grant knew. “The desire to overcome chance,” he observed, “from which modern DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-8

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techniques came forth and which is realized in any technique, involves always the reduction of the different to the same.”13 Yet (paradoxically it might seem) modernity “requires revolution in its primary sense of again and again and again. And recurrence,” Grant continued, “is expressed as a mechanical recurrence.”14 Mechanical reproducibility15 – so associated with Walter Benjamin – intensifies the demand for what is not exactly the same. This is “what is so dear to modernity,” Mary Ann Doane points out, “the possibility of the new, novelty, the continual difference and variation that constitutes the sensory basis of the modern.”16 Not only the sensory basis I suggest, but also modernity’s state of mind turns on the promise of “the new.” The “new” conception of the student – now no longer a human subject or a person, with the subjective coherence and continuity those terms imply17 – is a variable element of “big data,” information for manipulation so that learning can be assured, learning as quantified outcomes that is, outcomes that mask what is in fact being learned: subjection to software. Teachers and textbooks are replaced by curriculum online; school buildings disappear as students stare at screens anywhere they like (or are forced).18 Demoted to entrepreneurs in the “gig” economy, teachers become self-­employed monitors of technological learning. Community comes to connote association of the same, not the inclusion of difference. Fused with the screens at which s/he stares, the human subject conforms to patterns of interaction permitted by the software that operates the screens at which they stare.19 Diversity disappears as everyone becomes a technician, no longer a public servant but now a domestic one.

Privatization Privatization is well underway in the United States, as Silicon Valley worms its way into its public schools. A recent review by Natasha Singer – on the front page of The New York Times – provides a glimpse. In San Francisco’s public schools, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, offered middle school principals $100,000 “innovation grants” to encourage them to act like start­up entrepreneurs not professional educators. In Maryland, Texas, Virginia, and other states, Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings, promoted a math-­teaching program in which Netflix-­like algorithms determine which lessons students in fact see. In more than 100 schools nationwide, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, promoted software that presumably positions children to direct their own learning, repositioning teachers as facilitators and mentors maybe. Singer concludes: “[T] echnology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale…. Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches to learning.”20 There have been, Singer observes, “few checks and balances.”21 A professor of public policy at the University of Michigan - Megan Tompkins-­ Stange – told The New York Times that tech executives and their companies “have

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the power to change policy, but no corresponding check on that power. It does subvert the democratic process.”22 All the hype may not help children learn the school subjects, but U.S. tech companies want to revise those anyway. Financed with more than $60 million from Silicon Valley companies, Code.org, a major non-­profit group, intends to persuade every public school in the United States to forefront computer science in the curriculum.23 Together with Microsoft and other partners, Code.org has lobbied across the United States, pressuring states to rewrite education laws and require the funding of computer science courses. Code.org has persuaded more than 120 school districts to introduce such curriculum and trained more than 57,000 teachers. Code.org’s free coding programs, called Hour of Code, have enrolled more than 100 million students worldwide.24 Unlike earlier philanthropic gifts to education, these “gifts” are entirely self-­promoting. To ensure success, Singer reports, tech executives are tackling “every step of the education supply chain by financing campaigns to alter policy, building learning apps to advance their aims and subsidizing teacher training.”25 This “end-­to-­end” influence represents an “almost monopolistic approach education reform,” observed Larry Cuban, professor emeritus of education at Stanford University. “That is starkly different from earlier generations of philanthropists.”26 These efforts complement – indeed are aggressively in the service of – a larger Silicon Valley campaign to sell computers and software to U.S. schools, a market projected to reach $21 billion by 2020.27

Place If only technologization proceeds fast and far enough, students will learn whatever we teach them. Social problems will be solved; the stock market will soar. Secular salvation is assured, if only we tithe technology. George Grant emphasized that such a “universal” and “egalitarian” society would indeed represent the teleology of “historical striving.”28 Such a society – “a very tough, tight, twilight society”29 he lamented - would be installed via “modern science,” by enabling the “conquest of nature,” especially human nature.30 Where is the epicenter of this accelerating event? “Particularly” in the United States, Grant argued, do “scientists concern themselves with the control of heredity, the human mind, and society.”31 Tröhler shows that “educationalization” is not confined to the United States: it is now worldwide.32 Modernity comes in multiple forms.33 In the United States, Grant argued, individualism, capitalism, and technology fused with the nation’s faith in its divinely inspired exceptionality, producing a volatile, at times explosive, mix of economics, politics, and culture.34 Canada’s destiny was to be different from the United States, Grant reminded. Canada was intended to be a society more “ordered” and “caring,” decidedly “less violent.”35 Technology enforces its own intentionality, however, one that incorporates the manifest destinies of nations

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and their inhabitants through its totalizing tendencies. Therein lie the progressive dreams and apocalyptic nightmares of modernity: universality as conformity, equality as “sameness.”36 Efficiency,37 technology’s “driving principle,” Emberley concludes, effaces “local differences, particular loyalties, and credible resistances.”38 Whether nations or cultures or classes within nations or across borders, “differences” are what disappear in modernity. Consumers replace citizens39; the economy replaces culture.40 There are achievements of modernity Grant acknowledged, but, he added, “as soon as that it is said, facts about our age must also be remembered: the increasing outbreaks of impersonal ferocity, the banality of existence in technological societies, the pursuit of expansion as an end in itself.”41 Modernity means the concentration of economic powers in multinational entities, corporations that enforce “creativity” as the “bottom line” assures homogeneity.42 Such is the “fate,” Grant warns, of “any particularity” in the technological era.43 Canada, Grant announced, “has ceased to be a nation.”44

Pain The nation and the shared memory of its peoples disappear, but the state – in service to the economy - remains. Affluence, we are told unceasingly, depends upon ongoing technological advancement, and that advancement, Grant noted, “develops within a state capitalist framework.”45 Grant worried that the “wealthy” of Canada would abandon their “nationalism” should it conflict with their “economic” interests.”46 The wealthy are not the only culpable ones: Grant allowed that “many” North Americans know no “ideology” but one: “affluence.”47 The ideology of affluence embeds itself inside us not only through the promise of profit and pleasure but also through its corollaries: pain and deprivation. It is, Grant advised, “only” by attuning ourselves to “deprival” that we can “live critically” in the “dynamo.”48 That “dynamo” is not only the constant change technology simulates but also its concomitants, among them manufactured fears reactionary politicians propagate. I am thinking of the U.S. presidential administrations of George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, but the phenomenon in the United States is long-­standing.49 With the selection of Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education, the manufactured school crisis50 now is to be “solved” by consumer choice, as DeVos pressures for public funding of private schools,51 a sector in which she and her family have significant financial investments.52 After studying the impact of DeVos’ political lobbying in Michigan, David E. Kirkland, an education professor at New York University, warned she will “badly hurt public education”53 by removing resources from public schools. “Her extensive conflicts of interest and record of diverting money away from vulnerable students and into the pockets of the rich make DeVos completely unfit for the position,” Kirkland said.54 “People have sometimes taken National Socialism in Germany as an aberration,” George Grant knew, “and it certainly was in detail, but as a way of thought

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it was also something more universal.”55 When ideology (for Grant it is a “surrogate” religion56) triumphs, idols – the state, race, the nation – replace icons.57 Ideologues destroy “common sense and moderation,” he knew, “the two great protectors of the health of the public realm.”58 Grant cautioned: “English-­ speaking people are well advised to remember the German experience. The Germans were the first to build universities in which ‘objective’ science and scholarship was exalted above all questions of the good.”59 Instead of the eternal – Grant was a progressive Christian Platonist60 – we are left with “only the moving image, and our experience as listeners and as readers, and indeed as living human beings,” and that “is grounded in temporal sequence.”61 Ignorance of the past portends a technological future, fuelled by science and mathematics, implemented by engineering.

Practicality A STEM state of mind institutionalizes ignorance. “The fact [is] that our ruling classes have become technicized,” Grant lamented, “and our universities have largely excluded from the curriculum the serious study of the most important questions.”62 Grant worried that “the reading of the morning newspaper has taken the place of the morning prayer,”63 a ritual replaced today by staring at social media. Grant’s point remains: “At the beginning of the day when we need to pay attention to what is necessary to our good we turn that attention to reading about public events, not to the eternal.”64 Through teaching allegorically public (and private) events can provide portals to eternal topics.65 Grant saw that modernity’s demand for nomological knowledge was not confined to the social sciences, imperfect copies of natural science as they are. Philosophy – specifically its Anglo-­American versions in which logic not experience predominates – and the humanities more generally have become dominated by modernity’s demand for “objectivity.”66 The concept of “research” began to replace “scholarship,” Grant noticed, the latter concept implying that the scholar’s undertaking was a calling not a contract job. In contrast to the researcher – with that concept’s expectation of new discoveries and solutions to social problems – the scholar sought truth. Demands for methodological uniformity – limiting the search to what was observable and, often, measurable – undermined as it quantified that aspiration. In research, there are objects to be investigated, outcomes to be reported. In the humanities, Grant pointed out, that “object” became “the past.”67 One point of a cosmopolitan curriculum is not to reduce the past to the polemics of the present.68 For Grant, the danger seemed in the opposite direction: objectivity froze the fluidity of the past by conceiving it scientifically, as if someone here and now could, spectator-­like, apprehend the dynamics of then and there. For Grant, it was the distinctiveness of the past that can communicate its present significance. When the past becomes an “object,” however, its

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meaning is muted. Both the dead and the living become entombed in the temporally empty present.69 Instead of the past speaking to us in the present, research requires, Grant complained, that its protocols provide us with practical information, techniques that equip us to profit from what we learn. The intensifying emphasis upon vocationalism commands students and faculty alike to accent the practical point of what is studied. Not only in the United States have university students “flooded into computer science courses,” training to take “coveted jobs” at companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, perhaps even starting their own companies that could become worth millions.70 With the prospect of profit questions of meaning and significance become secondary, sometimes even suspicious, especially to right-­wing politicians. In January 2016, for instance, the governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, asserted that students majoring in French literature should not receive state funding for their college education. Senator Marco Rubio called for more welders and fewer philosophers. Governor Rick Scott of Florida criticized anthropologists, and Governor Patrick McCrory of North Carolina belittled gender studies.71 Grant would not have been surprised, as universities had in his lifetime devolved into “corporations for organizing the technical society,”72 declining to educate the public toward truth but instead “teaching young people techniques by which they can do things in the world.”73 Absent, he observed, is “concern in our educational system with seeing that our young people think deeply about the purposes for which these techniques should be used.”74 Today cognitive science threatens to reduce education to neurology and pharmacology.75 Rationalizing questionable behaviour as an acceptable means to whatever ends “freedom” allows, Grant alleged, amounted to “personal power combined with social engineering.”76 Constant craving in search of satiation, such “activism” casts its counter-­disciplines – Grant lists daydreaming, sensuality, art, prayer, theoretical science, and philosophy – as “leisure,” endeavours that do not “directly” produce measurable outcomes.77 “Non-­manipulative” and with “joy” and “adoration” as their “ends” – not “power” and “control” – these evidently antiquated disciplines had become entirely optional. “Our practicality has made us uninterested in systematic thought,” Grant rued, a “common moral language is seldom systematized.”78 A common faith was among John Dewey’s projects, but Grant only complains about the American philosopher. “Pragmatism has had such a pervasive influence in our schools,” Grant thought, “because it … was implicit in our way of life.”79 While also Canadian – versions of U.S. progressivism made their way North80 – the referent for Grant’s use of “our” seems the United States, as the “spirit” of democracy, pioneering, and science converged in educational theory the Puritans81 and later immigrants devised to produce what Grant summarizes as “egalitarian technologism.”82 Determined to find freedom in the land they took from Indigenous peoples, colonists were willing to destroy

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not only who and what was there but also whatever what remained from Europe, indeed anything that “limited” a presumably “open society.”83 “In the field of education,” Grant concluded, “the decisive victory of the technical over the older studies has allowed … success to consist of purely technical skills: engineering, commerce, etc.”84 Confirming and updating Grant’s analysis, LaCapra points out that the university is now managed like a “corporation,” that it has devolved into a “complement of private-­sector business enterprises,” with “knowledge” reduced to “information,” wherein “information technology is dominant,” evident from “the primacy of the ‘hard’ sciences to the restructuring and ‘digitalization’ of the library,” where substantial funds devoted to “continual technical ‘upgrades’ of systems that far exceed (or even counter) the needs of those who use libraries most, the humanists.”85 Once the core disciplines of the university, the humanities are no longer stems but ornaments.

Conclusion Educationalization as technologization secularizes the salvational structure of Western culture, promising solutions to social and well as psychic problems, every problem now ultimately an economic one. Such technologization recodes students – and teachers – as, in Williamson’s words, “inner-­focused individuals whose own self-­responsibility, competence, and well-­ being – their deep inner soul, interior life, and habits of mind – have been fused to the political objective of economic innovation.”86 Teachers must personify a ““total pedagogy,” downloading into their students and themselves “a continuous disposition to be trained.”87 The curriculum is no longer an ongoing ethical question – what knowledge is of most worth? – but whatever software designers deem saleable, “learning activities” now redesigned as “consumer goods.”88 Can reactivation of the past89 – not only lost good but nightmares under threat of being forgotten – encourage non-­coincidence with what is to enable educational experience of the present as well as intimations of that to which one might become attuned, to what Grant termed “the Good”? Recall that Grant thought that “only” by attuning ourselves to “deprival” that we can “live critically” in the “dynamo.”90 Deprival drives not only efforts at physical but also psychic and spiritual survival, no knee-­jerk reactivity but prolonged study in the service of subjective reconstruction.91 What Grant is advising, O’Donovan notes, is most fundamentally “to think our deprival.”92 For Grant, she explains, “recollecting the good and thinking our deprival are one.”93 Such reactivation might provide passage to the past, “becoming historical”94 in this temporally empty moment of (de)vice, stuck in the screens at which we stare. For George Grant, educationalization requires not technologization but spiritualization.

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Notes 1 In Educationalization and Its Complexities: Religion, Politics, and Technology, edited by Rosa Bruno-­Jofré (239–253). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Reprinted with permission. Revised slightly in 2021. 2 Tröhler (2016, 4) starts in France in the court of King Louis XIV in Versailles, where occurred the “quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.” He ends with educational interventions of the OECD and World Bank (see 2016, 8). 3 2016, 3. 4 2016, 7. 5 The “digital world,” Cohen (2021, 138) points out, “is that of the unbounded infinite where anything goes and where critical reflection is therefore impossible.” The creature who is virtually produced – “Homo digitalis” – “quite simply threatens to dispossess us of ourselves” (ibid.) 6 Few theorize these shifts as chillingly as Ben Williamson. “In the projects that constitute the curriculum of the future,” he summarizes, “new identities are being sculpted and ‘prototyped’” (2013, 103). As passages I will quote momentarily make clear, concern for the child or for the citizen is replaced by commands for profit-­making “creativity.” While not new – Trilling (1972, 126) reminds that “anxiety about the machine is a commonplace in nineteenth-­century moral and cultural thought” – in our time the “about” in Trilling’s sentence has vanished; the machine is no longer only “there,” but “here,” inside us. 7 I chronicle Grant’s prescience in Moving Images of Eternity (Pinar 2019a). 8 Grant finds that the very idea of time as history derives from the Bible, telling David Cayley (1995, 117): “Here were these people chosen by God and went into the wilderness, and then into exile, and are going to come back to Jerusalem – God as a great and immediate purpose for these people. Then Christianity comes into and says that this purpose as been realized in Christ. I think this is the origin of the idea in the West, though the word history is Greek…. The modern West seems to me to be taking this biblical vision and secularizing it – that is, eliminating God from it. So history, as Rousseau formulates it, becomes the idea that man comes to be by accident, but then it is his purpose to realize a rational society here on earth.” That rational society is scientific society, technologically structured. 9 2013, 81. Forgotten, Grant observed, is that “the central truth of Western ethical teaching has been that no human being should be treated simply as a means – but also as an end” (Davis and Roper 2005, 128). 10 “The U.S. educationalized the Cold War by passing National Defense Education Act,” Tröhler (2016, 2) appreciates. Such “educationalization” accomplished the deflection of political responsibility for the Sputnik event. America’s schoolteachers – not the military or scientific establishment – were to blame. Eisenhower associated national defense with education, initiating what would become the scapegoating of U.S. teachers and an intensifying politicization of so-­called school reform. 11 Hardly for the first time: Tröhler (2016, 4) suggests that the second transformation in the perception of history and development had to do with “the relation of money to politics, which changed at the end of the seventeenth century at first in England.” 12 The “technologizing of thought,” as Grant phrased the matter (Davis and Roper 2005, 614). The grammar of capitalism, technology can be “transmitted to the inner life of individuals through a kind of rhythmic patterning” (like economic values, as Marshall McLuhan noted: Stamps 1995, 112). Without subjective non-­coincidence with what is, mediation is absent; Friedrich Kittler knew – Gumbrecht (2013, 318) reminds – that it is a “dangerous (or at least very naïve) illusion that an ‘interface’ between human beings and computers was even possible.” Technologization portends subjective annihilation. 13 Davis and Roper (2009, 87).

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14 Ibid. 15 For Walter Pater, McGlazer (2020, 41) points out, scholastic mechanicity could be a “strength rather than a weakness, and even a recourse for critique.” If it means students remember the past and problematize the present – the two reciprocally related – I concur. 16 Doane 2002, 100. Here Doane is discussing the concept of scandal in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. 17 For a history, see Martin and Barresi (2006). 18 Not only schools lose staff and shift location. Cohen (2021, 123) notes: “When taxis no longer have drivers, when people will be taken care of, educated, and entertained online without leaving their rooms, the world will have radically changed.” 19 “[T]echno-­linguistic conformism,” Berardi (2012, 22) knows, “is making social life a desert of meaning.” 20 Singer (2017, June 7, A1). 21 2017, June 7, A14. 22 Quoted in 2017, June 7, A14. 23 Ignored in this enthusiasm for computer science is that – as Cohen (2021, 144) notes – “computers consume huge amounts of energy. Facebook has therefore moved some of its data centers to Norway, about sixty miles from the Arctic Circle, to reduce the heat emitted by its computers.” 24 “A new digital citizenship,” Cohen (2021, 143) writes, “will require the education of children and adolescents be adapted to the challenges they will face.” Coding is his first suggestion. He redeems himself by adding: “The culture of the written word, of the book, is the other indispensable pillar that must be protected. This consists less of getting students to produce flawless spelling tests than of fostering a love of reading” (Ibid.) 25 Singer (2017, June 7, A14). 26 Quoted in Singer (2017, June 7, A14). 27 Singer (2017, June 7, A14). 28 Grant [2005 (1965), 52]. “Grant also sees the establishment of the universal and homogeneous state in theological terms,” Sibley (2006, 102) notes, “recognizing that it necessitated the de-­divinization of the ‘Other’ that is God.” 29 Davis and Roper (2005, 597). 30 Grant [2005 (1965), 52]. “We see,” Grant complained, “that freedom has only brought us enslavement by science. And enslavement by scientists is surely even more dangerous than enslavement by prelates” (Davis 2002, 31). Why might he say that? Science led to “modern medicine,” Grant acknowledged, but it also threatens “modern nuclear war” (Davis and Roper 2009, 539). Now global warming threatens the biosphere. 31 Grant [2005 (1965), 52]. 32 For an overview of the situation in the United States, see Spring (2012); for China see Qian (2015). 33 There is no such thing as modernity in general,” Herf (1984, 1) concludes from his study of the Weimar Republic: “There are only national societies, each of which becomes modern in its own fashion.” 34 The “the more vulgar capitalism becomes,” Cazdyn (2012, 48) knows, the “more vulgar politics must become,” certainly the case (not only) in the United States. 35 Emberley 2005 (1994), lxxx. 36 Emberley 2005 (1994), lxxxi. 37 “With digitization,” Cohen (2021, 119) points out, “the number of tasks has been subcontracted to consumers themselves, who use software to perform them,” adding: “Now software has consumers themselves performing tasks that used to be paid work” (2021, 120). Other cost-­cutting profit-­maximizing prospects include the elimination

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of employees (2021, 61), something “made possible by the new information and communication technologies.” 38 Emberley 2005 (1994), lxxxii. 39 “Democratic citizenship,” Grant asserted, “is not a notion compatible with technological empires” (quoted in Christian and Grant 1998, 85). 40 In this revelation, Grant was not alone. Pasolini believed that consumer capitalism meant “cultural genocide” (Mariniello 1994, 115, 125). 41 Grant [2005 (1965), 92]. 42 “Affective labour and creativity in the digital economy displace faceless bureaucracies with a caring and sharing capitalism, or business with personality,” Williamson (2013, 50) writes. “In this ‘creativity explosion’ business culture values creativity over routine, and education seeks to promote in children the creativity required for nonlinear thinking and generating new ideas” (Ibid.). 43 Grant [2005 (1970), lxxii]. 44 Grant [2005 (1965), 85]. 45 Grant (1969, 74). 46 Grant [2005 (1965), 14]. 47 Grant (1969, 74). 48 Grant (1969, 141). 49 See Hofstadter [1996 (1965)]. It is hardly restricted to the United States of course. Approximately 40,000 teachers have expelled from Turkey’s education system after last year’s attempted coup against President Erdogan (Kingsley 2017, April 13, A1). 50 See Berliner and Biddle (1995). 51 Green (2017, March 30, A16). As they have so often in the United States, capitalism and Christianity (at least so-­called “conservative” versions of it) merge. At a 2001 gathering of so-­called Christian philanthropists, Betsy DeVos singled out education reform as a way to “advance God’s kingdom” (Stewart 2016, December 13, A31). In an interview, she and her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., said that school choice would lead to “greater kingdom gain” (Ibid.). Ignorance, arrogance, and greed combine in an unholy desecration of Christ. 52 Cohen (2016, February 21, A1); Fink, Eder and Goldstein (2017, January 31, A1). 53 Huetteman and Alcindor (2017, February 8, A20). As one of the architects of Detroit’s unregulated charter school system, DeVos is implicated in what “even charter advocates acknowledge is the biggest school reform disaster in the country” (Harris 2016, November 28, A21). 54 Quoted in Huetteman and Alcindor (2017, February 8, A20). 55 Cayley (1995, 149–150). That “something,” Grant suggested, was a “lower form of society even than contractarian capitalism” (Cayley 1995, 150). 56 Davis and Roper (2009, 185). 57 Grant admired Eastern Christianity’s embrace of mysticism and rationality, evident in the role of icons in worship. “The Western church fundamentally chose Aristotle; the Eastern church fundamentally chose Plato,” Grant told Cayley (1995, 77), adding: “As far as my own thought goes, I have fundamentally chosen Plato.” In July 1988 – two months before his death and in conversation with William Christian – Grant reaffirmed his allegiance: “I’m on the Eastern Church’s side, because it’s essentially Platonic against the Aristotelian” (Davis and Roper 2009, 743). 58 Davis and Roper (2009, 185). 59 Ibid. Grant reflected: “The Germans [now] have the great advantage over us of already having faced the political incarnation of the triumph of the will” (Christian and Grant 1998, 149). 60 “Grant was raised a progressive,” Davis (2002, 63) reminds, “and became a Christian Platonist.” I am suggesting that he remained a progressive while espousing Christianity and Platonism, embracing the latter due to his sense of what was at stake historically,

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and specifically politically. A “critical historical understanding,” Angus (2006, 358) appreciates, “underlies Grant’s non-­progressive and anti-­technological Christianity.” In other words, progressivism can require conservatism - in the sense of conservation (Pinar 2019b, 126). 61 Davis and Roper (2009, 464). 62 Davis and Roper (2009, 185–6). 63 Davis and Roper (2009, 181). Reading a reputable newspaper is required in this era of “fake news.” I recommend The New York Times (Pinar 2019b, 86). 64 Ibid. 65 See Strong-­Wilson (2021, 21). 66 Grant tells Cayley (1995, 164) that even “studies of literature are more and more technological.” On one occasion Grant names Northrop Frye as complicitous (see Davis and Roper 2009, 987). 67 Grant (1986, 37). 68 In April 2016 Princeton University announced that it will keep U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s name on its school of public and international affairs and a residential college despite calls to expunge his name from those institutions due his support of racial segregation (Anderson 2016, April 5, A5). Absent abrasive reminders, will not the past be bleached from the present? Of course, Confederate monuments are more than abrasive; they have become testimonies to white supremacy and neo-­ Nazism in the United States and best be moved to museums. 69 “The age of the new media,” Han (2017, 61) appreciates, “is an age of implosion. Space and time implode into the here and now.” 70 Bidgood and Merrill (2017, May 30, A1). The “exploding interest in these courses,” they report, has resulted in sky-­rocketing rates of high-­tech plagiarism. “There’s a lot of discussion about it, both inside a department as well as across the field,” admitted Randy H. Katz, a professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley; Katz discovered that 100 of his roughly 700 students had violated the course policy on collaborating or copying code (quoted passage in Bidgood and Merrill 2017, May 30, A1). 71 Cohen (2016, February 22, B1, B3). These demogagues are all Republicans, now the Nazi Party of the United States. 72 Davis and Roper (2009, 156). 73 Grant [1966 (1959), 38]. 74 Grant [1966 (1959), 38]. 75 The so-­called learning sciences, Taubman (2009, 160) points out, have “provided the switch point or transfer points that allowed the discourses and practices associated with the business world to enter education.” One example is the rapid rise in use of the medications for “learning” problems, a development that has prompted criticism that pharmaceutical firms, pursuing profits in an $11 billion international market for A.D.H.D. drugs alone, are driving the global increase in diagnoses. In 2007, for instance, countries outside the United States accounted for only 17% of the world use of Ritalin; by 2012, that number had grown to 34% (Ellison 2015, November 10, D6). 76 Grant [1966 (1959), 87]. 77 Grant [1966 (1959), 87]. In the curriculum of the future, Williamson (2013, 52) foresees everything being incorporated into the economic: “the merging of play and work has resulted in ‘playbor,’ a neologism that accurately captures the ways in which the affective elements of play have now been emerged into the value-­making tasks of the economy.” As a result, “commercial activities may now shape the structure of the school day, influence the content of the school curriculum, and determine whether children have access to a variety of technologies” (2013, 53). 78 Grant [1966 (1959), 88]. What is systematized, indeed automated, is language, including academic discourse. Such automation occurs on two levels, Berardi (2012, 17)

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suggests, the first concerning its “monetization and subjection to the financial cycle,” so that “signs fall under the domination of finance when the financial function (the accumulation of value through semiotic circulation),” thereby “cancel[ing] the instinctual side of enunciation, so that what is enunciated may be compatible with digital-­financial formats,” meaning that “signs produce signs without any longer passing through the flesh.” The second level concerns its “indexicalization” – think of Internet search engines and the domination of keywords – “effectively freez[ing] the affective potencies of language” (2012, 18). Disembodiment disembeds morality from the social body. 79 Grant [1966 (1959), 89]. Kinzel (2009, 11) points that “Grant did not treat pragmatism as a philosophy in its own right but only with reference to a particular historical situation.” 80 See Tomkins (1986, 106); Christou (2012). 81 Among relevant references to consult is McKnight (2003). 82 Grant [1966 (1959), 84]. Quoting Grant, O’Donovan (1984, 46) comments: “American ‘egalitarian technologism’ is the extreme historical development of Calvinist Puritanism with its ‘theology of revelation’ that discouraged contemplation and exalted Christian freedom in its practical expression.” 83 Grant [1966 (1959), 85)]. 84 Grant [1966 (1959), 85)]. “Technological society requires an enormous number of highly specialized people,” Grant tells Cayley (1995, 163), “and the multiversity is to a very great extent a product of that, is it not? It produces all kinds of specialists to serve the technological society.” 85 2004, 203–204. 86 Williamson (2013, 83). Han (2021, 54) suggests: “The skin of soul has, as it were, formed a callus, rendering us completing insensitive and unreceptive in the face of the other.” 87 Williamson (2013, 96). 88 Williamson (2013, 97). 89 For Grant, Christian (1990, 194–5) clarifies, recollection is not psychoanalytic (as it is for me, hence the term “reactivation”), but Platonic, recalling the ancient myth that “all souls, before they were embodied, had knowledge of the eternal and transcendent reality, but just prior to embodiment they were washed in the river Lethe, or Forgetfulness. The knowledge which they enjoy in this world, then, is the consequence of recollecting what has once been known and then subsequently forgotten.” For Grant, O’Donovan (1984, 73) acknowledges, “the restoration of past thought [w] as a theoretical possibility.” It exists, after all, in the present, still. 90 1969, 141. 91 See Chapter 3; Ruitenberg (2017). 92 1984, 104. 93 O’Donovan (1984, 129). I would add feeling to thinking. 94 “Becoming historical,” Toews (2008, 438) explains (discussing Kierkegaard and Marx), “involved a historical reconstruction of the current forms of self-­identification … as a specific product of human practices in time. The goal was to experience the self that was simply given as a self that was historically particular and contingent.” As particular and contingent, the self is not only determined by circumstances but capable of changing them, in the present context through renegotiation and repair.

Bibliography Anderson, Nick. 2016, April 5. Princeton Keeps Wilson’s Name on 2 Institutions. The Washington Post, A5.

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Angus, Ian. 2006. Socrates’ Joke. In Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy, and Politics, edited by Ian Angus, Ron Dart, and Randy Peg Peters (341– 368). University of Toronto Press. Athanasiadis, Harris. 2001. George Grant and Theology of the Cross. The Christian Foundations of His Thought. University of Toronto Press. Berardi, Franco. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e). Bidgood, Jess and Merrill, Jeremy B. 2017, May 30. A College Scourge of Plagiarized Language, This Time in Code. The New York Times CLXVI, No. 57,613, A1, A13. Cazdyn, Eric. 2012. The Already Dead. The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Duke University Press. Cayley, David. 1995. George Grant In Conversation. Anansi. Christian, William. 1990. The Magic of Art. In By Loving Our Own: George Grant and the Legacy of Lament for a Nation, edited by Peter C. Emberley (189–202). Carleton University Press. Christian, William and Grant, Sheila. Eds. 1998. The George Grant Reader. University of Toronto Press. Christou, Theodore Michael. 2012. Progressive Education: Revisioning and Reframing Ontario’s Public Schools, 1919-­1942. University of Toronto Press. Cohen, Daniel. 2021. The Inglorious Years. The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society. Princeton University Press. Cohen, Patricia. 2016, February 22. A Rising Call to Foster STEM Fields, And Decrease Liberal Arts Funding. The New York Times CLXV, No. 57,150, B1, B3. Davis, Arthur. Ed. 2002. Collected Works of George Grant. Volume 2: 1951-­1959. University of Toronto Press. Davis, Arthur and Roper, Henry. 2005. Collected Works of George Grant. Volume 3: 1960-­ 1969. University of Toronto Press. Davis, Arthur and Roper, Henry. 2009. Collected Works of George Grant. Volume 4: 1970-­ 1988. University of Toronto Press. Dewey, John. 1962 (1934). A Common Faith. Yale University Press. Doane, Mary Ann. 2002. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Harvard University Press. Ellison, Katherine. 2015, November 10. A.D.H.D. Rises, but Support Lags. The New York Times CLXV, No. 57,046, D6. Emberley, Peter C. 2005 (1994). Foreword to the Carleton Library Edition of Lament for a Nation by George Grant (lxxviii–lxxxv). McGill-­Queen’s University Press. Fink, Sheryl, Eder, Steve, and Goldstein, Matthew. 2017, January 31. Weak Support For Treatment Tied to DeVos. The New York Times CLXVI, No. 57,494, A1, A21. Grant, George. 1966 (1959). Philosophy in the Mass Age. Copp Clark Publishing. Grant, George. 1969. Technology & Empire. Anansi. Grant, George. 1986. Technology and Justice. Anansi. Grant, George. 2001 (1969). Time as History. University of Toronto Press. Grant, George. 2005 (1965). Lament for a Nation (40th anniversary edition). McGill-­ Queen’s University Press. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2013. Media History as the Event of Truth: On the Singularity of Fredrich A. Kittler’s Works. In The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, edited by Friedrich A. Kittler (307–329). Stanford University Press. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2017. The Scent of Time. A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering. Transated by Daniel Steiner. Polity.

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Han, Byung-­Chul. 2021. The Palliative Society. Polity. Harris, Douglas N. 2016, November 28. The Wrong Way to Fix Schools. The New York Times CLXVI, No. 57,430, A21. Herf, Jeffrey. 1984. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press. Kingsley, Patrick. 2017, April 13. With Thousands Purged, Chaotic Turkey Struggles to Fill Void. The New York Times CLXVI, No. 57,565, A1, A7. Kinzel, Till. 2009. Metaphysics, Politics, and Philosophy: George Grant’s Response to Pragmatism. Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, VI(1), 7–21. LaCapra, Dominick. 2004. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Cornell University Press. Mariniello, Silvestra. 1994. Toward a Materialist Linguistics: Pasolini’s Theory of Language. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (106–126). University of Toronto Press. Martin, Raymond and Barresi, John. 2006. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self. An Intellectual History of Personal Identity. Columbia University Press. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press. McKnight, E. Douglas. 2003. Schooling, the Puritan Imperative, and the Molding of an American National Identity: Education’s “Errand into the Wilderness.” Lawrence Erlbaum. O’Donovan, Joan. 1984. George Grant and the Twilight of Justice. University of Toronto Press. Pinar, William F. 2019a. Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology. University of Ottawa Press. Pinar, William F. 2019b. What Is Curriculum Theory? (3rd edition). Routledge. Qian, Xuyang. 2015. Technologizing Teachers Development? In Autobiography and Teacher Development in China: Subjectivity and Culture in Curriculum Reform, edited by Zhang Hua and William F. Pinar (163–178). Palgrave Macmillan. Ruitenberg, Claudia W. Ed. 2017. Reconceptualizing Study in Educational Discourse and Practice. Routledge. Sibley, Robert C. 2006. Grant, Hegel, and the “Impossibility of Canada”. In Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy, and Politics, edited by Ian Angus, Ron Dart, and Randy Peg Peters (93–107). University of Toronto Press. Singer, Natasha. 2017, June 7. Tech Billionaires Reinvent Schools, With Students as Beta Testers. The New York Times CLXVI, No. 57,621, A1, A14. Spring, Joel. 2012. Education Networks: Power, Wealth, Cyberspace, and the Digital Mind. Routledge. Stamps, Judith. 1995. Unthinking Modernity. Innis, McLuhan, and the Frankfurt School. McGill-­Queen’s University Press. Stewart, Katherine. 2016, December 13. DeVos and God’s Plan For Schools. The New York Times CLXVI, No. 57,445, A12, A31. Strong-­Wilson, Teresa. 2021. Teachers’ Ethical Self-­Encounters with Counter-­Stories in the Classroom. From Implicated to Concerned Subjects. Routledge. Taubman, Peter M. 2009. Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education Routledge. Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Harvard University Press. Toews, John. 2008. Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-­Century Berlin. Cambridge University Press.

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Tomkins, George S. 1986. A Common Countenance: Stability and Change in the Canadian Curriculum. Prentice-­Hall. Tröhler, Daniel. 2016. Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educationalization of the Modern World. Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, edited by Michael A. Peters (1–10). Springer. Williamson, Ben. 2013. The Future of the Curriculum. School Knowledge in the Digital Age. MIT Press.

9 TEACHING1

While still specific to each nation – even to each locale – curriculum worldwide has in common its technologization, a globalizing trend driven my standardized assessment, accelerated by the cancellation of in-­person schooling in many countries during the COVID-­19 crisis.2 Technologization recodes the human subject – the teacher now an entertainer,3 the student reduced to “learner,” both quantified as coin of “human capital”4 – as datum, appropriated for not only assessment but also for surveillance and profiteering, dubbed “data colonialism” by Couldry and Mejias, who define the term as “what happens when life becomes the input of capitalism and becomes organized through data relations.”5 What is the connection between technological and historical colonialism? “If historical colonialism was an appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources,” Couldry and Mejias explain, “data colonialism can be understood as an appropriation of social resources … [that] operates in ways that replicate relations re-­create a colonizing form of power.”6 Even when physically free, we can, they are suggesting, become psychologically enslaved, ensnared in the screen of our handheld devices.7 As raw material for capitalist production – one hundred years ago the automobile assembly line was the main metaphor for the curriculum conceived as an assembly line, producing children as products – “data colonialism brings extraction home, literally into the home and the farthest recesses of everyday life.”8 Technology and social media specifically constitute, Han asserts, “digital panoptica, keeping watch over the social realm and exploiting it mercilessly.”9 Exploitation of bodies but also our minds, as social media infiltrates our psyche, substituting identity for subjectivity, polarizing our politics,10 visibilizing interpersonal violence, not unlike “fascist visuality [that] brought politics (qua war and expansionism) into conversation with intimacy, interiority, and everydayness.”11 With the omniscient screen, its camera and recording capability, technological DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-9

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visuality insinuates itself inside the intimacy of interiority. No longer even apparently non-­political,12 technological infrastructure commands attention, and with attention, compliance, so insidiously that “now the subjugated subject is not even aware of its own subjugation.”13 Techno-­utopianism remains pervasive, intoxicating, especially in education. Any conception of a curriculum as an ongoing complicated conversation14 is eclipsed by “adaptive” learning software that can, Williamson reports, semi-­ automate the “allocation” and “personalization” of “content” according to each student’s “data profile.”15 Now and then blur, evident in Reese’s summary of what happened to students in Germany ninety plus years ago: “With little awareness of what was happening, children became part of an inhuman machinery, well-­functioning, but with stunted souls.”16 Today children become post-­human subjects of surveillance recoded according to software, i.e. “formats structuring data help shape who we are.”17 While the techno-­nation-­state can be considered fascist – more on the echoes of that earlier event later – Couldry and Mejias call it colonizing. Either association should, one would think, discourage educators from any uncritical embrace of the technologization of education. Consider technology’s association with colonialism, specifically its significance for restructuring subjectivity. Like historical colonialism, Couldry and Mejias point out, datafication structures how the “colonized think of themselves, legitimizing … a specific conceptualization of time and space that ends up universalizing a specific worldview.”18 The prospect of a “universal homogenous state” preceded the present moment,19 but never before has it seemed so material. No longer a matter of black skin and white masks,20 all children who are connected can become concealed behind data, masked as numbers. “Big Data,” Han warns, is reducing children and adults “into things, which can be quantified, measured and steered.”21 Academic study as (even relatively) autonomous and socially inflected self-­formation had long ago disappeared from many schools, but now study becomes cramming aided by pharmaceutical intervention22 with neurological consequences.23 Datafication can be considered the governance structure of the techno-­ nation-­state, seducing its own (de)sexualized or “asexual,”24 citizenry submerged in software, spellbound by the screen. “Desire is diverted from physical contact,” Berardi observed, and “invested in the abstract field of simulated seduction, in the infinite space of the image,” adding: “The boundless enhancement of disembodied imagination leads to the virtualization of erotic experience, infinite flight from one object to the next.” Han agrees: “Now, numbers and data are not just being absolutized – they are becoming sexualized and fetishized,” so that “dataism is displaying libidinal - indeed, pornographic – traits.”25 “Dataists mate with their data,” he suggests, becoming “datasexuals,”26 who find data “sexy.”27 Not only can physical intimacy become virtual – in one sense it was always: recall that for Freud sex was always primarily a matter of fantasy – physical classrooms are being replaced by virtual ones, especially during the COVID-­19

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pandemic but perhaps also post-­ pandemic, if Crow and Debars28 are right about the “fifth wave” of (not only) higher education. In Zoom, classrooms become waiting and break-­out “rooms” as TV acting threatens to replace teaching as coursework becomes more infotainment than intellectual engagement with knowledge of most worth. Embodied educational experience is eclipsed by staring at the screens of devices, screens into which children and teachers can disappear. That can constitute a welcome absorption in learning, but it can also represent submergence, a form of subjection, as Han accuses: Now “motivation, projects, competition, optimization and initiative represent features of the psycho-­political technology of domination that constitutes the neoliberal regime.”29 Entrepreneurship replaces education; autonomy is relocated from the political into the decidedly undemocratic economic sphere. “As an ‘entrepreneur of himself,’ the neoliberal achievement-­subject engages in auto-­exploitation willingly – even passionately,” Han explains, adding: “The self-­as-­a-­work of art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains in order to exhaust its resources entirely.”30 Overstatement maybe, but Han is not entirely mistaken.

The Techno-Nation-State Historically,31 Daniel Tröhler points out, the nation has been conceived as a cultural thesis about belonging, commonality, inclusion, and exclusion.32 In our era, the nation is being incorporated by technologization, simulations of commonality created by aggressive acts of exclusion, evident not only in unequal access to computers and the Internet but also in violent video games, politically polarized exchanges, in cults like QAnon. What is shared in common now seems to be staring at screens, complying with whatever commands software requires.33 Anyone who has a device and is connected to the Internet becomes its de facto citizen; anyone who has no access becomes, in effect, stateless. The device is the apparatus by which the techno-­nation-­state installs its hegemony. While humanity continues “to create and posit things,” human beings are also “posited by things, because that is what [we] essentially are by nature.”34 Our humanity (including our capacity to create things) is interwoven with our inhumanity (our capacity – and our created things’ capacity – to kill us, physically and spiritually). Despite this (in)human condition, a totalizing determinism won’t do; without humanity and our agency, there can be no education. Without that empty subjective space within us and between us and the world – the space of non-­coincidence35 – we can only coincide with what is, as the early Marx also knew.36 In the new millennium, the nation-­state mutates not only a marriage of the two (nation and state) but also their fusion in software. Online learning creates (supra)national citizens, instilling (supra)national literacies and loyalties, submerged in software, spellbound by the Medusa-­like stare of the screen. These

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could be called the techno-­dynamics of nation-­building, interpellating a (supra) national identity structured by software, accented by avatars, passports now usernames and passcodes, soulless citizens of nowhere, as humanity flees the plundered earth for the Cloud. The eschatological confidence of Christians is secularized as techno-­utopianism. The nation-­state’s emphasis upon its exceptionality, sometimes associated with its imagined ethnic purity and distinctiveness, with the mythologization of its history and future, goes global, one nation worldwide, united by software. (Does the eruption of old-­style nationalism in America, Brazil, China, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, and elsewhere constitute blowback?) Many nations’ sense of uniqueness had been corroded by post-­ 1960s demands for “development,” then often associated with the United States but now also with China, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-­operation and Development. Now development denotes technologization, infrastructure designed to connect markets, globalizing not only trade and capital but cyberculture as well. The very concept of globalization obscures the imperialism and colonialism embedded within it. Nowhere is technologization’s absorption of nationalism more evident than in the datafication of education.

A Techno-Totalitarian State of Mind Twentieth-­century models of professionalism – certainly in the United States – standardized curriculum (structured by objectives-­ design-­ implementation-­ assessment) and pedagogical conduct (best practices), standardization at first a progressive effort to minimize teachers’ racial, gender and personal bias to create an equal “playing field” for students. A century-­long standardization of teaching and learning – enforced by standardized assessment – is totalized by the ongoing triumph of the technologization Williamson describes. “Schools” are being converted into “data-­ production centers,” Williamson begins, as “students” subjected to “data mining” and “data analytics” technologies that “trace their every digital move.”37 So-­called “data brokers,” he continues, “collect, curate and aggregate” this information, then “sell it back to education stakeholders.”38 Children had already been reduced to “learners,” organic elements of human capital, “inner-­focused individuals whose own self-­responsibility, competence, and well-­being – their deep inner soul, interior life, and habits of mind – have been fused to the political objective of economic innovation.”39 “Innovation” has become an Orwellian word for exploitation, including self-­exploitation as the individual installs “an internal dictatorship, a regime of control inside himself.”40 Self-­ control combines with exploitation by others to increase everyone’s productivity. What roles do teacher-­ citizens play in this “datafication of social life”?41 Educators are reduced to “data entry clerks,”42 technicians who surveil student learning, themselves subjects of “digital governance,” compelled to “provide detailed and ‘intimate’ data” concerning “performances,” available for “public display and scrutiny.”43 Soon enough teachers may be replaced, as “pedagogy”

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becomes a function of “automated machines,” so-­called “teacher bots” and “cognitive tutors,” what Williamson terms “computerized software agents designed to interact with learners, conduct constant real-­time analysis of their learning, and adapt with them.”44 Such developments document the “datafication” of education, its recodification as “quantifiable information” stored in “databases” for “measurement and calculation.”45 Even one’s private self becomes a quantified, with sensor-­enabled devices tracking one’s movements, sleep patterns, feelings, and sexual activity,46 “emptying the self of any and all meaning” as the “self gets broken down into data until no sense remains.”47 Couldry and Mejias explain: “The reason both traditional surveillance and datafied tracking conflict with notions of freedom derives from something common to both: their invasion of the basic space of the self on behalf of an external power.”48 That external power is software. Composed in code, software is a set of instructions, structured and operationalized through algorithms, what Williamson summarizes as the conversion of “inputs” into “output[s].”49 Code makes software “work.”50 Code programs reality, coopting our “agency (who does what), materiality (what we can touch, see and hear), and sociality (how we form attachments and collective belonging).”51 Williamson sees software as a “substrate,” but there’s nothing “underlying” about it, as – by his own admission - code structures “our personal perceptions, sensations and transactions, and it crystallizes new social formations, publics and groups.”52 Never “innocent,” Williamson concedes, code “derive[s] from the worldviews of its originators and that are projected on to its recipients.”53 Projected and installed he might have added, as they become internalized psychically54 – “we are soothed by data that calm us into stillness and eventually into unthinking sleep.”55 – and enacted behaviorally, a scale of structuration Williamson does acknowledge: “code … augments and ultimately produces collective political, cultural and economic life.”56 Software engineers and programmers not only operate “technical systems,” Williamson allows, but also “social outcomes.”57 In effect, they codify what used to be called society.58 Algorithms ensure “social ordering, governance and control,”59 what Williamson characterizes as an “algorithmic ideology.”60 That ideology means that “coders … select our values for us and potentially prioritize the interests of private technology companies over public interests and concerns.”61 There’s no “potentially” about it, as “private technology companies” usurp “public interests” and in so doing constitute themselves as de facto officials of the techno-­nation-­state, structuring, governing, and directing “citizenry,” a concept now virtual no longer geographical or ethnic or mythological. Ideological control can seem almost complete, as education conceived as one of the humanities – even as a social science –is replaced by the so-­called educational “data sciences,” derived from the psychological and cognitive “learning sciences.”62 One of these – psycho-­informatics63 – deploys “data mining” and “machine learning” to “detect, characterize and classify behavioral patterns.”64 “Education data science,” Williamson explains, translates into the “unprecedented

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tracking of student behaviors and actions through big data and their analysis through algorithmic techniques of data mining and machine learning.”65 Once associated with emancipation,66 education becomes exclusively technical, sealed within software, the architecture of which constitutes one worldwide panopticon, the techno-­nation-­state. Learning analytics software is designed to track individual students in “real time,” to predict “future progress,” surveillance in service to the optimization of “learning.”67 The assumption is that “students’ access to knowledge” can become a function of “automated, algorithmic processes and techniques.”68 Understanding seems incidental, assessment is all, as what is sought are technologies that will “make emotional measurement and management possible.”69 Recall Goffman’s concept of the total institution,70 the “possibility of turning, or being turned, from a live person into a dead thing, into a stone, into a robot, an automaton, without persona autonomy of action, an it without subjectivity.”71 That panopticon was – is – the prison, now also a metaphor for the techno-­nation-­state.72 Measurement and management will be encoded in new “devices and platforms that measure and intervene in the body, behavior and mood of the learner,” Williamson warns.73 Such a totalizing scale of measurement and intervention is not limited to “learners.” As Williamson appreciates: “Data-­driven persuasive technologies … confer upon citizens particular ways of thinking and behaving – in other words, for educating citizens to participate in the dominant governing styles of society.”74 That “society” is virtual not actual, its “styles” software designed, homogenous, standardized, what George Grant knew would be “a universal tyranny, destined to eradicate the historic aspirations of the Western world and particularly its North American experiments.”75 Citizenship in such “society” is ensured by seduction, not spectacle.76 Such “education” starts early, embedded in “affective computing, biosensor and biometric technologies for measuring children’s moods [that] have been developed for schools,” including devices “designed to detect excitement, stress, fear, engagement, boredom and relaxation directly through the skin.”77 Such internally installed surveillance ensures compliance, colonization (to invoke the Mejias and Couldry analysis) rationalized by “growth mindsets research” associated, Williamson reports, with behavioral economics and its subset nudge theory; in its integration of research from psychology, neuroscience, and economics, such “research” promises to “address shortcomings in individuals’ decision-­making processes.”78 Williamson cites ClassDojo, an app that enables teachers to “collect, store and visualize data”79 about the children in their classroom. According to its website,80 ClassDojo is installed in 95% of U.S. schools, what Williamson subsumes in a totalizing “governmentalization of behavior change.”81 That “government” is the world’s new if officially unrecognized universal state, a total institution, a techno-­nation-­state. So, you see that the datafication of education extends well beyond students’ learning, implementing what Williamson worries is a “biopolitical strategy” to

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produce “pathology-­proofed” citizens capable of coping with the “stresses and anxieties themselves caused by government policies and capitalist culture combined.”82 Not only “pathology-­proofed” but also “emotionally maximized” as “personal well-­being is understood to be the prerequisite for the development of productive human capital under conditions of digital capitalism.”83 Not only nurture but nature is targeted: “educational genomics” draws on data “about the human genome to identify particular traits that are understood to correspond with learning,” so that corporate employees – not academic specialists – can develop curriculum according to each child’s “DNA profile.”84 “Neurocomputation” connects “neuro-­ scientific expertise with technical development, commercial ambitions and governmental objectives,”85 Williamson continues, providing infrastructure for “neuroeducation,” based on the “brain-­based nature of learning,” disclosed through “advanced brain scanning and imaging techniques.”86 Among the applications include: “computer-­based brain-­training programs, multi-­modal form of virtual reality designed to stimulate regions of the brain associated with learning, and the design of ‘human-­like’ artificial tutoring agents.”87 No more teachers’ pension payments, no more school buildings requiring upkeep: the screen at which the child stares provides all: total control for the sake of “learning.” Williamson reports that Pearson is proposing to “bypass the cumbersome bureaucracy of mass standardized testing and assessment … and instead focus on… the AI-­ enhanced classroom,” providing “detailed and intimate analytics of individual performance, which will be gained from detailed modelling of learners through their data.”88 In Pearson’s plan “educational systems” are recast as “neurocomputational networks where brain-­based technologies will perform a constant measurement and management of learning environments and of all those individuals who inhabit them.”89 Like Pearson, IBM operates on the assumption that “human qualities can be augmented, strengthened and optimized via intelligent machines in order to deal with technical and economic demands.”90 In 2016, IBM and Pearson partnered their “cognitive computing and AIEd project,”91 operationalizing the view that the brain is “mental software” that requires “being updated all the time” in order to stay aligned with an “increasingly networked social and technical environment” that is itself “retooling” the brain.92 Retooling psycho-­social life too, as sociality shifts from its civic associations with historic nation-­states to citizenship in a transnational techno-­ state, that universal homogenous society George Grant and others had feared, one we are now forced to embrace.

Digital Citizenship “Digital citizenship”93 in the techno-­ nation-­ state – materialized through machine–machine connections in the Cloud – seems also a state of mind. Rather than becoming, say, cosmopolitan – a citizen of the world – living online implies citizenship in the Cloud, stateless in its historic sense, without rights or

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protection.94 While Williamson emphasizes the “do-­it-­yourself (DIY) potential of citizens to participate in the production of new public services, create new value-­producing projects, and contribute to the cultural dynamics of cities and regions,”95 one is also obligated to acknowledge the erasure of “public services,” as the very concept of the “public” dissolves, not into separate publics but into websites, non-­places of propaganda, pornography, and other forms of distraction sometimes so engrossing that children and their caretakers disappear into the screen for hours, even days. The technologization of the K-­ 12 curriculum, Williamson explains, is “designed to sculpt and model a form of subjectivity that is deemed appropriate to contemporary digital citizenship.”96 Once again associating agency (as above with his reference to DIY) with technologization, Williamson cites the “UK Code Club initiative” – an “after-­school coding class run by volunteer programmers” – that communicates the “constructionist idea that young people should learn to program the computer rather than be programmed by it.”97 The UK computing curriculum was the result of a “series of lobbying and campaigning activities involving private sector, public sector and civic sector organization.”98 Williamson reports that the Oracle Corporation invested over $200 million in the U.S. Computer Science for All initiative; in 2016 it announced a $1.4 billion investment to produce “software, curriculum and professional development” for European Union computer teachers.99 Oracle is not alone, as Google and Microsoft also made significant investment installing the computing curriculum. The computing curriculum is not only a specific curriculum but a synecdoche for civic society, now a vast virtual space structured by tracking, trafficking, profiling, profiteering. “[L]earning to code is not a neutral, decontextualized or depoliticized practice,” Williamson acknowledges, “but shaped, patterned, ordered and governed by powerfully commercial coded infrastructures.”100 They are “commercially coded infrastructures” that dictate what people learn, corporate forms of (pseudo)public pedagogy101 that parody both terms, atomizing hundreds of millions cybercitizens “into filter bubbles and echo chambers where,” Williamson knows, “access to information, culture, news and intellectual and activist discourse is being curated algorithmically, sometimes via computational propaganda and fake news.”102 Except by poverty and corresponding non-­connectivity, is voluntary non-­ citizenship in the techno-­nation-­state an option? Is subjective non-­coincidence with technology possible when imprisoned inside it? Strathausen answers affirmatively, insisting on “the conceptual irreducibility of human to things.”103 What about the ontological irreducibility of humans to things? In answering that question – recall Marx’s assertion (quoted above) that we are things – other figures are not confident, among them George Grant.104 Is our disappearance into devices inevitable? Can one exceed one’s image on – fusion with – the screen? Online, is subjective presence possible?

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Being Online Non-­coincidence – open inner space – seems to me to be the issue here, as the “self ’s minimal integrity is the boundedness that constitutes as a self as a self,” by which Couldry and Mejias mean that inner space of separation from (non-­ coincidence with) what is that provides the “materially grounded domain of possibility that the self has as its horizon of action and imagination,” e.g. that “open space in which any given individual experiences, reflects, and prepares to settle on her course of action.”105 Couldry and Mejias caution: “By installing automated surveillance into the space of the self, we risk losing the very thing – the open-­ended space in which we continually monitor and transform ourselves over time – that constitute us as selves at all.”106 This space of non-­coincidence – an inner empty space wherein one comes to form as an individual through relationships with self and others (including non-­human animals and objects) – is the prerequisite for forming a self-­conscious relationship with devices, what Couldry and Mejias characterize as “living with an intimate enemy.”107 Since the device declines negotiation, this relationship requires separation for the sake of self-­preservation, for freedom, a political concept with its subjective substrate. As if originating in that empty inner space, the human “voice” – that “unmodulated, nonpredictive accounting of experience, once valued as part of social life” (as Couldry and Mejias characterize it), what can be an “active presence”108 – is “excluded from Big Data analytics.”109 The self-­splinters as it is quantified, facilitating an “absor[ption[ [of] human life into an external totality – the apparently self-­sufficient world of continuous data processing.”110 Without freedom there can be no ethics, as “ethics must start out from an understanding of the self.”111 While the self is social, it can also be asocial, solitary, a private self, continuous through changing circumstances, including a changing self; subjective coherence comes from non-­coincidence with the self itself, enabled by solitude, privacy, meditation.112 While “all values, such as privacy, are socially negotiated,” Couldry and Mejias allow, “there is something distinctively complex about privacy and, specifically, the importance of privacy to autonomy (understood as the capacity to ‘find one’s own good in one’s own way’).”113 Lured by technologization, many lose their way: “we must acknowledge that we are, most of us, deeply complicit in the order of data colonialism, whether we like it or not.”114 But any “reimagining of our existing relations to data is much more than saying no,”115 Couldry and Mejias caution, concluding: Rather than silence, it is better, as we stand to the side of data colonialism’s road, to affirm what we know: the minimal integrity of the self that cannot simply be delegated or outsourced to automatized systems; that the new social order being built through data will produce patterns of power and inequality that corrode all meaningful practices of freedom; and that these contradictions with important values can still, for now at least, be seen for what they are.116

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Lucidity and “critique” would appear to be humanity’s “last stand.”117 It’s already too late, Han tells us: “[n]o resistance to the system can emerge in the first place,” he declares, explaining that “under the neoliberal regime of auto-­exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves,” an “auto-­aggressivity [that] means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution as much as depression.”118 It is as if we realize – at least subliminally – that “communication and control have become one, without remainder. Now, everyone is his or her own panopticon.”119 “[W]e have become our data,” Koopman concludes.120 There may be no escape, but there is life in prison,121 this one virtual not physical, less awful than an actual prison of course, but confinement nonetheless, involuntary citizenship – incarceration – in a techno-­nation-­state. As in actual imprisonment, actions and relationships are strictly structured, now by software rather than prison-­building architecture and prison-­guard protocols. In both actual and technological prisons subjective presence – being there, Dasein, subjective presence – remains, if overdetermined by software and screen. Altering our relationships with our devices may be insufficient to challenge the techno-­nation-­state – as Couldry and Mejias insist (above) – but it seems hardly irrelevant to “living with an intimate enemy.” It may be our only move to make. Caution is constantly required, as life in prison can be toxic, dangerous physically and psychologically, triggering depression (as Han emphasizes) and aggression, the latter self-­directed against oneself and/or others, or by others against oneself. Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion resonates here: “We do not lack community. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.”122 In a “total institution” – a totalitarian state – what resistance is possible? Koopman poses that question this way: “What is resistance in a present saturated by data?”123 He adds: “What could it even mean to be against information today?”124 It is, he points out, “our functional universal”125 “To take a loud stand against data,” Koopman imagines, then stops himself: “the very idea is incoherent, impossible, incredible. We live within a data episteme and under a power of information. We are informational persons.”126 Acknowledging that “resistance” can [only] be “conducted within the operations of infopower,” Koopman fastens his attention onto “infopower,” recommending a “repurposing and releveraging information for alternative designs,” noting that “in their formats (which are also our formats) are already contained decisions and pathways that will entrench specific informational subjectivities for decades to come.”127 With inner struggle, including detachment from devices, becoming subjectively present within them, we may not in every instance be reduced to information, however channeled through information we must be. What evidence do I offer for that assertion? It is anecdotal, autobiographical, my first experience of teaching online that occurred during the pandemic: fall term 2020. There were 25 enrolled, too many to encounter each student each session. Despite the physical isolation in which Zoom meetings occur, a certain simulation of subjective presence – through dialogical encounter between human

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subjects (through but not reduced to the machine–machine interface characteristic of dataism) – occurred, as I was able engage each student who appeared solo on the screen, their voices and images constituting “indexical traces of the real,” as if “they have a power that energizes reality itself.”128 Subjective presence – an opportunity afforded even encouraged by appearing solo on the screen in the midst of others – is a “power” that can dissipate in an actual classroom, a setting where one’s individual voice can be modulated (even muted) by the psycho-­ social press of other physically present students.129 In my fall 2020 online course, students’ assignments – I asked each to quote a passage from the assigned reading, explain why s/he chose that passage, then pose a question, one hundred words in total – focused each of us on the text (yes, information but also analysis) filling the shared screen, “recall[ing] and rework[ing] a long pictorial tradition in which reading [and speaking] w[ere] encoded as spiritual communication – initially with God, then later as literary exaltation.”130 No literary exaltation or communication with God I admit, but still there was, to my astonishment, a simulated sense of being subjectively present. That subjective presence was imagistic and auditory, contained within the screen, confined to the Cloud, but – as Koepnick denotes (if in a different context) – an “indexical trace of the real.” The (illusory) privacy of the encounter was accented by the imagistic details of our separate settings: to my left side was a ceiling-­ to-­floor painting, books piled high on a table in back of me, books stacked on shelves behind the table. When she spoke to me, one student sat on an overstuffed couch, stroking her cat and sipping tea, the pot resting on the table in front of her, a landscape painting on the wall behind her. (When the background is bare – as YouTube Zoom videos often recommend - the figure dominates the ground completely, amplifying that person’s presence imagistically.) The illusion of privacy even intimacy – as if I had been invited into the student’s home to chat – simulates subjective presence as it insulates one from the pull of that differentiated materiality that is the physically populated seminar room in Scarfe Hall (where I teach when I teach in-­person), distracting in its dullness and lack of character, slightly claustrophobic when a window is blocked or absent altogether. In both physical and virtual classrooms there can be absent any sense of an “outside” that the painting (in my study now studio) and the couch and cat (in the student’s living room) registers. That appearance of parole – overstated as the prison analogy must seem – reminds that there is material natural reality outside. When embedded – “entrenched” is Koopman’s more military word, internalized psychically is Han’s observation - in the screen, there may be no outside, only a series of images and sounds, even when one closes the computer, even when one does walk outside. Despite the totalization technology triggers, Strathausen stays insistent, telling us that “the main characteristic of organic life is the emergence of new and unforeseen systemic effects.”131 Despite being potted in non-­organic “soil”? There is life in the prison that is the techno-­nation-­state, but what kind of life is it?

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“If radios inserted the immediacy of Hitler’s voice into the home’s interior,” Koepnick reminds, “airplanes mobilized Hitler’s body into ubiquitous visibility.” Zoom seems to fabricate a fusion of the two – ubiquitous visibility and a sense of immediacy – as not only students but colleagues and others one has never met suddenly appear on a screen inside the seclusion of one’s home. (During the COVID-­19 pandemic, sheltering in place meant working from home.) What the radio and airplane “accomplished jointly,” Koepnick continues, “was to make political leadership seem inevitable and indisputable.”132 Koepnick quotes Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt: “Our concept [of leadership] neither requires nor sustains the notion of a mediating image or representative likeness. It originates neither in baroque allegories and representations nor in Descartes’s idée générale. It is a concept of immediate … real presence.”133 Does Zoom accomplish the same? Or is an “immediate” and “real presence” already illusory in an era when for many the virtual seems to supersede the material? Recalling Koepnick’s account of how photography insinuated the sense of Hitler as Führer, I cannot help but hear, as does Koepnick, the “uncanny echoes today between how fascism and our own image-­driven times embed technological media in processes of physical and affective mobilization.”134 Is the simulation of subjective presence and intersubjective intimacy through dialogical encounter that I testified to teaching online only an admission of my own “physical and affective mobilization” demanded by my involuntary incarceration in the techno-­nation-­state?

Presence of the Human Subject As intrusions of the techno-­nation-­state inside our homes, inside ourselves, devices materialize the most recent iteration of a transhistorical trend toward technologization – George Grant associated it with modernity itself 135 – that was already educationally embedded in twentieth-­century models of in-­person professionalism that tended to standardize teaching practice, now conceived as “best practices.”136 Within this macro-­trend there have been efforts at resistance and reform, among the most memorable the progressive education movement in the United States one hundred years ago,137 today scattered throughout the world.138 Parole may be impossible but simulations of subjective presence through dialogical encounter remain possible, if threaded through the software from which Zoom profits. The question of the human subject recurs. Hanafi is clear that the “subject … is still the battlefield between threatening and threatened authority versus freedom.”139 She recommends that “both left and right, if capable of it, should relaunch the normativity of politics and law against the deviations of the economy and technology.”140 Casting economism and technologization as “deviations” seems hopeful indeed, as Wittgenstein’s sense of foreboding seems to me more realistic: “It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and

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technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known…. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.”141 Obvious it is not. While one waits one can still study and teach. There remain indexical traces of the real in the techno-­nation-­state, including the presence of the human subject, even in Zoom. As Hanafi appreciates: “[I]t is precisely the presence or absence of the political centrality of the subject and its equal dignity that makes the difference.”142 That centrality has been – is – often ignored in the physical classroom, often necessarily so. But fall term 2020, contra critique and common sense, it was simulated onscreen, if in short segments. There were traces of the real. Or so it seemed.

Notes 1 In Tröhler, Daniel, Piattoeva, Nelli, and Pinar, William F. World Yearbook of Education. Education, Schooling and the Global Universalization of Nationalism. Routledge, 2022. Reprinted with permission. Revised before publication here. 2 “In the pandemic,” Han (2021, 15) asserts, “the neoliberal labour camp is called the ‘home office.’ The only difference between the home office and the labour campus of despotic regimes is that, in the former, the ideology of health and the paradoxical freedom of self-­exploitation reign.” 3 The teacher as entertainer follows an earlier iteration – the teacher as facilitator – demotions antedated by apparent promotions. Over one hundred years ago William James, Kaag (2020, 161) reminds, prophesized that “teachers – the kind who might entertain meaningful questions about the meaning of life – would be replaced by ‘Professors,’ experts in the art of professing ever more rarified jargon.” 4 For a history of the concept, see Moghtader (2021). 5 2019, 57. 6 2019, 85. 7 “When the social body is wired by techno-­linguistic automatisms,” Berardi (2012, 14)) warns, “it acts as a swarm: a collective organism whose behavior is automatically directed by connective interfaces,” adding: “In a swarm it is not impossible to say ‘no.’ It’s irrelevant. You can express your refusal, your rebellion and your nonalignment, but this is not going to change the direction of the swarm, nor is it going to affect the way in which the swarm’s brain is elaborating information” (2012, 16). 8 2019, 136–137. 9 2017a, 8. 10 Cohn (2021, April 22, A14) reports that many analysts have diagnosed the death of democracy in terms of “authoritarianism,” e.g. when a demagogue exploits citizens’ dissatisfaction, is elected through legitimate means, then uses constitutional prerogatives to preserve his or her own power. As instances, Cohn cites Putin’s takeover of Russia, Chavez’s of Venezuela, Hitler’s of Germany; I would add Trump’s efforts to achieve the same in the United States. Supplementing these narratives of authoritarianism, Cohn continues, is sectarianism; he cites Ireland, the Middle East and South Asia, “regions where religious sectarianism led to dysfunctional government, violence, insurgency, civil war and even disunion or partition” (Ibid.) “In many ways,” he acknowledges, “that’s the story that’s playing out in America today” (Ibid.). 11 Eley 2020, 287. 12 “Political decision,” Berardi (2012, 7) appreciates, “has been replaced by techno-­ linguistic automatisms embedded in the interconnected global machine, and social

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choices are submitted to psychic automatisms embedded in social discourse and in the social imaginary.” 13 Han (2017a, 14). 14 Not only among the living but with the dead: Pinar (2015, 109). 15 2017, 7. 16 1997, 114. 17 Koopman (2019, vi). 18 2019, 85. 19 See, for example, Pinar (2019, 10, 106). 20 Fanon (1967). 21 2017a, 17, 12. 22 Ellison (2015). 23 Brody (2016). 24 Richardson (2018, 88). 25 2017a, 59. 26 Ibid. 27 2017a, 60. 28 2020. 29 2017a, 18. For Berardi (2012, 96), “neoliberalism is the most perfect form of fascism.” 30 2017a, 27. 31 An antiquated concept in the Digital Age: “The internet space,” Han (2017b, 40) points out, “does not consist of phases of continuity and transition, but of discontinuous events or facts. Thus, no progress or development takes place in it. It is an ahistorical space. The time of internet space is a discontinuous and point-­like Now-­ time. You move from one link to the next, from one Now to another.” 32 2020. 33 Technologization – “the draining from work of everything in it which was human, until man was used only as a machine” – is a long-­term trend, Heilbroner (1959, 37) reminds, quoting Adam Smith: “The man whose whole life is spend in performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding…. he naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to become.” The Age of Information – our age – is the Age of Ignorance. 34 Marx, quoted in Strathausen (2017, 311). 35 Pinar (2019, 17, 99). Subjective space – created and maintained by non-­coincidence with what is – enables insight and understanding. “The internet space” enables neither, as it is, Han (2017b, 39) points out, “a space without direction. It is woven from possible connections, or links, which do not fundamentally differ from each other. No direction or option has an absolute priority over the others.” 36 Strathausen (2017, 311). 37 2017, 6. “When transformed into data,” Han (2021, 47) points out, “the world becomes transparent,” adding: “The soul of the digital order is dataism, data totalitarianism. In place of narration, it substitutes addition. ‘Digital’ means numerical. The numerical is more transparent, more available, than the narrative.” 38 2017, 7. 39 Williamson (2013, 83). 40 Han (2021, 59). Han here is noting that our “mania for health is such that such that he [Nietzsche’s “last man,” the creature we’ve become in late modernity] is constantly monitoring himself ” (ibid.). 41 Williamson (2017, 71). 42 Williamson (2017, 82).

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43 44 45 46 47

Ibid. 2017, 7. 2017, 9. 2017, 28. Han (2017a, 60). “[F]rom the beginning,” Heilbroner (1959, 37) reminds, “within the force of technological progress was divined a component whose untoward social repercussions might vitiate the sheerly physical gains of the new productivity.” As noted here, there have been – are now – subjective repercussions too, intertwined with the social. 48 2019, 155. “[I]n the digital age,” Berardi (2012, 14) points out, “power is all about making things easy,” adding: “Techno-­linguistic procedures, financial obligations, social needs, and psycho-­media invasion – all this capillaric machinery is framing the field of the possible, and incorporating common cognitive patterns in the behavior of social actors” (2012, 16). 49 2017, 53. 50 2017, 53. 51 2017, 56. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Han 2017a, 12. 55 Koopman 2019, vi. 56 2017, 56. 57 2017, 57. 58 Cohen (2021, 5) calls it the “digital society,” adding: “To achieve efficiency, everyone must enter the cybernetic world like a pill into a body, becoming a bit of data that can be processed by another bit of data. Software, artificial intelligence, will be able to take care of unlimited number of clients, treat them, advise them, entertain them, provided they have been digitalized beforehand…. Such is the promise announced by Homo digitalis, that of a world emancipated from the limits of the human body.” Tell that to the hungry, the homeless, the sick, the elderly. 59 2017, 58. 60 2017, 61. 61 Ibid. 62 2017, 103; see also Taubman (2009). 63 Koopman (2019, 19). 64 Williamson (2017, 107). 65 Ibid. 66 See, for example, Gordan (1985). 67 Williamson (2017, 108). 68 2017, 111. 69 2017, 124. 70 1961. 71 Cohen and Taylor (1972, 109). 72 We are imprisoned wherever we live, as Cohen (2021, 142) appreciates, “digital society’s way of keeping us under house arrest behind its screens.” 73 2017, 124. 74 2017, 130. “Ways of thinking” is a misleading phrase as data-­driven technologies threaten to terminate thinking altogether. Berardi’s (2012, 126) phrase – “cognitive reformatting” – is more precise. 75 Pinar 2019, 106. 76 “Our society is one not of spectacle,” Foucault, (1995 [1979], 217) knew (critiquing Debord), “but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests

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bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of using forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.” 77 Williamson 2017, 134. 78 2017, 141. 79 2017, 142. 80 https://www.classdojo.com/ 81 2017, 145. 82 2017, 146. 83 Ibid. 84 2017, 155. 85 2017, 156. 86 2017, 159. 87 Ibid. 88 2017, 164. 89 Ibid. 90 2017, 167. 91 2017, 168. 92 2017, 170. 93 2017, 177. 94 2017, 306. 95 2017, 177. 96 Ibid. 97 2017, 179. Isn’t programming the other side of the same coin as being programmed? One is still stuck inside software. 98 2017, 183. 99 2017, 188. 100 2017, 192. 101 In Burdick and Sandlin’s (2013, 147) righteous riddance of the human subject – “intentionality” and “dialogical encounter” become culprits – is this the “posthuman” public pedagogy they imagine? 102 2017, 202. 103 2017, 297. 104 Pinar (2019, 96, 109 n. 4, 171). 105 2019, 156. 106 2019, 161. 107 2019, 204. 108 Breinig (2008, 48) is here referencing the orality of Aboriginal cultures, including the importance of telling stories that reactivate the past, in Vizenor’s phrasing “native stories/scenes of presence” (quoted in 2008, 53), language through which “survivance becomes real” (2008, 57). 109 2019, 148. For Berardi (2012, 20), the “voice” and “poetry” can constitute “two strategies” for the “reactivation” of embodied enunciation and the empathic potential of speech: “Once poetry foresaw the abandonment of referentiality and the automation of language; now poetry may start the process of reactivating the emotional body, and therefore of reactivating social solidarity, starting from the reactivation of the desiring forcing of enunciation.” Citing Agamben, Berardi (2012, 20) positions the voice as the “point of conjunction between meaning and flesh. The voice is the bodily singularity of the signifying process, and cannot be reduced to

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the operational function of language, notwithstanding the research in protocols and procedures for vocal recognition.” Really? That is exactly what’s happened. 110 2019, 156. 111 2019, 151. 112 Kumar (2013). 113 2019, 183. 114 2019, 194. 115 2019, 198. 116 2019, 214–215. 117 Koopman (2019, 180). For Foucault (1995 [1979], 201), the “major effect of the Panopticon: to induct in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” 118 2017, 6–7. 119 2017, 40. 120 2019, ix. 121 “Our unconscious feelings toward imprisonment,” Martha Grace Duncan (1996, 30) suggests, “have finally to do with a desire return to a period before we came to terms with ‘reality,’ that is, to the womb, to the fantasy of paradise. That is why, on an unconscious level, we can never regard incarceration as only evil. Duncan points also to what she considered the ill-­disguised envy that many on the ‘outside’ express toward prisoners. In their fantasies, prisoners are ‘coddled’when they should be punished. Our ‘fixation’ with the fetal period may help to explain why prisons have tended to be places of great brutality. To the degree that we unconsciously associate imprisonment with a peaceful womb or a timeless Arcadia, we find the mere deprivation of liberty an insufficient punishment.” 122 Quoted in Koopman (2019, 192). 123 2019, 193. 124 Ibid. 125 2019, 19. 126 2019, 193. 127 2019, 191, 194. 128 Koepnick (2020, 118). 129 “Speech always requires an individual speaker,” Kroeber (2008, 35) reminds, “so uniqueness if built deeply into such [oral] cultures. This characteristic is why [Gerald] Vizenor observes that conventional descriptions of native cultures too often exaggerate their communal character. His point is that the communal strength of native societies concentrates on empowering individuals.” As should be the strength of settler societies, I add. 130 2020, 119. 131 2017, 295. 132 2020, 123. 133 2020, 125. 134 2020, 132. 135 Pinar (2019, 8, 17). 136 http://geiendorsed.com/blog/inspiration/10-­best-­practices-­of-­highly-­effective-­ teachers/ 137 Pinar (2010). 138 For examples, see Thapan (2015, 147); https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­ europe-­39889523; for critique see Ramsay (2020). 139 2017, 97. 140 Ibid. 141 Quoted in Monk 1990, 485. 142 2017, 85.

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Bibliography Berardi, Franco. 2012. The Uprising. On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e). Bowers, C.A. 2016. Digital Detachment. How Computer Culture Undermines Democracy. Routledge. Breinig, Helmbrecht. 2008. Native Survivance in the Americas. Resistance and Remembrance in Narratives by Asturias, Tapahonso, and Vizenor. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (39–59). University of Nebraska Press. Brody, Jane E. 2016, May 31. Tear Your Eyes Away From the Computer. The New York Times CLXV, No. 57, 249, D5. Burdick, Jake and Sandlin, Jennifer A. 2013. Learning, Becoming, and the Unknowable: Conceptualizations, Mechanisms, and Process in Public Pedagogy Literature. Curriculum Inquiry 43 (1), 142–177. Cohen, Daniel. 2021. The Inglorious Years. The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society. Princeton University Press. Cohn, Nate. 2021, April 22. Growing Threat to American Democracy: Us vs. Them. The New York Times, CLXX, No. 59,036, A14. Couldry, Nick and Mejias, Ulises A. 2019. The Costs of Connection. How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford University Press. Duncan, Martha Grace. 1996. Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment. New York University Press. Ellison, Katherine. 2015, November 24. Treating A.D.H.D. Electronically. The New York Times CLXV, No. 57,060, D6. Eley, Geoff. 2020. Conclusion. In Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-­ Century Rise of the Global Right, edited by Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley (284–292). Duke University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Weidenfeld. Foucault, Michel. 1995 (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums. Anchor Books. Goldstein, Dana and Shapiro, Eliza. 2020, June 30. Full-­Time Return to Classrooms When Summer Ends? “That’s Wishful Thinking.” New York Times, CLXIX, No. 58,740, A8. Gordon, Beverly. 1993. Toward Emancipation in Citizenship Education. In Understanding Curriculum As Racial Text, edited by Louis Castenell, Jr. and William F. Pinar (263– 284). State University of New York Press. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford University Press. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2017a. Psycho-­Politics. Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2017b. The Scent of Time. A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering. Polity. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2021. The Palliative Society. Polity. Hanafi, Zakia. 2017. Left and Right: Why They Still Make Sense. In Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis, edited by George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek (63–99). Duke University Press. Heilbroner, Robert L. 1959. The Future As History. Harper Torchbooks. Kaag, John. 2020. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. How William James Can Save Your Life. Princeton University Press.

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Koepnick, Lutz. 2020. Face Time with Hitler. In Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-­ Century Rise of the Global Right, edited by Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley (111– 133). Duke University Press. Koopman, Colin. 2019. How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. University of Chicago Press. Kumar, Ashwani. 2013. Curriculum as Meditative Inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan. Moghtader, Bruce. 2021. Human Capital Theory of Education. University of British Columbia, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Monk, Ray. 1990. Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius. Penguin. Pinar, William F. 2010. The Eight-­Year Study. Curriculum Inquiry 40(2), 295–316. Pinar, William F. 2015. Educational Experience as Lived. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019. Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology. University of Ottawa Press. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press. Richardson, Diane. 2018. Sexuality and Citizenship. Polity. Strathausen, Carsten. 2017. Thing Politics and Science. In Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis, edited by George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek (292–317). Duke University Press. Taubman, Peter M. 2009. Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education. Routledge. Thapan, Meenaksji. 2015. Curriculum and Its Possibilities: Schooling in India. In Curriculum Studies in India: Intellectual Histories, Present Circumstances, edited by William F. Pinar (141–161). Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, Julia Adeney. 2020. Introduction. In Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-­Century Rise of the Global Right, edited by Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley (1–20). Duke University Press. Tröhler, Daniel. 2020. National Literacies, or Modern Education and the Art of Fabricating National Minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Kroeber, Karl. 2008. Why It’s A Good Thing Gerald Vizenor Is Not An Indian. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (25–38). University of Nebraska Press. Williamson, Ben. 2013. The Future of the Curriculum. School Knowledge in the Digital Age. MIT Press. Williamson, Ben. 2017. Big Data in Education. The Digital Future of Learning, Policy and Practice. Sage.

10 EXPERIENCE1

‘Consciousness,” Martin Jay writes, “is itself transformed by what it encounters, and so is the object that is encountered.”2 Likewise, the capacity of curriculum to contribute to our consciousness of our present circumstances is considerable, provided that curriculum provides encounters with those histories within which present circumstances become intelligible. Through opportunities for solitary study as well as dialogical encounter, the educational experience the curriculum encourages can become embodied and lived as well as thought. Such ethical engagement with alterity can increase our capacity to reconstruct not only present circumstances but ourselves as well.3 Subjective reconstruction is the site of so-­called teacher development.4 Can teacher development occur without embodied experience to reconstruct? Consciousness requires non-­coincidence with what is. It is within the space of non-­coincidence – the sphere of subjectivity – that we can reconstruct experience as educational. It is working from within5 – in-­between self and society – that activates our capacity to understand how we are embedded in a present from which we may also want to extricate ourselves.6 Through sustained academic study7 – conceived as ethical engagement with alterity – we can reconstruct curriculum to encourage cosmopolitan comprehension of what appears to contain us. In the opening line Martin Jay makes the point succinctly, e.g., that social and subjective reconstructions are reciprocally related. Peculiar perhaps to modernity – structured by the hegemony of science and technology, frayed by what we summarize as postmodernism8 – is an intensifying instrumentalization of experience, not only in education but in many (almost all it sometimes seems) areas of experience. Instrumentalization restructures experience as it repositions it from the ground on which we walk to the means by which we go where we want to be. Instead of being open to what DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-10

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experience9 may bring – in modernity we are disinclined to risk results that are not profitable – we plan experiences whose outcomes we desire. While in principle reasonable, in practice such instrumentalism is often restrictive, as it tends to confine us to those circumstances within which educational objectives (structuring instrumental action) have been constructed. Outcomes associated with objectives ensure reshuffling of what is already, the very circumstances from which we may want to extricate ourselves, or at least improve upon. We cannot get “there” from here. Given that experience often exceeds our capacity to predict it, it cannot conform to what we will it to be. Even when restricted to the trivial, the objectives-­outcomes sequence splinters. Historically that has been the fate of most curriculum reform worldwide. Bureaucrats blame “implementation,” but even when teachers and students are able to do what is demanded, there are, almost inevitably, outcomes that are unanticipated. For decades curriculum planners and reformers have lamented that what happens in classrooms – in Aoki’s terms the curriculum-­as-­lived10 – finally fails to coincide with our commands. In China, reformers have labored to reposition teachers and students from followers to creators – as Chen Yuting11 describes – hoping to shift from Kairov’s pedagogy12 to more student-­centered curriculum. However laudable its objectives, by definition reform risks the instrumentalization of experience. Instrumentalization amounts to the technologization of experience. In modernity, not only human experience has been so technologized, so has the world, the sustainability of which now depends on the devising new forms of instrumentalization – new technologies – that will contradict the catastrophes climatologists now forecast. Recycling and other sustainability strategies as well as sharp shifts in consumption practices are crucial, but clearly humanity – or at least our leaders – have wagered that the future can be different only if we continue to technologize it. Paradoxically then, despite the fact that the future of humanity is now imperiled thanks to technologization, it is clear that the future for humanity depends on further – accelerating – technologization.13 Today’s unprecedented and often unquestioned demand for technology in education is justified as utilitarian, as preparing students and their teachers for that even more thoroughly technological future. This utilitarian rationale is self-­contradicting given that the swift pace of technological change ensures that any such preparation must miss its mark. Never mind the facts, promises prevail, as promoters assure us that technology only improves student learning.14 Universities and schools appear powerless to resist, diverting funds from teachers and students to purchasing the (ever upgraded) products technology companies sell. Constantly acquiring technology has produced a “slick and fast-­g rowing sales force,” Matt Richtel reports, hired by computer and other technology companies determined to profit from public financing.15 The technology bubble continues to inflate, Richtel continues, even as “questions persist about how effective high-­tech products can be at improving student achievement. The companies say

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their products engage students and prepare them for a digital future, while some academics say technology is not fulfilling its promise.”16 Standardized examinations are an ancient17 instance of the technologization of educational experience. Reducing learning to numbers misrepresents student achievement as it de-­individuates it; it undercuts educators’ creativity and intellectual independence as it funnels teaching toward the tests. Today tests seem the least of the matter, as the technologization of human experience has – as the great Canadian theorist Marshal McLuhan discerned18 – no outside. No longer prosthetic, technology is now the sea in which we swim, the air we breathe, the blood that flows within.19 Even the unconscious is incorporated,20 as fantasy21 informs not only what we find online but the drive to search for what we imagine is “there,” not so much in material reality but in “the Cloud.” At first the virtual world – specifically the Internet – was conceived as an open space, free from the constraints of circumstances, space where we might be free to be what we want to be. Decades later it is clear that that dream is dead: what “access” brings is another set of constraining circumstances, as the Internet itself is structured by the software that also structures us. “All forms of participation are allowed,” Mejias points out, referencing online interaction, “as long as they submit to the organizing logic of the network.”22 No external enforcement is required, Mejias adds, “because it is affirmed through our personal use of technology, establishing the network as the main template for organizing and understanding the real.”23 Not only for addicts or bullies or their victims is the virtual world the “real” one. For millions who sit in front of screens each day, those physically present fade in significance, as what appears real is now “there,” on the screen. In our time the real seems virtual not actual, imagistic not embodied, structured by the software and networks profit-­seeking private companies have designed. “[T]he technological phenomenon,” Mejias warns, “represents the most dangerous form of determinism in the modern age.”24 In the standardization and virtualization that technologization enforces embodied experience evaporates. Staring at screens distracts, informs, and entertains but it can provide no embodied encounter with the subjective presence of others.25 Being physical present does not ensure subjective presence, as many have been drained of their subjectivity, now (seemingly) unable to engage with those around them. But without actually being in the embodied presence of others – not just their image26 on a screen – there is little chance of experience that is multi-­sensory and unanticipated. Being in the material world requires engagement with events we did not plan, with what and whom we did not want, and perhaps cannot comprehend. Even when we do get what we want we discover another set of circumstances we did not imagine. Experience as lived precedes27 – and sometimes – exceeds what we know or can imagine. Our capacity to do so – through academic study – enables us to construct opportunities to learn from what has happened, to render experience educational.

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“Experience is common ground,” Kaag points out, “the place where individuals with different ideas can meet and, many times, reach agreement.”28 Agreement seems elusive in these days of political polarization, but without experience difference itself disappears. “However much we may construe experience as a personal possession,” Martin Jay emphasizes, “it is inevitably acquired through an encounter with otherness, whether human or not.”29 Standardization and virtualization dissolve otherness, the former through predictability, the latter through absence, substituting images for presence. The Greek antecedent of experience is empeiria, which also serves as the root for the English word “empirical,” Jay explains, providing an etymological “link between experience and raw unreflected sensation or unmediated observation.”30 In this link, Jay notes, is an association between experience and specificity, not generality, with particularity not universality, although the concept of allegory31 reminds these binaries can be bridged. There is nothing “raw” about the screen, even when its images are (as, for instance in pornography, no small section of the Internet).32 The materiality of the machine – a phone, a tablet, a computer – communicates something smooth, something manufactured, not just a device but a procedure in which the movements of fingers alter that at which we stare.33 In contrast, “raw” is “in your face.” It’s possibly prickly and even painful,34 often outside one’s control.35 Experience as lived extends beyond our reach, occurring on occasion where we aren’t looking, at least at first. Perhaps we can divine what is happening only through means of apprehension36 other than observation, attunement accessed through existential experience.37 Experience as lived is an ongoing adventure, especially when it leads where we don’t want to go. Those destinations aren’t necessarily geographic of course, but matters of feeling and insight and regret. Experience is not only a conveyance – the bridge between objectives and outcomes – and even when it is, it sometimes breaks down. I am not romanticizing the rawness of experience – it can be unpleasant even perilous – but I am pointing out that without its tendency to keep us conscious, without an ongoing if sometimes subliminal38 sense of abrasion,39 there is only processed simulated (not embodied existential) experience.40 For Han, the “pain-­free life of permanent happiness is not a human life,” asserting that “life which tracks down and drives out its own negativity cancels itself out.”41 Virtual experience protects us from the peril of the unplanned, but in so doing ensures we suffer the one fate we might have avoided: the evisceration of experience. Because it is confined to the “Cloud,” visible only on screens, virtual experience is a spectator sport. It substitutes the voyeuristic for the visceral. Exhibitionism displaces dialogical encounter. Online one can become informed but one cannot know, as knowledge – however contextual, provisional, often uncertain – derives, as Dewey taught us one hundred years ago, from the reconstruction of experience as lived.

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Why isn’t staring at screens also an opportunity for experience? Why isn’t what see online provide the same (or even increased) capacity for experience as what we undergo “on the ground”? Doesn’t technology construct opportunities to learn that classrooms can’t possibly provide? Etymology cannot adjudicate disputes, but it can clarify them. The English word experience is derived, Jay explains, from the Latin experientia, which denoted “trial, proof, or experiment.”42 Because “to try” (experei) contains the same root as periculum, or “danger,” he continues, “there is also a covert association between experience and peril, which suggests that it comes from having survived risks and learned something from the encounter (ex meaning a coming forth from).”43 What one can learn from the peril one faces online – bullying, indoctrination, surveillance, identity theft, ransomware, and other crimes – is to stay offline. There is no safety there, but on the ground one’s experience is not only textual or imagistic. It is felt, embodied, subjective.44 Those domains of apprehension and experience are hardly definitive, but they do provide opportunities for experience as lived staring at screens cannot. Educational experience, then, requires experience from which one can learn. Images and information that are processed are not experience. Their status on screens relegates them to realms of the visual and the auditory, forms of “experience” I admit, but mediated by the machine, always at a distance, not coterminous with one’s body and the air one is breathing. Images and text are, by the flick of a switch or the touch of the tablet, altered or removed. Experience as lived is more stubborn, often rubbing up against, even entering, one’s body. Experience is not so easily fended off, filed, unplugged. However forceful the mechanisms of denial, it sticks. Later one thinks about it, reconsiders what it meant. Searching the screen one is sated (or not), but the search dissolves the difference between here and there. Online one is not here. The space of non-­ coincidence contracts. Recall the critiques of ocularcentrism45 – reducing what one can know to what can be observed – that Dewey46 shared, worrying that spectatorship undermined efforts to live engagé. Being busy – who among us is not “too busy” – submerges us in circumstances, as we comply with never-­ending demands, some of them self-­imposed. The very pace of not only virtual experience disperses the density of experience, e.g. its depth and temporal intertextuality. Staring at screens ensures we live on the surface, searching for what surely must be on the next website, if only we can enter the right keyword. We disappear into the Web, and experience becomes, in Dewey’s words, “so dispersed and miscellaneous as hardly to deserve the name.”47 The degradation of experience technologization accomplishes antedates the contemporary information technologies. Walter Benjamin suggested that instrumentality itself – the calculation of means to accomplish ends, enshrined in education as the objective-­outcomes protocol – installed a technologization of experience that devalues its immediacy, spontaneity, and inner meaning.48 Worse

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than instrumentality was History itself. Benjamin was writing in the shadow of the Great War while the Third Reich threatened a second: For never has experience been more thoroughly belied than strategic experience was belied by tactical warfare; economic experience by inflation; bodily experience by mechanical warfare; moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on horse-­drawn streetcars now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.49 While we may be spared the nightmare of technological warfare, be reminded that it goes on in the Middle East as I write.50 The “jihad” educators face is not religious but technological, promoted by faceless corporations whose profit projections require replacing lived experience – and the knowledge embedded in, derived from it – with machines,51 a utopian fantasy now nearly fundamentalist in faith. In education officials gratefully set aside heaven for higher test scores.52 For Benjamin the evisceration of experience was evident in its increasing incommunicability. If the traditional storyteller’s function within the community was to pass on “counsel” to his or her listeners,53 Benjamin pointed out, in modernity – itself defined by technologization – that function fades, along with the sense of community, when “we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others.”54 Replacing the curricular allegories of such narrative is endless information that substitutes stimulation for experience. The ethics embedded in caring55 – that counseling embedded in certain storytelling – is replaced by instrumental manipulation designed to capture attention and transfer funds for the service rendered.56 Benjamin was unequivocal; we live in a culture dissociated from experience or in which “experience is simulated or obtained by underhanded means.”57 Never mind the “hidden persuaders”58 of the 1950s – those subliminal cues embedded in TV advertising to tempt viewers to purchase products – today incorporation not persuasion underscores our immersion in the virtuality scientists, technologists, and profiteers (sometimes intersecting categories) have constructed for us not only on phones, tablets and laptops but also on eyeglasses, watches, and someday, some suggest, in chips implanted in our brains. That “tiny, fragile human body” Benjamin saw on the World War I battlefield disappears into the “Big Data” compiled by digital technologies, exchanging physical for subjective death, as “we” disappear into avatars and other virtualized representations of our life histories and lived experience, now available to corporations and governments for surveillance, manipulation and our “convenience” presumably. “Digital technologies,” Nusselder notes, “modify self-­experience in terms of accessibility, visibility, and being known.”59 Self-­disclosure within relationships

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of intimacy and trust converts to exhibitionism, as the impetus for confiding to others changes from working through what is private and perhaps disturbing within relationships of confidentiality to posting in public whatever is might seem entertaining. “Everything about us can and must be known to others,” Nusselder knows, “and we also want ourselves to be known to others. In this way technoculture produces subjects as objects of knowledge.”60 On the screen subjectivity hollows out into images and keywords, no longer a subject with experience but a celebrity with fans, or least “likes” or “friends.” “Technocultural subjectivation,” Nusselder emphasizes, “has to do with the scopic drive.”61 How you appear is more important than what you know or how you are.62 Staying on the surface of experience – focused on “behavior” – eviscerates that educational experience from which professional discernment derives. Recognizing this risk, medical educators from the Mayo Clinic “specifically set out to teach against the test,” Abigail Zuger reports.63 Instead of standardized protocols, Zuger continues, these “educators took their students through complicated, contradictory cases for which there were no clear ‘best’ strategies, but many reasonably acceptable ones.”64 Is not the same the case for teachers in actual school classrooms? Rosie Lowndes, a social-­studies teacher at Georgia Cyber Academy, told reporters that – as variable and ever changing as they are – relationships matter. In her experience those students “who work closely with parents or teachers do well.” And allowing a “child educate himself,” she cautioned, “that’s not going to be a good educational experience.” The computer, she emphasized, can’t do it alone.65 Everyday experience comes with a lived complexity technologization cannot replicate or adequately anticipate; only flesh-­and-­blood schoolteachers – face-­to-­face with children – can negotiate the every-­shifting situatedness of embodied learning in actual not virtual situations.66 Not only medical educators recognize the risk to educational experience that the standardization intrinsic to technologization poses.67 Striking Chicago teachers were not only alarmed by a new evaluation system and increasing class sizes but also, Monica Davey reported, by “data-­driven education reform nationwide, which many perceived as being pushed by corporate interests and relying too heavily on standardized tests to measure student progress.”68 Steve Parsons, a teacher at Lane Tech College, suspected Chicago wanted to move the curriculum online, effacing the primacy of teacher–student relationships in educational experience. Kelly Farrell, a kindergarten teacher at Higgins Elementary on Chicago’s South Side, lamented that her class had become so large that she could not attend to each child. “They are 5 years old,” she said. “They want their teacher’s attention, and there is one of me and 43 of them.”69 Long before humanity began staring at screens and no longer at each other, the technologization of education had standardized not only the educational experience of students but of teachers, confining their pedagogical participation in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum to “best practices” that

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can be, allegedly, “data-­driven” and “evidence-­based.” Not only the curriculum but teacher–student relationships devolve from ends to means. Relationships between teachers and students are intrinsically important, extensions and revisions of relationships with other significant others, especially parents and caretakers.70 The educational experience of children, then, occurs within relationships to authority,71 embodied in actual persons who are emotionally as well as intellectually engaged with each other. Educational experience, then, depends on having experience, embodied lived experience from which one can learn. Online one can acquire information, but can one craft that knowledge that derives from being experienced? That ongoing reconstruction of experience requires that information be worked through – idiosyncratically – incorporating the new into one’s prior knowledge, cultivating the capacity for (situation-­specific) judgment. Despite policymakers’ insistence that technology should structure almost every classroom experience, many educators appreciate that their subjective presence is prerequisite to social learning.72 “Whereas contemporary liberalism has come to consider ‘authority’ almost entirely in terms of the rule that binds citizens and government,” Nancy Luxon points out, the classical liberals – she cites Locke, Rousseau, Kant – appreciated that “formative, personal relationships of authority prepare citizens to occupy common public spaces organized through words and deed.”73 The education of children was “premised,” Luxon continues, on “personal relationships to authority,” including “parents” and “teachers,” providing experiences of authority “that prepared individuals to exercise their liberty as citizens.”74 Liberty and authority, she concludes, are paradoxically entangled, and, she adds, “that entanglement is one to be continuously and actively negotiated rather than one to be stabilized onto the dichotomous terms of hierarchy.”75 A computer or tablet screen cannot substitute for the embodied actuality of negotiated relationships with actually existing educators committed to helping children learn from their lived experience, learning not necessarily linked to outcomes but enacting the paradox – the ongoing educational experiment – of affirming freedom76 within relationships of authority. The standardization that technologization installs fools a gullible public into thinking that educational experience is everywhere the same. As Jay also reminds, the concept of experience is associated with “specific [rather] than general matters, with particulars rather than universals.”77 Educational experience occurs within the universal through the particular and vice-­versa; it is in this sense allegorical.78 As Colin Koopman points out, “the democratic contribution is thoroughly personal. This means that it is simultaneously individual and social just insofar as all persons find themselves simultaneously individuating from and association with other persons.”79 The social experience of learning with and from each other in classrooms small enough to encourage subjective presence in dialogical encounter – complicated conversation guided

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by erudite, engaging teachers80 – institutionalizes opportunities for improvisation, discovery, and understanding. Academic study is not shopping, students are not customers, and teachers are not store-­clerks or service-­providers; these are market metaphors that fool parents and politicians into fantasizing a problem-­free path when not only etymologically but experientially learning is sometimes uncomfortable, at least when it invites us to exceed what we know and can think. Despite its intense technologization, the sixteenth-­century French essayist Michel de Montaigne might recognize the present moment that you and I inhabit. After all, he saw his own age as one of “corruption, violence, and hypocrisy,” an assessment, Martin and Barresi explain, that forced him “to question what his age took to be knowledge, then the possibility of knowing altogether, and finally even the human capacity to seek truth consistently… [He] helped reorient modern philosophy from the external world and toward subjective experience.”81 It is such subjective experience that is effaced by staring at screens. While hardly guaranteed by the embodied presence of another, lived experience can be encouraged by the subjectively present teacher unafraid of engaging emotionally as well as intellectually in conversation82 with those in her or his charge. Professionalization today does not mean impersonality and bureaucratization, but the exercise of professional – ethical – judgment.83 Educational experience is not experience in general. There can be no experience that does not belong to someone, a person I still say, a human subject coming of age, coming to form, through the study of academic subjects, themselves often focused on life itself.84 In this era of the “post”85 we insist there is no preexisting or “substantial self but something more intimately connected with experience.”86 As crucial as “experience” is – when it is lived, embodied, subjectively engaged – it is not, Koopman underscores, no epistemological foundation for knowledge, morality, or politics.87 Indeed, experience can be misleading, as Juliet Mitchell88 knew, informed as it can be by (patriarchal) culture, (unjust) circumstance, and an opaque historical moment. As Jay notes: Mitchell’s “skepticism about experiential self-­evidence and her insistence on its mediation by more theoretical models of explanation” cautioned not only feminists but others whose work rested on “the authority of subjective experience, either in the present or past.”89 Indeed, experience – if it is to be educational – is to be learned from, not accepted at face value. It is the beginning, not the end. But without actual embodied educators – not only images on screens – authorizing and engaging in such experience, conformity not skepticism could be the more likely outcome. “Conformity is the enemy of learning,” Michael S. Roth reminds, “because in order to conform you restrict our capacity for experience; you constrict our plasticity.”90 If experience means anything at all, Jay concludes, “it involves an openness to the world.”91 That is the cosmopolitan cause of

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curriculum as complicated conversation, a cause to which educational experience enlists our allegiance.

Notes 1 In Autobiography and Teacher Development in China: Subjective and Culture in Curriculum Reform, edited by Zhang Hua and William F. Pinar (179–192). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, revised 2021. Reprinted with permission. Revised in 2021. 2 Jay (2005, 184) is glossing Hegel here. 3 Cusk’s (2021, 73) character rues “how little we are able to truly change ourselves.” No matter, it’s the effort that honors the obligation. 4 My sourcebook for this phrase is Day 2012 which I review in Pinar (2015). 5 Pinar (1972). 6 We may wish to affirm it as well. 7 See Chapter 1. 8 See Trueit (2012); Zhang (2014a). 9 “Make friends with your experience,” Rinpoche (2019, 253) advises. 10 Aoki [2005 (1986), 160]. 11 See Chen (2014). 12 Soviet-­style (Stalinist) pedagogy, widely adopted in China during the 1950s (see Zhang 2014b, 46). 13 See Chapters 8 and 9. 14 Not during the Covid-­19 pandemic, as I report (Pinar 2021). 15 Richtel (2011, A1) also reported that “billions” of dollars are at stake. In 2013, Singer (2014, B6) reported that “sales of education technology software for pre-­kindergarten through 12th grade reached an estimated $7.9 billion, according to the Software and Information Industry Association.” In 2019, global sales totaled $11 billion and by 2026 they are estimate to reach $56 billion: https://www.bing.com/search?q=2020+ %24+sales+of+technology+to+K-­12+education&FORM=AFSCVO&PC=AFSC 16 2011, B7. Failing to fulfill its promise may be only the beginning of the problems the technologization of education poses, as research documents the deleterious consequences of substituting virtual for actual embodied experience, consequences that are apparently gendered: Francis (2021, September 23, 61) reports that “Rates of deliberate self-­harm among ten-­to-­fourteen-­year-­old girls, by cutting or self-­poisoning, nearly tripled in the United States between 2009 and 2015. Although the ubiquity of smartphones makes it difficult now to establish a control group, there’s gathering evidence that social media use is a major causative factor.” 17 The first standardized tests appeared during China’s Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), when officials designed civil service exams to select government workers according to merit not family status: https://www.bing.com/search?q=where+and+when+did+st andardized+exams+begin%3F&FORM=AFSCVO&PC=AFSC 18 Pinar (2019, 87). 19 Mejias (2013, xii–xiii) includes “all kinds of electronic technosocial systems” in the “digital network,” defining the latter as a “composite of human and technological actors (the nodes) linked together by social and physical ties (the links) that allow for the transfer of information among some or all of these actors. While the Internet is the most notorious example of a digital network … digital networks can encompass other technologies not based on the Internet, technologies such as mobile phones, radio-­frequency identification (RFID) devices, and so on. 20 “Within technoculture,” Foster (2005, 93) suggests, “it becomes more difficult to … to defend the existence of the unconscious against instrumental reason.”

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21 “Fantasy,” Nusselder (2009, 75) writes, “is not simply the expression of one’s own very personal inwardness; it is also constitutive in that it synthesizes our perception, thus charging and signifying it…. it is exactly this constitutive function of fantasy that is at work in technoculture.” 22 2013, 27. 23 2013, 25. 24 2013, xv. 25 That’s not always true. Superb acting – while itself a simulation – can engender embodied experience, vicarious yes, but felt as if it were one’s own. 26 “What do I have against images?” Stepanova (2018, 52) asks, answering: “Perhaps it is that they all have the same flaw: euphoric amnesia. They no longer remember what they signify, where they can from, who they are related to, and yet none of this bothers them.” 27 “I am interested in the existence of things before our knowledge of them,” Cusk’s (2021, 13) character tells us. 28 2020, 141. 29 2005, 7. 30 2005, 10. 31 In this general sense, allegory is a specific narrative that hints at a more general significance; see Pinar 2012, 50. 32 Nothing raw about the screen as it keeps what’s happening at a distance. Moreover, you can always turn off the computer, the TV or even leave the theater. Still, what happens on the screen can feel raw, the psychological sleight-­of-­hand superb acting, screenwriting and editing can produce. The examples are endless: this moment I’m thinking of “Shameless” on Netflix. 33 “There is no such thing as profound computing,” Han (2021, 39) observes, adding: “Artificial intelligence … may well be capable of learning, even of deep learning, but it is incapable of experience” (2021, 40). 34 “Either suffering is the meaning of life,” Kaag (2018, 41) writes, “or there is no meaning of life,” adding: “Perhaps this sounds overly bleak, but Nietzsche, echoing Schopenhauer, believed that the ways in which most individuals sought to alleviate agony only deepened it in the end.” Kaag concludes: “Life goes only one way, into ever steeper decline” (ibid.). Slightly less bleak, Rinpoche (2019, 181) reminds us: “We cannot change pain directly, but we can change our relationship to it, and this can reduce suffering.” 35 For Charles Sanders Peirce, Kaag (2016, 145) reminds, “chance was an opening for human beings to explore at their will, a space to be personally responsible for one’s actions.” Reflecting on Peirce’s 1903 argument with William Ernest Hocking and Josiah Royce, Ella Lyman Cabot pointed out: “Chance is always my chance!” (quoted in Kaag 2016, 145). 36 Rinpoche (2019, 142) knows that the “object of perception cannot be separated from the mind that perceives it.” 37 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kaag (2018, 22) reminds, thought “that one could achieve transcendence by immersing oneself in lived experience, that transcendence was not to be found ‘out there,’ but only in a deeper exploration of life,” adding: “One could have faith – and experience moments of deep, nearly divine meaning – but only in the tangible, observable flow of existence.” 38 “Subliminal” can connote “unconscious,” Kaag (2020, 180) comments, “but it shouldn’t be. It refers, instead, to mental processes just below the threshold of consciousness that can often be felt without fully emerging.” He is here discussing William James who, Kaag (ibid.) points out, was “always ready and willing to experience the unseen.” 39 Even pain, which for Han (2021, 3) “purifies,” the “tear through which the wholly other can enter” (2021, 6), and when “shared,” the “catalyst for revolution” (2021,

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12). Even when private, pain has its point, he thinks: “Where pain is suppressed, happiness is attenuated, becoming a dull contentment” (2021, 13). 40 Like superb acting, simulation can reference, even invoke, reality, but in our time, Yu (2008, 94) reminds, “simulation is no longer the pure reflection of the reality. It gradually takes the place of reality and thereby becomes its own pure simulacrum. Indian, like simulation, also replaces the tribal real with its simulated reality.” Now “commodified,” the “simulated Indian representation,” Yu (2008, 89) notes, “has become commodified and therefore lacks the relation to history and culture.” In the Digital Age, lacking relation to history and culture is the case for all who are “connected.” 41 2021, 60. 42 2005, 10. 43 Ibid. 44 “Only ‘the act of being touched by the other’ keeps life alive,” Han (2021, 6) reminds. He is quoting Adorno. 45 See, for instance, Levin 1993. 46 See, for instance, Jay 2005, 163. 47 Quoted in Jay 2005, 166. 48 In a digitalized economy, Berardi (2012, 105) explains, the “faster information circulates,” the “faster value is accumulated. But meaning slows down this process, as meaning needs time to be produced and to be elaborated and understood. So the acceleration of the info-­flow implies an elimination of meaning.” 49 From Benjamin’s “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” quoted in Eiland and Jennings 2014, 530. 50 Recall I wrote this in 2014 – not such recent writing, the oldest of all the chapters. In 2021, the United States withdrew from Afghanistan; the Taliban triumphed. 51 Gardini (2019, 3) asks: “And if such is the fate of knowledge, that it be surrendered to machines – or, as we put it more often these days, to technology – what exactly will there be for humans to know?” He answers: “Of course, we’ll have to learn how to build machines and keep them functioning, and to dispose of the remains when they become obsolete, and to procure the materials necessary to build new machines. In short, all in service of machines, with the idea, no doubt, that machines are fundamental, the only truly useful thing, the all-­encompassing solution” (2019, 3–4). “But what about the rest?” he continues, asking: “These needs that aren’t immediate, that aren’t practical or distinctly material, and yet are no less urgent? The so-­called spirit? Memory, imagination, creativity, depth, complexity? And what about the larger questions, which are common to other essential domains of knowledge, including biology, physics, philosophy, psychology, and art: where and when did it all begin, where do I go, who am I, who are others, and what is society, what is history, what is time, what is language, what are words, what is human life, what are feelings, who is a stranger, what am I doing here, what am I saying when I speak, what am I thinking when I think, what is meaning? Interpretation, in other words. [Recall Gumbrecht’s suspicion of interpretation: see Chapter 2.] Because without interpretation there is no freedom, and without freedom there is no happiness. This leads to passivity, a tacit acceptance of even our brighter moods. One becomes a slave to politics and the market, driven on by false needs” (2019, 4). 52 Evidently even these require “experience” of certain sorts. Unable to alleviate poverty themselves, Ladd and Fiske (2011, December 12, A21, emphasis added) report, “education policy makers [in the U.S.] try to provide poor students with the social support and experiences that middle-­class students enjoy as a matter of course.” 53 Listening implies subjective presence, as “to not listen,” Gardini (2019, 12) knows, “is to empty oneself, to flatten out, to grow dull, to disappear.” 54 Quoted in Eiland and Jennings (2014, 530).

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55 A key concept in curriculum studies: see Jung 2016. 56 “What was previously exchanged or supplied freely,” Mejias (2013, 22) notes, “is now part of an economic exchange, which reduces its worth to a material value and opens up opportunities for exploitation.” 57 Eiland and Jennings (2014, 412). 58 See Packard [2007 (1957)]. 59 2009, 127. 60 2009, 127. I’d substitute “information” for “knowledge,” but Nusselder is describing precisely “prolificity” (see Chapter 14). 61 2009, 133. In contrast, Cavell (2002, 6) points out, “McLuhan regarded Modernism as representing the transition from a print oriented and visual culture to an electronically oriented as ‘acoustic’ culture, just as the Renaissance was the interface between a dying orality and the birth of a culture in which the eye would come to dominate.” In what ways virtuality can be acoustic space is a topic for another day. 62 Researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for Education Data and Research conclude that the “ability to work well with others – flexibility and interpersonal skills – seemed to be a bigger factor in teacher retention than where a teachers went to college. Other things like experience and instructional skills were also big factors” (Blankinship 2014, A8). What are the relations among these “things,” one wonders. Surely they differ according to person, perhaps school? Do not culture, class, age enter in? Note there is no mention of academic knowledge. Apparently smooth-­talking good-­looking young people who’ll do whatever they told are the most qualified to teach children. 63 2014, D4. 64 Ibid. 65 Quoted passages from Banchero and Simon (2011, November 12–13, C2). The need for physical as well as psychological presence went unmet during the Covid-­19 pandemic (see Chapter 11). 66 University students, especially graduate students, are quite capable of learning online (see Chapter 9). 67 See Richtel (2012); Hollander (2012). 68 2012, September 11, A14. 69 Quoted in Davey (2012), September 11, A14. 70 Educational experience occurs within relationships among children, of course. 71 See Chapter 6. 72 “It is only in the outside spaces of the network,” Mejias (2013, 17) argues, “beyond the limits of nodes, where we can acquire enough clarity to listen to the sounds that alternative subjectivities, even from within us, might suggest.” In my terms, one must work from within. 73 2013, 19. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Liberty is more associated with public, political – civic – practices while freedom includes the sphere of the subjective. 77 2005, 10. 78 In this general sense, allegory is a specific narrative that hints at a more general significance; see Pinar (2012, 50). 79 2009, 24. He is here threading U.S. pragmatism through Emerson, James and Dewey. 80 No standardized set of “practices” but individuated and situation-­specific enactments of ideals. 81 2006, 121. 82 When I characterize conversation as complicated, I am not positing an objective but acknowledging that we are more than what we say, that when we speak to each other we often fail to communicate, that sometimes misrepresent what we describe

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(in innocent ignorance or on occasion malevolently). My preference is simplification, although it risks obscuring what cannot be simplified. Here – in the main text – I am emphasizing the specificity of exchanges between individuals, perhaps with histories with each other and/or with those around them, or perhaps proceeding on hunches, but informed by being with the other person(s), “in person” as we say in English, a phrase that implies subjective presence with its singularity, momentariness, its unpredictable even unfathomable familiarity. 83 “[T]eacher education, like education itself,” Anne Phelan (2011, 210) reminds, “is a moral practice rather than a technological project.” 84 While in practice “life inquiry” may not always be closely tied to academic knowledge, it can never be severed, as whatever aspect of life that is studied requires, for its apprehension and comprehension, concepts and knowledge. 85 We are now, we are told, post-­human; see, for example, Agathocleous 2011, 184. 86 Martin and Barresi (2006, 174). Here Martin and Barresi are discussing Kant. 87 2009, 8. Koopman is here discussing Rorty. 88 1975. 89 2005, 246. 90 2014, 168. Apparently even intellectual capacity – as measured by one’s IQ score – “may be more malleable than previously believed – and more susceptible to outside influences, such as tutoring or neglect, according to findings by researchers at University College London (see Hotz 2011, A3). 91 2005, 408.

Bibliography Agathocleous, Tanya. 2011. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Visible City, Invisible World. Cambridge University Press. Aoki, Ted T. 2005 (1986). Teaching as Indwelling Between Two Curriculum Worlds. In Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki, edited by William F. Pinar and Rita L. Irwin (159–165). Lawrence Erlbaum. Banchero, Stephanie and Simon, Stephanie. 2011, November 12–13. My Teacher is an App. The Wall Street Journal, CCLVIII (14), C1–C2. Berardi, Franco. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e). Blankinship, Donna Gordon. 2014, October 30. Study Calls for More “Scientific” Teacher Hiring. The Bellingham Herald, A1, A8. Chen, Yuting. 2014. From Follower to Creator: The Past, Present and Future of the School as a Reform Subject. In Curriculum Studies in China, edited by William F. Pinar (69–82). Palgrave Macmillan. Cusk, Rachel. 2021. Second Place. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Davey, Monica. 2012. Teachers’ Strike in Chicago Roils Families Lives. Union Battles Mayor. Complaints Over Pay, Benefits, Class Size, and Respect. The New York Times Vol. CLXI, No. 55,891, A1, A14. Day, Christopher. Ed. 2012. Routledge International Handbook of Teacher and School Development. Routledge. Foster, Thomas. 2005. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. University of Minnesota Press. Francis, Gavin. 2021, September 23. Scrolling. The New York Review of Books, LXVIII (14), 60–62. Gardini, Nicola. 2019. Long Live Latin. The Pleasures of a Useless Language. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

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Han, Byung-­Chul. 2021. The Palliative Society. Polity. Hollander, Sophia. 2012. Online Holdouts No More. Private Schools in U.S. and Abroad Offer Web-­Based Classes Through New Venture. The Wall Street Journal, CCLX(73), A3. Hotz, Robert Lee. 2011. As Brain Changes, So Can IQ. Study Finds Teens’ Intellects May Be More Malleable Than Previously Thought. The Wall Street Journal, CCLVIII (894), A3. Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. University of California Press. Jung, Jung-­Hoon. 2016. The Concept of Care in Curriculum Studies. Routledge. Kaag, John. 2016. American Philosophy: A Love Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kaag, John. 2018. Hiking with Nietzsche. On Becoming Who You Are. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kaag, John. 2020. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. How William James Can Save Your Life. Princeton University Press. Koopman, Colin. 2009. Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty. Columbia University Press. Ladd, Helen F. and Fiske, Edward B. 2011, December 12. Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It? The New York Times, CLXI (55,617), A21. Levin, David Michael. ed. 1993. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1–29). University of California Press. Martin, Raymond and Barresi, John. 2006. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self. An Intellectual History of Personal Identity. Columbia University Press. Mejias, Ulises Ali. 2013. Off the Network. Disrupting the Digital World. University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, Juliet. 1975. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Freud, Reich, Laing and Women. Random House. Nusselder, André. 2009. Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology. MIT Press. Packard, Vince. 2007 (1957). The Hidden Persuaders. IG Publishing. Phelan, Anne M. 2011. Towards a Complicated Conversation: Teacher Education and the Curriculum Turn. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 19 (2), 207–220. Pinar, William F. 1972. Working from Within. Educational Leadership 29 (4), 329–331. Pinar, William F. 2015. Introduction. In Autobiography and Teacher Development in China: Subjectivity and Culture in Curriculum Reform, edited by Zhang Hua and William F. Pinar (1–47). Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2019. What Is Curriculum Theory? Routledge. Pinar, William. F. 2021. Curriculum and the Covid-­19 Crisis. Prospects. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11125-­021-­09560-­y Richtel, Matt. 2011. Silicon Valley Wows Education, and Woos Them. The New York Times, CLXI (55,580), A1, B7. Richtel, Matt. 2012. Teachers Resist High-­Tech Push in Idaho Schools. The New York Times, CLXI (55, 640), A1, B4. Rinpoche, Yongey Mingyur with Helen Tworkov. 2019. In Love With the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying. Spiegal & Grau. Roth, Michael S. 2014. Beyond the University. Why Liberal Education Matters. Yale University Press. Singer, Natasha. 2014. September 15. With Tech Taking Over In Schools, Worries Rise. The New York Times, CLXIII(56,625), B1, B6. Stepanova, Maria. 2018. In Memory of Memory. Translated by Sasha Dugdale. New Directions.

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11 NINETEEN SEVENTY-TWO1

The Latin infinitive of curriculum – currere – I invoked in 1975 to emphasize the experience of curriculum, embodied experience that was structured by the past while focused on the future.2 To study such existential experience I suggested a method in four steps or phases. In the regressive phase one returns to (not simply recalls, which implies remaining planted in the present) the past, or to aspects of it: for instance, one’s school’s experience, the experience of an influential teacher or text, one’s ongoing relationship with an academic discipline, with oneself, especially as a student, perhaps as a teacher. In the progressive phase one imagines the future (personal, political, planetary); in the analytic one analyzes these texts and the experiences they register and provoke to understand what before might have had been obscured by being in the present. That expanded3 subjectivity becomes, in the fourth moment or phase, synthesized, as mobilized one acts in the private and public worlds one inhabits.4 My study of the Canadian philosopher George Grant5 emphasized two of these four moments of currere. In the first I reactivated Grant’s critique of time, technology, and teaching, quoting him extensively, his voice resounding in the present. In the second I reconstructed what I learned from that experience of Grant’s subjective presence. In so doing I revised Grant’s critique while tempering my theory of curriculum as complicated conversation.6 In the first section of the book, the reader too can return to Grant and to the historical moment he personified, allowing Grant’s critique to reverberate through us living now.7 By experiencing the past – “the scandalous revolutionary force of the past”8 – I attempt to provide passages to the future, one blocked by the temporally vacuous present. Reactivation is a reformulation of the regressive phase of currere, encouraging not only remembrance of things past but also a return to their immediacy there, DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-11

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a temporal regression in service of reconstructing one’s subjective experience of the present. Reconstruction is a reformulation of the analytic phase of the method, wherein one attempts to learn from the experience of being in another time, somewhere else, with someone there and then, incorporating that experience – that knowledge – into what becomes a reconstructed understanding of who one is and what is at stake in the present moment. Evident in the introduction as well as in section two of the Grant book, such a subjective synthesis ensures what seems like slippage9 between Grant’s critique and my own, but the two (must) remain distinct. In reactivating my experience of my first year as a professor I aspire to remember10 the persons and circumstances surrounding the start of the journey I am close to concluding now. While it is has had twists and turns,11 there has been, it is retrospectively clear, continuity. As Grant’s analyses of time, technology and teaching reduce to one albeit complex critique, my variations turn out to be on a single theme too: the lived experience of study, in time, in place, with others: currere. I share that study with you “now,” a “temporal simultaneity”12 the method demarcates sharply. No rigorous regression, this reactivation is punctuated, as you will see, by my associations with what has happened in the years that followed. These final years, it turns out, were foreshadowed in that first one.

That First Year After graduating in June 1972 with the Ph.D. from Ohio State University I began driving West. In Denver I decided to go back.13 I telephoned the Head of the Search Committee who had hired me – William T. Lowe14 – who kindly offered me a summer course to teach. What struck me right off – as I entered that classroom on the River Campus of the University of Rochester – was the age difference between us. Working the year before as a teaching assistant, my students had been undergraduates – student teachers of English – and, in general, slightly younger than I. That summer course at Rochester was filled with graduate students – practicing teachers – older than I, almost but not yet twenty-­ five. Sometimes I have wondered if my respect for teachers –imprinted by my educational experience of the public schools15 where I had studied and taught – was extended by this experience of age difference teaching that first summer at the University of Rochester. Not that I have always been deferential toward my elders. Only a few years earlier being “young” had been an implicit moral advantage, as it was the aged “establishment” in the United States that we students had protested, who had been to blame for racism and militarism, abstractions made concrete by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the race riots, and the War in Vietnam. Four years later, hired as a faculty member I had become a member of the “establishment” myself. That first year my youth seemed, suddenly, a disadvantage.

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The undergraduates to whom I taught English teaching methods that first fall greeted me with skepticism. Intellectually aggressive, several challenged my critique of teaching methods, my insistence on dialogical encounter16 articulated in the first-­person singular, emphasizing solitary and social engagements with literary texts. In contrast, my teaching assistants – doctoral students – were agreeable that first term. In time I came to rely on my teaching assistants, especially Madeleine Grumet.17 While she too eschewed the standardization that the notion of teaching “methods”18 implied, Madeleine developed exercises, and by mid-­decade we were I confess teaching “methods,” referenced in our 1976 Toward a Poor Curriculum. That first year I would also meet Janet L. Miller, a M.A. student with whom I also became close. Janet19 would move to Columbus to complete her Ph.D. with my mentor, Paul R. Klohr.20 Later Janet and I would direct the Bergamo Conference and collaborate on JCT.21 Also that first year I met Jeannine Korman and Margaret Zaccone, secretaries in the Department with whom I became friendly. From France, Jeanine would be my guest for dinner at the restaurant Chez Jean Pierre on Alexander Street, where she taught me French cuisine and I subjected her to my three years of college French. Her interventions to improve my pronunciation were exemplars of teaching: gentle but firm, correcting my errors, encouraging my efforts. Born and raised in Rochester and formerly on the staff at the Eastman School of Music – she had stories tell – Margaret Zaccone22 would come to handle the finances of Bergamo and JCT, and (with her friend Dorothy Horton) manage the conference registration desk. In addition to the “teaching methods” course (during September) I supervised – with help from the teaching assistants – the students as they “practice taught” (during October–December). Visiting their classes in various Rochester city and suburban schools not only provided glimpses of their teaching and of these schools in this once vibrant upstate New York city, it helped me find my way to “complicated conversation,” my conception of curriculum with which I concluded Understanding Curriculum.23 While dialogical encounter was – remains – for me a crucial concept, it was never a technique to be utilized to achieve outcomes. I encouraged those student teachers to think of teaching as a professional responsibility for keeping conversation going, contributing to its quality24, even if that meant on occasion speaking in slang or lecturing. No objectives, no outcomes, nothing knowable in advance25; instead I advocated unswerving support for specific students in specific classes on specific days encountering specific assignments. One could not know in advance what that would look like. Improvisation – spontaneity – informed by erudition, professional ethics, and self-­knowledge – that was the mode d’être I recommended. No formula, teaching was participation in a conversation complicated not only by the singularity of those involved but as well by the past, including the absent presence of significant others, as well as by the presence in print of those writers whose works we were reading and discussing, as well as those scholars whose analyses of these works

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were also influencing what it was occurring to us to say. For me, student teaching supervision was a continuation of the theoretical26 course I had taught earlier in the fall titled “Teaching Methods.” In the spring I taught two graduate courses, one on English education and one on curriculum theory. While curriculum theory had been my secondary area in graduate school, that first year it was “promoted” to my primary interest. By spring 1973 I was emphasizing educational experience – a concept I had heard theorized by Dwayne Huebner27 – by providing an intellectual history of the noun. Martin Jay’s definitive study28 was decades away, and so I lectured on the concept of “experience” in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. As an undergraduate I had been allowed entry into graduate courses in the philosophy department and my notes29 from those and from my graduate courses proved handy that spring. As any teacher knows, one learns one’s subject more deeply through teaching it. In his communications with contributors to this collection,30 Andrew T. Kemp posed two questions: 1) how do you become successful? and 2) what advice would you give yourself if you were to start today? I’ll start with the second and in so doing imply a reply to the first. The truth is that I’m not sure I would start today.31 While 1972 was no “golden era” of higher education in the United States, 2016 represents … well, let’s say … no improvement upon it. The anti-­intellectual tendencies evident then – often summarized as the “corporatization” of higher education – have become almost complete; they seem to encompass almost all aspects of life in academe.32 Departments develop “signatures” and universities have “brands.” For three years I sat on the University of British Columbia, Faculty of Education, Dean’s Promotion and Tenure Committee: expectations for promotion and tenure were comprehensive and quantified. We examined measures of teaching “success”33 as well as numbers that purported to measure “impact” and determine which journals are influential. “Service” means not only attending Department, Faculty of Education, and University meetings, but reviewing manuscripts, acting as external examiner at dissertation defenses at other universities, serving on editorial boards and being elected officers of professional associations. Service to local professional associations is scrutinized too: “community involvement” is increasingly important and can be linked with research. Impact, service, and student evaluations I did not face in 1972. While greeted skeptically – not only my age was in play as I was, I was reminded by a senior colleague, the only graduate of a public university hired that year – I was also given time to do something that would be judged important.34 Such a demand positioned my scholarship and research as central, not teaching and certainly not service.35 While the three may have been conjoined with conjunctives even then, there was no mistaking how far behind number one teaching and service were. Research was everything. For someone trained in literary theory and criticism, research meant – means still – reading, thinking, and writing. My mentor in graduate school – Paul Klohr36 – had always encouraged me to read scholarship

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outside the field of education. Much of my graduate coursework had been in the English Department where I had studied the fiction of Virginia Woolf. The major intellectual event of that first year of university teaching was Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf. Juxtaposed to Bell’s biography was my study of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Voyage Out.37 The emphasis in these novels on the everyday: its momentariness, its momentousness, its nestedness in what escapes our conscious attention and rational understanding, the radical decentering of subjective experience that Heidegger was philosophizing at the same time Woolf wrote. Each of these aspects of Woolf ’s work captivated me. Still today I am eager to read what literary scholars38 are writing about Woolf. Woolf ’s poeticity, her sheer brilliance, her sense of the sacred and bawdy still steady me when I feel that it’s Weimar time,39 that catastrophe is coming, as it must have felt – as it was – for Woof. I think suicide too, but my cowardice means it will be sleeping pills not stones and the River Ouse.40 In 1972 it wasn’t the end of her life that preoccupied me, however, it was the beginning: the excitement of the Bloomsbury Group. In Rochester, Francine Shuchat Shaw41 and I fantasized forming a group focused on the humanities and education. I remember walks down Park Avenue in Rochester and coffee at Jine’s where, a decade later, Philip Wexler42 (while having coffee with me) would meet his second wife. It was Virginia Woolf ’s life and writing that intrigued me as a first-­year assistant professor wondering what I should do. Yes “should” because I felt keenly, if subliminally, the duty the privilege of professorship brings, the dignity of the calling, as Andrew Kemp phrases it. The demand to do “something important” was definite but diffuse, and I would not have claimed to know what “something important” was, except that Virginia Woolf and her writing and her life were expressions of it. It was specifically her stream-­of-­consciousness writing and its invocation of the everyday43 that I would reformulate as currere, curriculum as the lived experience of study and teaching and their consequences for me as an actually existing person in this time in this place. Those words had not yet occurred to me during that first year. I’d left my dissertation44 behind and was focused on what was left of the sixties: heightened consciousness and cultural revolution. Arriving in Rochester in July I had moved into an abandoned – but rentable, after I tracked down the owner – cottage in an abandoned agricultural field south of town45 where I was soon joined by two women, one a former high-­school student Nancy Fruchtman and her friend Marjorie Harper. Not initially conjugal, we were close and communal, conscious of the continuity of our relationship with the 1960s, even though the decade had turned over, and a Republican president was now in charge. In retrospect, that ménage provided a kind of counter-­weight to the University and the demand pressing down on me to clarify what was then still an unfocused “research agenda.” Soon I started sitting zazen at the Rochester Zen Center on Arnold Park46 where Philip Kapleau taught, and there were, of course, the usual “supplements,” marijuana

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chief among them. In stiff prose – very unlike Virginia Woolf ’s – I would try to make something of it all in an essay I delivered in May.47 The 1973 Rochester conference must have been Paul Klohr’s idea. It’s hard to imagine I would have had the confidence to convene a national invitational conference wherein I would insert myself among those whose work I had admired as a graduate student: Donald Bateman, Maxine Greene, Dwayne Huebner, James B. Macdonald, William Pilder, and Robert Starrett. Certainly, I wouldn’t have known whom to invite to listen to them. So Klohr must have concocted the idea and perhaps even prepared the proposal which I may have “tweaked” and then took to Dean James Doi48 who funded it. After the keynote addresses, small groups assembled – with leaders – to discuss the implications of each keynote address, a nod not only to my interest in “dialogical encounter” but also to the groups that spontaneously assembled after George Counts legendary 1932 speech.49 I began to think what the curriculum field might look like if it were reconceptualized after the work of these six scholars. My initial sketch of the “Reconceptualization”50 would wait another year.51 That first year nothing seemed settled. Almost everything seems settled now. I am grateful to be alive, but it is long past the sense (however false it always was) of unlimited time to explore what being alive might mean. As does its disappearance now, the panorama apparently before me then provoked profound anxiety. Like now, I responded to that anxiety by alternating detachment and contemplation with engagement and calculation. Regularly I retreated – retreat still – into solitude where I ruminate over what needs to be done. Especially with the multiplication52 of institutional demands, there is always a “next” thing to do, today, tomorrow, this week, this month. I sequence the tasks, starting early on larger projects not due until later, bribing myself (if necessary) to do what must be done now. Punctuating this sequencing is the intrusion53 – glimpses of persons, places, events – of the past, thanks to this assignment of that first year. Despite the riptide that is the present and the occasionally crushing weight of age, reactivating the past keeps the calling loud and clear.

Notes 1 Reprinted in 2017 in the Currere Exchange Journal, 1 (1), 1–10 after appearing first in Investigación Cualitativa; reprinted here with permission of IC Editor and Publisher Dr. Daniel Mardones Johnson. 2 Pinar 1975a. 3 Expanded both temporally and spatially, as it “houses” more from the past and anticipations of the future. A more expansive subjectivity means, perhaps paradoxically, a smaller (that is, more humble) ego. Lasch (1984) uses the adjective “minimal” to depict the besieged, contracted self, one that defensively defines everything and everybody in relation to self, e.g. narcissism.

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4 For the original formulation, see Pinar and Grumet [2015 (1976)]. 5 Pinar 2019. 6 Pinar 2015, 109–125. 7 Speaking of Torah study, Michael Fishbane’s (2008, 147) insight spiritualizes my conception of reactivation: “Through recitation and assimilation of the words of the past, the oral tradition becomes alive in one’s mouth.” 8 Pasolini, quoted in Castelli 2014, xxviii, a phrase from the closing lines of Pasolini’s documentary Le mura di Sana’a (The Walls of Sana’a), which he made as a plea to UNESCO to preserve the cultural legacies he encountered in Yemen while filming The Arabian Nights: “In the name of simple men whom poverty has kept pure./In the name of the grace of obscure centuries./In the name of the scandalous revolutionary force of the past.” As events indicate, “grace” is now absent from Yemen (Rashwan 2021). 9 My thanks to University of British Columbia Professor Steven Taubeneck for bringing this issue to my attention. In section one – Reactivation – Grant’s critique rings loud and clear (I trust); in section two – Reconstruction – Grant’s voice audible still – synthesis occurs (I trust). 10 Remembrance is different than regression, as the former means bringing to (one’s present) mind past events while the latter emphasizes re-­experiencing the past, as much as is possible. While the past may inform the present through remembrance, it does not alter my emplacement there. By contrast, regression is in the service of reconstructing the present, providing passage to the future through the past. 11 I have identified seven of them: Pinar 2015, 1–10. 12 Dinshaw 2012, 116. 13 Why? Certainly I had had enough of the highway I-­70. I was lonely. And in retrospect I’d say my destination – San Francisco (then the gay capital of the United States) – may have been factor, if unconsciously. Not for a few years more would I be ready to “go there.” 14 I cannot overstate Bill Lowe’s kindness to me, especially in the early years. There were intellectual differences between us, but he never used these against me. His conduct was impeccable, as was the conduct of almost all my colleagues that first year. Even the snide remark about me coming from a public university (which I’ll reference in the main text momentarily) was intended as a compliment. Today the situation for faculty has dramatically deteriorated not only in the United States but also at some other places. The “intensification” of academic labor – in part due to regimes of “accountability” enforced technologically – has left few faculty feeling affirmed. 15 On one occasion I listed several of my teachers, in gratitude (Pinar 2009a, 147–148, n. 2). My intellectually impressive colleagues at Paul D. Schreiber High School also required my respect. 16 A phrase from Freire, whose work I had studied during my last undergraduate year in a seminar on what then called “urban education” with Professor Donald R. Bateman (1974; Pinar 2015, 3). Daniel Johnson-­Mardones (2018) has documented Freire’s influence on what would become the reconceptualization of curriculum studies in the United States. 17 While we met that year, Madeleine didn’t become a teaching assistant until the year following. In March 2014 my husband Jeff Turner and I visited her in Chapel Hill, where she was then teaching at the University of North Carolina. Retired, she is now an on-­site grandmother to her daughter Jessica’s daughter Talia. See Grumet (1988) for a brilliant exposition of curriculum theory. 18 Now the conception of “methods” has morphed into “best practices,” but the standardization and anti-­intellectualism standardization installs remains. Then the problem was in the profession; now it is shored up by politicians, especially (it seems) in the United States. There is, evidently, even a National Governors Association Center for

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Best Practices, busily standardizing the United States school curriculum to create “a more highly skilled workforce [that] is better equipped to meet the needs of local, state and national economies” (Signatories 2013, February 12, A7). So much for citizenship or character – the classic concerns of American education – as now only economic functionality counts. Absent is any conception of “practice” as a “cooperative activity” with “potential for the moral transformation of the self ” (Bielskis 2011, 303). 19 Janet and I too have remained lifelong friends. See Miller (2005) for a stunning account of her – our – work since that first year we met. 20 As I will soon recount, Paul played a major role in my life that first year (see Pinar 2009b). 21 See Pinar (1999, xi–xii). 22 On the side Margaret did taxes and she has prepared mine since the early 1970s, even learning the Canadian tax code so she could continue to help me now that I work in Canada. We talk every couple of months, complaining about the Republican Party and remembering our time together at the University of Rochester. 23 Pinar et al. (1995, 848). 24 Its liveliness, its subtlety, its precision, its complexity, its directness and sometimes its indirectness: “quality” is always contextual and never independent of judgment. 25 Now I would say that “no objectives” is too emphatic, a revision I make to guard against that stance becoming another (if negatively stated) “objective.” 26 Important in itself, apart from – even in generative tension with – practice (Pinar and Grumet 1988), theory is also crucial in legitimizing “new kinds of activity” (Knight 2011, 281). 27 I was a student in his seminar in 1969; see Huebner (1999, xv). On a March 2014 trip to North Carolina, Madeleine Grumet, Jeff Turner, and I spent an afternoon with Huebner who lives (with wife Ellen who teaches theology at Duke University) in Durham. With University of British Columbia Ph.D. student Joseph Kyser, I returned to Durham in 2015 to conduct an extended interview with Professor Huebner, an interviewed videotaped by Mr. Kyser, who completed since completed a Ph.D. dissertation on this great scholar’s life and work. 28 Jay (2005). 29 I have notes from other undergraduate courses as well, now archived at the LSU Library. My undergraduate textbooks remain with me. My husband pinpoints past years, relationships, and residences through music (I do that too), but I also gain access to the past through the books in my library. 30 Not having heard from Professor Kemp in several years, I concluded he had abandoned this project. I was mistaken (see Kemp 2018). 31 Certainly, I could not be a public-­school teacher today. Forty years of school deform leave many schools unfit for children or educators. Mooresville, North Carolina would seem to be one example (see Pinar 2013, 31–32), although Idaho may remain a site where professional ethics need not be entirely sacrificed when fulfilling contractual obligations (see Pinar 2013, 33). 32 Still, as Alasdair MacIntyre (2011, 327) points out, “good work … still goes on.” But as he (and many others) acknowledge, the corporatized university deserves little credit for it. 33 I am not the first to point out that the questions listed on student evaluations skew the answers. 34 “Important” was not then quantified: “productivity” had not yet substituted for quality, however problematic that term now is, given our culture of suspicion and the displacement of ethics by politics. The final judgment regarding my promotion and tenure would be made not only by the usual means – a file of “external” letters testifying to the importance of the work to the field it addressed and of course the votes of colleagues in one’s department – but by the University Committee. At the University of Rochester at that time there was one committee organized for each promotion

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and tenure case. “Important,” then, would be a judgment made by colleagues (I later learned) in the English, philosophy, and history departments. Their seventeen-­page single-­spaced typewritten review – and endorsement – of my work remains the most insightful I have received. 35 At the University of Rochester in 1972, declaring an interest in serving on committees risked one’s scholarly reputation. Anything remotely resembling bureaucratic work was considered “housekeeping,” unsuitable for a serious scholar. Despite the (probably gendered) elitism, the attitude isn’t mistaken. Bureaucracy is not only tedious and time-­consuming, it is intellectually deadening. 36 Pinar (2015, 4–5). 37 See Bell (1972). I’ve reread Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse in the last several years, for the third or fourth time. The Voyage Out was the text on which I focused (Pinar 1978, 325) to demonstrate “educational experience” through academic study – the method of currere – presaging my argument that study – not teaching – is the site of education (Pinar 2006, 109–120). In 1973 I would publish an affirmation of lived educational experience drawn from Woolf ’s Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (Pinar 1994, 19–27). 38 Even more so when they are composed by my UBC colleague and friend Janice Stewart (2010). I quoted from one study – Berman 2001 – in my keynote address at the 2013 meeting of the European Association for Curriculum Studies and from another – Agathocleous 2011 – in my keynote address at the 2014 meeting of the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies. 39 After the horrifying result of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, I feel it more than ever. For a sketch of the Weimar Republic as an allegory of the present, see Pinar (2012, 69–101). 40 See Bell (1972, 226). 41 For an example of her early work – composed while we were in conversation – see Shaw 2000 (1975). My close friend during graduate school, Francine had come to town the year after I moved there in order to teach film at the Rochester Institute of Technology After a year she left Rochester to teach film at New York University. We fell out soon after she arrived upstate but met again, cordially, maybe ten years ago when I sponsored a birthday party for our PhD supervisor, Donald R. Bateman, then living in Granville, Ohio. Professor Bateman died in December 2013. 42 I headed the search committee that hired Wexler in 1981. We would become friends, spending summers with similarly aged sons. After I left Rochester in 1985, Wexler became dean, leaving later for Jerusalem. In the early 1980s, he was a critical theorist in the Frankfurt School tradition; now he reconciles sociology with mysticism (see Wexler 2013). 43 Everyday life is a major focus of curriculum research in Brazil (Pinar 2011, 206–208). 44 Starting from a R. D. Laing-­inspired analysis of schooling – later published as “Sanity, Madness, and the School” – I focused my dissertation research on humanities curriculum organized around dialogical encounter and solitude. I revisit the “dialogical encounter” emphasis in the 2011 book (pages 18–20) – it comes from Freire whose work I read as a fourth-­year undergraduate – and “solitude” reappears in my emphasis on “study” (2006). The humanities I never left. 45 In Henrietta, just southeast of Scottsville, where I moved after our household broke up in 1974. 46 At the Zen Center I met Denah Joseph, with whom I fell in love. On September 15, 1976 our son Gabriel would be born. Today he is married to Jane Virga. With their daughters Olympia and August and son Rhein they live in the Bay Area. 47 See Pinar (1974). 48 Later Doi become dean at the University of Washington from which he retired. Doi and I exchanged greetings through email after a 2009 conversation with James Banks in South Korea. Turns out Professors Banks and Doi remained in touch with each other.

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49 See Perlstein (2000, 51). 50 See Pinar et al. (1995, 186–239). 51 See Pinar (1975b). 52 Regimes of “accountability” are enforced through the electronic media. The screen on my computer becomes the panopticon. While email is an enormous convenience, it imposes on me an hour each day of labor that I did not have before its creation. (It is an hour because I refuse to spend more than 60 minutes on email. Correspondents have learned that a several days delay is likely when communicating with me.) In 1972, when I waltzed in the office mid-­morning; Margaret Zaccone would sometimes say “you’ve a letter” or “there’s a phone message,” but not every day. Still a correspondence accumulated, now in the LSU Library archives. 53 Intrusion in its geological sense, as the movement of molten rock (magma) into preexisting rock. Magma is a “recurrent, significant word” for Pier Paulo Pasolini, Lawton (2005, xxxii) points out, “used figuratively – as it can be in Italian – to indicate a confused and unpredictable mass. It also retains the charge of its literal meaning of incandescence, of molten energy ready to erupt and flow, willy-­nilly.” See Pinar (2009, 99–142).

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Lawton, Ben. 2005. Introduction to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Heretical Empiricism (xxvii–xlii). New Academic Publishing, LLC. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2011. Where we were, where we are, where we need to be. In Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism, edited by Paul Blackledge and Kevin Knight (307–334). University of Notre Dame Press. Miller, Janet L. 2005. The Sounds of Silence Breaking and Other Essays: Working the Tension in Curriculum Theory. Peter Lang. Perlstein, Daniel. 2000. “There is no escape … from the ogre of indoctrination”: George Counts and the Civic Dilemmas of Democratic Educators. In Reconstructing the Common Good in Education: Coping with Intractable Dilemmas, edited by Larry Cuban and Dorothy Shipps (51–67). Stanford University Press. Pinar, William F. Ed. 1974. Heightened Consciousness, Cultural Revolution and Curriculum Theory: The Proceedings of the Rochester Conference. McCutchan. Pinar, William F. 1975a. “The Method of Currere.” Paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC. https://eric. ed.gov/?id=ED104766 Pinar, William F. Ed. 1975b. Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists. McCutchan. Pinar, William F. 1978. Currere: A Cast Study. In Qualitative Evaluation: Concepts and Cases in Curriculum Criticism, edited by George Willis (318–342). McCutchan. Pinar, William F. 1994. Autobiography, Politics, and Sexuality: Essays in Curriculum Theory, 1972-­1992. Peter Lang. Pinar, William F. Ed. 1999. Contemporary Curriculum Discourses: Twenty Years of JCT. Peter Lang. Pinar, William F. 2009a. The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate Lives in Public Service. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2009b. The Primacy of the Particular. In Leaders in Curriculum Studies: Intellectual Self-­Portraits, edited by Leonard Waks and Edmund C. Short (143–152). Sense Publishers. Pinar, William F. 2011. Curriculum Studies in Brazil. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2012. What Is Curriculum Theory? (2nd edition). Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2013. Curriculum Studies in the United States. Intellectual Histories, Present Circumstances. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2015. Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019. Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology. University of Ottawa Press. Pinar, William F. and Grumet, Madeleine R. 1988 (1981). Socratic Caesura and the Theory-­ Practice Relationship. In Contemporary Curriculum Discourses, edited by William F. Pinar (92–100). Gorsuch Scarisbrick. Pinar, William F. and Grumet, Madeleine R. 2006 (1976). Toward a Poor Curriculum. Educator’s International Press. Pinar, William F., Reynolds, William M., Slattery, Patrick, and Taubman, Peter M. 1995. Understanding Curriculum. Peter Lang. Rashwan, Nada. 2021, September 25. As Covid Cases Spiral Upward, War Continues to Raze Yemen. The New York Times, CLXXI, No. 59, 192, A9. Shaw, Francine Shuchat. 2000 (1975). Congruence. In Curriculum Studies: The Reconceptualization, edited by William F. Pinar (445–452). Educator’s International Press.

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Signatories. 2013, February 12. Our Collective Support… The New York Times Vol. CLXII, No. 56, 045, A7. Stewart, Janice. 2010. A Thoroughly Modern Melancholia: Virginia Woolf, Author, Daughter. Woolf Studies Annual 16, 133–154. Wexler, Philip. 2013. Mystical Sociology. Toward Cosmic Social Theory. Peter Lang. Woolf, Virginia. 1920. The Voyage Out. Harcourt, Brace & Company. Woolf, Virginia. 1924. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1925. Mrs. Dalloway. Harvest. Woolf, Virginia. 1955 (1927). To the Lighthouse. Harcourt, Brace & Company.

12 RECONCEPTUALIZATION1

By the time I finished graduate school in 1972, America’s first national curriculum reform was over. Having attending public schools in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio – Westerville - I had missed much of it. No New Math for me, although in an honors government class my senior year of high school (1964–1965), Mrs. Sarah Ott introduced us to the worldly philosophers (Heilbroner 1964). Marx was not what President John F. Kennedy had in mind when he promised, during his 1960 presidential campaign, to “Get America Moving Again,” in part through upgrading the school curriculum. By the time I took Mrs. Ott’s course, America was “moving” alright, not toward the “Great Society” (the slogan of Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson) but the Violent Society,2 accented by the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as several civil rights and anti-­Vietnam war activists. That fall term of my high-­ school senior year saw the Republican Right rejected at the polls; almost sixty years later – January 6, 2021 - an even more radical Republican mob would assault the U.S. Capitol. By fall term 1966, my sophomore year at university, I, like many others, had by then become “radicalized,” if on the Left, although I substituted for street protests “rap sessions” and reading history, existentialism and phenomenology, fiction and literary criticism. To those last two subjects I turned after deferments from military service for graduate study – I had planned to study for a Ph.D. in History - were ended; only public-­school teaching remained exempt. So, I transferred from Liberal Arts to Ohio State’s College of Education, where I prepared to become an English teacher. Fall-­term senior year, 1968, my pre-­ practicum course found me focused on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, unaware that thirty years later I would spend an evening with the man in his home in São Paulo. What I was aware of then was Freire’s concepts of dialogical encounter DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-12

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and conscientization: these I internalized, reworking them over and over again in very different circumstances than those in which Freire first formulated them. Professor Donald R. Bateman taught us that pre-­practicum course; he also supervised my 1969 spring-­term practicum in the all-­Black impoverished inner city of Columbus at Theodore Roosevelt Junior High School, where I taught astonished eight-­g raders Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. Evidently somewhere in my academic preparation was circulating a trace of the Kennedy curriculum reform, the idea that one could teach anything to anybody.3 Afterward, I was somehow offered a job at that school, but – having decided I had been there “in over my head” – I took a job in Port Washington, on the north shore of New York’s Long Island. At the Paul D. Schreiber High School, I would also be “in over my head,” surrounded by wealthy white suburban New Yorkers who were smarter and more sophisticated than I. So, I insisted that they teach me, almost every day asking what they thought and felt about what we were reading. Two years later I decamped to Columbus to complete my graduate studies and, having internalized that emphasis on “lived experience” – emphasizing what students thought and felt - I completed a Ph.D. dissertation wherein solitude and dialogical encounter structured my effort to formulate a humanities-­focused curriculum theory. In 1972, at the University of Rochester – my first university job - I found students who wanted to be (and sometimes were) smarter than I and, like those Schreiber students, certainly more prosperous.4 I learned that for many undergraduates, Rochester had been their “safety school” should they not be admitted to Harvard or Chicago or Stanford. Stuck in upstate New York, my students were eager to prove they deserved to be at a top-­tier school, not just a well-­ endowed substitute. My graduate students had less to prove but were likewise ambitious and smart. Madeleine Grumet,5 Janet Miller,6 Jo Anne Pagano,7 and Peter Taubman8 were among the remarkable students I taught there. Grumet did the “heavy lifting” when I sketched a theory of curriculum inspired by lived experience and self-­encounter, what I coined currere.9 During the three years the concept of currere was incubating, I was working through what I have just described: that practicum, followed by public-­school teaching, my formal academic studies, as well as those 1960s violent events. Working through them I was, but I was also funneling that experience into theorizing curriculum. With the invaluable advice of my PhD mentor Paul Klohr, I organized a conference, inviting those whose scholarship had been decisive for me as a graduate student, prominent among them Maxine Greene,10 James B. Macdonald,11 and Dwayne Huebner.12 I inserted myself into the program, presenting a paper whose title and content have since made me wince. But the deed was done – the conference held, the papers published13 – and soon after I found myself assembling another edited collection, this time recontextualizing the scholarship of my intellectual mentors and their students as a paradigm shift, although I wasn’t yet using that Kuhnian concept. Instead, focused

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on the individual scholar, I subtitled the collection “The Reconceptualists,”14 rankling several whose scholarship seemed to them to share little with the others. Altogether, I pointed out, what these individuals had done – were doing – was reconceptualizing the curriculum field. When that collection was reissued twenty-­five years later,15 I altered the subtitle. What was this reconceptualization?16 First, it was a rejection17 what many came to call a technocratic conception of curriculum organized around so-­called “basic principles” – objectives, design, implementation, assessment – mistakenly attributed18 to Ralph Tyler.19 It also rejected (social) scientific demands to devise mathematical mirrors of reality, affirming the arts and humanities instead. The Reconceptualization was not theoretical in the sense Schwab20 had complained about that term. We were committed to “practice” alright, if through theorizing educational experience autobiographically, historically, politically, racially, theologically, as gendered, aesthetic, and institutional. These concepts would come to merit their own separate chapters when I – and three former graduate students – summarized the reconceptualization in our 1995 Understanding Curriculum. We told a simple story: removed from public schools by Kennedy’s curriculum reform and no longer able to collaborate in curriculum development with colleagues there, curriculum specialists had turned to understanding the curriculum, including the hidden one, which, it turns out, was not so hidden, as it was outed over and over again. Speaking of outing: what we now call queer studies was something I sounded avant la lettre.21 Other conferences followed that 1973 Rochester meeting, these alternating between one that emphasized the political dimension of curriculum and one that emphasized the subjective experience of curriculum. At the 1976 Milwaukee meeting I read a letter to Elliot Eisner which I guess was in fact a “confrontation,”22 a video of which found its way (four decades later) to YouTube.23 I ended that (the conference tug-­of-­war, not the theoretical tension) by starting what became the Bergamo Conference, an ongoing event accompanied by a journal, the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT),24 projects I invited my former MA student (whom I’d recommended to Paul Klohr for PhD study) Janet L. Miller to share, articles from which I collected twenty years later, dedicating the volume to her.25 The idea of reconceptualization resonated with many, including critics,26 perhaps because the concept funneled the public events of the previous decade into curriculum concepts while acknowledging that the Kennedy curriculum reform had removed the field’s material substructure: school-­based curriculum development. That reform had been waylaid by the tumultuous 1960s but, by decade’s end, there was no return to school-­based curriculum development. It turned out that I was not the only one astonished that any conception of curriculum could ignore the lived – the existential, political, racialized, gendered – experience of those who taught and studied it. As an event, the Reconceptualization lasted a decade. By the early 1980s Bergamo was booming and it was not long before

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the American Educational Research Association acknowledged the paradigm shift by changing the name of its Division B from Curriculum and Objectives to Curriculum Studies. Curriculum “discourses”27 emerged: Cameron McCarthy28 inaugurated understanding curriculum racially, an effort he detached from understanding curriculum politically; Patti Lather29 proclaimed feminist theory of curriculum as separate too. While joined by Sleeter and Grant,30 Watkins,31 Baszile et al.,32 among others, McCarthy33 remained the major theorist of race while Lather was eclipsed by Grumet,34 Miller,35 and Hendry.36 Once separate, these discourses mixed, evident in the endlessly invoked intersectionality of race-­ class-­gender. “Curriculum scholarship,” Burns summarizes succinctly, “is deeply historicized and imbricated with essential questions of both how and why we have come to embody our subjective positions in the world.”37 Presumably in a period of post-­reconceptualization,38 Reconceptualist streams of scholarship have separated and merged, evident in the emergence of “identity politics,” an amalgamation of racial, gendered and political discourses, a synthesis, if one is thinking dialectically, of the 1970s emphasis on, tension between, subjectivity and society. Identity politics constitutes a major intellectual advancement,39 but it comes at a considerable cost, including the eclipse of (1) subjectivity, as the singular if elusive inner life is traded for group identity,40 (2) society, when the public good is reduced to one’s own good, and (3) history, evident in efforts to rectify injustice by altering the historical record. Examples of the latter include insistence that Carter Woodson be acknowledged in the curriculum field’s history,41 that U.S. public schools be renamed, including schools named after Presidents George Washington (for owning slaves) and Abraham Lincoln (for allowing the execution of 38 Native Americans).42 While Woodson’s work could be considered canonical, it is focused on a single subject, not the overall school program, the marker of membership in the professional field of curriculum. (Fifteen years ago, I proposed to the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies a Canon Project to ensure the inclusion of scholars like Woodson on the supplemental reading list all students of curriculum studies should be assigned to study.) In contrast to the scene in the United States, in Canada Indigenous scholarship aims not to efface the past but to emphasize it.43 Indigenous scholars in Canada appear to appreciate that altering the ugly past rectifies nothing in the present; what it achieves is the effacement of historical memory, threatening that already endangered species: the “fact.” Rewriting the past I think of as form of “discursive engineering,” politicizing the post-­ structuralist insight that language not only reflects but also creates reality. “One does not,” McGlazer knows, “disempower Fascism by saying … “it’s high time to leave [it] behind.”44 Today social justice seems more a slogan than a scholarly agenda, a rhetorical trace of earlier efforts to understand curriculum politically, first advanced by the neo-­Marxist Apple,45 then tilted toward Gramsci by Giroux,46 afterwards incorporated into cultural studies by Kincheloe,47 finally fashioning its own fiefdom

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focused on “critical pedagogy,”48 a phrase still in circulation if now also dismissed as an assemblage of “political prescriptions, admonitions, and hyperventilated moralism.”49 Earlier Reconceptualist ideas remain recognizable, among them power and politics,50 psychoanalysis,51 phenomenology,52 currere,53 Native American studies,54 complexity theory,55 non-­violence,56 early childhood education,57 community,58 and internationalization.59 Rocha60 rejects such a situated synoptic text61 as I’ve provided here, insisting that the significance of the reconceptualization is “conceptual,” anticipating any objection that, given the “reconceptualist emphasis on the need for historical memory and consciousness, along with its method of citation and attribution, cannot be understood, conceptually or otherwise, without a thorough historical and biographical base.” True to his embrace of the idea apart from the “detail,” Rocha suggests that “curriculum theory [itself] has no delay or gap within its ontogenesis insofar as it begins with the idea and the demand that curriculum must be reconceptualized.”62 That could be the core concept derived from that 1970s event: that the curriculum ought not be apart from but rather address the world, emphasizing the experience of the child who will inherit it. So reconceptualized, curriculum becomes a complicated conversation63 located in as it transcends the historical moment and the lives of those embedded in it. That idea is the afterlife of the Reconceptualization.

Notes 1 An earlier version was published in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education. Reprinted with permission. Revised winter 2021. 2 “Society is in fact dissolving,” Berardi (2012, 60–61) testifies, “reducing public space to a jungle wherein everyone is fighting against one another.” 3 Bruner 1965, 12, 33. 4 For details, see Chapter 11. 5 1988. 6 2005. 7 1990. 8 2009, 2011. 9 Pinar 1975a; Pinar and Grumet 2015 1976). 10 1971. 11 1995. 12 1999. 13 Pinar 1974. 14 Pinar 1975b. 15 Pinar 2000. 16 While it starts in the United States, it was not confined to that country, as Carson (2017, 35) confirms: “A reconceptualization of curriculum studies was also underway in Canada in the 1970s.” Ted Aoki was the key player: see Pinar and Irwin 2005. 17 “[H]ow serious a matter it is,” Virginia Woolf (2014, 33) knew, “when the tools of one generation are useless for the next.” 18 Pinar 2015, 99. 19 1949. 20 1970.

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21 Pinar 1983; reprinted in Pinar 1998a. 22 Rocha 2020, 9. 23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv1FpS6fhTM 24 http://www.jctonline.org/ 25 Pinar 1999. 26 Tanner and Tanner 1979; Hlebowitsh 1993, 1999; Wraga 1999. 27 Pinar et al. 1995. 28 1990. 29 1987. 30 1988. See also Grant et al. 2016. 31 1993. 32 2016. 33 1993; 2005, et al., 2014 et al. 34 1988. 35 2005. 36 2011. 37 2018, 25. 38 Malewski 2010. 39 Pinar 2007. 40 Pinar 2015, 174. 41 Brown and Au 2014. 42 Fuller 2021, A19. 43 http://curriculumstudiesincanada.ca/research-­briefs/ 44 2020, 134. McGlazer is here discussing Foucault’s critique of Pasolini’s final film Salò, Foucault complaining that it represents a “sacralization” of the Marquis de Sade: “It’s time to leave that all behind, and Sade’s eroticism with it. we must invent with the body, with its elements, surfaces, volumes, and thicknesses, a nondisciplinary eroticism – that of a body in a volatile and diffused state, with its chance encounters and unplanned pleasures” (quoted in McGlazer 2020, 130). McGlazer (2020, 131–132) replies: “By now we can recognize in this response to Salò a version of the impulse to abandon the past that I am arguing the film itself works to counter. In fact, Salò points up in advance the wishfulness of Foucault’s thinking here, the utopianism of his search for a ‘nondisciplinary eroticism.’ The film also lets us see the progressivism that implicitly underwrites even queer theories inspired by Foucault’s call for reinvented bodies and pleasures.” (For an abbreviated review of McGlazer’s critique of progressivism see the Preface.) 45 1979. 46 1982. 47 2002; Pinar 2015, 126. 48 McLaren 1989; Kincheloe and McLaren 2007. 49 Rocha 2020, 23. 50 Burns 2018. 51 Britzman 2015, Taubman 2011, Boldt and Salvio 2006. 52 Rocha 2020. 53 https://www.currereexchange.com/ See also currere bibliography, Appendix, this volume. 54 Grande 2004. 55 Trueit 2012. 56 Wang 2016. 57 Iannacci and Whitty 2009; Yelland and Bentley 2018. 58 Smith 2021, 14. 59 Johnson-­Mardones 2018. Moore (2015, 124) calls our attention to the possibility that “globalising or internationalising the curriculum” is “potentially dangerous or that it might be – perhaps in some cases already has – been hijacked or colonised by

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instrumental economics discourse rather than embedding itself within more strictly humanitarian, social liberal ones.” 60 2020, 20. 61 Pinar 2006. 62 2020, 21. Rocha reconceptualizes curriculum as syllabus, contesting the commonsense of the field, evident, for instance, when the legendary Lawrence Stenhouse inveighs against the very idea: “What is a curriculum as we now understand the word? It has changed its meaning as a result of the curriculum movements. It is not a syllabus – a mere list of content to be covered – nor is it even what German speakers would call a Lehrplan – a prescription of aims and methods and content. Nor is it our understanding a list of objectives…. Let me claim that it is a symbolic or meaningful object” (quoted in Moore 2015, 43). I emphasize curriculum as “subject” if in a doubled sense (human being and academic discipline), but not until Rocha can we appreciate that the curriculum includes – and in a significant sense – the syllabus. “It would be a mistake,” Moore (2015, 43) comments wisely, “to accept any one existing definition as – ‘definitive’.” 63 Pinar 2015, 109.

Bibliography Apple, Michael. 1979. Ideology and Curriculum. Routledge. Baszile, Denise Taliaferro, Edwards, Kirsten T., and Guillory, Nichole A. Eds. 2016. Race, Gender and Curriculum Theorizing: Working in Womanish Ways (147–170), edited by Denise Taliaferro Baszile, Kirsten T. Edwards, and Nichole A. Guillory. Lexington Books. Berardi, Franco. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e). Boldt, Gail M. and Salvio, Paula M. Eds. 2006. Love’s Return: Psychoanalytic Essays on Childhood, Teaching, and Learning. Routledge. Britzman, Deborah P. 2015. A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom. State University of New York Press. Brown, Anthony L. and Au, Wayne. 2014. Race, Memory, and Master Narratives. Curriculum Inquiry 44 (3), 358–389. Bruner, Jerome. 1965. The Process of Education. Harvard University Press. Burns, James P. 2018. Power, Curriculum, and Embodiment. Palgrave Macmillan. Carson, Terrance R. 2017. Crossing the Continental Divide. In The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies, edited by Mary Aswell Doll (34–41). Routledge. Fuller, Thomas. 2021, January 28. Changing School Names. The New York Times, CLXX, No. 58, 953, A19. Giroux, Henry A. 1981. Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling. Temple University Press. Grande, Sandy. 2004. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Rowman & Littlefield. Grant, Carl A., Brown, Keffreyln D., Brown, Anthony L. 2016. Black Intellectual Thought in Education. The Missing Traditions of Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain LeRoy Locke. Routledge. Greene, Maxine. 1971. Curriculum and Consciousness. Teachers College Record 73 (2), 253–269. Grumet, Madeleine R. 1988. Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching. University of Massachusetts Press. Heilbroner, Robert L. 1964. The Worldly Philosophers. Simon and Schuster.

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Hendry, Petra Munro. 2011. Engendering Curriculum History. Routledge. Hlebowitsh, Peter. 1993. Radical Curriculum Theory Reconsidered. Teachers College Press. Hlebowitsh, Peter S. 1999. The Burdens of the New Curricularist. Curriculum Inquiry 29 (3), 343–354. Huebner, Dwayne E. 1999. The Lure of the Transcendent. Lawrence Erlbaum. Iannacci, Luigi and Whitty, Pam. Eds. 2009. Early Childhood Curricula: Reconceptualist Perspectives. Detsileg. Johnson-­ Mardones, Daniel F. 2018. Curriculum Studies an International Conversation. Routledge. Kincheloe, Joe L. 2002. The Sign of the Burger: McDonald’s and the Culture of Power. Temple University Press. Kincheloe, Joe L. and McLaren, Peter. Eds. 2007. Critical Pedagogy. Peter Lang. King, Joyce E. 1995. Race and Education, In Thirteen Questions, edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg (159–179). Peter Lang. Lather, Patti. 1987. The Absent Presence: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Nature of Teacher Work. Teacher Education Quarterly 14 (2), 25–38. Macdonald, Bradley J. Ed. 1995. Theory as a Prayerful Act: The Collected Essays of James B. Macdonald. Peter Lang. Malewski, Erik. Ed. 2010. Curriculum Studies Handbook: The Next Moment. Routledge. McCarthy, Cameron. 1990. Race and Curriculum. Falmer. McCarthy, Cameron. 1993. Multicultural Approaches to Racial Inequality in the United States. In Understanding Curriculum as Racial Text, edited by Louis A. Castenell and William F. Pinar (225–246). State University of New York Press. McCarthy, Cameron, Crichlow, Warren, Dimitriadis, Greg, and Dolby, Nadine. Eds. 2005. Race, Identity, and Representation in Education. Routledge. McCarthy, Cameron, Bulut, Ergin, and Patel, Rushika. 2014. Race and Education in the Age of Digital Capitalism. In the International Handbook of Curriculum Research, edited by William F. Pinar (32–44). Routledge. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press. McLaren, Peter. 1989. Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education. Longman. Moore, Alex. 2015. Understanding the School Curriculum. Theory, Politics and Principles. Routledge. Pagano, Jo Anne. 1990. Exiles and Communities: Teaching in the Patriarchal Wilderness. State University of New York Press. Pinar, William F. Ed. 1974. Heightened Consciousness, Cultural Revolution and Curriculum Theory. McCutchan. Pinar, William F. 1975a. The Method of Currere. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED104766 Pinar, William F. Ed. 1975b. Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists. McCutchan. Pinar, William F. 1983. Curriculum as Gender Text. JCT 5 (1), 26–52. Pinar, William F. Ed. 1998a. Queer Theory in Education. Lawrence Erlbaum. Pinar, William F. Ed. 1998b. Curriculum: Toward New Identities. Garland. Pinar, William F. Ed. 1999. Contemporary Curriculum Discourses: Twenty Years of JCT. Peter Lang. Pinar, William F. Ed. 2000. Curriculum Studies: The Reconceptualization. Educator’s International Press. Pinar, William F. 2006. The Synoptic Text Today and Other Essays: Curriculum Development after the Reconceptualization. Peter Lang.

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Pinar, William F. 2007. Intellectual Advancement through Disciplinarity. Sense Publishers. Pinar, William F. 2015. Educational Experience as Lived. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2017. That First Year. Currere Exchange Journal, 1 (1), 1–10. Pinar, William F. and Grumet, Madeleine R. 2015 (1976). Toward a Poor Curriculum. Educator’s International Press. Pinar, William F. and Irwin, Rita L. Eds. 2005. Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki. Lawrence Erlbaum. Pinar, William F., Reynolds, William, Slattery, Patrick, and Taubman, Peter. 1995. Understanding Curriculum. Peter Lang. Rocha, Samuel D. 2020. The Syllabus as Curriculum: A Reconceptualist Approach. Routledge. Schwab, Joseph J. 1970. The Practical: A Language for Curriculum. National Education Association. Sleeter, Christine and Grant, Carl. 1988. Making Choices for Multicultural Education: Five Approaches to Race, Class, and Gender. Merrill. Smith, Liesa Griffin. 2021. Curriculum as Community Building: The Poetics of Difference, Emergence, and Relationality. Peter Lang. Tanner, Daniel and Tanner, Laurel. 1979. Emancipation From Research: The Reconceptualists’ Prescription. Educational Researcher 8 (6), 8–12. Taubman, Peter M. 2009. Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education. Routledge. Taubman, Peter M. 2011. Disavowed Knowledge. Routledge. Trueit, Donna. Ed. 2012. Pragmatism, Postmodernism, Complexity Theory. The Fascinating Imaginative Realm of William E. Doll, Jr. Routledge. Tyler, Ralph. 1949. Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. University of Chicago Press. Wang, Hongyu. 2016. Nonviolence and Education: Cross-­Cultural Pathways. Routledge. Watkins, William. 1993. Black Curriculum Orientations. Harvard Educational Review 63 (3), 321–338. Woolf, Virginia. 2014. Virginia Woolf: Essays on the Self. Notting Hill Editions Ltd. Wraga, William G. 1999. “Extracting Sun-­Beams Out of Cucumbers”: The Retreat from Practice in Reconceptualist Curriculum Studies. Educational Researcher 28 (1): 4–13. Yelland, Nicola and Bentley, Dana Frantz. Eds. 2018. Found in Translation: Connecting Reconceptualist Thinking with Early Childhood Education Practices. Routledge.

13 REACTIVATION1

“Why,” Alex Moore wonders, “do our curricula tend to marginalize or discourage explorations and understandings concerning the nature of existence, of knowledge, and of the universe – other than those embedded within various forms of religious education?”2 The lure of the transcendent3 need not be institutionalized – as in officially sanctioned forms of religious education - but even when it is, it can still be comparatively cosmopolitan,4 as Brad Petitfils notes when he references the “innovative curriculum” that Ignatius Loyola developed, one that “combined” Renaissance culture with medieval Catholic mysticism, inspiring the Jesuits to create “the first global network of education.”5 Such a curricular juxtaposition6 of the historical, the cultural, and the spiritual – the cause of cosmopolitan curriculum today - also structured a 1964 film dedicated to the memory of Pope John XXIII.7 That film – The Gospel According to Saint Matthew – was made by the Italian poet, novelist, and public pedagogue Pier Paolo Pasolini who, it must be acknowledged, is not often associated with Catholic education or even with Catholicism itself. A former schoolteacher8, as early as 1943, Pasolini was keeping a notebook of “religious meditations”9 that would form the basis of The Nightingale of the Catholic Church (1943), the title he gave to his 1958 collection of Italian10 poetry he had composed from 1943 to 1949. Pasolini was, Castelli concludes, “an anti-­clerical Catholic,”11 a characterization conservative Catholics may have also composed for Pope John XXIII whose Second Vatican Council emphasized that “the Church is in the world and not over and against the world.”12 The worldliness of Pier Paolo Pasolini is associated with his cosmopolitanism, a stunning still reverberating mix of politics, sexuality and savvy that took several aesthetic forms in addition to film.13 Despite expulsion14 from the Communist Party, Pasolini retained his Communist commitment well into the 1960s when, DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-13

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Testa notes, he would finally lose that form of faith and return to religion.15 “In me,” Pasolini reflected, “[ideological uncertainty] took the form of this regression to certain religious themes which nonetheless had been constant in all my work.”16 Indeed, they were intertwined: [my] “adoption of Marxist philosophy is due, at its origin, to an emotional and moral impetus, and is therefore continually permeable to the insurgence of the religious and, naturally, Catholic spirit [this position] presupposes.”17 For Pasolini, as Maggi points out,18 the Catholic Church consecrated - and desecrated19 - a “lost sense of the sacred.” What constituted “the sacred” for Pasolini? “Grace, the gift of the sublime,” he wrote, “is … initially … only a moral behavior, … the transmutation of the self in an idealistic sense…. Later, sanctity can become rejection of the world, asceticism, … a quest for an unreachable self-­understanding”20 The “self ” Pasolini sought, Castelli notes, was crafted to “intervene in the culture of his moment.”21 The “sacred,” she continues, manifests itself “not only incarnationally but also carnally, disrupting bourgeois conformity and ushering in something like a crisis of the sublime.”22 “Every blasphemy,” Pasolini proclaimed, “is a sacred word.”23 Pasolini “detects the sacred,” Maggi tells us,24 among peasants living in Italy’s rural South. In one poem he laments: “The church I loved in adolescence/ had died over the centuries, living/only in the old and sorrowful scents/of the fields.”25 Pasolini felt sure that the bourgeoisie were absent – lacking subjective presence - in this sacred sense.26 What many of his contemporaries calculated to be progress – industrialization, urbanization, socialization – Pasolini considered a cultural catastrophe.27 “The great enemy of Christianity,” Pasolini chided, “is not Communist … but bourgeois materialism.”28 In any effort to contest bourgeois materialism and the capitalism that encouraged it, art, Pasolini thought, could play a pivotal role. Pasolini was hardly the first to think so, as Walter Benjamin - working in very different political circumstances and religious traditions - also imagined a crucial role for art in the restoration of lived experience through remembrance.29 Benjamin had wondered if the appearance of a new “image space” could enable the historical emergence of a new “body space,” a “transformation in the experience of space and time,” and with that experience, a “new form of human collectivity.”30 “I want my images,” Pasolini proclaimed, “to cause a surge in vitality.”31 Given the complicity of his compatriots with capitalism – their often-­eager conversion from supplicants and citizens to consumers - Pasolini grew less sanguine about the prospects for “collectivity,” but he remained resolved to teach, even if the public sphere had dissolved into “the marketplace.” Pasolini thought that that the imagery of his poetry, fiction, and cinema might startle his “students” – the Italian public, the world – into reimagining who they were. Pasolini, Barański points out, hoped his “spectators” would not “consume passively what they are being shown.”32 He wanted to “encourage [them] to think about the epistemological status of what they are seeing.”33 Specifically, in his film The Gospel According to Matthew Pasolini was determined

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to teach that viewers’ impressions of Christ had been “constructed out of many different perspectives, and that each of these perspectives is governed by its own conventions.”34 In the juxtaposition of these perspectives and conventions – “between a fixed past and the present,” Gordon suggests, a “space … is opened,” structured “by the plenitude of history: the specificity of the film’s reading of the Gospel and its subjective impact are located with the filling.”35 Through such a cinematic expression of “indirect subjectivity”36 he might startle his viewers into self-­study, a consciousness of their complicity with the world that degrades them. Pasolini’s personification of his “indirect subjectivity” is his portrait of Christ who, Schwartz suggests, is “both hard and soft, … perplexed and perplexing,”37 adjectives that could describe the filmmaker as well. Indeed, Pasolini asserted that “Christ, in his time, was an intellectual, thus his friends were intellectuals, as mine are now.”38 “As mine are now” - in that phrase it becomes clear, as Schwartz appreciates, “Pasolini took the stuff of his life to make his art. But he also transformed autobiography into myth and found in myth the stuff to render his autobiography cogent.”39 Such movement from autobiography to allegory40 becomes audible in those “long periods of silence,” when, as Barański points out, the “camera focuses on character and location.”41 Pasolini’s Jesus is “an angry Christ,” Viano emphasizes, “a revolutionary,”42 a characterization at odds with the biblical text, one interviewer noted: “many” consider Matthew “the most counterrevolutionary of the Evangelists,” in fact “a moderate.”43 When asked, Pasolini side-­stepped the issue: I was not interested in reconstructing the whole situation exactly. It is the feeling of the Gospel as a whole when you first read it that is revolutionary. Christ going around Palestine is really a revolutionary whirlwind: someone who walks up to a couple of people and says, “Drop your nets and follow me” is a total revolutionary. Subsequently, of course, you may go into it more thoroughly, historically and textually, but the first reading is profoundly revolutionary.44 Admitting here he is no biblical scholar, Pasolini pledges allegiance to the text, “at ease” however, as Castelli phrases it, with “temporal” and “topographical transpositions.”45 His determination to “persevere a pure and universal theological message (one aligned with his political commitments),” she adds, creates a “stark contrast to the corruptions of the institutional Church.”46 This issue over fidelity to the gospel underlines the importance of “cultural translation,” the project that Castelli associates with the overall “theoretical importance”47 of Pasolini’s oeuvre, “its deeply analogical”48 character, as he recast the classics, indeed canonicity itself, as a kind of critical “commentary”49 on the historical moment.50 That moment is new and the same as it was in ancient time: for Pasolini temporal difference was finally illusory.51

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Pasolini portrayed Jesus’ life and death in black-­and-­white to mimic newsreel reality, enabling, as Sartarelli notes, the Gospel to emerge “from centuries of incense-­ beclouded church rituals with striking immediacy.”52 This sense of immediacy Sartarelli characterizes as a “clairvoyant realism”53 that Pasolini accomplished in part by a “subjectively ‘poetic’ handheld camera.”54 Immediacy was also achieved by employing nonprofessional actors, including one of the young men he had discovered scouring the slums for sex. Fifteen-­year old Ninetto Davoli55 was given “the tiny part of a shepherd boy,” Schwartz notes, providing him what Pasolini afterward admitted was “a kind of screen test.”56 Pasolini’s desire for Davoli, Siti suggests, also conveyed his “love” for the poor and oppressed, a love that for him dissolved “class division.”57 Pasolini’s sexual desire for young men was matched, Ryan-­Scheutz points out, by his “emotional and aesthetic affinity” for “young mothers.”58 That affinity is apparent in the opening scene of the film, a long shot of the young, beautiful, pregnant Mary. Neither sexualized nor sublimated, Ryan-­Scheutz suggests, the “imminent greatness” of this young Mary – played by Margherita Caruso – “is conveyed through numerous close shots of her face, which, in conjunction with her silence, imbue her with an aura of mystery.”59 “Pasolini develops the young Mary,” Ryan-­Scheutz continues, “neither as sexual object nor desexualized mother, but, rather, as a symbol of spiritual plenitude and social difference.”60 To play the aging Mary – whose grief at her son’s crucifixion fills her face - Pasolini chose his mother, Susanna Colussi Pasolini. Pasolini’s mother’s presence, Viano notes, exposes “the film’s autobiographical dimension,”61 a point Gordon makes as well.62 In the mid-­1960s, Ryan-­Scheutz reminds, Pasolini theorized a “double mode of filmmaking that reflects the particularly non-­verbal approach to female subjectivity we see in the young Mary and other saints.”63 Pasolini theorized that underneath the film is “free indirect subjectivity,” wherein an artist can “mesh his own point of view with that of his characters.”64 Such subjectivity allows one to convey “ideological messages” and acknowledge “autobiographical subtexts” – interwoven with what Pasolini termed the “dominant psychological state of mind in the film”; there was, he was suggesting, “another film or text underneath this surface-­level film,” one without (Pasolini’s phrase), any “pretext of mimesis” at all.65 There is, Viano agrees, a “powerful subtext in the film,” for him created by Pasolini’s “own homosexuality”66 and his resolve to respect Matthew’s original text. Ryan-­Scheutz detects this “subterranean” text “in the filming of the young Virgin and her silence.”67 Pasolini recodes this palimpsest technically, using “repeated close shots of the young woman’s face” done in adagio, “thereby,” Ryan-­ Scheutz suggests, “granting her freedom of expression beyond any mimetic responsibilities or linguistic codes.”68 Yet the matter of mimesis remains, due to Pasolini’s allegiance to the biblical text. There have been many such “Jesus films,” Testa reminds, but “none” – save Pasolini’s – “go directly to scripture for

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the text.”69 Indeed, “not one word in the film is Pasolini’s invention,” Viano emphasizes, ‘the whole being a long faithful quotation from the original. True, there is a lot of Matthew that is omitted and the film does not rigidly follow the order of the written text, but it is nonetheless evident that, for the first time, Christianity is being treated like a text.”70 Despite this textual fidelity – contested, you recall, by one interviewer Pasolini was acutely conscious of the context in which the movie would be viewed, conceiving of his movie as “the life of Christ plus two thousand years of story-­telling about the life of Christ.”71 “I have an idea of Christ that is almost inexpressible,” Pasolini remembered: “He could be almost anyone, and in fact I looked for him everywhere.”72 He considered Jack Kerouac, but “then I discovered that the photograph of Kerouac [I had] was ten or fifteen years out of date.”73 Nico Naldini reports that Pasolini also considered Allen Ginsberg and the Spanish poet Luis Goytisolo. He also wrote to Yevgeny Yevtushenko in Moscow.74 Accident not design produced the savior. A student named Enrique Irazoqui had read Ragazzi di vita75 and resolved to meet its author. “I came back to the house and found this young Spaniard waiting to see me,” Pasolini recalled, “and as soon as I saw him, even before we had started talking, I said, ‘Excuse me, but would you act in one of my films’ -- even before I knew who he was or anything. He was a serious person, and so he said no. But then I gradually won him round.”76 Irazoqui had no acting experience. His voice was “dubbed by Enrico Maria Salerno, a famous actor with an easily recognizable voice,” Viano reports.77 “The practice of dubbing with voices heavily marked by regional dialects in order to induce analogical associations in the viewer is not without its ideological and artistic validity,” Viano adds.78 For Schwartz, Irazoqui was “thin, stoop-­ shouldered, heavy-­ browed,” not exactly “the muscular Christ of Michelangelo.”79 Pasolini’s Christ looked like a “preoccupied thinker,”80 Schwartz continues, as if capable of honoring (quoting Pasolini) “a violent summons to the bourgeoisie that has stupidly thrown itself toward the destruction of man.”81 In that line is registered both Pasolini’s Communism and his Catholicism, the latter perhaps prerequisite (as he came to think82) to the reanimation of the former. For Pasolini, Testa argues, “a ‘regressive’ surrender to religious impulses will restore ideological certainty -- or least a radical contradiction with modernity.”83 His contempt for the bourgeoisie, Rohdie reminds, was political and historical but also self-­referential, indeed self-­ confrontational, as “by birth and education, … and in practice, he was a bourgeois writer.”84 The Pharisees represent the bourgeoisie, Barański notes, the “enemies” of “progress” and “emancipation.”85 Pasolini’s Jesus was an advocate for the poor of Galilee; for him they were the ancestors of the poor of Friuli. “Misery is always, in its most intimate characteristic, epic,” Pasolini told students at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia; “this, my way of seeing the world of the poor, of the subproletariat, has consequences, I believe …in the very style of my films.”86

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“Misery” is what images of the denuded hills of Calabria would communicate to viewers, he felt, accented by a sound track almost absent original compositions.87 While everything said on screen came from the gospel there were also “long stretches completely without dialogue,” Schwartz reminds.88 Pasolini cautioned that the film was to be viewed as “by analogy…I was not interested in exactitude, I was interested in everything but that.”89 For Barański such “secularization of the Gospel in political terms is not the film’s main preoccupation, but only part of a more complex operation.”90 He points out that Pasolini does not focus exclusively on Christ but on several characters as well as the crowds, using techniques associated with cinéma vérité, thereby fragmenting the film’s narrative focus.91 Jesus’ “words” and “actions,” Barański continues, galvanize Jesus’ listeners who “do not abandon him, even on the road to Calvary,” testifying to the “socio-­political significance of Jesus.”92 These scenes, Barański notes, “echo newsreels of modern demonstrations,” and their juxtaposition with Russian revolutionary songs and Prokofiev’s music to Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky intensify the sense of historical momentousness.93 While we are shown Jesus speaking “close-­up,” Testa suggests, apparently contradicting Barański, “his talks do not seem to “resonate” with his listeners.94 While giving the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has almost no listeners at all. The Last Supper is “all close-­ups,” Testa notes.95 Maggi too notes Pasolini’s use of “unmoving single images” accented by silence; the “close-­up,” he adds, “must be described as all but a trademark of his cinematographic gaze.”96 It conveys, Maggi suggests, “a sense of an atemporal revelation.”97 Despite Jesus’ didacticism – even dissociation from those surrounding him – he does enlist several, a fact resolving the contrary accounts Barański and Maggi appear to provide. There are moments -- during the trial, the march to Calvary, and the Crucifixion – when, Testa notes, “Matthew narrates swiftly and laconically, [and] Pasolini’s camera withdraws into long-­shot distance from Jesus, redolent of television-­news shooting.”98 The film is, finally, a “mixed style,” Testa concludes, a style Pasolini termed “epic,” in which “compression, ellipsis, and distension alternate in accord with a principle that Pasolini sometimes terms ‘absolute’ representation, distinguishing it from naturalistic verisimilitude.”99 Testa references Sergei Eisenstein as the “great master of this epic style in cinema,” associated with “eliminating the intervals between, and distensions of, significant moments.”100 Dilating the moment can underline its significance.101 Pasolini “repeatedly remarked on the violence of Jesus,” Testa reports, and “this violence is revolutionary.”102 More than Luke and John, and in contrast to the earlier cited suggestion that this Matthew is “moderate,” Testa argues that Matthew invokes tropes of “condemnation” and “threat,” according Jesus’ preaching a violent and confrontational quality.103 This quality is enacted not only through Enrique Irazoqui’s “severe performance” but also through Pasolini’s “framing” and “cutting,” one effect of which, Testa suggests, is that Jesus never seems “conversational.”104 His preaching – what before I summarized

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as “didacticism” - is presented, Testa emphasizes, as an “incommensurable confrontation,” no democratic dialogue, a fact “Pasolini’s use of frontal close-­ups makes emphatic.”105 For location Pasolini considered Israel or Palestine, visiting there between 27 June and 11 July 1963. He and his companions - Don Andrea Carraro and Dr. Lucio Settimi of the Pro Civitate, Walter Cantatore of the production company Arco Film, and cameraman Aldo Pennelli - visited the Sea of Galilee, Mount Tabor, Nazareth, Capernaum, Bar ‘am, Jerusalem, the River Jourdan, Bethlehem, and Damascus.106 Nowhere would do: “I realized it was no use -- that was after a few hours driving.”107 While monuments of the biblical past remained, Pasolini felt that “the past itself was gone.”108 The people of Palestine and Israel appeared too modern. Then Pasolini thought, “a Southern Italian peasant … is still living in a magical culture where miracles are real like the culture in which Matthew wrote.”109 It was Southern Italy - specifically the town of Matera110 that, Pasolini decided, “belongs completely to a past which resembles the Palestine of the Bible.”111 Pasolini’s Christ, Rohdie emphasizes, would be a “social reformer within a magical, sacred world, the world that produced the Gospels.”112 For Pasolini the sacred is, then, not otherworldly. “Pasolini goes out of his way to question Jesus’ divinity,” Barański argues.113 “[B]ecause I’m not a believer,” Pasolini explained, “I had to narrate the Gospel through the eyes of someone else who isn’t me, namely a believer: I fashioned ‘a free indirect discourse’.”114 “Indirect vision,” Barański explains, “presupposed a contamination between the believer and the non-­believer.”115 That “contamination” has its stylistic consequences. In his introduction to the script Pasolini tells us: By literally following Matthew’s “stylistic accelerations” -- the barbaric-­ practical workings of his narration, the abolition of chronological time, the elliptical jumps within the story which inscribe the “disproportions” of the didactic, static moments such as the stupendous, interminable, discourse on the mountain -- the figure of Christ should finally assume the violence inhering in any rebellion which radically contradicts the appearance and shape that life assumes for modern man: a grey orgy of cynicism, irony, brutality, compromise and conformism.116 Pasolini sought, Testa concludes, to duplicate in his film the quality of Matthew’s text that was, in a Gramscian sense, a “national-­popular epic.”117 That required not only fidelity to Matthew’s text but “contamination” of it. “[T]he style in the Gospel,” Pasolini reflected later, “combines … an almost classic severity with moments that are almost Godardian….The stylistic unity is only my own unconscious religiousness, which came out and gave the film its unity.”118 While a “national-­popular epic,” then, The Gospel is also an expression of indirect subjectivity, of Pasolini’s subjective presence.

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Both meld in the “zeal” and “anger” animating Jesus, expressing, Rohdie notes, “indignation with the present. Christ, like Pasolini, was an anti-­modern.”119 In modernity the past had dissolved; being anti-­modern meant appreciating the present as empty. The barren landscape would convey that temporal emptiness, as Deleuze appreciated: “These are the deserts of Pasolini, which make prehistory the abstract poetic element, the ‘essence’ co-­present with our history, the archaean base which reveals an interminable history beneath our own.”120 Such imagery encodes the alterity of history. It wasn’t obvious the film would be made. Alfredo Bini, who had financed Pasolini’s first feature film, struggled to find underwriters. “The heads of five banks turned him down,” Schwartz reports; it seemed “no one in Italy wanted to pay for a film about Christ by the notorious Pasolini.”121 Promoting Pasolini, Bini admitted, “was like going to bed with a leper.”122 When the State-­controlled Banca Nazionale del Lavoro finally agreed to a partial underwriting, it was on the condition that the script pass the censorship board. Full financing remained elusive, and the uncertainty plagued Pasolini, who told his Vie nuove readers” “I have been passing terrible days, days of anxiety…. [I]f we do not succeed in making Il Vangelo, for external reasons, I do not know what to do with my life at this point.”123 Financing was finally secured and, as promised, Pasolini submitted the script for approval to the priests at Cittadella. “Timing,”124 Schwartz reminds, was favorable, as Pasolini acknowledged: “[E]verything was made easier by the advent of Pope John XXIII who objectively revolutionized the situation. If Pius XII had lived another three or four years I’d never have been able to make The Gospel.”125 While Pasolini personalized the shift, he could have also ascribed it to Vatican II. The movie was first screened at the twenty-­fifth Venice Film Festival126 on the evening of September 4, 1964, “only hours,” Barański tells us, after Pasolini had finished editing it.127 At the Festival’s Palace of Cinema, Pasolini was greeted by whistles, then tomatoes and raw eggs, followed, inside the theater, Schwartz reports, by more eggs and spitballs thrown at both the screen and the audience.128 The ruckus made the premier, Schwartz continues, “good news copy,” as “intellectuals” and “the rich in tuxedos and evening gowns” were photographed finding their way through the police – there to protect Pasolini from those intent on assaulting him - to see the film.129 Once the Festival ended, Pasolini left for a vacation with Ninetto Davoli who, much to Pasolini’s pleasure, shouted while swimming “how beautiful life is!”130 In April of the next year the Nastro d’argento (Silver ribbon) -- Italy’s version of the Oscars, awarded by the film critics’ association -- went to Pasolini for best picture, to Delli Colli for best director of photography, to Danilo Donati for best costumes.131 Earlier, the jury of the Ufficio Cattolico Internazionale del Cinema (OCIC) had awarded a prize to the film. The citation acknowledged the film as public pedagogy: “The author, without giving up his own ideology, has faithfully translated, with simplicity and piety, often very movingly, the social message of the Gospel, in particular love for the poor and the oppressed.… It shows the real

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grandeur of his teaching stripped of any artificial and sentimental effect.”132 Such a scale - “grandeur” - requires the teacher to take the world as his or her classroom. The whistles at Venice, film critic Tullio Kezich reported, had been drowned out by the “ovation which the public gave the poet of Le ceneri di Gramsci.”133 The Gospel’s success – it would be “the most famous” and “popularly successful” of all Pasolini’s films134 - infuriated Pasolini’s enemies: it was inconceivable that the pariah Pasolini had made a film characterized by Catholic critics as “a fine film, a Christian film that produces a profound impression.”135 “Endless confrontations” followed, Viano reports, that “forced nearly everyone, from Right to Left, to take a stand.”136 Il tempo alleged that Pasolini had made a devil out of the Son of God. A Roman paper was sure that the OCIC prize would be “to the immense profit of Communism.”137 “[T]o have given this work a prize,” the magazine Folla asserted, “and even in the presence of Fathers [of the Church], was a humiliating concession to error … to confusion.”138 When Goffredo Fofi reviewed it negatively in the Leftist Quaderni piacentini, Pasolini replied in kind.139 Two years later he attacked that magazine again, this time dismissing it as a “refuge” of the “worst Marxist critics,” perpetrators of a “beatnik Stalinism.”140 Having awarded The Gospel its Grand Prize, the Catholic Film Office arranged for the film to be screened in Paris, within the walls of Notre-­Dame, with Pasolini present. Following a Mass in the filled cathedral, the film was shown, followed by a round-­table discussion. Later, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi would characterize Pasolini’s encounter with the French intellectual Left as “tempestuous.” For them, she wrote, “the film was a slap right in the face. They are laical, rationalist, like Voltaire.”141 Indignation was evident in the review that Michel Cournet wrote: “It is … religious propaganda beneath the façade of a faithful transcription of the Gospel made by a Marxist…. I do not know if M. Pasolini is a prodigy of unawareness or a little champion of publicity.” Claude Mauriac wrote, “No, it is not sacred art, nor art. It is only a fantasy. It is nothing.”142 Pasolini replied: “The French intellectuals are deaf, out of touch with the historical reality of the whole world…. Sartre is the only one who has understood.”143 Jean-­Paul Sartre had agreed to meet Pasolini the day after the Notre-­Dame showing. Pasolini and Macciocchi set out for the Pont-­Royal Café – Sartre’s customary place - but got lost; they arrived, Schwartz reports, only after reaching Simone de Beauvoir by phone.144 “We arrived two hours late,” Macciocchi remembered, reporting that “Sartre was ensconced on a red velvet sofa, smoking his hundredth Gitane. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t wait for you? Now, about Saint Matthew’.”145 Sartre told Pasolini that Marxism, at least in France, had yet to confront Christianity, quipping that “Stalin rehabilitated Ivan the Terrible; Christ is not yet rehabilitated by the Marxists.”146 The only way to placate French critics was to show the movie in Italian, not the version dubbed (evidently done “badly by a French priest”), juxtaposed with La ricotta,147 to demonstrate that Pasolini was no Catholic apologist. That, Sartre thought, would silence his country’s anticlerical thought-­police.

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“I have been faithful to myself,” Pasolini told Sartre, “and I have created a national-­popular work in the Gramscian sense.”148 “Had I been French,” Pasolini told Sartre, “I would have set the Gospel in Algeria, and that would have shaken them, just as the Italians are shaken because I set my Gospel in Lucania.149 Maybe that way they would have then understood.”150 Sartre asked Pasolini to return to Paris the following January -- after The Gospel had been shown in both Budapest and Prague -- to open a discussion on his film between the lay Left and Catholics, especially those priests who had been engaged in the fight to free Algeria.151 “Religion,” Castelli remarks, “retains for Pasolini the revolutionary power of human solidarity, a bulwark against the materialist noise of bourgeois culture.”152 Such solidarity is an expression, Castelli explains, of a “revolutionary and profoundly unsentimental authenticity (as a counterweight to bourgeois conformism)”; it provoked Pasolini to “address the question of temporality through recourse to myth,” a genre that accents what is universal within contingency.153 No fusion of the two, Pasolini’s recourse to religion enables him to “stage a confrontation between two incommensurate systems of value” in which he mounts, Castelli suggests, a “vigorous defense of the religious and the sublime – what Pasolini called his ‘nostalgia for the sacred,’ set against the dominant forms of power and cultural value.”154 For Pasolini, then, pining for the past was political.

A Sensual Spirituality The “Christian reference,” Alain Badiou acknowledged, “played a role of primary importance in the formation of Pasolini’s thought.”155 As The Gospel According to Matthew testifies, Christianity – Catholicism specifically - is more than a reference; it is an animating influence in Pasolini’s art, pedagogy and politics. These Sartarelli characterizes as “Marxist, anarchist, and Catholic.”156 There is “spiritualism” and “sensualism” as well – “twin poles” Sartarelli imagines them157 - but they seem to me intertwined, contaminated (Pasolini might say) in an embrace. It is through “spiritualism” and “sensualism” that Pasolini takes - as Sartarelli suggests - “his pedagogical vocation to the metaphysical level.”158 Metaphysical and worldly too, as the metaphysical becomes incarnate and not only in the body of Christ. It is made flesh in the suffering of the subaltern, the beauty of youth, the devotion of the aged, the latter gendered in the person of his mother Susanna, the former sexualized in his lover Ninetto Davoli. “Perhaps the homosexual,” Pasolini pondered, has the sense of the sacred origin of life more than those who are narrowly heterosexual. Respect for the sanctity of the mother predisposes him to a particular identification with her … [against] the terrible power of the father, of the profaner. I would say that the homosexual tends to preserve life, not contributing to the cycle of procreation-­destruction, but rather substituting the coherence of culture, the continuity of consciousness, for the survival of the species.159

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Pasolini overstates his case – a characteristic move – but he has a point.160 Even so, perhaps it is sin not virtue wherein the key elements of Pasolini’s intertext intersect. “In the portrayal of the untenable dilemma of a body that cannot but live in sin,” Viano suggests, “it is possible to detect the point at which the Marxist and Catholic discourses intersect with the homosexual one.”161 Might study of that intersection serve as one site of a cosmopolitan curriculum? Submerged within a “universal profanation,” Pasolini enacted the “memory of sacred”162 by rendering vivid and immediate the ancient and invisible. Despite his fidelity to Matthew’s Gospel as textual source, Pasolini was engaged, Castelli emphasizes, in “translation,” specifically its “capacity” for (as Pasolini put it) “regeneration,” and of “the necessity of elective affinities, of mysterious historical correspondences” such that, he knew, ‘translation is primarily, explicitly or implicitly, a historiographical act’.”163 A curriculum cosmopolitan in its catholicity, for Pasolini, would be curriculum that temporally encoded and enacted. Through such a “contaminated” curriculum one might defer what Pasolini worried was the “final spasm,” when “this last/consecration is also exhausted,/ there is no place […] where the Lord might be.”164 For Pasolini, then, “to yearn for the sacred” within modernity, as Maggi appreciates, was “to yearn for something that does not exist.”165 To experience the sacred means, Maggi continues, excavating “the void lying within the present reality.”166 It is that void that the anti-­cleric, passionately catholic Pasolini pledged to contest.

Notes 1 In Catholic Education in the Wake of Vatican II, edited by Rosa Bruno-­Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldivar (301–317). University of Toronto Press, 2017. Reprinted with permission. Revised slightly in 2021. 2 2015, 151. Surely secularization is the answer, secularization sometimes evangelical in its fervor and fundamentalism. 3 “Every mode of knowing,” Huebner (1999, 350) testifies (perhaps too expansively), “witnesses to the transcending possibilities of which human life is a part.” The human being, he affirms (1999, 134–135) is a “transcendent being,” with the “capacity to transcend what [one] is to become something that [one] is not.” This “going beyond, this ‘moreness’ of life, this transcendent dimension is the usual meaning of ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’” (1999, 344). 4 A concept that for me conveys spiritual as well as historical, psycho-­social, cultural, and political elements: Pinar 2009. 5 2015, 22. 6 Or, as Pasolini would prefer, “contamination.” As Welle notes, Pasolini himself claimed to work “under the sign of contamination” (Pasolini, quoted in Welle 1999, 95), the “collision of two sometimes very different minds” (Pasolini, quoted in Wagstaff 1999, 196). For a discussion of the concept, see Pinar 2009, 185, n. 32; Strong-­Wilson 2021, 21. Related is the concept of “analogy,” a “basic concept of Pasolini’s poetics,” Maggi (2009, 21) notes, “a postcolonial rhetorical devise that includes both similarity and opposition.” 7 “The new Pope,” Pasolini wrote in praise of John, “in his sweet and mysterious turtle smile, seemed to have understood that he must be the pastor to the most miserable” (quoted in Schwartz 1992, 434).

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8 For details see Pinar 2009, 105–106. 9 Sartarelli 2014, 13. 10 He first wrote in the Fruilian dialect, in Jewell”s (1992) view, poiesis as resistance to that state authority. 11 2014, xxii. See Chapter 6. 12 http://www.vatican2voice.org/2need/need.htm accessed July 4, 2015. 13 Cf. Pinar 2009, 142. 14 The story is well known; for a summary see Pinar 2009, 106–107. 15 1994, 183. 16 Quoted in Testa 1994, 183. 17 Pasolini, quoted in Sartarelli 2014, 33. 18 2009, 23. 19 “[T]his Christian faith is bourgeois,” Pasolini complained, “the Church is the merciless heart of the State” (quoted in Schwartz 1992, 445). See also Castelli 2014, xxxix. 20 Quoted in Maggi 2009, 24. 21 2014, xxii. 22 2014, xxxii. 23 Quoted in Castelli 2014, xv. 24 2009, 23. 25 Quoted in Sartarelli 2014, 38. 26 See Maggi 2009, 23. Accordingly, “the film was a gallery of unfamiliar, wrinkled faces,” Viano (1993, 138) notes, “whose southern traits could not escape the Italian spectator’s notice.” Casting so, Pasolini conveyed, Viano (1993, 138) continues, “a second meaning apart from the fictional one,” namely Italy’s “social reality,” from which “subproletarian faces” are absent. 27 See, for instance, Sartarelli 2014, 38. 28 Quoted in Testa 1994, 183. As Pasolini told an English journalist: “To conclude I would like to say however that the ‘opposite’ of religion is not communism (which, despite having taken the secular an positivist spirit form the bourgeois tradition, in the end is very religious); but the ‘opposite’ of religion is capitalism (ruthless, cruel, cynical, purely materialistic, the cause of human beings’ exploitation of human beings, cradle of the worship of power, horrendous den of racism)” (quoted in Castelli 2014, xxxii). 29 Eiland and Jennings 2014, 10. 30 Ibid. 31 Quoted in Viano 1993, 345 n. 7. “The English word vitality,” Viano (1993, 345 n. 7) cautions, “may fail to reproduce all the connotations (energy, zest, desire) of its Italian counterpart, which was, indeed, one of Pasolini’s favorite words. Be that as it may, Pasolini’s argument is yet another proof that for him the viewer’s body is the ultimate recipient and gauge of the image.” 32 1999, 313. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 1996, 222. 36 For Pasolini such subjectivity seemed an eruption of the unconscious: see Pinar 2009, 14. 37 1992, 444. 38 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 423. 39 1992, 444. 40 Cf. Pinar 2012, 43ff. 41 1999, 297. 42 1993, 141.

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43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 451. Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 451. 2014, xxxiii. Ibid. 2014, xviii. 2014, xxvi. Ibid. 2014, xxviii. Referencing biblical scholar George Aichele, Castelli (2014, xix) suggests that the technical translation – converting biblical test into film – “interrupts the ‘biblical’ nature of the Gospel, and foregrounds the instability of authority claims about scriptural meanings.” Translation, she (2014, xx) adds, “is also an act of violence and an act of betrayal.” 51 See Castelli 2014, xxxiv. Pasolini’s sense of the “tactile and experiential presence of the past,” Castelli (2014, xxxv) reminds, is evident in a poem - “Tarsus, from a Distance” - he composed in 1969 while shooting the film Medea in Turkey: “Of course, if a thing changes/it still remains what it was first…. Of course, the egg-­ shaped form of time connects everything.” 52 2014, 47. In the colorized version this sense of immediacy is, it seems to me, largely lost. 53 2014, 45. Sartarelli’s characterization is redolent of Pasolini’s relationship to neorealism (see Pinar 2009, 185, n. 33). 54 2014, 47. 55 Davoli would prove to be not only a “trick” but a lasting relationship. For Pasolini, Siti (1994, 64) suggests, he represented nothing less than the “paradoxical” unification of “eros” and “agape,” of “desire” and “affection.” Davoli reappears in the 2014 film Pasolini directed by Abel Ferrara, written by Maurizio Braucci, and starring Willem Dafoe as Pasolini. 56 1992, 446. 57 1994, 66. 58 2007, 8. 59 2007, 140. 60 2007, 142. 61 1993, 145. 62 1996, 199. “Self-­representation is also found Pasolini’s films in less direct forms of autobiographical self-­portraiture,” Gordon (1996, 199) points out, “often based on oblique allusion,” an instance of which would include the casting of his mother as the older Virgin Mary in Vangelo.” 63 2007, 143. 64 Ibid. This identification of Pasolini with the saints was not only an expression of “free indirect subjectivity,” but one made by others as well. “In an unpublished interview,” Castelli (2014, xxiii) tells us, “the famed Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci called Pasolini a saint.” 65 2007, 143. 66 1993, 143. 67 2007, 143. 68 2007, 144. 69 1994, 182. 70 1993, 140. 71 Quoted in Gordon 1996, 222. 72 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 446. 73 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 447. 74 Schwartz 1992, 447. 75 Literally the “boys of life,” the novel was “graphic description of life in Roman underclass, not simply sex and street talk,” but a testimony that many “were being

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76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

1 02 103 104 105 106

left out of Italy’s ‘new prosperity,’ living as precariously under democracy as they had under Fascism” (Schwartz 1992, 277). The novel took fourth place among the five finalists for the 1955 Strega Prize but Ragazzi did win the Colombi-­Guidotti Prize at Parma and came in second place for the Viareggio Prize (Schwartz 1992, 276). Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 447–448. 1993, 138. Ibid. 1992, 448. Ibid. Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 448. Sartarelli 2014, 33. 1994, 184–185. 1995, 48. 1999, 302. Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 448. The sound track, with which Elsa Morante helped, was mostly Bach, supplemented with Webern, Russian revolutionary songs, original music by Luis E. Bacalov, and the recently released Missa Luba from the Congo. For the Massacre of the Innocents, Pasolini used the same Prokofiev that Eisenstein had used in 1938 in Alexander Nevsky. For the Baptism of Christ Pasolini chose the American black spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and Mozart (see Schwartz 1992, 450–451). 1992, 449. Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 443. 1999, 300. 1999, 301. Ibid. Ibid. 1994, 191. 1994, 194. 2009, 54. Ibid. 1994, 194. 1994, 195. Ibid. Both Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad before her, Agathocleous (2011, 173–174) notes, “use dilated moments of mutual recognition as ways of registering connections between individuals; in place of panorama both compose an overarching sense of evolutionary time that makes evident the finitude of human history. These temporalities, the moment and the end of time,’ produce a new kind of cosmopolitan sublime.” 1994, 196. 1994, 197. Ibid. Ibid. Rascaroli 2014 (2009), 158–159. Filmed, the tour was released as Sopralluoghi in Palestina, described by Rascaroli (2014 [2009], 159) as “notebook, as ephemeral, open and unstable text,” one that “completely belongs to Pasolini, who is credited as director, and who dominates every image, from the first to the last (his onscreen presence indissolubly links the film with his vision and will). In addition, he made the film his own by superimposing his authorial voice on it as well as a musical commentary.” She adds: “Utterly and unquestionable subjective, characterized by the onscreen presence of a strong director/enunciator through the image of his

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body and the sound of his voice, Sopralluoghi in Palestina is more than a documentary, or even a collection of images resulting from location scouting and the search for actors. It is, also and distinctly, an essayistic work. Even though it ostensibly does not present a strong philosophical argument … it does indeed offer the director’s musing on various topics, including the work of the filmmaker, the relationship between representation and imagination, between spirituality and aesthetic, Christianity and the Arab world, archaism and modernity, capitalism and the subproletariat” (Rascaroli 2014 [2009], 160). 107 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 426. 108 Rohdie 1995, 161. 109 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 426. 110 The town’s “hauntingly beautiful Sassi (the old section, virtually untouched), was a daring visual translation of Jerusalem,” Viano (1993, 138) suggests. 111 Rohdie 1995, 161. 112 Ibid. 113 1999, 310. 114 Quoted in Barański 1999, 311. 115 1999, 311–312. 116 Quoted in Testa 1994, 184. 117 1994, 184. 118 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 450. 119 1995, 161. 120 1989, 244. “Not only would the desert appear in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, Medea, and Il fiore delle Mille e una notte,” Viano (1993, 131) points out, but it would also acquire a structural significance in Edipo re, Teorema, and Porcile.” 121 1992, 430. 122 Quoted Schwartz 1992, 430. 123 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 437. 124 1992, 444. 125 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 444. 126 The Venice Festival awarded Gospel a Special Jury Prize, but the Golden Lion of first place went to Antonioni’s Red Desert. About it Pasolini wrote in Vie nuove: “It seemed to me an extremely beautiful film” (quoted in Schwartz 1992, 453). I judged it the same when I saw it almost sixty years ago. 127 1999, 281. Still, Barański (Ibid.) insists it had “not been a hurried project.” Pasolini had been working on the film for two years (see Schwartz 1992, 448). 128 1992, 451. 129 1992, 542. 130 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 452. Evidently Davoli’s marriage to a woman did not end the intimacy. When Pasolini flew to Stockholm on Monday, October 27, 1975 (a week before his assassination) as the “sole Italian candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature” (Schwartz 1992, 4), they shared a hotel room (Schwartz 1992, 5). 131 Schwartz 1992, 545. 132 Quoted in Rohdie 1995, 162. 133 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 452. In 1957 Pasolini had been awarded the Premio Viareggio for this collection of his poems: in English The Ashes of Gramsci. 134 Testa 1994, 180. 135 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 454. 136 1993, 134. 137 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 454. 138 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 454–455. 139 Schwartz 1992, 452. 140 Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 453.

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1 41 142 143 144 145 146 147

1 48 149

1 50 151 152 153 1 54 155 156 157 158 159 160

1 61 162 163 164 165 166

Quoted passages in Schwartz 1992, 457. Ibid. Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 457–458. 1992, 458. Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 458. Ibid. Pasolini’s film La ricotta enacted a “comic reversal” of the Gospels; it was “condemned and sequestered for being blasphemous” (Schwartz 1992, 426). Fellini knew that its condemnation was “incredible, unacceptable, a source of anguish…. It seems the best spirits are always blocked by the obtuse…. Those people are putting him [Pasolini] in a condition to express in his coming film on the Gospel exactly what is the sadness of not being understood” (quoted in Schwartz 1992, 419). Quoted in Testa 1994, 184. Lucania is ancient territorial division of southern Italy corresponding to most of the modern region of Basilicata, with much of the province of Salerno and part of that of Cosenza. http://www.britannica.com/search?query=lucania accessed March 3, 2015. Quoted in Schwartz 1992, 458. Schwartz 1992, 458. 2014, xxxii. 2014, xxix. Recall Mary Aswell Doll’s pedagogical invocation of myth: see Doll 2017. Ibid. 2014, vii. 2014, 34. 2014, 46. Ibid. Quoted in Rohdie 1995, 70. Against “resistance” – ensuring “reproduction” – the straight son’s rage against the father is more adroitly expressed as “seduction” I argued in 1983 (Pinar 1998, 227). Regarding the generalization, Pasolini himself disclaimed identity politics (see Pinar 2009, 131–135). 1993, 190–191. Sartarelli 2014, 49. 2014, xx-­xxi; see also Pinar 2009, 15. Quoted in Sartarelli 2014, 50. 2009, 21. 2009, 21–22.

Bibliography Agathocleous, Tanya. 2011. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2014. Foreword. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s St. Paul. A Screenplay (vii–xi). Verso. Barański, Zygmunt C. 1999. The Texts of Il Vangelo secondo Matteo. In Pasolini Old and New (281–320), edited by Zygmunt G. Barański Four Courts Press. Castelli, Elizabeth A. 2014. Introduction. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s St. Paul. A Screenplay (xv– xlii). Verso. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2. University of Minnesota Press. Doll, Mary Aswell. 2017. The Mythopoetics of Currere. Memories, Dreams, and Literary Texts as Teaching Avenues to Self Study. Routledge. Gordon, Robert S. C. 1996. Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity. Clarendon Press.

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Huebner, Dwayne E. 1999. The Lure of the Transcendent. Lawrence Erlbaum. Jewell, Keala. 1992. The Poiesis of History. Cornell University Press. Maggi, Armando. 2009. The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade. University of Chicago Press. Moore, Alex. 2015. Understanding the School Curriculum. Theory, Politics and Principles. Routledge. Petitfils, Brad. 2015. Parallels and Responses to Curricular Innovation. Routledge. Pinar, William F. Ed. 1998. Queer Theory in Education. Lawrence Erlbaum. Pinar, William F. 2009. The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education. Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2012. What Is Curriculum Theory? Routledge. Rascaroli, Laura. 2014 (2009). The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. Wallflower Press. Rashwan, Nada. 2021, September 25. As Covid Cases Spiral Upward, War Continues to Raze Yemen. The New York Times, CLXXI, No. 59,192, A9. Rohdie, Sam. 1995. The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Indiana University Press. Sartarelli, Stephen. 2014. Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Life in Poetry. In The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, edited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli (1–58). University of Chicago Press. Schwartz, Barth David. 1992. Pasolini Requiem. Pantheon. Strong-­Wilson, Teresa. 2021. Teachers’ Ethical Self-­Encounters with Counter-­Stories in the Classroom. From Implicated to Concerned Subjects. Routledge. Testa, Bart. 1994. To Film a Gospel … And Advent of the Theoretical Stranger. edited by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (180–209). University of Toronto Press. Viano, Maurizio. 1993. A Certain Realism. University of California Press. Wagstaff, Christopher. 1999. Reality into Poetry: Pasolini’s Film Theory. In Pasolini Old and New, edited by Zygmunt G. Barański (185–227) Four Courts Press. Welle, John P. 1999. Pasolini Traduttore: Translation, tradition and rewriting. In Pasolini Old and New, edited by Zygmunt G. Barański (90–129) Four Courts Press.

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“[A] grey orgy of cynicism, irony, brutality, compromise and conformism”1 – that, you recall, was Pasolini’s depiction of life in his time. One-­ sided surely, but Pasolini’s condemnation was not unjustified. In too many ways his description remains right today, a fact evidenced by present premonitions of the future. “In conditions of info-­acceleration and hypercomplexity,” Berardi predicted – before Trump but during Putin and Erdoğan – “right-­wing electoral victories and dictatorships of ignorance”2 whose “first preoccupation is to impoverish public schooling and to prop up media conformism,” a “dark blend of techno-­financial authoritarianism and aggressive populist reaction.”3 The “future is over,” he concludes, and “we are living in a space that is beyond the future.”4 Berardi has hardly been alone in such prognostications. “Despite its enormous promises,” Cohen notes that “the exponential development of technologies has not created a desire for what is to come.”5 Cohen reminds that this represents “a huge reversal in expectations compared to the sixties,” a time when university students throughout the West were inspired by a “sense of history,”6 of what had been, what could – should – be. The present moment, Cohen continues, “is no longer a moment of tension between the past and the future but a sort of morass, a perpetual present,” as “presentism” has replaced “historicism.”7 The “line” on which we stand is not the striker’s line8 but a virtual one, online, in the Cloud. No longer here but not there either, as there is no there “there.” Without a historically meaningful place – there is now only empty space – there is no time: no past, no present. Without narrative,9 without a sense of History, there is no future. And accompanying the presentism that technologization intensifies is narcissism: we wither without engagement in the material world, having retreated – when the economic circumstances of our lives permit – to the luminous smooth surface of the screen. I’m staring DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348-14

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at one now. I am no longer present, having poured myself into something that will (not) sell. I fashion a profile. Or so Hans-­Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio would depict what I’m doing.

Profilicity Moeller and D’Ambrosio list three forms of identity: sincerity, authenticity, and what they term profilicity, specifically one’s profile on social10 media. Sincerity they associate with pre-­modernity; it connotes coinciding with one’s role, performing it as perfectly as possible, sincerely.11 Authenticity they associate with modernity; it reverses sincerity, rendering one’s role a reflection of one’s inner self. While in both one’s public persona presumably reflects one’s private self, in sincerity this is accomplished by fusing the inner with the outer,12 a move presumably reversed in authenticity. Profilicity Moeller and D’Ambrosio associate with postmodernity, the present period, when life is on online, where one’s public presentation – one’s profile – follows from and is directed toward “specific audiences,” relying on “feedback processes”13 that prompt us to adjust our profile to fit what others will like.14 Moeller and D’Ambrosio suggest that although sometimes segregated among different groups and places, the three can co-­exist.15 Nonetheless, in the technologized world, “being successful, or simply being, relies heavily on profilicity.”16 Despite the self-­misrepresentation implied in profilicity, Moeller and D’Ambrosio presume to tell the truth, positioning themselves outside what the rest of us are evidently entrapped inside. While Moeller and D’Ambrosio acknowledge that “identity” is “constituted, felt, and performed” in “complex ways,” and that multiple elements of identity are not always in “perfect harmony,”17 they contradict this assertion by reducing identity to its function.18 The “main function” of identity, they inform us, is to “establish” and maintain a person’s “stability;” as identity makes “whole” one’s various “aspects.”19 Since, they tell us later, one is always chasing “likes” online, it’s not obvious how one’s profile can so function. It is a split-­off fictive creation designed to appeal to others, on occasion to be shed – if there remains anyone underneath it to do the shedding. Identity has no inevitable integrative function nor can be it be reduced to its function. For victims of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism, identity can be crushing, a burden to bear. Identity is the interface between one’s interiority and exteriority, what one experiences inside and what others see or think they see from the outside. Even when not imposed, identity can be overloaded with content conferred by others. A stranger on the street identifies me as an old white man, quite correct but all de-­individuating identitarian terms that represent only impersonal features of my identity. In so seeing they efface my inner self, ignoring even erasing the “I” at the center of my personhood, a composite concept that can include but does not necessarily coincide with my “identity.” My identity is hardly where I live; yes it contains (and creates) aspects of my inner

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self but it is, fundamentally, what others perceive me to be.20 So rather than it having a “function,” identity can be a load I try to lighten, a reality I work to renegotiate and reconstruct. Besides oversimplifying identity by reducing it to its function, Moeller and D’Ambrosio confer apparently limitless power upon profilicity, a determinism that while possibly empirically accurate is nonetheless theoretically simplistic. Politics and morality, they note, are two domains profilicity perverts. Moeller and D’Ambrosio name Donald J. Trump as the consummate apprentice of politics in an era of profilicity. They report that Trump at first dismissed the phrase “drain the swamp” as stupid, but after seeing how his right-­wing supporters seized it, he repeated it endlessly, a move that, Moeller and D’Ambrosio tell us, demonstrated his “profilicity savvy.”21 What it shows of course is Trump’s moral corruption, that last failing hardly new to politics or “profilicity.” Morality is likewise corrupted, they continue, no longer “being” or “doing good” as “what we say” profiles our morality more than “what we do.”22 What matters is “what is seen, and importantly, what is seen as being seen.”23 What Moeller and D’Ambrosio term “virtue speech” constitutes one’s moral identity.24 In our era – an “age of infinite acceleration of the infosphere”25 – the “surface” is the “real thing.”26 In profilicity there is, then, no interiority, no subjective presence, only scheming to “curate” a profile that “sells.”27 Not only do Moeller and D’Ambrosio endorse morality’s complete collapse into expediency – celebrity becomes everyone’s dream, to be achieved at any price – they seem sure profilicity constitutes an “advanced mode” of “perception … more mature” than being true to oneself.28 And I thought “maturity” – to the extent the term sidesteps its exclusively developmental denotations – had to do with independence of mind, incisive judgment, sensitivity and such.29 Turns out all that is a version of “authenticity,” the identity paradigm now nearly discarded, identity that is, well, inauthentic anyway, since (as Moeller and D’Ambrosio assert) “authentication” of “my authenticity” must be made by another authentic person.30 If authentication of one’s maturity or authenticity must come from others, one can be confident one is neither mature or authentic. But now, under conditions of profilicity, authentication of one’s presence is not self-­conferred or conferred by loved ones but by anonymous others; the “point is no longer to be seen but rather to be seen as being seen.”31 One’s shadow not one’s substance is what matters, as “positive reactions” to one’s profile Moeller and D’Ambrosio deem “crucial” in the “emergence” and “maintenance” of “self-­identity,”32 that last term a conflation of “self ” and “identity,” yes intertwined but hardly (if one is mature or authentic) fused. In profilicity the two as conflated, as, they suggest, “being oneself ” is “much harder” without anonymous others’ “validation,” dependent as we are upon it.”33 No problem, all that matters is visibility, “being seen.”34 Moeller and D’Ambrosio consider the Internet “dynamic” and “hungry, devouring information” almost immediately, encouraging everyone to “consume

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quickly,”35 no lingering on that bridge in-­between here and there.36 Information goes stale, requiring replacement by “new information,” reducing “websites” to “feeds.”37 Under such circumstances I wonder how the concept of “identity” remains usable, the term implying, as it does, some sense of stability or continuity of meaning,38 however altered it can become – if one “comes out,” for instance. For Moeller and D’Ambrosio “prolific identity” is comprised of “information” not “meaning,”39 and so – like the website as feed – requires constant updating,40 “crucial” to “maintaining” a “profile.”41 They call that being “flexible,” a term to be decried when it recasts exploitation42 as admirable, but Moeller and D’Ambrosio see it as simply the price of the ticket: In such an “accelerated” space, “personas” take the form of “flexible profiles.”43 You are no longer here, no longer subjectively present, nor do you have a “core identity.”44 Without that any coherent self or identity, what used to be termed human condition45 – aspiring to humanity while constantly capable of being inhuman – we are left in a hall of mirrors, except we’re not seeing ourselves (however imperfectly) reflected but what we think others want to see. “Prolific” identity depends entirely on “public appearance,” Moeller and D’Ambrosio continue; as a consequence “knowing who we are” derives from learning “how others see us.”46 Introspection is irrelevant. All that matters is figuring out what anonymous others want to see, and “present ourselves accordingly”; these others, our authors remind, are not necessarily human but often instances of algorithms and AI.47 The acknowledgment that a “sentence is a public space”48 is replaced by the fact of “feedback loops.”49 Products morphed first into brands, then into images,50 Moeller and D’Ambrosio summarize; advertising slowly substituted emotion and sexuality for testimonies to a product’s effectiveness. Now ads no longer represent products; they present profiles.51 A work of art’s uniqueness – its aura – rendered it iconographic (in religious terms) or valuable (in secular monetary ones).52 Art is original, an insight Moeller and D’Ambrosio remind is Walter Benjamin’s: “the whole sphere of authenticity is outside the technical – and, of course, not only technical – reproducibility.”53 Moeller and D’Ambrosio assert that prolificity is “not inauthentic but nonauthentic,” adding that actual authenticity “never in fact existed,”54 another assertion offered without evidence or argument, and one that renders false their own distinctions among sincerity, authenticity, and profilicity. They smuggle these back in soon enough, if negatively, assuring us that their own profiles imply no “role commitment” (sincerity) or true representation of their inner selves (authenticity).55 Apparently neither author exists at all; each is an “aggregate” of his “personal connections.”56 The idea of an “antecedent selfhood” can be traced back to Plato they tell us, his conceptions of an “unchanging soul” and “knowledge as memory” providing the backdrop for the (apparently delusional) idea that one has an “inner self,” the search for which could conceivably lead to a true “identity,”57 yet again conflating “self ” and “identity,” ignoring the non-­coincidence between the two and

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the “I” who is capable of noticing both. They associate the “real explosion” of “authenticity” with figures after Plato (among them Niccolo Machiavelli, Martin Luther, William Shakespeare, Immanuel Kant, adding the French Revolution and Romanticism); then they conflate “authenticity” with “individualism”58 and situate these two in modernity only, again ignoring important distinctions within these terms, for instance between “possessive individualism”59 and individuation.60 Moeller and D’Ambrosio almost demonize authenticity by construing it as the “demand” that each of cultivate what is unique about us,61 converting it from the prerequisite for self-­knowledge and social understanding into a degrading concession to others. That becomes clear when they assert – again without evidence or argument – that the “status” of “being” an “independent original individual” is “utterly dependent” on “recognition,”62 an obvious contradiction in terms. While in social, cultural, political democratic societies one can infuse one’s identity with the uniqueness imprinted by one’s genetics, upbringing and circumstances – that would be one marker of being “independent” – the two (uniqueness and identity) are not the same, as identity is always, often primarily, what others perceive us to be, as stereotypes or simple generalizations substitute for discernment of the individual. In any case, cultivating the “unique” person that one can be is not equivalent to one’s “identity,” and certainly such being – such subjective presence – does not “crave identity validation.”63 One might request even demand that others sidestep identity to see what’s inside oneself, but that is a matter of self-­validation and social generosity. So it’s unsurprising that Moeller and D’Ambrosio depict authenticity as “paradoxical”64 when it is, in their misconception,65 simply convoluted. Of course it’s “impossible,”66 in part because they’ve made it so, but partly because the alterity within always remains, even to the most self-­knowing and wise, unrecognizable and unexpressed, i.e. the unconscious.67 Moeller and D’Ambrosio seem relieved when they announce that “authenticity” is on the way out, a fact, they continue (committing ageism and Whig history in one quick move), that produces complaint and rebellion, especially among the old.68 Magnanimous, Moeller and D’Ambrosio say they “sympathize” even “empathize” with us old-­timers, but not for long, as they admit that they find “such reactions unhelpful.”69 They summon the courage us old ones evidently lack, namely to face the fact that authenticity is disappearing because it “lacks efficiency” and credibility.”70 Never mind the false gods of “efficiency” and “credibility,” notice that while Moeller and D’Ambrosio patronize the elderly for clinging to out-­of-­date ideas like integrity and honesty they are quite capable of claiming these for themselves, adopting the tone of telling the hard truth, straight-­up, unvarnished, all features of the authenticity at which they have just sneered. As the “reigning identity paradigm,”71 profilicity fulfills “functions”72 that sincerity and authenticity once fulfilled, expressing again a reductionistic and discredited functionalism. What would that function be? “Profilicity curates

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identity in a complex world where technology has drastically changed the environment within which people must exist, in both body and mind,”73 they answer. Profilicity constitutes a “new” and “more complex conceptual framework,” they announce, as if prostituting oneself was “new” and always “complex.”74 While the verb “curates” derives from the Latin cura, meaning to care or take care, in our time it connotes exhibiting artworks or tweaking your business brand, underlining the exhibitionistic exchange structuring profilicity.75 Not compromise but corruption: that’s the correct term for a time when one says and does only whatever promotes one’s position. That’s what time it is, no longer a nightmare but the morning after, when one realizes that one has not been dreaming at all. I am “already dead.”76 My self has been sucked into my identity, and that identity is what I post online.77 Authenticity is replaced by profilicity; one’s profile is a feature of “professional marketing” or “personal branding” or “self-­branding.”78 Even those ugly phrases – the latter two conjuring up cattle prods – fail to specify the inhuman situation of utter absence, nobody home, homo sapiens replaced by homo digitalis.79 Being present becomes political as it signals a desperate and – if Moeller and D’Ambrosio are right80 – doomed effort at subjective preservation,81 protecting that inner sphere wherein one can think, feel, experience without (only) calculation, without converting everything to its exchange value, without being reduced to a “marketable asset.”82 Profilicity is “especially taxing,” Moeller and D’Ambrosio admit, as it “demands” not only ongoing “self-­promotion” but also “continuous attention” to the online response, always adjusting one’s profile, a profile at once “fake” and “true.”83 This tweaking, they emphasize, is never-­ending, as we are “constantly” pressured to “polish our profiles.”84 Profilicity is a prison-­house, a fact Moeller and D’Ambrosio seem to sense, as defensively they volunteer that profilicity is “not totalitarian.”85 It merely “informs bodily, mental, and social regimes,”86 but evidently does not (contrary to their own earlier assertions) determine them. In fact, Moeller and D’Ambrosio insist they are not “defending” profilicity (or authenticity or sincerity, but then that was clear) and “recommend” skepticism toward each,87 once again positioning themselves above from the fray, tried-­and-­ true indeed authentic academicians simply studying a subject, a move they then undercut by asserting we have always and everywhere been practicing “genuine pretending.”88 If we are always only pretending, who are we?

Cultural Crises Presentism, narcissism, and technologization are not, contrary to what the term implies, “crises” we can work through, that will end, allowing us to emerge out the other side. They cannot be solved by the method of currere, even when engaging currere toward decolonization.89 As Shauna Knox shows, what is internalized90 – in her case anti-­Black racism – is not easily exorcised, even if it can be confronted, on occasion dislodged, not enough for emancipation but certainly

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some self-­understanding. The truth may not set you free but it at least it allows you to know where you are – in prison. That knowledge may mean your survival.91 Knowing where you are, what you’re made of, what time it is: this is knowledge of most worth in an era of narcissism, presentism, technologization, interrelated crises that appear can only accelerate and from which there appears to be no parole. Subjective and social survival are possible even in the worst of times – the Harlem Renaissance, I show, is one such allegory of the present92 – but these require knowing the rudiments93 that academic knowledge can help provide, if it configured around sincerity and authenticity. Not naively of course, as Lionel Trilling reminds (remembering Oscar Wilde), as sincerity uncritically acclaimed can become only a sign of “Philistine respectability,” that (less superciliously) the “direct conscious confrontation of experience and the direct public expression of it do not necessarily yield the truth and indeed that they are likely to pervert it.”94 To emphasize the point Trilling then quotes Nietzsche: “Every profound spirit needs a mask.”95 Not a profile mind you, not something you can’t remove, but a cover that doesn’t corrode what’s underneath it, that “I” who remembers even “parents” the self still struggling to survive. In such a situation what knowledge is of most worth? Even that composed by Moeller and D’Ambrosio – and by Gumbrecht – is valuable, as it prods us to reflect on what is at stake being here, now. These topics are the purview of the arts and humanities, not STEM, as needed as these subjects are and will be. But if there is to remain a scientist, a technologist, an engineer, a mathematician – and not only an artificial intelligence – there must remain a self-­conscious, self-­ questioning, self-­critical self,96 an actual human being that study in the humanities and arts can support, providing insight and opportunity to experience, not only vicariously or virtually, but also the abrasive embodied experience of being present in one’s life and in the lives of those within and around you. Trilling knew that for an “increased experience of self, art was pre-­eminent.”97 That which “diminished” lived experience – in fact the “enemy” of being,” Trilling knew, is “having.”98 Indeed, the commodification of knowledge – here Trilling cites Marx – can mangle the self into what is “not human.”99 Today the self who has Internet access risks evaporating into the “not human,” into the device with which one can become fused, no longer “standing reserve” but an image on a screen, a profile, a phantom – no longer present. Trilling concludes: “It was the mechanical principle, quite as much as the acquisitive principle – the two are of course intimately connected – which was felt to be the enemy of being, the source of inauthenticity.”100 Horrified at what we’ve become was not always the case: a century ago –Trilling reminds that the Futurist Manifesto, written in 1908 by Marinetti – espoused the “beauty” and “vitality” of the “machine,”101 as, for Marinetti, the “mechanical” was the “authenticating principle” of “modern life.”102 Modernity begins in the Renaissance, then accelerates, not without protest, resistance even repudiation (ah, nineteenth-­century Romanticism). It was

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often facilitated by academic knowledge and its practitioners. Consider the case of James McKeen Cattell, a major late nineteenth-­early twentieth-­century American psychologist. Cattell sought “knowledge about perception that would permit an accommodation of subjective life to machinic operations, speeds, and temporalities, even as the conditions of its own research were imposing comparable machine speeds and movements on subjects”; he was among the first to seek a “psychology of human capacities … that could modify the performance of an individual subject.”103 By the end of the 1880s, Cattell was determined to go “far beyond the measurement of ‘simple’ reaction time, or of discrimination and association; he sought to measure more significant components of human subjectivity,”104 including “how long it takes to form a judgement or opinion.”105 Critiquing Cattell was John Dewey. In his 1896 essay “The Reflex Arc Concept,” Dewey asserted – I am relying here on the scholarship of Jonathan Crary – that behavior cannot be meaningfully analyzed into element components, countering with a conception of the subject who is in a perpetual multi-­ sensory engagement with the world, experience that is “one uninterrupted, continuous redistribution of mass in motion … there is nothing which can be set off as stimulus, nothing which reacts, nothing which is response. There is just a change in the system of tensions.”106 Dewey was acknowledging that “stimulus” is not, finally, distinguishable from “the overall state of the organism as a whole,” that – in Crary’s succinct summary – “the individual responds not to some punctual sensation but to its own total condition, a unity of many processes and movements.”107 Moreover – here Crary quotes Dewey again – “organisms bring meaning into the world.”108 Attention was for Dewey no “distinct or discrete interval in the middle of a linear sequence of stimulus and response but a continuous and variable activity that was always undergoing a reorganization of its focus and intensity.”109 Like William James’ metaphor – stream of consciousness110 – Dewey’s idea of continuity conveyed a sense of “unity and wholeness,”111 what I would term subjective coherence, remembering who you are, have been, might become, a person present to oneself and others, not devolved into seemingly separate selves. “What happens when perception is no longer necessarily synonymous with presence?”112 Crary answers his question by citing Cézanne and Henri Bergson, whose Matter and Memory (1896) affirmed an experience of perception not “routinized and reified,” but instead valorized “specific types of attention as types of perception with the highest ethical and aesthetic possibilities.”113 There is an essential temporal dimension to such attention: no matter how apparently instantaneous, perception for Bergson “constitutes a duration that prolongs the past into the present, inescapably contaminating its ‘purity’ by giving it a composite status,”114 thereby acknowledging that “memory and perception interpenetrate each other.”115 Like Dewey, Bergson critiqued the stimulus-­response model, emphasizing the “complexity of what happens between awareness of stimulation and reaction to it,” what for him (and for Aoki decades later) an “in-­between”

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space that enables “lived experience,” experience dependent upon “attention,”116 upon being subjectively present. “How the attentive body and mind process sensation,” Crary suggests, “decides not only the nature of one’s perception but the degree of freedom of one’s own existence.”117 Matter and Memory demonstrates that attention is a form of double consciousness,118 focused on the “flow of external sensations and events” as well as “the way in which memories coincide with or diverge from ‘present’ perception.”119 Crary summarizes: “The degree of vital autonomy possessed by an individual is proportional to the very indetermination and imprecision with which memory intersects with perception.”120 The more “determined” – the “more habitual and repetitive one’s perceptual response to one’s environment” is – “the less autonomy and freedom characterize the individual’s existence.”121 If a response follows a stimulus “without the self interfering with it,” one has become “a conscious automaton.”122 Creativity occurs within what Bergson terms “a zone of indetermination,”123 what I term non-­coincidence. Matter and Memory, Crary points out, constitutes “a major response to the general standardization of experience and automation of perceptual response at the turn of the century,” specifically those “new arrangements of spectacular consumption (especially when they were posed as novelty) within a mass society” that were anything but “new” but “productive of redundancy and habit.”124 Despite “deep reservations about Bergson’s project,” Walter Benjamin appreciated that “Bergson’s dismay at the increasingly impoverished role of memory on an individual level” was linked to “his own analysis of the decay of traditional forms of collective memory.125 As a potential subjective “center of indetermination,”126 Bergson’s subject can “recreate the present,”127 that is, can extricate oneself from a “relationship of constraint and necessity with one’s lived milieu.”128 Loosen perhaps, but I wonder to what extent one can extricate oneself, unless Bergson means just leaving, which would mean a literal extrication but not necessarily psychic one. In that psychic sense, many – most? – of us never leave home. What does seem possible – at least obligatory – is becoming conscious of that fact, acknowledging one’s embeddedness in the past, maybe not so “revolutionary” a “force” as Pasolini rhetoricized it,129 but at least a loosening from the grip of the temporally-­empty present, now one primarily of profilicity – apparently absent authenticity or sincerity – a moment when it pays not to be here. Such subjective absence ensures a “reduced individuality,” a condition, Trilling reminds, with “adverse political implications,”130 as (for Marcuse at least) “moral intransigence” as well as “political activism” result from “renunciation” and “sublimation.”131 Trilling remembers that Marcuse affirms “character” as life’s “intensity, its creativity, its felt actuality, its weightiness, requires the stimulus of existence.”132 As radical as Marcuse might have seemed to his contemporaries, his call to character, being present in one’s life and in world, is not exactly new or novel; Trilling recalls that as an unlikely a pair as Wordsworth and Rousseau affirmed the “individual’s experience of existence,”133 for both

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the very “sentiment of being,”134 for Walt Whitman – to make a maddening ménage-­à-­trois – “the hardest basic fact and only entrance to all facts.”135 Trilling summarizes: “The facts to which this fact is entrance are those of the social and political life – it is through our conscious certitude of our personal selfhood that we reach our knowledge of others.”136 We work from within: alone, together: “We feel ourselves apart in the same way,” Kaag knows.137 “To each his own urgency,” Carl Philipps writes. “Or hers. Or theirs. How is it not political, to be simply living one’s life meaningfully, thoughtfully, which means variously in keeping with, in counterpoint to, and in resistance to life’s many parts? To insist on being who we are is a political act.”138 Enter currere.

Notes

1 2 3 4 5

Quoted in Testa 1994, 184. 2012, 12. 2012, 12–13. 2012, 81. 2021, 132–133. What is to come? For Berardi (2012, 26), we face “irreversible trends of devastation, pollution, and impoverishment are marking the horizon of our time.” 6 2021, 133. Gardini (2019, 234) clarifies this phrase when he admonishes us to remember that what is past “cannot be applied literally to our present needs,” but – in studying our ancestors – “we too, in a sense, become a little ancient; it isn’t they who become modern. Through studying, reading, writing, and loving [for instance] Latin, we step into the river of history, and there we find a deeper understanding of where we began and where we want to go.” 7 2021, 133. Vizenor writes: ““The trick, in seven words, is to elude historicism, racial representation, and remain historical” (quoted in Mackay 2008, 258). Historicism here, Mackay (ibid.), comments, is meant as an overdetermined – indeed genocidal – process that renders the “Native a museum case spectacle.” Mackay continues: “Vizenor proposes the shadow, the ‘unseen presence,’ as an extralinguistic haunting of the American narrative, a specter of an original presence that cannot be captured in words (‘memories in silence’) but that … means that the reader is always consciousness of ‘this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there’” (quoted in 2008, 258). The “trick” Vizenor identities as key for First Peoples is one non-­Native peoples might also try: elude overdetermination, dis-­identify with (others’ construal of your) identity, become historical, e.g. an agent creating as well as being created by History. 8 “Working-­class France joined the students,” Cohen (2021, 15) reports, adding: “Work gradually came to a holt. In little more than a week, from May 14 to 25 [1968], the number of strikers reached ten million.” The “European insurrection” to come, Berardi 2012, 68) predicts, “will not be an insurrection of energy, but an insurrection of slowness, withdrawal, and exhaustion. It will be the autonomization of the collective body and soul from the exploitation of speed and competition.” Could it be “quietude”? (Pinar 2019b, 271) 9 Today, Han (2021, 16) concludes, “life is divested of any narrative that could give it meaning. Life is no longer a matter of what can be recounted but a matter of what can be counted, measured.” 10 Certainly not social in any civic sense. Gardini (2019, 6) has it right: “In this very moment the entire planet is jabbering, amassing an immeasurable heap of words.

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And yet those words are already gone. Another heap has already formed, also destined to vanish in an instant.” These words too, unless you reading now keeps them subjectively present. 11 In Trilling’s (1972, 2) terms, sincerity refers to a “congruence” between “avowal” and “actual feeling.” Not an entirely separate or subsequent development, authenticity is already present in sincerity when Trilling (1972, 5) tells us that sincerity means not deceiving others, “being true to one’s own self.”” 12 Trilling (1972, 12) tells us the term entered the English language during the first third of the sixteenth century, considerably later than its appearance in French; it derived from the Latin word sincerus and meant what the Latin term means: “clean,” “sound, “pure.” Sincerity soon came to mean the “absence” of “dissimulation” or “feigning” or “pretence” (1972, 13). 13 Moeller and D’Ambrosio 2021, 250. The term “feedback” brings to mind Gardini’s (2019, 13) refreshing rant: “As for the good of society, our mental health, the beauty of sentences – as for the education of the spirit, in other words – we no longer seem to give them any thought, betting all our happiness on material wealth. And so our taste decays, along with our expectations. Our words turn anemic, signifying less and less, sounding more and more like white noise, like traffic, or like certain politicians. Words! Our greatest gift, our most fertile ground.” 14 “The ubiquity of the like leads to a numbness that undermines reality,” Han (2021, 32) notes. 15 2021, 20. 16 2021, 21. 17 2021, 205. 18 “Pure functionality without meaning,” as Berardi (2012, 28) depicts our moment, the utter “automation of thought and will.” Does reducing identity to its function imply the term is meaningless? 19 2021, 206. 20 Obviously intimate others have access to my subjectivity, even then refracted through the prism of perception. After twenty-­six years – we celebrated that anniversary on September 26, 2021 – my husband Jeff Turner knows my habits very well, but he does not always know – in part because I do not always tell him – what I’m experiencing. We are separate while very much together. 21 2021, 185. 22 2021, 26 23 2021, 27. 24 Ibid. 25 Berardi 2012, 10 26 2021, 29. 27 Excepting in its enframing – and intensification – by software, scheming is of course nothing new. When citing David Riesman’s (1950) concept of the “other-­directed” personality – one totally attentive to others’ expectations so that one ceases to be oneself at all, but rather a “reiterated impersonation” – Trilling (1972, 76) thinks of Jane Austen’s concern over the “negation” of oneself through “role-­playing.” Austen, Trilling (1972, 82) continues, affirmed the “ideal of ‘intelligent love,’ according to which the deepest and truest relationship that can exist between human beings is pedagogic. This relationship consists in the giving and receiving of knowledge about right conduct, in the formation of one’s person’s character by another, the acceptance of another’s guidance in one’s own growth.” Walter Benjamin too testifies to “instruction as a defining characteristic of story-­telling and a condition of its vitality” (1972, 84). Each of these conceptions assumes a certain sincerity and authenticity absent in profilicity. 28 2021, 42. Evidence? Argument? Neither is provided, only assertion.

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29 Butler (2017, 227) knows: “Indeed, thinking … takes place between me and myself or in dialogue with one other.” The educator can think “out loud” in front of others but kowtowing to anyone – including to oneself – precludes thinking at all. 30 2021, 47. 31 2021, 48. 32 2021, 52. 33 2021, 52–53. 34 2021, 55. 35 2021, 56. “Communication is fastest where the same meets the same,” Han (2021, 37) observes. 36 Concepts associated with the work of Tetsuo Aoki: see Pinar and Irwin 2005; Lee, Wong, and Ursino 2022. 37 2021, 58. 38 Meaning has become meaningless I realize. Berardi (2012, 85) blames finance capitalism for “truth” having “disappeared, dissolved … no longer there,” replaced by an endless “exchange of signs, only a deterritorialization of meaning.” While a phantom, I experience meaning still, in private life, within (inter)subjective presence. “[I]is is our duty,” Chee (2018, 255) knows, “to matter.” 39 2021, 59. 40 Always updating seems parallel to what Berardi (2012, 96) terms “semio-­inflation … where you need more signs, words, and information to buy less meaning.” Truth is there’s no meaning to buy, just as updating ensures no actual identity at all. 41 2021, 59. 42 The curriculum of the future, Williamson (2013, 49) tells us, “is concerned with students’ future employment,” and “it adopts the flexible correspondence model that flexible learning = flexible labor.” You’ll do whatever I assign you to do: that has always been the rule in school but now servitude is in service to economic not educational ends. 43 2021, 67. 44 2021, 68. 45 Arendt 1958. For Montaigne, “everyman carries within him the entire form of the human condition” (quoted in Weintraub 1978, 184). 46 2021, 74. 47 2021, 74. Agency is not altogether absent, Moeller and D’Ambrosio concede (ibid.); after all, one is always chasing those elusive “likes.” 48 Gardini 2019, 230. 49 2021, 74. 50 2021, 105. 51 2021, 114. 52 2021, 119. 53 Benjamin, quoted in 2021, 119. 54 2021, 130. 55 2021, 132. 56 2021, 139. 57 2021, 167. 58 2021, 167. 59 Associated with the atomistic self-­owned individual whose actions ignore the common good, the term is associated with C.B. Macpherson (1962). Authentic individualism acknowledges one’s utter dependence upon others, as well as the individual as “containing multitudes” (to quote Walt Whitman), as well as commitment to the common good. 60 The process of becoming the singularity one is and can be, the term – often associated with the work of Carl Jung – can be traced back to Socrates, whose devotion to

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reason also impeded the development of the idea (Weintraub 1978, 11). Siedentop (2014, 337) associates “individuation” with “modernity” – distinguishing between “the pursuit of ‘individuality’ – an aesthetic notion – with the invention of the individual – a moral notion.” Without individuated selves we are dummies, puppets of the current regime; ventriloquism replaces conversation and communication. “Collaboration” and “cooperation” – corporate appropriations of the social for the sake of efficiency, productivity, profit maximization – substitute for dialogical encounter. 61 2021, 169. 62 2021, 174. Cusk’s character (2021, 136) admits that “my individuality had tormented me my whole life with its demand to be recognized.” How “individual” can one be if recognition is demanded? 63 2021, 174. 64 2021, 175. 65 They assert that authenticity (1) is “learned from others” when in fact it can only be learned from oneself; that (2) authenticity must be “recognized” by others when it’s self-­recognition that matters, and (3) that authenticity is expressed in “necessarily similar ways,” another contradiction in terms as they acknowledged earlier that authenticity is a matter of uniqueness and originality, not conformity (2021, 175–176). 66 2021, 176. 67 Trilling (1972, 4–5) invokes not Freud but Mathew Arnold to remind us “how hard it is to discern one’s own self in order to reach it and be true to it.” 68 2021, 176. “In late modernity,” Berardi (2012, 67) points out, “the rhetoric of the young and the devaluation of the old becomes an essential feature of advertising. Contrary to fascist discourse, late-­modern advertising does not abuse old age. It denies it, claiming that every old person can be young if they will only take part in the consumerist feast.” The main course of that “feast” is social media. 69 2021, 176. 70 2021, 177. 71 2021, 158. 72 2021, 178. 73 2021, 178. 74 Sexual prostitution should be legal, respected, and compensated appropriately (which is to say generously). Rationalizing prostitution in social life – as apparently profilicity does – is detestable. 75 2021, 261. 76 “The already dead have been killed,” Cazdyn (2012, 194) explains, “but have yet to die.” Oddly, he tries to construe being a zombie as a pre-­revolutionary condition: “Might the already dead make room for us to collectivize in this world on the way to making revolutionary historical change?” (2012, 156) Good luck with that. 77 2021, 187. “Under the polished veneer of reputation,” Zambreno (2021, 25) asks, “is there any space for the real?” There used to be, there could be, but under conditions of profilicity the answer is – apparently not. 78 2021, 187. 79 “[H]omo digitalis,” Cohen (2021, 138) appreciates, “quite simply threatens to ‘dispossess us of ourselves’.” For Han (2021, 32), “digitalization is anaesthetization.” 80 At times Moeller and D’Ambrosio waffle; at one point writing that we should relax as there is “no need” to “overinternalize” profilic identity (2021, 214). If “selfhood” is “achieved” through identity (2021, 217), where is it being “internalized” to? Identity is all. Relaxation doesn’t last long, as three pages later we’re told that now “our actions” are always “geared” to tweaking our profiles, everything in service to “acceptance” and “validation” (2021, 217).

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81 The phrase I employ in the third edition of What Is Curriculum Theory? (Pinar 2019a, xii, 4, 6, 16, 25–27, 40, 48, 51) to convey the emergency of the moment. It incorporates my earlier (2004, 2012) emphasis upon subjective reconstruction, but unless there is a self still present, a self to work with, there’s no reconstruction possible. 82 2021, 193. Under conditions of profilicity, being marketable means always observing how your profile is playing, and in order to do so, “you need to observe how it is observed” (2021, 233). 83 2021, 236. 84 2021, 243. 85 2021, 249. 86 2021, 250. Italics added. 87 2021, 251. 88 2021, 251. 89 Knox 2022. 90 “The self,” Trilling (1972, 61) notes, “is subject to the constant influence, the literal in-­flowing, of the mental processes of others, which, in the degree that they stimulate or enlarge his consciousness, make it less his own.” 91 “To define survivance is to refuse negation, to refuse an identity based on social eradication,” Lockard (2008, 209) explains, adding that “survivance incorporates a consciousness with which one lives with terms of self-­reference imposed by a dominant culture: it places quotation marks around identity references.” He is here discussing the challenge of subjective – cultural – survival for Native Peoples, but the self-­immolation profilicity implies renders this idea important for non-­Native peoples as well. 92 Pinar 2019a, 37ff. 93 In American slang: know the score, what’s up, what’s happening, including inside oneself. 94 1972, 119. 95 Quoted in 1972, 119. 96 Nicola Gardini (2019, 5–6) is one such “self,” asking: “Why submit ourselves to the cult of instant access, of destination over journey, of answers at the click of a button, of the shrinking attention span? Why surrender to the will-­less, the superficial, the defeatists, the utilitarians?” 97 1972, 122. 98 1972, 122. 99 1972, 123. 100 1972, 126–127. 101 1972, 129. 102 Ibid. That mechanical principle was temporal and gendered, as Berardi (2012, 90–91) points out: “Masculine potency is essentially perceived by Italian futurists as a problem of acceleration and we must not forget that Italian futurity was very much concerned with the problem of the masculinization of perception of time, of politics, of power.” 103 Crary 1999, 307. 104 1999, 308. 105 Quoted in 1999, 308. 106 Dewey, quoted in 1999, 313. 107 1999, 313. If there remains an “individual” that is, aside from a “profile.” Citing the “info-­acceleration” and “stimulus-­intensification that broadband technology has made possible,” Berardi (2012, 115) suggests that the “whole sphere of emotionality is invested by the intensification of the rhythm of the infosphere.” What and who, then, is left over? 108 Quoted in 1999, 313.

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109 1999, 313. In addition to “focus” and “intensity,” time too might require “reconstruction,” as “attention cannot be infinitely accelerated” (Berardi 2012, 97). 110 James’ “stream of consciousness,” John Kaag (2020, 100) points out, is a “seamless movement, always in the middle of things.” Its “first proposition,” Kaag (2020, 101) continues, “is that thought is always personal, in other words, subjectively held and experienced.” Indeed: “Thoughts are always perfectly unique and perfectly one’s own. Everything can be taken from you, but you remain in possession of your stream of thought” (2020, 102). 111 1999, 314. 112 1999, 315. 113 1999, 316. 114 1999, 316. When the past has been expunged from the present by an obsessive insistence on “the new,” prolonging the past in the present isn’t an option, only reactivation is – however remote an option reactivation is. And, as I suggested in Chapter 3 and as McGlazer (2020, 17) reminds, even the “Latin class, as the site of a long-­dead language and defunct tradition, might yet shelter alternative possibilities, […] might put students in touch with still-­available resources from the past and even in some cases show them ways out of a present impasse.” A “Hail Mary Pass” I agree, but time is running out. 115 1999, 317. Many students of currere acknowledge the same. 116 1999, 317. Now even attention is monetized; Berardi (2012, 97) notes that the “semio-­capitalist world is a market of attention. Market and attention had become the same thing.” 117 1999, 317. 118 Du Bois’ concept is a form of non-­coincidence with what is: Pinar (2019b, 271). For Jales Coutinho (2022) it becomes bifocality, a praxis of conscientização. 119 1999, 317. 120 1999, 317. I should have thought the contrary would be the case: the more precise one’s memory, the freer one is from routinized repetitive patterns. Reactivation of the past is pointless unless one’s past is re-­experienced exactly (or as exactly as possible). What double consciousness allows is the reconstruction of residues of the past in juxtaposition with present thought, feeling, behavior. 121 1999, 317. Habits are not necessarily mindless; when consciously cultivated and focused they mobilize action. Understood as customs, “they are the repositories of pasts. They remain … things ‘to be done,’ and means by which we might yet become something.” McGlazer (2020, 52) is here analyzing Walter Pater. One “something” someone became was Roland Barthes: “it’s hard to think of a better or more brilliant student of Pater’s than Roland Barthes” (ibid.) 122 Quoted in 1999, 317. 123 Quoted in 1999, 317. 124 1999, 318. 125 1999, 318. 126 Quoted in 1999, 318. 127 1999, 318. 128 1999, 319. 129 McGlazer (2020, 206 n. 74) shows “how Pasolini’s late work everywhere attests to the survival and the still-­possible return of that which has been declared long gone,” in McGlazer’s view, a “dynamic rather than dichotomous approach to history; one that does not declare any past over and done with definitely.” Maybe not a revolutionary force, but certainly a sobering and clarifying force the past can be. 130 1972, 165. 131 1972, 166. Recall my affirmation of intransigence in 2012, 237–238. 132 1972, 166. Recall my affirmation of character in 2011, 9–12.

226  Absence

133 1972, 92. The abrasiveness of embodied experience, I am eager to add: see Chapter 10. 134 Quoted in 1972, 92. “Sensibility,” Berardi (2012, 121) reminds, “is the ability of the human being to communicate what cannot be said with words.” While Berardi worries that “life” online suppresses sensibility – yes, it can – I would remind him of Mary (played by Margherita Caruso) in Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew, whose enigmatic expression says it all: see Chapter 13. 135 Quoted in 1972, 92. “Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality,” Virginia Woolf (2014, 5) writes, “this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-­fitting vestments as we provide.” 136 1972, 92. 137 2020, 157. Kaag (ibid.) points out that even “suffering ‘individuates,’ meaning it is experienced subjectively, in isolation, but this, in fact, is the underlying commonality of the social world.” 138 n.d.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press. Berardi, Franco. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e). Butler, Judith. 2017. Arendt: Thinking Cohabitation and the Dispersion of Sovereignty. In Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis, edited by George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek (220–238). Duke University Press. Cazdyn, Eric. 2012. The Already Dead. The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Duke University Press. Chee, Alexander. 2018. How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Cohen, Daniel. 2021. The Inglorious Years. The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society. Princeton University Press. Coutinho, Allan Michel Jales. 2022. Curriculum Work and Social Justice Leadership in a Post-­ Reconceptualist Era: Attaining Critical Consciousness and Learning to Become. Routledge. Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. MIT Press. Cusk, Rachel. 2021. Second Place. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Earle, William. 1972. The Autobiographical Consciousness. Quadrangle. Gardini, Nicola. 2019. Long Live Latin. The Pleasures of a Useless Language. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Han, Byung-­Chul. 2021. The Palliative Society. Polity. Lee, Nicole, Wong, Lesley E., and Ursino, Joanne M. Eds. 2022. Lingering with the Works of Ted T. Aoki. Routledge. Kaag, John. 2018. Hiking with Nietzsche. On Becoming Who You Are. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kaag, John. 2020. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. How William James Can Save Your Life. Princeton University Press. Knox, Shauna. 2022. Engaging Currere Toward Decolonization: Negotiating Black Womanhood through Autobiographical Analysis. Routledge. Lockard, Joe. 2008. Facing the Wiindigoo: Gerald Vizenor and Primo Levi. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (209–219). University of Nebraska Press.

Absence  227

Mackay, James. 2008. Diane Glancy’s Paradoxes of Survivance. In Survivance. Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor (247–269). University of Nebraska Press. Macpherson, C.B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke. Oxford University Press. McGlazer, Ramsey. 2020. Old Schools. Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress. Fordham University Press. Moeller, Hans-­Georg and D’Ambrosio, Paul J. 2021. You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. Columbia University Press. Phillips, Carl. n.d. A Politics of Mere Being. Poetry Magazine. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/91294/a-­politics-­of-­mere-­being Pinar, William F. 2004. What Is Curriculum Theory? Lawrence Erlbaum. Pinar, William F. 2011. The Character of Curriculum Studies. Bildung, Currere, and the Recurring Question of the Subject. Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, William F. 2012. What Is Curriculum Theory? Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019a. What Is Curriculum Theory? Routledge. Pinar, William F. 2019b. Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology. University of Ottawa Press. Pinar, William F. and Irwin, Rita L. Eds. 2005. Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki. Lawrence Erlbaum. Riesman, David, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer. 1950. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Yale University Press. Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual. The Origins of Western Liberalism. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Harvard University Press. Weintraub, Karl Joachim. 1978. The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. University of Chicago Press. Williamson, Ben. 2013. The Future of the Curriculum. School Knowledge in the Digital Age. MIT Press. Woolf, Virginia. 2014. Virginia Woolf: Essays on the Self. Notting Hill Editions Ltd. Zambreno, Kate. 2021. To Write As If Already Dead. Columbia University Press.

APPENDIX

Currere Bibliography Since its initial formulation, currere has contributed to numerous efforts to understand curriculum by emphasizing educational experience. In addition to a wide range of studies, there is also an annual conference, a journal – www.currereexchange.weebly.com – and numerous books and articles devoted to currere studies, several (but by no means all) of which are listed below. Baszile, Denise Taliaferro. 2016. Critical Race/Feminist Currere. In The Sage Guide to Curriculum in Education, edited by Ming Fang He, Brian D. Schultz, and William H. Schubert (119–126). Sage. Bigloo, Fay. 2021. Cosmo-­Currere: To Understand Curriculum as Bio-­Geospheric Justice and Terra-­Didactic Text. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of British Columbia. Brant-­Birioukov, Kiera Kaia’tano:ron. 2021. Kanenhstóhare: The Educative Possibilities of Indigeneity, Estrangement and Homecoming. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of British Columbia. Burns, James P. 2018. Power, Curriculum, and Embodiment: Re-­ thinking Curriculum as Counter-­Conduct and Counter-­Politics. Palgrave Macmillan. Casemore, Brian. 2008. The Autobiographical Demand of Place. Curriculum Inquiry in the American South. Peter Lang. Casemore, Brian. Ed. 2022. Dialogical Engagement with the Mythopoetics of Currere: Extending the Work of Mary Aswell Doll across Theory, Literature, and Autobiography. Routledge. Chen, Samuel. 2021. Legacy in a Family Business Context: An Intergenerational Curriculum to Foster Legacy and Assist in Navigating Transitions. Unpublished Ed.D. dissertation, Simon Fraser University. Doerr, Marilyn. 2004. Currere and the Environmental Autobiography: A Phenomenological Approach to the Teaching of Ecology. Peter Lang. Doll, Mary Aswell. 2017a. The Mythopoetics of Currere. Memories, Dreams, and Literary Texts as Teaching Avenues to Self Study. Routledge.

Appendix  229

Doll, Mary Aswell. Ed. 2017b. The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies: A Festschrift in Honor of William F. Pinar. Routledge. Grumet, Madeleine R. 1988. Bitter Milk. Women and Teaching. University of Massachusetts Press. Johnson-­ Mardones, Daniel F. 2018. Curriculum Studies an International Conversation: Educational Traditions and Cosmopolitanism in Latin America. Routledge. Kanu, Yatta and Glor, Mark. 2006. “Currere” to the Rescue? Teachers as “Amateur Intellectuals” in a Knowledge Society. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 4 (2), 101–122. Kincheloe, Joe L. 1998. Pinar’s Currere and Identity in Hyperreality: Grounding the Post-­formal Notion of Intrapersonal Intelligence, in Curriculum: Toward New Identities, edited by William F. Pinar (129–142). Garland. Knox, Shauna. 2022. Engaging Currere Toward Decolonization: Negotiating Black Womanhood through Autobiographical Analysis. Routledge. Martin, Jill Voorhies. 2009. Currere and The Hours: Rebirth of the Female Self. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 25 (1), 100–109. McNulty, Morna McDermott. 2018. Blood’s Will: Speculative Fiction, Existence, and Inquiry of Currere. Peter Lang. Nazari, Saeed. 2021. Dialogue for Student and Teacher Development: My Persian Currere. Peter Lang. Norris, Joe and Sawyer, Richard D. Eds. 2012. Toward a Dialogic Methodology. In Duoethnography: Dialogic Methods for Social, Health, and Educational Research, edited by Darren Lund, Richard D. Sawyer and Joe Norris (9–39). Left Coast Press. Palmer, Leslie L. 2019. Intern Teachers Using Currere. Discovering Education as a River. Peter Lang. Paul, W. James and Beierling, Susan. 2017. Currere 2.0: A 21st-­Century Curricular “Know Thyself ” Strategy Explicating Cultural Mediations of What It Means and Not to Be Fully Human. In Through a Distorted Lens: Media as Curricula and Pedagogy in the 21st Century (3–19). Sense. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­94-­6351-­017-­2 Pinar, William F. 1975. “The Method of Currere.” Paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC. https://eric. ed.gov/?id=ED104766 Pinar, William F. 2020. Currere. In Key Concepts in Curriculum Studies, edited by Judy Wearing, Marcea Ingersoll, Christopher DeLuca, Benjamin Bolden, Holly Ogden and Theodore Michael Christou (50–52). Routledge. Pinar, William F. and Grumet, Madeleine R. 2015 (1976). Toward a Poor Curriculum. Educators’ International Press. Schubert, William H. 2009. Currere and Disciplinarity in Curriculum Studies: Possibilities for Education Research. Educational Researcher 38 (2), 136–140. Strong-­Wilson, Teresa. 2021. Teachers’ Ethical Self-­Encounters with Counter-­Stories in the Classroom. From Implicated to Concerned Subjects. Routledge. Strong-­Wilson, Teresa, Ehret, Christian, Lewkowich, David, and Chang-­Kredl, Sandra. 2020. Provoking Curriculum Encounters Across Educational Experience: New Engagements with the Curriculum Theory Archive. Routledge. Thomas, Samira. 2017. Grief and the Curriculum of Cosmopolitanism. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Wang, Hongyu. 2010. The Temporality of Currere, Change, and Teacher Education. Pedagogies: An international journal, 5(4), 275–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/15544 80X.2010.509469

230  Appendix

Wang, Hongyu. 2021. Contemporary Daoism, Organic Relationality, and Curriculum of Integrative Creativity. Information Age Publishing. Wang, Wanying. 2020. Chinese Currere, Subjective Reconstruction, and Attunement: When Calls My Heart. Palgrave Macmillan. Whitlock, Reta Ugena. 2007. This Corner of Canaan. Curriculum Studies of Place and the Reconstruction of the South. Peter Lang.

INDEX

Aboriginal cultures 153n108 academic freedom 113 accountability 106, 109–111, 113, 182n52; see also No Child Left Behind Act active learning 64n30 Addams, Jane 43n8, 65n51 Adorno, Theodor 87 affluence 126 Agamben, Giorgio 23 Agathocleous, Tanya 207n101 agency 77, 79n6, 84n71, 89, 92, 99n18, 140, 145, 222n47 Aichele, George 206n50 Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein) 199, 207n87 algorithmic ideology 142 American culture 60, 61n5, 65n52, 80n19, 114, 118n50; see also Southern culture American Educational Research Association 188 Annovi, Gian Maria 88, 89, 91, 95 anti-intellectual tendencies 176 anti-Semitism 81n20 Aoki, Ted 7n37, 20, 24, 73, 79n9, 158, 189n16, 218 Apple (company) 128 Apple, Michael 188 Arendt, Hannah 55, 62n16 Arnold, Mathew 223n67 art 17, 18, 21, 92, 93, 97, 108, 195, 214 Austen, Jane 221n27

authenticity 56, 214–216 authoritarianism 3, 9n64, 77, 87, 90, 91, 150n10 authority xii, 77, 79, 79n8 authorship 90–92, 94, 99n17, 100n44; see also identity autobiography 39, 44n26, 78; see also currere Axelrod, Charles David 36, 44n26, 45n30 Badiou, Alain 99n15, 203 Baker, Edith 63n23 Baldwin, James 5n10, 99n33 Barański, Zygmunt C. 198–201 Barresi, John 165 Baszile, Denise Taliferro 188 Bateman, Donald R. 178, 186 Bell, Quentin 177 Benedetti, Carla 88, 90, 92, 94, 95, 100n44, 101n65 Benioff, Marc 124 Benjamin, Jessica 74, 81n26 Benjamin, Walter 25n3, 47n71, 124, 161, 195, 214, 219, 221n27 Berardi, Franco 41, 44n23, 222n38, 222n40, 223n68, 224n102 Bergamo Conference 187, 188 Bergson, Henri 218, 219 Bevin, Matt 128 Biesta, Gert 76 big data 124, 162 Bildung 69n103, 76

232  Index

Bini, Alfredo 201 Block, Alan 39, 40 Bobbitt, John Franklin 57, 66n60 Burns, James P. 5n10, 188 Bush, George W. 126 Butler, Judith 62n16 Calvin, John 28n57 camouflage 88 Canada 55, 58, 76, 125, 126 Cantatore, Walter 200 capitalism ix, 9n57, 69n98, 81n25, 90–95, 101n80–101n81, 125, 126, 130n12, 132n51, 138, 222n38; see also neoliberalism Cardona, Miguel A. 116n13 Carraro, Don Andrea 200 Caruso, Margherita 197 Casemore, Brian 4n6 Castelli, Elizabeth 90, 91, 95, 96, 195, 196, 203 Catholicism 194, 198, 202–204, 204n7 Cattell, James McKeen 218 Cayley, David 130n8 Cazdyn 46n62 censorship 201 Cézanne 218 Chee, Alexander 8n49 children’s interests xvn43, 57, 59, 70n105 China 55, 58, 68n74 Chodorow, Nancy 74 Chun, Wendy 95 climate change 6n28, 131n23 coding education 124, 125, 145; see also STEM coercion xi, 55; see also agency; freedom Cohen, Daniel 130n5, 211 Cold War 123, 130n10 Comay, Rebecca 25n3 communism 194, 195, 198 complexity theory 22 conformity 79n6, 90, 95, 165 Conrad, Joseph 207n101 consciousness 157, 167n38, 218 constructivism 28n54 consumption 21, 92, 93 contamination 200, 204n6 cosmopolitanism 60, 127, 144, 145, 165, 166 Couldry, Nick 138, 139, 142, 143, 146 Counts, George 69n98, 178 COVID-19 pandemic 5n9, 22, 49n111, 138–140, 147, 149, 150n2

Crary, Jonathan 218, 219 Cremin, Lawrence A. 58 critical pedagogy 188, 189 critical race theory 120n141; see also racism critique 147 Crow, Michael M. 42n2, 140 Cuban, Larry 125 culture of objectification 54; see also objectification Cuomo, Andrew M. 106 currere: development of 20, 173, 184–186, 189; as lived experience xii, 1–3, 88, 174, 175, 177; method of 1, 2, 4, 5n19, 7n36; perceptions of xi, 216; stakes of xiii, 3, 14; see also curriculum; education; knowledge; lived experience; praxis of presence; relationship; subjective presence curriculum: and best practices 163, 164, 179n18; conceptions of 4n6, 42n4, 60, 63n24, 64n32, 70n105, 88, 175, 191n62; experiences of 1, 2, 4, 6n26, 7n37, 41, 173; and future orientation 5n11, 36, 110, 127; private influence on 124, 125, 129, 145; see also currere; education; knowledge curriculum reform 58, 63n26, 120n141, 158, 185–187 curriculum theory 31n134, 54, 186, 189 D’Ambrosio, Paul J. 13, 87, 212, 213, 215, 223n80 Dasein 18 data colonialism 138–144; see also technologization Davey, Monica 163 Davoli, Ninetto 197, 201, 203 Debars, William F. 42n2, 140 de Beauvoir, Simone 202 decolonization 216 dehumanization 31n147 Deleuze, Gilles 147 democracy x, xi, 55, 57, 77, 81n20, 92, 150n10 desubjectification 36, 37 DeVos, Betsy 116n13, 126, 132n51, 132n53 Dewey, John xi, xivn24, 55, 58, 59, 62n21, 63n24, 66n56, 81n21, 128, 160, 161, 218 dialogical encounter 175, 185, 186 digital citizenship 144, 145

Index  233

digital society 152n58 Dillard, Annie 8n49 discrimination 108, 118n50; see also racism diversity 124 Doane, Mary Ann 124 Doi, James 178 Doll, Jr., William E. 13, 25n8, 46n53 double consciousness 22 Du Bois, W.E.B. 44n29 Duncan, Arne 89, 93, 98n14, 106, 116n13 education: as a consumer good 111, 165; datafication of 141, 143; and democracy 55, 81n20; economics of xvn27, 109, 128; evaluation of 106, 110, 143, 144, 176; experiences of 5n9, 63n24, 65n50, 176; funding 108, 158, 166n15; as gendered 46n58; and the military-industrial complex 118n56; and modernity 123; perceptions of 55, 56, 58, 67n66, 73, 90; privatization of 124, 125; purposes of xvn43, 20, 24, 36, 42n4, 55, 63n28, 158, 222n42; and religion 132n51; and remembrance 35; sites of 38, 40; see also currere; curriculum; knowledge educational freedom xvn43, 54 educationalization 124, 125, 129, 130n10 Eiland, Howard 47n71 Eilenberger, Wolfram 24 Einstein, Albert xvn45 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 118n56 Eisenstein, Sergei 199, 207n87 Eisner, Elliot 187 Eliot, T.S. 7n44 embodiment xii, 5n9, 14, 15, 65n50, 80n11, 81n26, 93, 134n89, 153n109, 157–165; see also lived experience; online education Emerson, Ralph Waldo 26n22, 167n38 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 211 Erleben; see also lived experience; phenomenology estrangement 62n9 ethics 20, 75, 76 Eucharist 17, 19, 28n57, 29n92 exploitation 141, 169n56, 214; see also self-exploitation Facebook 124 family life 75 Farrell, Kelly 163

fascism x, xi, xii, 64n30, 83n68, 87, 89, 91, 93, 188 finance capitalism 222n38; see also capitalism; neoliberalism food security 107 Foucault, Michel 75, 77, 78, 83n55, 190n44 Frankfurt School 66n56 freedom 78, 100n42, 128 Freire, Paulo 179n17, 181n44, 185 Freud, Sigmund 9n66, 76, 78, 81n23, 102n109, 223n67 Frye, Northrop 76 future 2, 5n11, 13, 41, 127, 211; see also past; present; presentism Futurist Manifesto 217 Gardini, Nicola 168n51, 220n6, 221n13 gender 3, 41, 43n13, 46n58, 69n104, 74, 81n25, 100n45, 141, 187, 188, 203, 224n102 gender studies 128 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 7n42 genocide 35, 41, 43n11, 44n27, 88, 132n40 Gentile, Giovanni ix, x, xi, 9n60 Germany 127 gig economy 124 Ginsberg, Allen 198 Giroux, Henry A. 188 Glancy, Diane 26n19, 41 globalization 138 Goffman, Erving 143 Google 128, 145 Gordon, Robert S. C. 89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 206n62 Gospel According to Saint Matthew, The (Pasolini) 194–204, 208n126 Goytisolo, Luis 198 grading 58, 80n15, 109, 118n56 Gramsci, Antonio x, xi, 64n30, 68n78, 188, 200 Grant, George 17, 18, 22, 35, 43n11, 101n63, 123–129, 130n8, 143–149, 173, 174, 188 Greene, Maxine 45n35, 178, 186 Grumet, Madeleine R. 15, 39, 59, 175, 179n17, 186, 188 Guattari, Félix 147 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 15–24, 29n92 Han, Byung-Chul 4n5, 8n48, 31n136, 36, 138, 139, 151n31 Hanafi, Zakia 149, 150

234  Index

Harlem Renaissance 3, 64n32 Harvey, David 28n58 Hastings, Reed 124 Heidegger, Martin 17–19, 21, 24, 28n63, 31n136, 46n51, 101n63, 176, 177 Heilbroner, Robert L. 151n33, 152n47 Hendry, Petra Munro 188 Henry, Patrick 65n50 High Stakes (Johnson and Johnson) 106–114 historicism 220n7 history 28n63, 41, 94, 130n8, 211; see also autobiography; currere; lived experience; past Hocking, William Ernest xvn43 Holocaust 22, 35, 43n11, 89, 101n73 Holt, John 7n44 homophobia 212 homosexuality 89, 91, 99n33–99n34, 197, 203, 204; see also sex Huebner, Dwayne E. 39, 42, 68n83, 176, 178, 186 human capital 45n39; see also neoliberalism humanities 19, 20, 22, 41, 127, 217; see also STEM IBM 144 identity 10n72, 91, 101n65, 188, 212–216; see also authorship; subjective presence; subjectivity imagination 27n48, 44n25 impotentiality 23, 31n147, 37 Indigenous peoples 64n33, 188, 220n7 individualism 3, 7n44, 8n48, 8n50, 99n16 individuality 54, 59, 61n5, 224n107 instrumental rationality 31n134 internet space 151n31, 151n35, 159; see also technologization interpersonal skills 169n62 interpretation 17, 19, 27n48; see also presence intimacy 148, 162; see also relationship intransigence 36 Irazoqui, Enrique 198, 199 Italian society 88, 103n145 James, William 14, 40, 62n21, 150n3, 218 Jameson, Fredric 28n58 Jay, Martin 46n51, 65n50, 157, 160, 161, 165, 176 Jennings, Michael W. 47n71

Johnson, Bonnie 106–114 Johnson, Dale 106–114 Johnson, Lyndon B. 185 Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT) 187 Jung, Carl 222n60 justice 25n1–25n2, 60, 120n141, 188, 189, 220n7 Kaag, John ix, xivn1, xivn24, xvn43, 5n21, 14, 26n22, 41, 167n34, 220 Kant, Immanuel 164 Kapleau, Philip 177 Kemp, Andrew T. 176, 177 Kennedy, John F. 185–187 Kennedy, Robert 185 Kerouac, Jack 198 Kierkegaard, Søren 24, 47n78, 176 Kilpatrick, William Heard 54–61, 61n5, 62n6, 62n21, 63n26, 65n51, 69n98 Kincheloe, Joe L. 188 King, Jr., John B. 116n13 King, Jr., Martin Luther 185 Kirkland, David E. 126 Kittler, Friedrich 37, 46n56 Klohr, Paul R. 15, 67n70, 175–178, 186, 187 knowledge: as gendered 46n58; and objectivity 127; perceptions of 19, 22, 58, 168n51; as separate from skill 67n70; utility of 76, 82n42; valuation of 35, 42n3, 129; see also currere; curriculum; education Knox, Shauna 216 Koepnick, Lutz 148, 149 Koopman, Colin 45n32, 147, 164, 165 Korman, Jeannine 175 Labaree, David F. 80n17 Lacan, Jacques 98n3 LaCapra, Dominick 129 Lasch, Christopher 6n32, 36, 43n8 Lather, Patti 188 Latin x, xi, 41, 50n119, 50n122, 68n78 learning analytics software 143 lesson planning 111, 112 Lewis, Tyson 35–38, 40, 45n32 literacy 110, 111, 131n24 lived experience xii, 1–3, 14–19, 38, 49n109, 61, 93, 162–165, 167n37, 174–177, 186, 217–219; see also currere; embodiment; phenomenology Lockard, Joe 224n91 Locke, Alain 64n32

Index  235

Locke, John 39, 164 Lowe, Bill 179n14 Lowndes, Rosie 163 Loyola, Ignatius 194 lucidity 147 Luxon, Nancy 38, 39, 74–78, 83n55, 83n67, 164 Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta 202 Macdonald, James B. 118n56, 178, 186 MacIntyre, Alasdair 75, 82n37 Mackay, James 220n7 Macpherson, C.B. 222n59 Maggi, Armando 195, 204 Mahler, Gustav 30n108 Marcuse, Herbert 219 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 217 Martin, Hill Voorhies 165 Marx, Karl 140, 145, 185, 217 Matter and Memory (Bergson) 218, 219 maturity 213 Mayo Clinic 163 McCarthy, Cameron 188 McClintock, Robert 42 McCrory, Patrick 128 McDermott, John J. 65n50 McGlazer, Ramsey ix–xii, xvin48, 1, 9n60, 49n109, 50n119, 64n30, 91, 188, 190n44 McLuhan, Marshall 159 meaning-making 23, 46n66, 98n4 Medea (Pasolini) 96 Mejias 138, 139, 142, 143, 146, 159, 166n19 memory 1, 13, 15, 25n1, 25n3, 35, 41, 94 Microsoft 128, 145 military-industrial complex 118n56, 162 Miller, Claire Cain 117n37 Miller, Janet, L. 175 Miller, Janet L. 186–188 Mitchell, Juliet 165 modernity 9n63, 17, 18, 28n57, 35, 43n12, 93, 123–127, 149, 157, 158, 162, 215, 217, 218; see also postmodernity Moeller, Hans-Georg 13, 87, 212, 213, 215, 223n80 Montaigne, Michel de 165 monuments 133n68 Moore, Alex 4n3, 50n122, 194 Morante, Elsa 207n87 Musil, Robert 46n65 Mussolini, Benito x, 87, 91 mythmaking 95, 96

narcissism xiii, xvin50, xvin55, 3, 6n32, 9n62, 14, 22, 64n31, 93, 216 Narcissus 9n62, 93 National Defense Education Act 130n10 national identity 56, 65n52, 125 nationalism 65n52, 126, 141 Neational Education Association (NEA) 120n141 neoliberalism 35, 36, 44n19, 83n53, 140, 150n2; see also capitalism Netflix 124 New York Times 124, 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich xivn1, 7n42, 14, 41, 167n34, 176, 217 Nightingale of the Catholic Church, The (Pasolini) 194 No Child Left Behind Act 77, 83n66, 106, 113, 115n2 Noddings, Nel 41, 46n58 North, Michael 96 Nusselder, André 162, 163 Obama, Barack 106 objectification xvin51, 54, 61n4, 62n8, 88 O’Donovan 129 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 98n4 online education 5n9, 73, 80n11, 138–141, 147–149; see also embodiment Oracle 145 oral cultures 153n108, 154n129 O’Reilly, Agnes Boyle xvn43 Pagano, JoAnne 79n3, 186 Pallavicini, Lucia 43n11 panopticism 112 parrhesia xii, 76–79, 83n55, 83n67 Parsons, Steve 163 Pasolini, Pier Paolo xii, xiii, 9n60, 14, 19, 35, 43n11, 87–97, 98n14, 99n15, 179n8, 190n44, 194–204, 204n6, 205n28, 207n87, 207n106, 211; see also specific films passivity 18, 36, 168n51 past: disappearance of 127, 128, 133n68, 200; ethical relation to 42n5; experiences of 5n22, 173; perceptions of 13, 19–21, 95; reactivation of xii, 3, 41, 48n108, 50n114, 178; value of x, 220n6; see also future; history; present Pater, Walter 32n150, 49n109 patriarchy 81n25 pedagogy of presence 14

236  Index

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire) 185, 186 Penney, James 45n32 Petitfils, Brad 43n11, 194 Petrolio (Pasolini) 98 Phelan, Anne 31n147, 54, 55, 60, 61, 61n4, 62n9 phenomenology 15, 189; see also embodiment; historicism; lived experience Phillips, Carl 8n52, 220 physical intimacy 139, 140 Picard, Cecil J. 109 Pilder, William 178 plasticity 79n6 Plato 214, 215 poetry 37, 41, 50n115, 50n119, 96 political polarization 140 postmodernity 1, 17, 28n58, 88, 92, 157; see also modernity poverty 107–109, 113, 116n21, 117n37 practicality 82n42, 128 pragmatism xivn24, 14, 54, 62n21, 128 praxis of presence 3, 4, 13–15, 18, 19; see also currere; subjective presence presence ix, xii, 15, 16, 23, 24, 26n15; see also interpretation; relationship; subjective presence present, the xvn45, 3, 21, 29n79; see also future; past; praxis of presence presentism xiii, xvin54, 3, 14, 16, 22, 211, 216; see also future Pringle, Becky 120n141 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci) x private schools 108, 111, 116n21, 126 process-over-content xivn24 Production of Presence, The (Gumbrecht) 15 professionalism 74, 89, 165, 169n62, 180n31 profilicity 212–216, 223n75, 224n107 progressivism xi, xvn43, 57, 59, 61n5 project method 55, 56, 58–60, 63n24, 64n30–64n31, 66n59, 67n66, 68n85 “Project Method, The” (Kilpatrick) 55 propaganda x, xii, 60, 145 Protestantism 17, 28n57 psychoanalysis xvn44, 4n6, 9n66, 38, 39, 47n74, 66n56, 74, 75 public pedagogy 201, 202 purposeful activity 55, 56 purposefulness 16, 67n68, 212 Putin, Vladimir 211 QAnon 140 Quaderni piacentini 202

Race to the Top 106 racial justice 120n141 racism 41, 61n5, 83n56, 108, 120n131, 212; see also critical race theory; discrimination Ravitch, Diane 55, 63n23, 68n85 Reardon, Sean F. 117n37 reconceptualization 185–189, 189n16 Reform of Education, The (Gentile) ix relationship: and authority 77; embodied actuality 164; expression of 89; fragility of 73, 74, 80n11; and intimacy 163; and reciprocity 76, 82n45, 109; with a text 39, 40; value of xvin48, 14, 46n66, 75, 163; to the world 24; see also currere; intimacy; presence; subjective presence religion 24, 89, 90, 194, 198, 202–204, 204n7 religious texts 40, 48n98, 130n8, 179n7 remembrance 35, 179n10; see also Benjamin, Walter renunciation 97 research, prioritization of 176, 177, 180n34 resistance 147 Richtel, Matt 158 Ricotta, La (Pasolini) 89, 90, 209n147 Riesman, David 221 Riforma Gentile (Gentile) x Rocha, Samuel 40, 189 Roth, Michael S. 44n29, 76, 165 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 26n22, 164, 219 Rubio, Marco 128 Rugg, Harold 63n27 Ryan-Scheutz, Colleen 197 Saint Paul (Pasolini) 95, 96 Salesforce 124 Salvio, Paula 87, 88 Sartre, Jean-Paul 176, 202 Schmitt, Carl 149 scholarly reputaton 181n35 scholastic mechanicity 131n15 school choice advocacy 108, 126, 132n53 school subjects 59 Schopenhauer, Arthur 167n34 Schwartz, Barth David 196 Scott, Rick 128 secularization xvin56, 48n108, 89, 90, 95, 129, 199; see also technologization Seixas, Peter 49n113 self-experience 162, 163

Index  237

self-exploitation 36, 44n19, 141; see also exploitation self-formation 4, 10n71, 37, 59, 60, 66n65, 75, 76, 79n6, 139 self-representation 206n62 self-self relationship 40, 75, 82n37 self-understanding 14 Settimi, Lucio 200 sexuality 89–91, 96–98, 99n33, 103n145, 139, 140, 197, 203; see also homosexuality Silicon Valley 124, 125 Simmel, Georg 36 Simon, Roger 35 simulation 94, 140, 147–150, 167n25, 168n40; see also subjective presence Singer, Natasha 124 singularity 101n65 Sleeter, Christine 188 Smith, Adam 151n33 Smith, Jason 36 Smith, John E. 65n50 socialization theories 81n25 social media xii, xiii, 212, 223n68; see also technologization social norms 5n16 social workers 113 Socrates 222n60 Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Pasolini) 207n106 Southern culture 61–62n5; see also American culture South Korea 55, 63n24 specialization 41 Spencer, Herbert 42n3, 62n21, 68n78, 82n50 spiritualization 129 Spivak, Guyatri xi standardization 59, 60, 64n32, 141, 163, 164, 175; see also technologization standardized testing 106–111, 116n15, 117n49, 144, 159 Starrett, Robert 178 STEM 41, 59, 60, 123–127, 131n23, 217; see also coding education; humanities STEM state of mind 123, 127 Stenhouse, Lawrence 191n62 stimulus-response model 66n53, 218 stream of consciousness 218 structuring time 14 students as consumers 74, 126, 129, 165 study 14, 36–38, 40, 42, 47n71, 59, 97, 139 subject formation 37, 38

subjective presence: and attentiveness to others 8n53; forms of xii, 1, 13, 14; and physical presence 159; and rationality 24; simulation of 147, 148, 168n40; and social learnign 164; and voice 20; see also currere; identity; praxis of presence; presence; relationship; simulation subjective reconstruction 157 subjective space 151n35 subjectivity 18, 61n4, 62n12, 94, 178n3, 196; see also identity surveillance 143, 152n76, 161 survivance 224n91 symbolist school 17 Taba, Hilda 64n30, 68n85 “Tarsus, from a Distance” (Pasolini) 96 Taubeneck, Steven 179n9 Taubman, Peter 97, 186 taxation 116n21 Taylor, Charles 1 teacher-citizens 141 teachers: ages of 174, 175; creativity of 111; education of 54, 60, 157; evaluation of 106, 176; perceptions of 80n15, 96, 114; relationship to curriculum 94; retention of 169n62; roles of 57, 58, 66n65, 150n3, 165; salaries 109, 110; shortages of 112, 120n117; standardization of 141, 163 technologization: effects of 3, 14, 21, 43n11, 123, 124, 130n12, 151n33, 158, 163, 164, 168n51; and identity 213, 214; ideology of 9n64, 37, 45n41, 126, 127; and narcissism 9n62, 216; and the nation 138, 140; and subjectivity 92, 95, 129, 145, 149, 159, 213, 214; see also data colonialism; internet space; secularization; social media; standardization techno-utopianism 139–141, 152n58 tempo, Il 202 tenure 120n117 Teorema (Pasolini) 14, 97 Testa 199, 205n28 test scores 107 Thoreau, Henry David 26n22 Thorndike, Edward 56, 62n21, 66n53 Todorov, Tzvetan 35, 36, 44n20 Tomkins, George 76, 82n42 Tompkins-Stange, Megan 124, 125 Toward a Poor Curriculum (Pinar and Grumet) 175

238  Index

transference relationship 47, 81n21 trauma 5n22, 6n24, 25n5, 47n74, 74, 75, 108, 111 Trilling, Lionel 217, 219, 221n27 Trilogy of Life (Pasolini) 98 Tröhler, Daniel 123–125, 140 Trueit, Donna 25n8 Truffaut, François 14 Trump, Donald x, xi, xvin50, 49n111, 82n30, 101n73, 126, 211, 213 truth 17, 18, 77, 78, 222n38 Turkey 132n51 Tyler, Ralph 67n66, 187 Uljens, Michael 73, 76 ultraliberalism 35, 36 Underhill, Ruth 64n33 Understanding Curriculum (Pinar) 175, 187 Venice Film Festival 201 Viano, Maurizio 196–198, 202, 204 virtual experience 160 vocationalism 128 Voltaire 202

Wagner, Richard 17 Wang, Hongyu 13, 14 Watkins, William 188 Wells, Ida B. 83n67 Westbrook, Robert 59, 68n85 Whitman, Walt 220, 222n59 Williamson, Ben 123, 129, 130n6, 139, 141, 145, 222n42 Wilson, Woodrow 133n68 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 9n66, 149, 150 Woodson, Carter 188 Woolf, Virginia 35, 177, 207n101 World War I 55, 81n20, 162 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny 198 Ylimaki, Rose 73, 76 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 81n20 Yuting, Chen 158 Zaccone, Margaret 175 Zambreno, Kate 26n21 Zuckerberg, Mark 124 Zuger, Abigail 163