Pedagogies of critique: struggling with what and how to think

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See Deleuze and Guattari (1987 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987. A thousand plateaus, Edited by: Massumi, Brian. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. [Google Scholar], 374–80). 2. Connell (2007 Connell, R. 2007. Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science, Crows Nest, , Australia: Allen & Unwin. [Google Scholar]) argues that the ‘northerness’ of social theory is a result of ‘four characteristic textual moves: the claim of universality; reading from the centre; gestures of exclusion; and grand erasure’. 3. In this essay we borrow the concept of the ‘orthodox form of thought’ from Deleuze (1994 Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and repetition, Edited by: Patton, Paul. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]), but employ it to refer more generally to the dominant ways of thinking valued by, and reproduced within, what Delpit refers to as the culture of power: ‘The upper and middle classes send their children to school with all the accoutrements of the culture of power; children from other kinds of families operate within perfectly wonderful and viable cultures but not cultures that carry the codes or rules of power’ (1995 Delpit, L. 1995. Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom, New York: The New Press. [Google Scholar], 25). To the extent that this culture of power values the classical thought of Western intellectual traditions, and is concentrated in the metropolitan centres of the global north, our notion of the orthodox form of thought is intended to echo the arguments of Deleuze and Guattari (1987 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987. A thousand plateaus, Edited by: Massumi, Brian. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. [Google Scholar]) and Connell (2007 Connell, R. 2007. Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science, Crows Nest, , Australia: Allen & Unwin. [Google Scholar]). 4. Of course, we are not the first to use the concept of a ‘game’ to describe the way in which its rules work to represent certain ‘plays’ in the game as ‘natural’ or legitimate, and others as illegitimate. For example, see Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992 Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. 1992. An invitation to reflexive sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar], 99–100). 5. While we give primacy to the axiological over the epistemological in the argument developed in this essay, we do not do so in terms of ‘axiological knowledge’. We follow Levinas and Derrida and understand ethics not as a matter of knowing what we ought to do in relation to others, but of being responsible to the other amidst irreducible uncertainty. The impossibility of ever gaining access to an adequate axiological knowledge is the condition for ethics, not its demise. 6. Duncan‐Andrade and Morrell, and Delpit (1995 Delpit, L. 1995. Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom, New York: The New Press. [Google Scholar]) in her work, conceive this both/and approach as a synthesis. Zipin, Brennan, and Sellar (2006 Zipin, L., Brennan, M. and Sellar, S. . Making social justice problematic: Exploring an educational aporia. Paper presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education Conference. November, Adelaide. [Google Scholar]) develop an alternative aporetic conception of this both/and logic that emphasises the impossibility of satisfying both demands of this approach in a synthetic manner.