Ilan Gur-Ze’ev

Counter-Education should not  run away from philosophy. It should present transcendence as a central element of the  struggle against mere life as the purpose of life, a struggle of which  normalizing education and Critical Pedagogy are part of. Education reassures the present realm of self-evidence not only by reproducing absolute truths and a-priory yardsticks; it can be as effective in maintaining the postmodern self-evidence of the market which is supported by the privatization of identities and the ideologies of contingency, fluidity, difference and hybridity.

    Counter-Education is impossible in the absence of a utopian axis. It refuses, however, any positive utopia or any kind of optimism. Here I have to disagree with my critics like Gert Biesta who sugests that ultimately I share the foundations and the optimism of Critical Pedagogy thinkers. In my mind the deviation between an optimistic-positive utopia and a negative utopia is central; there is no room for any positive utopia within the framework of what I call Counter-Education. Exactly this is what differentiates it even from the most radical Critical Pedagogy and or other versions of normalizing education.

     Facing the optimism of all the participants of the symposium but Machelein, I have to stress that Counter-Education, or the struggle against normalizing education, faces not only the closure of the system as an historical set of power relations and symbolic exchanges, as some postmodern thinkers do so well; it begins by addressing the closure of the pre-conditions which enables thinking and activates human relations and the evolution of their products into a system. At the same token Counter-Education  refuses one-dimensional pessimism. It combines the ontological with the historical yet acknowledges that in each level there is special stance to the subject, to knowledge, and to intersubjectivity. In each level there is a different status to the tension between the closure and meaninglessness on the one hand, and human openness and mission which enables transcendence and meaning, on the other. Critical Pedagogy recognizes only the self-evident or one dimension of its construction. It avoids the dialectics of nothingness and being, closure and openess, which opens the door for transcendence, and vitalizes the possiblity of an disillusioned de-mystification of the realm of self-evidence. In this respect I think it was wrong to assert that my thesis is but another version of Critical Pedagogy.

      Most recent versions of Critical Pedagogy, as we can see in the contributions to this symposium, are explicitly anti-positivistic, relativist and emphasize border-crossing, contingency and difference. At the same time they are characterized by two problematic characteristics: the first is a positive Utopia and education for optimist-oriented political activism. The second is their failure to acknowledge the presence of the dialectics of clodure and the openess in life and in thinking refuses mere life as the aim of life. This  failure prevents them to respond to the call for transcending mere life in all its manifestations. It is a central element within Counter-Education to transcend the self-evidence and the other manifestations of normalizing education which praize life, pleasure and truth. This dialectics presents itself in  the tiger leap from transcendence open to the isolated ethical I into another kind of transcendence: an historically situated emancipatory dialogue which strives to alternative intersubjectivity.

     Peter McLaren and Jan Massclein referred to the socio-cultural arena and its power relations as a close system. The kind of openness Masscelein holds, differs substantially from that of McLaren. For Masschelein transcendence is possible, yet it is not a communicative action. In contrary to McLaren’s view he holds that transcendence is possible but not in the level of rational, moral and political intersubjectivity. I think this is why McLaren can offer a positive Utopia of emancipation. According to McLaren transcendence is possible as revolutionary reflection and radical social action: the current oppression, a-symmetrical relations or false education can be universally overcome. Other participants of the symposium are less utopian yet do not give up optimism and reserve the struggle to contingent, temporary and local settings. Jan Masschelein is the only participant who avoids presenting some sort of optimist conception of critical political activism. My conception of Counter-Education is uneasy with McLaren’s positive revolutionary utopianism as well as with Masschelein’s retreat from the historical and from the political. Yet these poles are the most important positions for my conception of Counter-Education. Counter-Education presents transcendence of the ethical I as an open possibility. This possibility enables but does not secure the struggle for a dialogical community. It challenges the given historical facts and enters into local, specific, and concrete political engagements as a manifestation of pessimist utopianism.

     As a special element of being the human being represents a fundamental openness and only as such subjects can actually struggle for their de-subjectification. This is why even as a “subject” she or he can become some-one, an ethical I, who realizes readiness for the call of the “totally Other”, the quest for dialogue, elevation and transcendence and become some-one. In contrary to the conclusions of my critics I think Critical Pedagogy does not share this responsibility with Counter-Education. With all the similarities here the roads split to different directions. Counter-Education alone faces meaninglessness in all its weight and it is here where the ethical I overcomes normalizing education as an a-historical moment which is immanently impotent, from the public point of view.

     The structural aim of normalizing education is to secure the castration, abandonment or perversion of the realization of the human potential for transcendence. And yet, this potential is what determines the subject as human even when actually as some-thing and not as some-one normalizing education activates the “subject” to escape the dialogue which we are. Transcendence is possible only in this sense; as an overcoming of the success of subjectification processes within normalizing education, challenging its immanent quest for nothingness. In light of the responds of critics such as Gert Biesta it is important for me to stress that in contrast to the promise of Critical Pedagogy for direct, actual “empowerment of the oppressed”, within Counter-Education transcendence is a Utopia, yet a concrete utopia; it is always situated within a concrete reality and against specific historical facts of the “internal” and “external” order of things - in face of the fundamental closure of life and its meaninglessness. The tension between the two is what engines Counter-Education and protects it from being  deteriorated into “emancipatory”, normalizing education. This is another good reason to refrain from locating Counter-Education within the framework of Critical Pedagogy and the tradition of positive utopianism.

     As I tried to elaborate here, transcendence as a Utopia of an ethical I is realized as a temporary, a-historical experience, not a communicative theory reducible to a political engagement. The relations between the Ethical I and the critique within a dialogical, political active community is central element of Counter-Education. It is important for the realization of transcendence as a social process of actually overcoming the violence of normalizing education without introducing counter-oppression. This dimension was regretfully missing in the first stage of the dialogue. I can only hope that we will address it in the near future.
 
 

 (1)  A response to my critics in the Critical Pedagogy Symposium.