"When scholars study a thing, they strive
To kill it first, if it's alive;
Then they have the parts and they've lost the whole,
For the link that's missing was the living soul."
—Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, Part One (1936—1939)
J. W. Goethe's Faust, Part One opens to an exasperated scholar lamenting the limitations of knowledge and teaching. In what might be a rude summary, he throws his pursuit of Natural knowledge behind him and embarks—yes, with the help of Mephistopheles—on an education of experience, but this can only be done as Mephistopheles assists him in disguise and acting.
Kristie S. Fleckenstein and Karen Kopelson have explored similar pedagogies of exhaustion in their "Resistance, Women, and Dismissing the 'I'," and "Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning: Or, the Performance of Neutrality (Re)Considered as a Composition Pedagogy for Student Resistance," respectively. I use the term pedagogy of exhaustion to emphasize the physical, emotional, and mental tolls that teaching inevitably entails; I use the term as well because of the particular historical moment in which I write, one that clearly reveals a spectrum of fatigue on all sides of the Aisle, even as that fatigue strengthens or conjures resistance. It is for reasons, for moments, like these that Fleckenstein's and Kopelson's essays become vital as means of pedagogical buffering, even if their ideas are not fully or partially adopted by their readers.
To address Fleckenstein first, we must first admit that the multi-interstitial "identities of women in our culture" restrict the movement and identity-formation of women (107), and that this is a gross cultural—I would add moral—deficiency. Even as I write I am acutely aware of my position as a man—a white man—with experience teaching secondary and higher education; this position enables me to comment only as an observer, and in reality my position ought first to be a listener and perhaps rarely a commentator. But to be witness to something is to be changed by it. Fleckenstein's aim is to respond to Bartholomae's "dismissal of material identity, which he discards for an emphasis on textual identity" (108).
I am uncomfortable with Fleckenstein's summary of Bartholomae not because I believe she does him an injustice, but because she brings his case to the dock for a plea of "guilty," and I must concur. Whereas "autonomous identities" exist primarily in those individuals who are not encumbered by the knotty existence that uniting multiple identities entails, the imposition of a textual identity on—let us say it—particularly white, cis-gender, straight males requires little if no imposition or manipulation: the textual identity is de facto without identity; however, for those persons who must navigate the cat's cradle of their embodiment, the addition of another identity is an injustice in the Aristotelian, Augustinian, and Thomist senses: to impose identity is not lawful, does not distribute the due to any, and causes no "reciprocal transactions." Even before Fleckenstein continues her argument, I cannot accept Bartholomae's based on my pre-supposition that a teacher must be just before all.
To turn to Kopelson, let me write this: while I am uneasy with active deception in the classroom, I do not think this is what Kopelson argues for; deception and performance differ wildly: Mephistopheles deceives Faust, but Mephistopheles is to the audience only a performer who nevertheless exerts his influence. I do not think the stage of Kopelson's performance is the classroom; it is student resistance, complete with trap doors and curtains that open and close on the actors without warning.
The actor sacrifices identity, momentarily, for the sake of the audience, and as teachers our audience(s) have paid much more than the price of admission. The "ultimate goal...is to open doors for students, to prevent them from shutting out critical social issues they would likely script as merely personal" (emphasis in original, 129).
How complex a society we live in that in one sphere we are looking to establish a congruent identity and in another we are looking to perform an identity. I am saddened in reading articles such as Kopelson's and Fleckenstein's because of their necessity; while I cannot speak with certainty recalling my early college years, I have no inkling of remembrance that my "clearly visible minority teachers" had nefarious, progressivizing agendas. (My History of Russian Since 1865 professor, however, was very comfortable telling us about the merits of Stalin's "methods." He was white, for what it's worth.)
This sort of performance, though, is not new, as Kopelson demonstrates by discussing techne and metis and their place in ancient Greek education. And resistance as a term does seem to connote a battle or war. In adopting Kopelson's argument, we might risk saying with Faust "In me there are two souls, alas, and their / Division tears my life in two" (1112-3), but I see within Kopelson's and Fleckenstein's arguments far more than division. I read sacrifice and service and devotion there, an attempt to war not against students but against the disunity produced in their lives as a result of homogeneous, non-discursive and non-dialogic education.
(Image courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria Eugene Delacroix, 1828 lithograph)
I do not wish to impose much further on my reader's time, but please indulge this last consideration. The enjoyment of Marguerite becomes the aim of Faust; early on, Mephistopheles instructs him to "Learn, above all, to handle women" (2023). And when learning, power, and identity can be seen as separate—as with Bartholomae—manipulation and oppression will naturally follow.
In addressing a question his protege, Wagner, asks, Faust tells how to bring about the betterment of man[kind]: "Give up pursuing eloquence, unless / You can speak as you feel...compel them with an art / Deeper than words...But what can blend all hearts into a whole? / Only the language of the soul" (530-545). If, then, women have had "to cultivate the voice of masculine privilege" inside their texts (Fleckenstein 114), they reverse Faust's answer, blending their hearts into many in an attempt to gain admittance into the realm of masculine respectability. Yet Faust himself—Goethe, nonetheless—cannot accept Bartholomae's dismissal of identity. We must not be fooled. Mephistopheles does not offer knowledge, but ignorance. The betterment of man[kind] will come through a confrontation of and with personhood.
This is the way toward justice.
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