The passage from Difference and Repetition that shocked my thinking came on page twenty-three where Deleuze writes the following: “We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do’. Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce” (Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.) What does this mean? For me, Deleuze is marking a distinction between two modes of teaching. The first is the more common, but by no means the more effective. Deleuze encapsulates that method with the imperative, “Do as I do.” The teacher who utters this phrase, either explicitly or implicitly, seeks to act as a model for his or her students. The wish embedded within the phrase is one that would find a transformation within a student resulting from a kind of Aristotelian mimetic operation through which the student comes into class without a clue; the students then deduces a method for approaching a certain object or field of study by watching the performance of the professor, and then the student embodies that method and acts like the teacher. Through this mimetic procedure, the student apes the teacher’s method and in so doing becomes capable of learning something about something else.
When I discovered Deleuze’s thought, I was a bit dismayed. I must admit, I had frequently talked about teaching as modeling a certain method of approaching objects and fields of study. I had thought that, as distinct from simply dictating what specifically one must learn from a given topic of discussion, modeling a line of inquiry was an effective method for showing students new ways of thinking. Perhaps you, too, are reading this and thinking, “What’s so bad about ‘Do as I do’?” I think that Deleuze’s insight unfolds from the belief that modeling methods of thinking is equally as dangerous as offering concrete answers to complex problems. Why dangerous? Because implicit in the act of asking a student to “do as I do” is the notion that “you can’t do it like that.” There is a foreclosing of possibilities by producing one’s own method of investigation as the one to be watched and copied. What then is the solution? Deleuze offers one, but it is by no means easy to understand, at least not at first. In opposition to “Do as I do,” Deleuze posits the invitation, “do with me.” This invitation, he continues, requires the teacher “to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.” In my own words, I would translate Deleuze’s proposition to mean that a more potent pedagogical method derives from the ability to plant guideposts within students fields of perception. These guideposts mark out not one path but many paths, such that one student may choose to explore the winding road that leads to the riverside, while others may choose to hike up over the mountains. Moreover, the guideposts and multiple paths do not chart out walkable routes within the teacher’s own mental terrain; rather, the guideposts appear within each student’s mental terrain. If the former were true, then the teacher would simply be helping students to navigate the pedagogue's own way of seeing. With the latter, each student has the opportunity to interpret the guideposts in his or her own way; each student can arrive at that interpretation by drawing on the knowledge he or she brings into the classroom space from previous life experiences.
Now, for a teacher to accept Deleuze’s challenge, he or she must let go of certain expectations. First, the teacher must recognize that there is no “one-to-one” correspondence between what one teaches and what one learns, therefore the teacher may not see the students immediately internalize the ideas under discussion. The teacher cannot hope to smoothly transmit a fact or a piece of knowledge to the students. There is, on the contrary, so much turbulence in the learning process that one must relinquish the notion of “getting it” entirely. As my friend Jeff has pointed out, this may not hold true for teachers in the sciences who have (or at least think they have) actual factoids to transmit. There is usually an answer to 3 + 4 = x. In my field, however, where philosophical concepts and artistic affects fill the syllabus, there is no answer to get. As a teacher, then, I will not see students “get” anything. I will only see them struggle to think about the notion that there is nothing to get; that there is some other type of education that culminates in the process of thinking; that there is something strange going on here in the classroom. Joanne, my wife, compares this form of teaching to planting seeds, but the blooms that sprout will do so in twenty years when the student lives in a different country. We might never get to see the bloom.
Second, teachers offering the invitation of “do with me” must surrender their self-satisfaction of having attained a terminal degree. That I have this doctorate means nothing to the students. How does that fact help them to learn or to go off sauntering through their fields? Rather than allow the Ph.D. to erect an impermeable barrier between the teacher and the student, one must set the stage of the class as a space of experimentation in which everyone, teachers and students, come together to think through problems. Again, the aim is not to solve the problems. The aim is especially not to give the answer to the students. Instead, the classroom space must be a site of investigation where the students and the teacher do the exploration together. All sorts of institutional paradigms attempt to stop this type of teaching before it even begins. Students have, in many cases, started to expect a teacher to be a Master of a certain subject and to provide answers to the questions that appear throughout the semester. Students want the satisfaction of having “earned their money’s worth” of education, since they pay through the nose to sit in that classroom space. Nevertheless, the teacher seeking to grapple with the ideas proposed by Deleuze must negate those paradigms, must make them visible in order to deauthorize their legitimacy, and then set about composing an alternate dimension in which the classroom space becomes free for experimentation and where students feel able to articulate problems without the need of answers. I know from first hand experience that this is a struggle, but I think it is necessary if we care about fostering creative thinkers instead of manufacturing automatons.
In terms of the questions I posed at the start of this essay, I think my confrontation with Deleuze leads to the following answers. First, “Am I teaching for myself?” Absolutely not. And yet, neither am I selflessly working for the betterment of the student. What occurs in the classroom must consist in a dialectical movement between my own subjective tactics and the performances of the students. I can try to strengthen the discipline with which students approach a given line of thought or object of study, but I cannot do so in order to make myself feel superior; nor can I seek to discipline them by negating all the struggles with discipline that each student has undergone prior to arriving in our classroom. Second, “What do I want these students to be doing in this class?” I want these students to do three things. One, I want students to summon all of their individual expertise in an effort to think through a series of problems that, though perhaps not at first glance, relate to their own lives. Two, I want them to infuse their own expertise with doubt in order to say something along the lines of, “perhaps I don’t know what I’m talking about.” This doubt creates space to learn and keeps the possibility open that there are numerous ways of thinking about any one given idea. Third, I want students to work together to relate whatever we happen to be examining back to their lives, both individual and collective. What is the point of learning about Ancient Greece if we aren’t going to turn that knowledge back on our own contemporary moment? Most importantly, however, I expect myself to engage in these three activities along with the students. Finally, “What can we really hope to accomplish in this space provided by this educational institution?” My answer to this question has two parts. On the one hand, we can hope to make plausible the notion that things are not okay. In other words, we can hope to make visible the expectations on the students and the teacher, imposed by the institution, that the goal of learning is to know something solid; that the goal of college is to obtain a diploma in order to get a job; that a professor must profess and a student must sop up that which is professed. We can hope to make these expectations visible in order to suggest that other ways of educating are possible; that thinking is a performance in and of itself, one that requires discipline; that education not be reduced to an economic necessity; that we are all doing this thing together, this thing called learning, teachers and students alike. On the other hand, and at the same time, we can hope to make visible what Mathew Goulish refers to as the “irreducible complexity” of all things. If we truly want to be good actors, directors, designers, writers, thinkers, people, etc., then we have to stop trying “to get it” and start immersing ourselves in the kaleidoscopic explosion of perspectives that results from a deep immersion within a problem, an object, a performance, etc. Changes in the “way things are” will proceed from immersion in the details of these things.
Immediately, these hopes run smack into the oppositional movements of educational institutions and the ingrained or learned behaviors adopted by students through years of No Child Left Behind and other initiatives that seek to reduce education to the achievements that one can measure through quantitative analysis. This point of collision is where Paolo Freire comes into the picture for me. In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire lays the foundations for his critical pedagogy, which rises from a dialogic exchange between teacher and student. He sets this notion of dialogue in opposition to what he calls the “banking method” of education through which a professor seeks to deposit information into a student, much like one might deposit money into a bank. For Freire, the banking method only reifies the unequal power dynamic between a teacher who knows and a student who knows nothing. By contrast, the dialogic method seeks to establish a more equal relationship between teacher and student by empowering the student to draw on his or her life experience to interpret the world. The philosophical worlds of Deleuze, on the one hand, and Freire, on the other, though drawing from a similar lineage that includes Hegel and Marx, have substantial differences. That said, the model of “do with me” that Deleuze advances in Difference and Repetiton has numerous resonances with this dialogic method of critical pedagogy that Freire and his followers endorse.
Personally, I’ve had a difficult time relating many of Freire’s insights into pedagogy to my own experience as a college professor. The primary reason for this comes from the fact that Freire’s mission was to engage peasant and members of the proletariat in dialogue about the socio-economic and political conditions that kept them laboring for meagre means of subsistence all for the benefit of the landowners and/or capitalist businesspersons who maintained a higher quality of life by keeping the workers down, so to speak. How precisely do we reconcile the difference between peasants laboring in fields and students attending American higher educational institutions? The relation between the one and the other is not direct, for reasons that I don’t need to go into here. At the same time, Freire opens many avenues of thinking that connect the seemingly dissimilar peasant and American college student. No doubt, these avenues of connection explain the prominent place that Freire holds within the pedagogical practices of teachers in higher education.
There is one footnote in particular in which Freire makes explicit mention of middle class students and the challenges they face, and it is this footnote to which I want to draw your attention. The quotation uses the expression “limit-situation,” which occupies a primary position in Freire’s critical apparatus. The term refers to a perception of reality that takes a given set of limits produced by society as natural and unchangeable conditions of life. The opportunity for education arises from a change in perspective through which an individual or a collective begin to see the limits of their situations as changeable and man-made. It is in fact this opportunity that Freire’s educational program targets at every turn. Since the opportunity to change perception entails an actual reshaping of one’s horizons, Freire thinks of education as an act that enables freedom. If a person’s limit-situation dictates that the only option for work one has is to labor in the fields, for example, then that person is a slave to the conditions that present one and only one option. When one educates oneself, one changes the limits of his or her perception. By changing the limits of one’s perception, one enables a freedom of mental movement. Increased mental movement leads to increased physical and societal mobility. The combination of mental or theoretical activity and practical action creates a critical praxis that Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed works to make possible.
After that brief explanation of the “limit-situation,” this quotation should make more sense. Again, it comes from Freire’s effort to relate his pedagogy to students emerging from a middle class background, who, no less than students from any other background, demonstrate the tendency to fight against a changing of perspectives. Instead of blithely embracing the possibility to reshape one’s limit-situation and to free oneself from mental and societal binds, Freire suggests that students resist freedom:
Individuals of the middle class often demonstrate this type of behavior, although in a different way from the peasant. Their fear of freedom leads them to erect defense mechanisms and rationalizations which conceal the fundamental, emphasize the fortuitous, and deny concrete reality. In the face of a problem whose analysis would lead to the uncomfortable perception of a limit-situation, their tendency is to remain on the periphery of the discussion and resist any attempt to reach the heart of the question. (Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York; London: Continuum, 2009. 104)
This quotation bears such striking resemblance to the reactions I’ve experienced as a teacher, that I want to unpack it. In truth, the quotation also speaks to my own experience as student since I, too, have come from a middle class background and have fought against the rationalizing tendencies of which Freire speaks.
First, what does Freire mean when he says that students erect defense mechanisms which conceal the fundamental? The defense mechanisms frequently manifest themselves in one of two ways. First, and here I draw from my own experience, students become defensive and ask questions like, “Why are we learning about this in a theatre class?” The subtext of the question is the location wherein resides the defense mechanisms. I hear within such questions additional claims like, “why are you making me talk about race/class/economics in a class about theatre” and “I already know what theatre is and this is not it.” I actually like these types of aggressive questions because it reveals that the student is invested in something. The challenge lies in how precisely to enter into a dialogue with the student that could lead the student to dissecting his or her own insecurities. Second, and perhaps more interesting, the defensive mechanisms show up in a refusal to speak at all. I recently taught a class about capitalist mechanisms inhering with Cumberland’s 1771 play titled, The West Indian. Students had a difficult time answering any of my questions about the origins of capitalism, the basic building blocks of capitalism, or the significance of talking about capitalism today. One student was able to articulate the idea that when students hear the word “capitalism” they think they are being accused of something and therefore they shut down and resist what they perceive to be a forced confrontation with some aspect of their lives they are supposed to change. This type of articulation is not common, however. More often than not, students defend their positions as innocents by not speaking or by not hazarding answers to questions they fear they know nothing about. In such situations, I try to name the elephant in the room and make the silence the focus of conversation, thereby suggesting that there is some link between one’s unwillingness to speak and one’s unwillingness to learn or to teach oneself. The defense mechanisms of which Freire speaks are the tactics that students deploy to hide this unwillingness from sight.
The “fundamental” problem with capitalism, in other words, is that we all live within it but that we don’t want to talk about it. When we talk about it we confront many unpleasant truths about ourselves and the world, but until we confront those truths we cannot hope to break through their spell. This “spell” is related to the “fortuitous” that Freire also mentions in the quotation above. When he says that middle class students tend to emphasize the fortuitous, he is drawing attention to the fact that one strategy for avoiding the unpleasant conversation about capitalism is to discuss some tangential topic. More specifically, I have seen a tendency to abstract the conversation to general cliches instead of narrowing one’s focus on the relation between capitalism and the self. Students will quickly decry the unfair labor conditions of peasants in South America, but they won’t turn the conversation back on themselves and analyze the capitalist mechanisms giving birth to their own life as a student. If that turn does occur, then the phrase, “that’s just how it is” frequently appears, as though capitalism was fortuitous, simply a chance occurrence that must persist because of some indeterminate amount of complex equations that they as students couldn’t possibly hope to learn. Here, however, I draw attention to that irreducible complexity that I mentioned above and try to shift the focus of conversation away from abstract principles toward how we, the people in this room, deal or refuse to deal with capitalism. Abstraction moves away from the concrete reality of the now in which we all find ourselves enmeshed and which we all work to create whether we are aware of that fact or not.
Again, in my own experience, this tendency to remain on the periphery of a conversation instead of going to the heart of a given problem reveals itself repeatedly in the classroom. This is certainly the case for theatre history classes where the prevailing sentiment of history as something which has already happened tinges students perception of education prior to even entering the classroom. Since history is so removed from us, then all we can do is to learn about it. The presupposition here is that we are separate from history. Our distance from it allows us to occupy a privileged position from which to study it like a corpse in an anatomy theatre. Against this, however, I suggest that we are always already both product and producer of history, and, as such, we must seek to place ourselves into the class discussions. There is no corpse, but there is a living history of which we are all a part. This perspective does not stick at first, as students tend to recoil from the self-reflexive challenge and revert to a safe distance from which to observe the unfolding of the lesson. Freire’s insights have helped me to realize that the effort required to shift attention from peripheral matters to the core of the conversation is always worthwhile. To paraphrase Deleuze, and to draw another connection between he and Freire, we will always fail to find an answer if we do not correctly state the problem. We cannot hope to confront the paradoxes of history if we do not map out the ways in which we are always enmeshed in those paradoxes ourselves.
I believe that the pedagogical methods endorsed by Deleuze and Freire will always result in a rigorous struggle. We must, however, clearly define the terms of that struggle. The struggle should not be between teacher and student, but between the conditions or limits we seek to confront and our own methods of confronting them. While the resistance to the invitation to “do with me” and to Freire’s dialogic method is frustrating and tiresome, the alternative is much more depressing. A world without critical and creative thinking is a world in which the status quo reigns supreme. There is no sign at all that Higher Education in the United States is moving toward the methods of teaching endorsed by Deleuze and Freire. In fact, the university looks more like a diploma mill everyday. But this is precisely the reason that we should evaluate critical pedagogical methods and fight the retreat into static ideological positions by transforming the classroom into spaces of confrontation. I firmly believe that the fight waged in the classroom against passive learning models deserves as much attention as any other fight currently waged. The fight requires an unceasing acknowledgement of one’s own shortcomings and defense mechanisms as well as a tenacity to fight against the defense mechanism erected by students who fear changing their perceptions of the world.
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