The

Power of Unknowing
By Judith/Jack Halberstam

Credos have always been a little off-putting to me: first there is the religious element, the Catholic
chanting of a set of beliefs during mass; second, and probably deriving from the first, credos reek
of piety and self-righteousnessnot that I am not self-righteous much of the time, but why
advertise it? Third, I have been turned off to credos by the saccharine This I believe segment on
NPR radio where some pious, self-righteous and quite possibly religious person tells you what he
or she believes and therefore what everyone else in the world must start doing as a consequence.
These I believe segments rarely surprise: I believe there is still a place for love in the world.;
I believe in the sanctity of marriage.; I believe that we can find a way to eliminate phosphate
emissions by the end of the year: and the worst, I believe that everything happens for a
reason. I always imagine myself on the show intoning: I believe that random acts of violence
really do make the world a better place or I believe that pet owning is akin to bestiality. But
precisely because I have imagined myself talking back to the I believe people on the radio, I
believe I can write a credo.
One of the first credos that actually appealed to me appeared in the unlikely form of Kevin
Costner in Bull Durham (really unlikely! I know.) where, in a pitch to win over Susan Sarandon
(a worthy goal), he lays down his credo for her, a list of life lessons he has learned from being a
catcher in the minor leaguesa metaphor for some kind of smart but down-trodden
masculinity.
I believe, says Crash Davis, in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a womans back, the
hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent,
overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a
constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet
spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas
Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
Ok, there is so much that is wrong with this credo: lets start with the obligatory hetero pairing of
cock and pussy, two words you do not want to hear Kevin Costner say by the way, and then
we can move down to the rejection of Susan Sontags novelshmm, she was not noted for her
novels but for her incisive and clear-headed essays and so why even bring up her novels? But the
idea of outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter and living for the hanging curve balls and
the sweet spot, these seem like worthy goals. So, if I were to rewrite Crash Davis, what would I
say? The short version would be something like this: I believe in the queer and the freak, dying
quickly and for a good cause, the long ball, the short book, strong coffee; I believe that high school
students deserve better than The Catcher in The Rye; I believe that Bush lost. I believe that artists
should let others speak about their work, that the push for gay marriage is a betrayal of earlier
generations of queer activism, that Finding Nemo is one of the best films ever made. I believe in
slow food, fast dialogue, hot baths, cold swimming pools. I believe that Ivy League schools tend
not to be the places for intellectual innovation and I do believe that anarchy, creative or
otherwise is possible, preferable and perfectly doable. I believe that Lady Gaga is a genius, that
Justin Bieber is a lesbian and that Prince is Lady Gaga. I think we should abolish English
departments, change disciplines every few years, go back to school, get rid of standardized tests,
all speak 3 languages and I believe in the living wage. I also believe that straight men dont try
hard enough, gay guys try too hard and butches should catch a break.
Well, maybe not, but that is what came to mind when I was asked to write a credo. So, having
offered the quick and dirty version of my credo, let me draw out a few of my hastily offered rules
to live by. In our line of work, professional scholars, there are lots of benefits and not a few
downsides. The benefits include flexible hours, working without an onsite boss, summers
without teaching and job security. But the problems in academia are sometimes a consequence of
those benefits: namely, complacency (produced by job security), laziness, absenteeism (flexible
hours), elitism, nepotism, intellectual snobbery and cronyism. I really do believe that many
academics need to buck up and remember how to learn many people teach the same classes

over and over, repeat the work they did years ago in new scholarship and then jealously guard
the gates of their discipline from intruders and newcomers who might shake things up to such a
degree that their own work becomes irrelevant, anachronistic or at least in need of an update.
Lets remember what tenure is supposed to be for while we ponder some of the stagnancy of the
university: tenure was supposed to protect scholars while they pursued possibly unpopular or at
least counter-intuitive ideas; it should provide a shield behind which socially useless along with
socially useful work can be completed. Tenure, in its ideal form, allows scholars to take risks, try
out daring theses and innovate. But, in a university where senior people often deny tenure to
junior folks much more talented, skilled and qualified than they are, we have to begin to question
the validity of a system that protects the mediocre from the brilliant. And so, I believe in shaking
down the big disciplines once a generation, replacing dinosaur forms of knowledge production
with improvised programs and reinventing curricula, disciplinary knowledge and knowledge
clusters every decade at least. I believe that administrators are too often failed and bitter
academics and that the university needs to dance carefully along the thin line between raising
funds and becoming a corporation.
In recent years, I have been deeply interested in the politics of knowledge and in thinking
through what some have called oppositional pedagogies. In pursuit of such pedagogies, I have
come to realize that, as Eve K. Sedgwick once said, ignorance is as powerful a force as knowledge
and that learning often takes place completely independently of teaching. In fact, I am not sure
that I myself am teachable! As someone who never aced an exam, who has tried and tried without
much success to become fluent in another language, and who can read a book without retaining
much at all, I realize that I can only learn what I can teach myself and that much of what I learned
in school left very little impression upon me at all. I thought about this while watching the
extraordinary French documentary about a year in the life of a high school in the suburbs of
Paris, The Class (Entre Les Murs, 2008, dir. Laurent Cantet). In the film, a white schoolteacher,
Francois Bgaudeau (who wrote the memoir upon which the film is based) tries to reach out to
his disinterested and profoundly alienated mostly African, Asian and Arab immigrant students.
The cultural and racial and class differences between the teacher and his pupils make effective
communication difficult and his cultural references (The Diary of Ann Frank, Moliere, French
grammar) leave the students cold while theirs (soccer, Islam, hip hop) induce only pained
responses from their otherwise personable teacher. The film, like a Frederick Wiseman
documentary, tries to just let the action unfold without any voice of God narration and so we
actually experience close up the rage and frustrations of teacher and pupils alike. At the end of
the film, an extraordinary moment occurs. Bgaudeau asks the class to think about what they
have learned and each write down one thing to take away from the class, one concept, text or
idea that might have made a difference. The class disperses and one girl shuffles up to the front.
The teacher looks at her expectantly and draws out her comment: I didnt learn anything, she
tells him without malice or anger, nothingI cant think of anything I learned. The moment is a
defeat for the teacher, a disappointment for the viewer who wants to believe in a narrative of
educational uplift but it is a triumph for alternative pedagogies because it reminds us that
learning is a two way street and you cannot teach without a dialogic relation to the learner.
I didnt learn anything could read like an endorsement of another French text, a book by
Jacques Ranciere on the politics of knowledge. This book was another revelation to me, a
reminder that I too require a different model for knowledge transmission and reception. Jacques
Rancieres inspired speculations on intellectual emancipation in The Ignorant Schoolmaster
(Rancire 1991) consists of a short series of essays in which Ranciere examines a form of
knowledge sharing that detours around the mission of the university with its masters and its
pupils, its expository methods and its standards of excellence, and that instead endorses a form
of pedagogy that presumes and indeed demands equality rather than hierarchy. Drawing from
the example of an 18th century professor who taught in French to Belgian students who spoke
only Flemish, Ranciere claims that conventional, disciplinary pedagogy demands the presence of
a master and proposes a mode of learning within which the students are enlightened by the
superior knowledge, training and intellect of the schoolmaster. But in the case of Joseph Jacotot,
his experience with the students in Brussels taught him that his belief in the necessity of
explication and exegesis was false and that it simply upheld a university system dependent upon
hierarchy. When Jacotot realized that his students were learning to read and speak French and to

understand the text Tlmaque without his assistance, he began to see the narcissistic investment
he had made in his own function. Jacotot was not a bad teacher who became a good teacher,
rather he was a good teacher who realized that people must be led to learn rather than taught
to follow. Ranciere comments ironically: Like all conscientious professors, he knew that teaching
was not in the slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having them repeat it like
parrots, but he knew equally well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still
incapable of distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the principle from the consequence,
get lost (Ranciere, 1991: 3). While the good teacher leads his students through the pathways of
rationality, the ignorant schoolmaster must actually allow them to get lost in order for them to
experience confusion and then find their own way out or back or around.
In a less lofty vein, I believe in knowledge both practical and obsolete, knowledge that fosters
collective forms of being and knowledge that breaks with conventional wisdom. To that end, I
want to close my credo with my favorite film of the moment, a film from which I have learned
much about masculinity, life, risk, wildness, love, loss and survival. Based on a Roald Dahl novel,
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, dir. Wes Anderson) tells the story of an aspiring fox who gives up his
wild ways of chicken-hunting to settle down with his foxy lady in a burrow.
As the film begins, we find Mr. Fox striving for something more, looking for excitement in his life,
wanting to move above ground and out of the sedate world of journalism and into the wild world
of chasing chickens. From his new above-ground home in a tree, Mr. Fox can see the three farms
of Boggis, Bunce and Bean and they present him with a challenge he cannot refuse. Who am I?
he asks his friend Kylie, an eager but not gifted possum, and he continues: why a fox? Why not a
horse, or a beetle, or a bald eagle? Im saying this more as, like, existentialism, you know? Who
am I? And how can a fox ever be happy without, youll forgive the expression, a chicken in its
teeth? How indeed?
And of course, Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) cannot be happy without that chicken in his
teeth and he reminds the viewer that the difference between a fox in the hole and a fox in the
wild is just one hunting trip away. While this stop-motion animation marvel seems ultimately to
reinforce the same old narrative of female domesticity and male wildness, in fact it tells a tall tale
of masculine derring-do in order to offer up some very different forms of masculinity, collectivity
and family.
But the best moment in Fantastic Mr. Fox, and the moment most memorable in terms of credos,
comes in the form of a speech that Mr. Fox makes to his woodland friends who have survived the
farmers attempt to starve them all out of their burrows. The sturdy group of survivors dig their
way out of a trap laid for them by Boggis, Bunce and Bean and find themselves burrowing
straight up into a closed supermarket stocked with all the supplies they need. Mr. Fox, buoyed by
this lucky turn of events, turns to his clan and addresses them for the last time: They say all
foxes are slightly allergic to linoleum, but its cool to the pawtry it. They say my tail needs to be
dry cleaned twice a month, but now its fully detachablesee? They say our tree may never grow
back, but one day, something will. Yes, these crackles are made of synthetic goose and these
giblets come from artificial squab and even these apples look fakebut at least theyve got stars
on them. I guess my point is, well eat tonight, and well eat together. And even in this not
particularly flattering light, you are without a doubt the five and a half most wonderful wild
animals Ive ever met in my life. So lets raise our boxes to our survival.
Maybe it is not quite a credo, something short of a toast, a little less than a speech, but Mr. Fox
gives here one of the best and most moving addresses in the history of cinema. Like Mr. Fox, I
believe in detachable tails, fake apples, eating together, adapting to the lighting, learning not to
learn, risk, sissy sons, and I believe in the raw importance of survival for all those wild souls that
the farmers, the teachers, the preachers, the parents and the politicians would like to bury alive.