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Education and the Subject of Desire

Frank Pignatelli
Published online: 03 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Frank Pignatelli (1998) Education and the Subject of Desire, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural
Studies, 20:4, 337-352, DOI: 10.1080/1071441980200404
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Frank Pignatelli
Education and
the Subject of Desire
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Text Reviewed: Need and desire—out of which grow purpose and

direction of energy—go beyond what exists, and
William Ayers. hence beyond knowledge, beyond science. They
A Kind and Just continually open the way Into the unexplored and
Parent: The unattained future.1
Children of —John Dewey
Juvenile Court.
Boston: Beacon How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?2
Press, 1997. —JaneAddams
Herbert Kohl has written about becoming a
teacher and about what such a decision
asked of him. For Kohl, the issue of hope
becomes a central preoccupation and con-
cern. "After all," he writes, "seeding hope is at
the center of the art and craft of teaching....
Creating hope in oneself as a teacher and
nourishing or rekindling it in one's students
is the central issue educators face today."3
Kohl speaks to the source of this hope. Mr.
Kliensinger, Kohl's high school chemistry
teacher, asks him to tutor his son, Robert, a
year older than Herbert and afflicted with
cerebral palsy. He writes:
My first teaching experience was as a companion,
friend, and fellow learner. I don't know if our time
together was useful to Robert, but it set forces and
energy loose in me that have played a central role
in my development. I am still trying to understand
the character of those forces and the source of
that energy.
337
338 Frank Plgnatelll
And a bit later he adds:

What In our relationship released the teacher in me? I believe it was the
pleasure I got from helping him reach out to me and through that expe-
rience learn ways of reaching out to other people. I could feel him getting
more hopeful about having a place in the world with other people, of
being liked, and being of use.4
Encountering Robert was a painful, even frightening rupture
for Kohl at the same time that it offered him an opportunity
to see himself otherwise, to be otherwise. Kohl's story is not,
simply, about how this encounter with Robert motivated him to
become a teacher. His elusive reference to the energy, forces,
and pleasure released in him suggests something else, or more,
is at play.
William Ayers's book, A Kind and Just Parent, takes us into

the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center School in Chicago
(Audy Home). Reminiscent of Kohl's encounter with Robert,
Ayers opens his book with his own story from his past:
My first encounter with Juvenile Court stretches back to a high school
field trip organized to observe and study the courts and Jails of Chicago.
In retrospect, it couldn't have been more grotesque: thirty-five favored
white boys, casually prepped up in ties and jackets, assembled to
observe justice dispensed to the mob—hundreds of poor boys, mostly
black. We crowded behind the bench and looked appropriately somber
as a judge heard about a dozen cases in an hour. The expressions of defi-
ance, anger, and hatred from the boys below were frightening to me; the
faces of sadness were heartbreaking. I looked away, but not for long—
I was also fascinated and I wanted to see more. I was bursting with ques-
tions: What had this kid done? Why? Was he sorry? Was he dangerous?
How did the Judge know to release one kid and jail another for what
sound like identical offenses? All of those questions stay with me....
Years later Frank Tobin, a teacher I admire enormously invited me to
visit his classroom at Audy Home, and I was caught." (pp. xiv-xv)
Both Kohl and Ayers, through the stories they tell, speak to
the importance of valuing "that space that refuses the measur-
able, that legitimates the concrete in a way that is felt and expe-
rienced rather than merely spoken."5 They turn our attention
to the role desire plays in the pedagogical relation.
THE TERRAIN OF DESIRE

Desire haunts the fixity of meaning and purpose; tests its
worth. It contests tightly packed rational models which aim to
Education and the Subject of Desire 339
explain, predict, and control possible futures. Desire is diffuse,

longstanding; its presence has more to do with degree of inten-
sity and a more complicated, textured, nuanced kind of com-
mitment. Desire presumes risk, disruption, and a taste for
ambiguity. As a subject of desire one is beyond oneself,
stretched, fractured. As the feminist writer Helene Cixious
speaks about it in her essay, "Coming to Writing," desire is a
necessary condition without which her writing could not be
done, could not even be thought about being done; desire as an
unyielding call to enter into forbidden realms, the (male) world
of the so-called prophets. She says: The reasons, mysterious
to me, that give you the "right" to write? But I didn't know
them. I had only the "wrong" reason; it wasn't a reason, it was
a passion, something shameful—and disturbing; one of those

violent characteristics with which I was afflicted. I didn't "want"
to write."6 More is at stake for Cixious than finding the motiva-
tion to write. Motivation, anchored instrumentally to a ratio-
nally conceived plan, entails the need to master, achieve,
accomplish an end iri sight. It has to do with devising a means
by which to bridge what students know with what they want to
know. It presumes that learning needs to be logically related to
the experiences students bring to school and that educative
growth is necessarily marked by such continuity and interac-
tion. Along these lines, the lack of "relevancy" of school work to
the lives of students distinguishes liberal-progressive critiques
of schooling.
Desire, here, stands as a challenge to invent, an obstinate
curiosity.7 A subject of desire presses against an assuring pro-
gressivism anchored securely to an imagined future which
promises harmony, completion, and satisfaction. At the same
time, it stretches postmodern critique beyond intellectual game
and detached analysis investing it with felt needs, a palpable
density, a human context. As a counter-logic to our culture's
incessant need to conflate the social world as an endless series
of commodity exchanges and instrumentalized transactions,
desire emerges as "unrecuperable by the prevailing structure."8
Put differently, desire provides the momentum to disturb the
regularity with which dissent is contained and neutralized to
serve existing asymmetrical relations of power.
This calls for a pedagogical relation which maintains a
necessary and uneasy alliance between desire and rationality.
340 Frank Ptgnatelll
A pedagogical relation predicated upon the centrality of desire

draws one toward the improbable.9 It calls both teacher and
student to be more, to render themselves complex. One refuses
to choose between "bloodless reason" and undisciplined
desire.10 A pedagogy of desire extends the surface of the peda-
gogical landscape beyond the limits of what seems reasonable
and apparent as it acknowledges variant, multiple, shifting
expressions of pleasure and pain, generative memories, pos-
sible futures, and buried, harsh injustices. Fine, for example,
explores this terrain as she identifies and traces the "discourse
of desire" of female high school students around matters of
sexuality who portray themselves, at various points in her
study, as agents as well as victims, caught in contradictory but
very real subject positions that defy the logic of a pure ideology
critique.11 More broadly speaking, a discourse of desire inter-
rogates reason being its own justification.
Ayers sets a troubling, frightening set of conditions within
which to even think about the individual as a subject of desire
in the context of a pedagogy of transformation of oneself and
one's world. Temporary detention is a liminal space where ado-
lescent lives are deferred, put on hold. Both teacher and stu-
dent have no choice but to confront what is painfully obvious,
the almost certainty of each of these young people facing fur-
ther disciplinary action by the State by doing additional time at
Little Joliet, the youth prison.
The kind and just parent the social reformer Jane Addams
envisioned responding to these adolescents around the turn of
the century has been eclipsed by a burgeoning, overburdened
technico-legal machine. This machine, of course, does not
work in a vacuum. It is fueled by a volatile mix of horrific
media images and stories which cast some adolescents as
potential superpredators and worrisome crime statistics pre-
dicting a growth in criminal activity among this age group as
they move into adulthood. It is buttressed by the strong ten-
dency in our society to rely upon punitive responses to crimes
already committed rather than to fortify a community's capac-
ity to offer alternatives to a life of crime.
hi the midst of the harsh, austere conditions of Audy Home,
though, hope manages, at times, to emerge. Mr. Tobins ("Tobs"),
one of the Audy Home teachers Ayers, as already noted, was
drawn to, for example, invites Alex, a former resident and
student of his, to speak with his class, and a language of desire

saturates the classroom. Ayers describes the scene: "Alex is
carried calmly along in the steady flow of stormy words,
vignettes, anecdotes leading to other stories. He is opening him-
self up, cutting back the skin, showing raw nerves and beneath
that a roiling sea of emotion, unthinkable childhood experi-
ences, seemingly unavoidable crises and confrontations. ...The
tough kids, the students are riveted" (p. 65}.
The existentialist knower, writes Maxine Greene, "finds his
[sic] consciousness leaning, stretching, reaching out to trans-
form what Is mute or apparently meaningless Into a communica-
ble reality, significant for him."12 Greene means, here, more than
just a quality of mind to assure deeper understanding of oneself
and one's predicament, limitations, and obstacles. She turns our

attention to what it takes to act, given one's awareness of one's
particular set of circumstances. Uncertainty is fundamental to
being more, to moving out toward a more differentiated world;
risk and consciousness being intimately caught up with one
another. What Ayers bears witness to is the energizing, the revi-
tallzation of a classroom and its transformation at certain
moments into an authentic, vibrant public space. The classroom
becomes a hothouse where the seed of reaching beyond one's
confinement and outcast status is planted and tended. This often
happens, we discover, in the midst of a dialogue constructed
around a piece of literature the class has read. It happens in the
imaginative leaps the adolescents choose to make instigated by a
piece of literature and through the readiness of both teacher and
student to risk moving beyond what is familiar and assuring.
The texts seem to be chosen, as Bruner puts it, "for their
amenableness to imaginative transformation and...presented in
a light to invite negotiation and speculation."13 What we learn
from Tobs" and Mr. B (Willie Baldwin, the other teacher Ayers
writes about) from what manages, at times, to transpire in the
classrooms between them and their students and among the stu-
dents themselves is that their work, at its best, is more than the
sum of pedagogical processes, strategies, and programs deemed
good and appropriate pedagogical practice. Both teachers in
concert with their students manage to construct fragile pockets
of possibility predicated upon taking the risk of dialogue. The
tight certainty of identities each adolescent has both deliberately
cultivated and been confined to/by is loosened.
342 Frank Pignatelli
Ayers's book lies somewhere between what Bruner argues

are two complementary modes of knowing—"a good story and
a well-formed argument."14 As story, Ayers brings a concern for
character, nuance, gesture, for life-likeness. The intellectual
and affective investment adolescents make in a class discus-
sion about a short story, a play, an article in the press unseals
the borders between our world and theirs. Their engagement
with the texts can become a means by which we narrow the
perceived gap that exists between our world and theirs. Their
struggle to articulate their position vis-a-vis a text such as The
Piano Player, for example, provides us with the opportunity to
understand better and gain insight into their circumstances,
what they see as possible, what they take as obstacles. But
Ayers does not loose sight of the social context within which
this drama enfolds; when, for example, he establishes the
irrefutable correlation between poverty, child abuse and neglect,
and the likelihood of juvenile crime. His strong critique of a
set of tired legal-therapeutic practices that, for the most part,
perpetuate and reinforce exclusion, marginality, and further
involvement in a life of crime, mixes with his worries about his
own sons, his memories of being a victim, and the relation-
ships he, himself, develops as a tutor to those adolescents he
writes about. Ayers is unwilling to seal off his professional,
public identities as teacher, researcher, activist from his private
world as once preppy and privileged adolescent, father, hus-
band, and crime victim. He is part of the story he tells and in
choosing to reveal himself from a mix of stances complicates
any definitive reading of these young people, himself, and the
text, itself. Thus, Ayers as parent—"I think of our own three
boys.... I remember my anxiety and occasionally my anger when
I saw them treated as things: a learning disability, a threatening
teenager, a behavior problem." While he is quick to recognize
the differences between his sons, whose chances of ending up
in Audy Home are slim, at best, and the young people he meets
at Audy Home, he goes on to say: "But I can't help thinking:
What if?... I can't entirely resist the obvious and powerful simi-
larities between them and ours: the adolescent bravado, the
sense of invulnerability, the natural narcissism, the precarious-
ness, the frightening lapses in judgement." Taking the position
of "if this were my child," Ayers believes, sets a higher standard
for judgment of these disturbing acts (p. 48).
We come to understand that choosing to take on an attitude

of "what if" demands that those responsible for making judg-
ments embrace the full range of messy, strange details which
compose a life. This peculiar choice flies in the face of cer-
tainty, foreclosure, and uniformity of response. It cuts a wider
girth of indeterminate space within which to understand and
respond to young people who push hard against and trans-
gress norms many take for granted and consider necessary for
the collective well-being. When one takes on the vantage point
of what-if-this-were-my-child, the interpretation assigned to
each of these acts and correctness attached to each decision
lingers, haunted by the possibility that it could have been
understood and responded to differently—more lovingly, more
intelligently, more wisely. Is this too much to ask of a system

crushed by the dimension of the need and driven to respond
cost effectively and in a timely fashion? One thinks of Delpit's
repeated call to challenge a pedagogy predicated upon teaching
"other people's children" because it stretches the distance
between people and contributes in dangerous ways to fixed
readings of those who appear different. Whether the ascription
of otherness is intentional or not is beside the point. What
is important are the multiple ways teachers come to read the
situations and possibilities their students bring with them
(whether confined or not} and how they set upon the challenge
of acting upon those readings.
Much of the beauty of Ayers's text emerges out of his atten-
tiveness to "Tobs" and Mr. B, as they do just this. In the midst
of the harsh, despairing circumstances of a juvenile detention
school, they have found ways to avoid taken for granted, one
dimensional, damaging classifications of these young people.
They keep managing (not all the time) to help their students
reach beyond what too often and too easily gets perceived as
permanent, fixed, inevitable readings of who they are, what is
possible. They have crafted an understanding of teaching as
supple, nuanced, hopeful, sometimes inspiring, and always
moving beyond what is obvious and apparent. Tobins, no
pushover, can admit to feeling hurt by one of his students who
breaks a rule and breeches his trust by smuggling a joint into
his class and smoking it in the backroom. More than this, both
teachers manage to draw upon a deep reservoir of goodwill for
each of the students we encounter. With Mr. Tobins, a former
344 Frank Pignatelll
priest, this goodwill is fortified by his religious faith and

shaped in the midst of his social activism. Teaching has
always been for me a kind of ministery," he states (p. 54). Are
we drawn to Frank Tobins because of this admission or suspi-
cious of his motives? Is he on a holy mission to save souls for
the afterworld and, thereby, insure his own redemption? Ayers
takes a chance in situating a commitment to teaching as a min-
istry and honoring Frank Tobins in this regard. But Frank is
not a weak man who hides under the covers of a belief in a bet-
ter afterlife. His engagement with the young people of Audy
Home for over 26 years demonstrates an extraordinary resolve
to form deep attachments to the young people in ways that
make sense to them. At his best, Frank Tobins manages to take
that risk of dialogue. This risk is sustained and nourished by a

cluster of metaphysical beliefs, to be sure. But what also is
conveyed is Tobins's own capacity to imagine himself in their
shoes. This desire, this ability to stretch beyond oneself in this
way without succumbing to a flabby moralism requires an
awareness and disclosure of one's own vulnerability. William
Desmond talks about taking on the risk of goodwill as "agapeic
otherness." He captures well what is at stake:
In passing beyond the instrumentalized desire that seeks to objectify the
other, agapeic otherness leads to a rupturing of the functional, isolated
self. ...[It concerns itself withj desire's ambiguity and the unsheltering
effected by human flnltude. It reveals something radically postlve in
being unsheltered, for it demands a radical openess to otherness that
sifts desire's ambiguity, allowing the possibility of both a supreme affir-
mation and a supreme debasement.15
What makes Tobins's story significant for the non-believer is
the degree of goodwill he is willing to put forth in the company
of young people who, for the most part, maintain a stance
toward the other as a means of enlarging themselves at the
other's expense. When Tobins's goodwill is recognized by one
of his students a scent of possibility, of transformation sur-
faces. We learn from Tobins that, given the harshness of their
world, their troublesome past, and the dark cloud of additional
confinement hanging over their heads, the chance for good-
will toward the other emerges out of the cultivation of a care
for oneself; a caring marked by the self s ability to challenge
its own fixities and strain toward what might be. Ayers refuses
to give us simple portraits of each of the young people.
He acknowledges the hardened, glossy, frightening image of

adolescent as predator and then pries it open to reveal people
complex and contradictory; kids being silly, sweet. Intelligent
as well as tempestuous and tough. We encounter kids who are,
themselves, anxious and afraid. Both teachers give their stu-
dents opportunities to contest this assigned and internalized
identity. Ayers, himself, is not safely on the sidelines. He
straight out admires Tobins and Baldwin; he forms friendships
with his tutees.
Again, what it might take to cut through the hard crust of
further marginality and the disheartening loss of freedom is
some modeling of vulnerability from one who managed to
break through but refuses to forget; someone who can provide
a "counter-memory" which contests the legitimacy, but more

importantly, the inevitability of closed readings of oneself, one's
world, one's future. Alex, the former student of Tobins men-
tioned earlier, does this. He was/is one of them. He speaks to
the young people about what he remembers and about the
meaning he makes from this past; about what it meant, what it
required of him to beat the odds, to defy the predictions prof-
fered by some. Ayers opens a door and we get a glimpse at
what this might look like: The tension is all physical, while the
voice is vulnerable, confessional. The students arch slightly
toward him to catch his words. They are eager to hear him,
and a little surprised at their eagerness. ...Alex is so brutally
honest, so authentic, so matter of fact in his talk that each kid
feels personally pulled in" (pp. 61, 65). Alex brings to this pow-
erful moment—powerful for the kids, powerful for this
reader—what Maxine Greene calls "a conscious concern for the
particular, the everyday, the concrete." His reflecting back, his
story-making becomes a means by which to "recapture the
nascent logos—our mind just before it emerged from the per-
ceived and vivid and began abstracting."16
Ayers moves us to regard this landscape as generative, fer-
tile; that walking through it, searching it, may, in fact, be nec-
essary, if what we are after is the seeding of possibility; If what
we intend is a more lovely, just, decent set of conditions within
which to choose ourselves. This event, set in motion by Tobins,
is saturated with felt needs, a thick resonance that stretches
beyond the construction of a reasonable argument designed to
persuade kids to turn away from one life and embrace another.
346 Frank Ptgnatellt
If we listen closely to Alex and the young people as they come

together and build local knowledge, if we let them into our
worlds, we may be moved, as it appears they have been, to
devise ways to counter bloodless reason, eviscerated abstrac-
tions, the legal-therapeutic machine.
Encouraged to keep shifting perspectives and, thereby,
enriching our interpretive capacities, we move ourselves closer
to understanding how to respond. I am suggesting that this
response, this pedagogy of desire, is both a reaching out and
opening up to the other. It requires we perform radical surgery
on fixed, unitary readings of what our role is, as educators,
and who "they" are. Singular readings of young people which
shy away from complexity, contradiction, and mystery not only
restrict our understanding and freeze analysis, they actually do

damage to the capacity of educators to repair. They assault. In
bringing us to a place we know, most likely, only in shadow,
this book may jolt educators to recapture the nascent logos
Greene speaks of. How it jolts has everything to do with telling
stories which confound fixed images about the other; stories
capable of providing a substitute for the voyeuristic plea-
sure some derive from getting a glimpse at the forbidden. The
mediated image of "superpredator" youth, for example, Ayers
reminds us, provides a seductive mix of relief, release, and
excitement. Countering this image is a formidable task.
Ayers's bold claim (it is displayed through the stories he
tells, not stated explicitly), is that the classroom can be a place
where such stories enfold—a public space saturated with pos-
sibility, a breeding ground for moral and political indignation,
a site for personal transformation. But clearly the indignation
expressed is not always toward a better, more kind and just
future. Freddie, in Mr. B's class, at one moment providing a
sharp, well-argued opinion about the decriminalization of
drugs, turns menacing at another confronting Andrew with
what Ayers chillingly describes as a "mean smile." Ayers:
"[During free time, Freddie) pokes everyone he passes, pushing
the edge of danger, just this side of violence." Confronting
Andrew, a fellow student, he says, with a menacing rhythm:
"Everybody trying to kick with me. ...All these people trying to
kick it with me. Why you all trying to kick it with me? Why all
eyes on me? Son, why you want to kick it with big Freddie?
Listen, Joe, don't kick it with me. I'm not going anywhere.
I'll be here. Don't kick it, dude" (p. 163). Sometimes, there is
no response, no commentary, and neither Mr. B nor Ayers pro-
vide one. We want to believe, as Greene does, that the public
spaces vital for the flourishing of democracy will "take shape in
response to unmet needs and broken promises." We can only
wonder if Freddie will develop, overtime, "an awareness of
future possibility."17 Watching Freddie crossing indiscrimi-
nately the border between playfulness and intimidation, wit-
nessing him shifting from impassioned analysis in the class
discussion to mean-spirited put down, we are caught between
fearing and caring for him. Freddie tests our ability to hold on
to this hope, shakes our discomfort with this whole situation
even more. We might be more certain about why these circum-
stances need to be denounced, why the whole arrangement

around rehabilitation through containment as portrayed here
is wasteful, even absurd, but, moving from the abstract to the
particular, less sure about how to proceed.
It is in Mr. B's classroom where Ito, former gang leader,
learns to confront his two-headed, outcast status: a status he
has chosen and is struggling to disengage from and one, he
believes, has been bestowed upon him and his classmates by
the stream of visitors who parade through Audy Home—"we're
like monkeys in the zoo. But I ain't a monkey. I ain't a mon-
ster." It is in the classroom where Ito writes about the dreari-
ness of life in Audy Home and, poignantly, about his love for
Tina—"When we kissed it was freedom and hope."; where his
longing to return to his family is disclosed (pp. 91, 94). The
bitching, the outbursts, the vulnerability and regret surface
when trying to make sense of his troubled past as a gang
leader, his present state of confinement, and what might be—
Ito is a subject of desire, or as Ayers puts it, a person "strain-
ing to define himself, intensely aware of his own growth and
development, his being and becoming" (p. 92). Mr. B knows
that fostering reasonable, norm-governed conversation and
insisting upon a non-negotiable level of civility are necessary
conditions, to be sure, if classrooms are to flourish but, in
themselves, are not enough. Stories nourished by a discourse
of desire, where this straining is rendered palpably and vividly,
can contest the insipid voyeurism and the self-righteous pos-
turing that coheres around, and within, people like Ito. Finding
ways to release and respond to "the needs of the other, their
motivations, what they search for, and what they desire" opens
a clearing for a moral discourse as well. Not a moral discourse
predicated solely upon the rule of law, rights, and universal
obligation but one that takes "the standpoint of the 'concrete
other*... [an other] with a concrete history, identity, and affective-
emotional constitution."18 Tending to this relationship among
desire, moral discourse, and the concrete other, can help edu-
cators from backing themselves into ideological corners, rigid
positions, and one-dimensional analysis. A complex, contradic-
tory, and fluid space, educators willing to navigate through this
terrain with their students, have a chance to extend democratic
forms of living in places simmering with rage and mistrust, or
deadened by mindless conformity.
Confronted with dangers which range from the horrific and

blatantly terrifying to an everyday discourse disturbingly devoid
of critique and possibility, educators—if they allow themselves
to be conscious and remain wide-awake—have no choice but to
find some means by which to resist and counter the dread of
such circumstances. How might teachers respond—those teach-
ers bold enough to believe that the work they do might—or
must—make a difference? What kind of discourse need they
employ and take heed of to replenish themselves as agents, as
subjects of desire themselves? A pedagogy predicated upon
the mobilization and release of desire is a means by which to
contest assigned, assumed and hurtful identities and the
embedded practices which sustain them. It disrupts the give-
ness of the way things are and nourishes acts of courage and
compassion. McLaren offers a set of provocative questions
intended to help sustain the work of educators in this regard:
"How has the social order fashioned me in ways with which
I no longer desire to identify? In what directions do I desire and
why? To what extent are my dreams and desires my own?"19
A pedagogy of desire tests the durability of policies and prac-
tices that manage to erode initiative and suggests a fashioning
of teacher identity against a backdrop of willed refusals and
risky acts. It frames school reform as disloyalty to the grinding
ineffectiveness of calcified systems. A pedagogy which takes
seriously the mobilization and release of desire not only
informs but inspires strong responses. This is not a question
of searching for best practice models of teaching and school
reform that can, then, be replicated. Exemplary teachers and
admirable schools, while, no doubt, guided by preferred beliefs

and principles, are carried by their capacity to continuously
examine their practice and creatively test their limits. Recalling
the questions posed by McLaren, they are mindful of, and hold
themselves responsible for, their own self-constitution.
Some argue that a discourse of desire obscures collective,
"public" concerns; that the cultivation of civic virtue marked by
participation and education would be imperiled without the
containment of desire. Rorty, for example, argues that, for lib-
eral culture to thrive, self-creation (a private, individual matter
which emerges, he contends, out of the desire for self-definition
and uniqueness) and social reponsibility (necessary in the pub-
lic realm which requires we be decent toward, hopeful about,
and committed to our neighbor) simply do not mix.20 He

argues that it is necessary to value both as private and public
matters respectively, but not to combine them. Hence, the
question: How much uniqueness can/ought a culture that calls
itself liberal actually tolerate? How far can we take this notion
of desire into the public realm? The following story suggests
one way of thinking through Rorty's concern:
From the mid-fifties through most of the sixties disenfran-
chised and progressive-minded groups fought for integrated
schools in some parts of New York City. When it became obvi-
ous that, through residential zoning and the location of the new
schools being built to accommodate the influx of people into
New York City, defacto segregation was the rule and the reality
and, further, that for people of color their children were by
all measures receiving an inferior education, activists in three
communities argued for, and were successful for a very short
period of time in realizing community control of their schools.
With support from the New York State Legislature, three experi-
mental school districts were established. However, amid charges
of racism and anti-semitism and deep disagreement over who
had the right to reassign teachers and administrators deemed
incompetent, community control quickly ended. Oceanhill-
Brownsville, the most visible expression of this effort, was, in
my view, a community responding with courage to a deeply felt
danger, the quality of education their children were receiving.
In refusing to be controlled through containment some dared to
take responsibility to re-fashion schools in, and for, their com-
munity. The initiative was quickly and unambiguously subverted
350 Frank Plgnatelll
and. indeed, dismantled on the basis of a presumed exclusivity.

The drama of Oceanhill-Brownsville is a story of suspicion, an
act of refusal on the part of those who, ironically, had most to
lose by deeply questioning the capacity of others to make good
on their promises. The hope that integrated schools would
breed tolerance for the other and provide better opportunities
for those minorities who lived within what was in the 1960s
termed the "culture of poverty" by liberal social scientists and
politicians came up against the force of a community welling
with desire to define itself on its own terms, yearning to tell its
own story. It possessed a terrifying beauty akin to self-creation.
Matters having to do with self-creation or character, predi-
cated upon the release of desire, inevitably find their way into
the public lives of teachers who stand out. But moving beyond
the extraordinary, all teachers need to be supported, encour-
aged, and expected to keep alive the markings of what Rorty,
himself, calls the "strong poet", people who are "capable of
telling the story of their own production in words never used
before"21 and not willing to obscure or trivialize the idiosyn-
cratic designs they invent as dramatists of their own lives. This
privileging of oneself as a distinct being in the world, this
expression of desire, is not meant to jeopardize the value of
educators to form commitments and do socially responsible—
and, hopefully, transformative—work. Rather, it brings to the
foreground an important dimension of this work; what Greene
calls "the shock-receiving capacity" in ourselves—that is, the
capacity to be moved deeply, made uneasy and discomforted—
such that these shocks might give rise to indignation, renewed
understanding and, it is hoped, purposeful action.22 As sub-
jects of desire, we exercise this capacity. It may be what it takes
to deflate the balloon of self-assuring benevolence (a priori, we
know what's good for them; and what Ffeire calls malefic gen-
erosity). Tapping into this capacity, if we can, may safeguard
against the numbness we feel, at times, when the lack of kind-
ness and care in schools become so familiar we hardly notice
them or when these lacks appear as if beyond our control to
repair.
Allowing ourselves to reckon with how the pull and messi-
ness of felt needs, private yearnings, and personal drama infil-
trate our lives as teachers and, just as importantly, how they
shape the lives of our students causes us to see our work as a
braiding of personal/poetic and public/solldaristlc concerns.

In the absence of recognizing the subject of desire, we may lapse
into a disembodied understanding of what it means to teach;
a cautiously crafted pedagogy whose movements and asser-
tions risk losing sight of what it means, and takes, to test the
giveness of oneself as well as one's world and energize action.
Notes
1 Dewey, John, (1991) "Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us," in The
Later Works, 1925-1953. vol. 14: 1939-1941, ed., J o Ann Boydston,
Southern University Press, p. 229.
2 Addams, Jane, as quoted in Ayers, William, (1997) A Kind and Just
Parent. Beacon Press, p. 44.

3 Kohl, Herbert. (1993) "The Tattoed Man: Confessions of a Hopemonger,"
in / Won't Learn From You. The New Press, p. 35.
4 Ibid., p. 44.
5 Giroux, Henry and Simon, Roger (1992) "Decolonizing the Body," In Henry
Giroux, Border Crossings. Routledge, p. 194.
6 Cixious, Helene (1991) "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays, ed.
Deborah Jenson. Harvard University Press, pp. 8-9.
7 Foucault, Michel (1986) The Use. of Pleasure. Viking, p. 8.
8 Aronowitz. Stanley (1990) The Crisis in Historical Materialism, University
of Minnesota Press, p. 249.
9 Along these same lines, see Jurgen Habermas's commentary on Georges
Bataille, who wants to explore the limitations of discursive knowledge and
purposive-rational thinking. Bataille makes a case for the unproductive
expenditure and wasteful consumption of surplus over its reinvestment
into productive usage as a means of resisting reification and objectifica-
tion. See, Jurgen Habermas (1984) "The French Path to Postmodernity:
Bataille Between Eroticism and General Economics," New German
Critique 44, Fall, pp. 79-102.
10 Dewey, John (1922, 1957) Human Nature and Conduct, The Modern
Library, p. 235.
11 Fine, Michelle (1988) "Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females:
The Missing Discourse of Desire," Harvard Educational Review 58, no. 1,
pp. 29-53.
12 Greene, Maxine (1973) Teacher As Stranger, Wadsworth Publishing
Company, Inc., p. 37.
13 Bruner, Jerome (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Harvard University
Press, p. 127.
14 Ibid., p. 11.
15 Desmond, William (1987) Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness, Yale University
Press, p. 164.
16 Greene, Maxine (1995) Releasing the Imagination, Jossey-Bass
Publishers, pp. 69, 75.
17 Ibid., p. 166.
18 Benhabtb, Seyla. as quoted in Glroux. Henry (1988) Schooling and the

Struggle for Public l>lje. University of Minnesota Press, p. 58.
19 McLaren, Peter (1997) "Revolutionary Praxis: Toward a Pedagogy of
Resistance and Transformation," Educational Researcher, vol. 26, no. 6,
August-September, p. 25.
20 Rorty. Richard (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge
University Press, pp. 119-120.
21 Ibid., p. 28.
22 Greene, Maxine (1995) Releasing the Imagination, pp. 101-108.

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This article was downloaded by: [Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona]

On: 23 October 2014, At: 00:43

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies

Education and the Subject of Desire

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1071441980200404

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Text Reviewed: Need and desire—out of which grow purpose and

And a bit later he adds:

William Ayers's book, A Kind and Just Parent, takes us into

THE TERRAIN OF DESIRE

explain, predict, and control possible futures. Desire is diffuse,

a passion, something shameful—and disturbing; one of those

A pedagogical relation predicated upon the centrality of desire

student of his, to speak with his class, and a language of desire

and one's predicament, limitations, and obstacles. She turns our

Ayers's book lies somewhere between what Bruner argues

We come to understand that choosing to take on an attitude

intelligently, more wisely. Is this too much to ask of a system

priest, this goodwill is fortified by his religious faith and

that risk of dialogue. This risk is sustained and nourished by a

He acknowledges the hardened, glossy, frightening image of

a "counter-memory" which contests the legitimacy, but more

If we listen closely to Alex and the young people as they come

restrict our understanding and freeze analysis, they actually do

stances need to be denounced, why the whole arrangement

Confronted with dangers which range from the horrific and

admirable schools, while, no doubt, guided by preferred beliefs

and committed to our neighbor) simply do not mix.20 He

and. indeed, dismantled on the basis of a presumed exclusivity.

braiding of personal/poetic and public/solldaristlc concerns.

Parent. Beacon Press, p. 44.

18 Benhabtb, Seyla. as quoted in Glroux. Henry (1988) Schooling and the

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