PublicationNotes #12

Introduction: Revolutionary Feminist Praxis

It is now an intellectual and political habit for us to begin our writing with the assertion that the world is messy and chaotic. The more we open our essays with this statement, the messier the world gets. Millions of people are driven to the seas and through the deserts by wars, destruction, dispossession, and displacement. Aspirations to live free of violence are difficult to realize in the context of the vast, persistent, and growing inequities of Europe and North America, compounded by increasingly reactionary and racist violence on the part of the state and civil society against forcibly displaced people. The persistence of this material condition is utterly dependent on the ideologies of patriarchal, racist capitalist social relations. Under the global expression of racialized patriarchy, violence has increased exponentially, taking on a massified character and regularly reported around the world: the rape to death of women in public, including by military, paramilitary and extremist forces; their abduction and selling in the sex market; the enforcement of child marriage; sexual abuse and assault from refugee camps to university campuses; arrest and imprisonment of Palestinian girls and women for their resistance to occupation; the detainment of Kurdish women activists in Turkey; the missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada; the murder of women on the US–Mexico border; girls kidnapped across Africa; and religious forms of terrorism against women’s reproductive autonomy. These are breathtaking atrocities committed every day and night by patriarchal forces of capitalism, imperialism, and fundamentalisms. As Himani Bannerji argues, “the very content of the word ‘human’ is being emptied out and filled with screams of agony of those condemned to it. In this atmosphere of violence how can violence against women not intensify, almost as an excrescence of this ordered disorder?”¹

In order to address not only these forms of violence and degradation, but also the continuing contradictions of patriarchal, racist capitalism, we argue that we need to revolutionize our thinking around learning and the critical education project. We consider this endeavor to be our contribution as revolutionary feminist scholars of education. By “revolutionize,” we do not simply mean change: we need to fully embrace the revolutionary potential of learning and pedagogical work and engage with our history of scholarship through the imperative of generating revolutionary feminist praxis. By “praxis” we mean, following Paula Allman’s dialectical articulation, “a concept that grasps the internal relation between consciousness and sensuous human experience, a unity of opposites that reciprocally shape and determine one another.”² We explore this dialectical iteration of praxis through this text. It is our contention — and we would argue these claims can easily be seen in the last three decades of debate — that critical education is plagued by persistent theoretical and political inconsistencies. Following significant articulations of the relation between education and social reproduction, the field of critical education has been unable to contend with the growing complexity of both the material condition of the world and the ideological apparatus of bourgeois society in the academy. As argued by key Marxist scholars of education, including Paula Allman, Wayne Au, Noah De Lissovoy, Teresa Ebert, Sandy Grande, John Holst, and Glenn Rikowski, critical education theory suffers from several important inconsistencies and reformist tendencies. The influence of a non-dialectical reading of Marx under conditions of patriarchy and racism continues to produce substantial errors in scholarship, including the inability to understand class and labor power as relations and processes; a causal and deterministic articulation of consciousness and praxis as external relations; culturalist and identity-based approaches to “difference” that cannot illuminate interconstitutive social relations; confusion over the relationality between colonialism, fundamentalisms, imperialism, and neoliberalism within capitalism; and the continued marginalization of feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial scholarship within the academy. This position has left critical education theory stuck in economistic, reformist, and culturalist cycles, unable to contend with the aggressive tendencies of both liberalism and the veiled bourgeois project of post-identity and identity theories. Or, as Bannerji has argued in a discussion of her own feminist praxis, we see a clear need to overcome “a binary and inverse relationship between ‘class’ and ‘culture,’ or ‘discourse’ and ‘social relations,’ structure and forms of consciousness, which seems to pervade our intellectual world.”³ […]

Critique versus “Being Critical”

A guiding thread to this discussion is a preoccupation with the following question: What do we mean by “critical?” This question then begs the further question in our title: What is “critical” about critical education? In an attempt to “be critical,” we face two obstacles that derail our focus on the complexity of social relations and contradiction. On the one hand, “being critical” is undermined by demands for action, for practice, for possibility, and even for the rejection of theory. On the other hand, “being critical” is undermined by problems inherent to the notion of critique, which forms the central intellectual practice of “being critical.” For this reason, we propose that it is very important for educators to be critical of being critical. In other words, we must be rigorous in what we mean by the concept “critical.” Angela Davis has developed a similar argument for a parallel and persistent problem in feminist theory:

The feminist critical impulse, if we take it seriously, involves a dual commitment: a commitment to use knowledge in a transformative way, and to use knowledge to remake the world so that it is better for its inhabitants — not only for human beings, for all its living inhabitants. This commitment entails an obstinate refusal to attribute permanency to that which exists in the present, simply because it exists. This commitment simultaneously drives us to examine the conceptual and organizing tools we use, not to take them for granted.⁴

We believe that a similar commitment drives those who identify as critical educators. For this reason, a continued commitment to the critical examination of our conceptual tools is of the utmost importance.

The word “critical” is often used as a catch-all term to denote some form of opposition to the mainstream, the status quo, or “being liberal.” For example, we have critical education, critical race theory, critical feminism, and critical social theories. But we should ask two important questions: What are we being critical of, and how are we doing it? To be critical implies that one is engaging in a process of critique. However, not all critiques assume to perform the same function or result in explanations that are politically useful in the same ways. What we mean by this is that the process of critique itself is not neutral.

We can say, broadly, as Teresa Ebert has done,⁵ that there are at least two different types of critique popular in the social sciences today. She argues that one is immanent critique, dynamically seen in the process of deconstruction. In this process, we take apart the construction of a particular social formation. Deconstruction often begins by demonstrating that human relations are social to begin with, and not a natural by-product of human life. A classic example of this is the construction of “race,” which only the most conservative of thinkers still asserts is biological in origin. We have used quotation marks around this category to refer to our contestation of its construction and deployment; specifically, the notion that “race” is separate and autonomous from social relations. Many agree that “race” is a historical and social construction used to organize human relations and systems of power. It is not a genetic “thing.” Once this is established, we can then engage in processes of critique that demonstrate just how pervasive and insidious the problem of racism is in contemporary life and how it operates, largely through language, representation, and meaning systems. For instance, we can research how racialization operates in classrooms, how it influences assumptions about teaching and learning, and how it mitigates experiences in educational institutions.

Ebert argues that there is another kind of critique that is embodied in the notion of critique-al, or rather, historical materialist critique. In this form of critique, social formations are located in social relations of production and reproduction. Their historical specificity and operation is demonstrated in relation to complex webs of social relations, forms of consciousness, organizations of human labor, and operations of ideology. This does not mean attributing everything to capitalism; it means identifying the social organization of historical phenomena, their root in forms of human labor, social organization, and consciousness.

To explain the different forms of critique to students, we often use the language of describing a social problem versus explaining the social problem. One form of “being critical” describes the contours and realities of our conditions. It highlights elements of social life that are otherwise unobservable. This descriptive process is extremely useful to those who are unable to see the world from the standpoint of others or to recognize, without the force of evidence, that not everyone experiences the world as they do. It is also necessary to the process of explanation, but alone it is insufficient.

For still others, to be critical is to question the pretenses of power, to speak truth to its origins, and you are thus an agitator or, if you are lucky, a shit stirrer. This is the kind of critique that we hope is driven by a desire to explain why we live the way we live in such a way that our social life becomes an object of contestation. As human beings, we choose, within history, to live among and with each other and our natural world in particular ways. This form of “being critical,” embodied in historical materialist critique, should lead us to revolutionize our relations in their entirety. In a complex and dynamic way, this project has remained at the center of critical education scholarship and practice for more than a century.

Given these debates, students and scholars of education should ask important questions. What kind of critique does critical education offer us? And of what use is it? It is our position that “critical” education should not simply describe the world as it is. It should not take as its main pedagogical purpose the pointing out of this reality to those for whom this “critical” vision is obscured. Rather, “critical” education should explain the source, function, expression, and operation of the contradictions that constitute our social relations. As Bertell Ollman has argued,

With dialectics we are made to question what kind of changes are already occurring and what kind of changes are possible. The dialectic is revolutionary, as [Bertolt] Brecht points out, because it helps us to pose such questions in a manner that makes effective action possible. … The dialectic is critical because it helps us to become critical of what our role has been up to now.⁶

It is our position that critical education should equip learners with the tools of social analysis to continue this explanation on their own and translate this analysis into mobilization, resistance, and revolution.

This perspective leads us to read the terrain of critical education in particular ways. Most importantly, it requires us to historicize and materialize the field. This means understanding the development of critical education as part of the history of ideas and social movements — which come into existence through their relationships to one another — and their relationship to the material and social organization of daily life.