compromising positions: or, the unhappy transformations of a “transformative intellectual”

Richard Boyd

Communication Theory

Nine: Four

November 1999

Pages: 377-401

Compromising Positions: Or, the Unhappy Transformations Of a “Transformative Intellectual”

This essay chronicles the author’s attempts to enact his own ethical and political ideals within a university system that often seems inhospitable to these goals and aspirations. Beginning from the notion that organizational life is in part defined by the struggles between individual “creativity” and institutional “constraint,” the essay describes the author’s often unsuccessful efforts to reconcile professional self-identity with institutional reality and his persistent failure to achieve a workable balance between private goals and organizational demands. The author’s commitment to critical scholarship and transfomative pedagogy is interrogated in light of postmodern understandings of power, resistance, and the place of the critical intellectual in the university system. The essay concludes with a consideration of how an explicit embrace of the ethical might serve as the starting point for professional renewal, though such a project is also seen to hold its own set of very real paradoxes and contradictions.

Edward Said (1983) once used the term “sulky gloom” (p. 230) to char- acterize the unhappy condition of contemporary academics struggling to find their way amid today’s varied and often competing interpreta- tions of discursive practices. I have always remembered Said’s phrase because it seemed to describe so aptly my own feelings of growing dis- satisfaction with the academy and my place within it. For, although my particular unhappiness has little to do with Said’s account of a contemporary scene dominated by a “babel of arguments for the limitlessness of all interpretation’’ (p. 230), it has everything to do with the broader context of his remarks and with the example he sets as a critically engaged intellectual whose voice and actions have meaning not only in the academy but also in the very public world of international politics. One of Said’s primary concerns in so much of his work-including the afore- mentioned essay on the emotional state of today’s textual scholars-is with the political function of the intellectual within the American uni-

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versity system, with the possibilities and obstacles faced by the critical intellectual who would seek to use his or her institutional position as a site for transformative pedagogy and engaged scholarship. I share Said’s preoccupation and find such concerns starkly present in my own professional life, though I am far less sanguine than Said appears to be about negotiating the paradoxes and contradictions within such a position. My “sulky gloom” is the end product of these struggles with my professional self-identity, and so it must serve as the starting point for my considerations of the reality of disenchantment and the possibility for renewal in the academy.

The essay that follows will therefore be the story of my largely unhappy struggles to enact my political and ethical ideals within a university system that often seems inhospitable to these goals and aspirations. The essay also intends to at least entertain the possibility of renewal, and so it will also serve as a place to consider the ideas of others who have perhaps more successfully overcome those deep contradictions I so keenly feel between the reality of my professional life and my convictions about what that reality should be. I hope that my story resonates with others, and especially with those who in their scholarship and pedagogy are concerned with the operations of knowledge and power and the ways discursive practices can both promote and subvert patterns of domination.

My academic work is chiefly in the fields of rhetoric and composition, yet I seek a less discipline-specific audience than such a background might imply. As I have already suggested, I am interested in the more general figure of the critical intellectual and the possibilities for resistance within certain kinds of communicative acts (chiefly academic writing and classroom pedagogy) that find their place within the university’s traditional charge to reproduce the dominant culture. As Murphy (1998) writes in a recent issue of Management Communication Quarterly, “organizations are not neutral sites of meaning formation but, rather, contested fields where meaning is produced, reproduced, negotiated and resisted” (p. 500).’

My essay begins precisely with this point, recognizing that “every act of communication in organizations takes place in nested contexts, and each of these contexts contains structures of creativity and constraint” (Eisenberg & Goodall, 1997, p. 147). This will indeed be a story about “balancing creativity and constraint” (p. 29), though as my opening invocation of Said’s somber words should suggest, I am feeling rather more constrained than creative at this particular moment. It is important to make clear from the very beginning of this essay that my reserva- tions about academic life do not originate in some terrible horror story about academia, though I have certainly heard my share of them and

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Compromising Positions

been party to a few of them. Rather, my discomfort arises out of what are generally regarded as the more appealing elements in our collective job descriptions. As tenure-track faculty, I have enjoyed a nice standard of living, a comfortable work environment, and the freedom to do pretty much as I please in my scholarship and my teaching. The work is seldom dull, and the cultural prestige that accompanies my position is considerable. So why all the gloom? Am I simply being childish and pouting about minor hurts and disappointments, as Said’s use of an adjective like “sulky” might suggest?

These are reasonable questions, but I hope that I have a reasonable, nonchildish explanation as to how I have ended up in this particular state of mind. In some ways the answer seems very simple. I have become disillusioned-my life in the academy has not turned out the way I had anticipated when I so eagerly pursued the career as a graduate student. I entered the profession because I believed it offered me the opportunity to do politically meaningful work, to use my scholarship and my teaching in support of an agenda for social change and progressive values. I was inspired by the idea of the transformative intellectual who might serve as a catalyst for initiating real change in the classroom and, ultimately, in the world beyond that classroom. I even hoped that I might have a meaningful role to perform in the reimagination of the American university so that it might become, in the words Mario Savio uttered 35 years ago, “the place where people begin seriously to question the conditions of their existence and raise the issue of whether they can be committed to the society they have been born into” (as cited in Anderson, 1995, p. 105). Now I understand such a professional agenda to be much less certain in its assumptions than I had initially believed. My scholarship and my teaching have effected little discernible change; nothing that I have done could in any way be viewed as genuinely sub- versive of the powers that be, even on the very local level of my own educational institution. Like McLaren (1995), I have instead found the postmodern world, and specifically the postmodern university, to be a site where “forms of organized resistance collapse into public apathy and mass inertia” (p. 102). The result for me has been that kind of low- grade despair evoked at the beginning of this essay.

* * * I promised, however, a nonchildish explanation for my gloom, and so far I have only blamed others and the world-at-large for my situation, which sounds much more like the whimpering of a toddler than I would care to admit. Thus, let me turn immediately to the deeper reasons for my disenchantment, for I believe they tell a far more interesting and important story. If my graduate student assumptions about the possi-

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bilities within academic life were naive, so too did I fail to understand my own motivations for choosing this career. I thought I wanted to imi- tate the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, but I opted for a life in the university that provided me with the kind of material benefits and cultural power that instead placed me squarely in the camp of those staunchly opposed to the transformation of Freire’s peasants. Of course, I resisted this conclusion for a long while and instead constructed a highly stylized professional identity that closely resembled what Connor (1 997) describes as the typically postmodern academic performance of some “self-pro- moting vision of oppositional avant-garde practice” (p. 37). I tried to represent myself as a marginalized, quasi-outlaw figure engaged in dangerous intellectual and pedagogical work that would define me as one of Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals” aligned in solidarity with the oppressed. Of course, unlike Gramsci, I spent no time in prison and my work threat- ened no one in particular, though I did manage to devote a good deal of my energies to figuring out how I might spend my nice-sized monthly paycheck.

Only at that moment, when my delusions of activist grandeur had been forced to confront the realities of my professional and institutional life, could I begin to think clearly about my position within the academy. What I realized about myself was disenchanting, to say the least. I had long understood that the university was essentially a site dedicated to reproducing the ideology and values of the dominant culture, but now I had to admit, along with Knoblauch (1991), that “I too have been constituted in its [the university’s] terms, and I help the school, even when I would prefer not to, in furthering its social and economic agendas” (p. 13). I teach at a comfortable institution with students who do not arrive on campus with the intent of participating in some oppositional agenda. I am deeply inscribed within the dominant value structures the university exists to promote, and I cannot flee from this reality through some clever self-fashionings of the academic as marginalized Other. Rather, I have to acknowledge, as Bove (1986) suggests in his summary of Said’s work, the full extent of my dependency upon these dominant structures “for [my] work and comfortable, ‘nonalienated’ [life]” (p. 273). I had long tried to deny these uncomfortable truths about myself and claim that I was an outsider from the humanities and thus not soiled by the university’s close ties with the worlds of business and military research (Connor, 1997). Now I recognize that this was perhaps my most egregious act of naivete.

It is perhaps a small consolation, but I believe I came by this naivete honestly. In the early years of my professional career, I met few academics in the humanities who would speak openly of their own “dirty hands,” of their own complicity in the system they would claim to oppose. The

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mythical reality handed down to me was of courageous scholars bravely resisting the dominant order, of heroic intellectuals called to a leader- ship role in the reimagination and reinvigoration of the political order.2 This “failure” of my early mentors3 and colleagues, though, is really no excuse for my blindness to reality; the simple fact is that I was in flight from something that should have been perfectly obvious. Indeed, as Merod (1987) argues in his The Political Responsibility of the Critic, what progressive academics most need to do is “ask how they are posi- tioned within the culture and how they are used, how their work is used, and how they lend themselves to those uses” (p. 19). Merod poses this imperative with such urgency precisely because we work in an institution “that is situated squarely in the reproductive heart of Western economic life (the university) but that locates its force elsewhere, in the transcendental realm of professional competence” (p. 5 1). This reality supersedes all else, even if we would protest our innocence by virtue of our oppositional pedagogy and “critical” scholarship. Just as I intuitively sensed that my own comfortable professional life made hollow my pro- testations of innocence, so too does Merod assert that no matter how vigorously critical scholars might insist upon their essential separation from “the institutional practices that define a capitalist society,” they are always “vulnerable . . . to absorption by the cultural and political energies they oppose” (pp. 2, x).

Merod’s (1987) words ring powerfully when I consider my own professional position, but I must admit that much of that resonance origi- nates in the disposition of my sense of personal ethics, and it is not solely generated by my stunning insight into the perilous condition of today’s critical intellectual. The truth be told, I am instinctively drawn to the stark imperative in Merod’s words, to the urgency with which they cam- mand careful, perhaps even harsh, self-analysis. I therefore recognize that my preference for an either-or construction of these issues (and I do not mean to imply that Merod is guilty of this, but only that I choose to read his words in this manner) is somewhat idiosyncratic, and that it certainly seems to ignore the rather indisputable conclusion that “ [mlost of the political life of subordinate groups is to be found neither in overt collective defiance of powerholders nor in complete hegemonic compli- ance, but in the vast territory between these two polar opposites” (Scott, 1990, p. 136). It is apparent to me that my analysis of the position of the critical intellectual is a deeply personal one, largely the product of how I understand the relation between the moral imperatives that seem to consume me and the apparent compromises I have made with “the cultural and political energies” I claim to oppose. Perhaps it can even be judged a dangerously “modernist” project as defined by Eisenberg (1998), since it is premised on resolving these internal contradictions rather than

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embracing “a more constitutive, contingent, provisional view of communication” (p. 99) and selfhood. Because of these tendencies I am probably somewhat blind to the more nuanced and incremental strategies of resistance that many honorable people have developed in response to the same contradictions that I experience. Indeed, a primary purpose of this essay is to engage some of these other voices of professional renewal offered by those who claim the academic identity of the critical intellectual.

As the remainder of this essay will ultimately demonstrate, my present state of mind is not particularly receptive to ideas of multiple agendas and modest goals obtained tactically, nor does the goal of professional renewal appear to be all that close at hand. Admittedly, this may well be a rather unique perspective, yet I also hope to demonstrate that there are powerful arguments to support my none-too-hopeful conclusions that extend well beyond the peculiarities of my own psyche. Certainly others have remarked upon many of the same circumstances surrounding the critical scholar that I have outlined in the opening pages of this essay, and often they have posed questions about the absorption of the critical scholar-teacher in terms more starkly drawn than any I have yet been able to manage. Knoblauch (1991), to cite only one prominent example, has prompted me to much self-reflection by asking that most fundamental and important of questions: “IS critical teaching [and scholarship] anything more than an intellectual game in such circumstances” (p. 15)? As time has passed, as I have come to understand better the meaning of my work in the university, I have also come to realize that I cannot meet the powerful challenge within Knoblauch’s question. There most certainly is a fundamental disjunction between what I wish to believe I am doing in my scholarship and my teaching and what I feel I must now acknowledge to be the ultimate impact of that work. Indeed, Knoblauch includes in his discussion of “critical teaching and dominant culture” a further question that now seems to me largely rhetorical in nature:

What is the meaning of “radical teacher” for faculty in [the university]-paid by the capitalist state, protected from many of the obligations as well as consequences of social action by the speculativeness of academic commitment, engaged in a seemingly trivial dramatization of utopian thought, which the university itself blandly sponsors as satisfying testimony to its own open-mindedness? (p. 16)

At one point in my professional life I was able to resist the sense of malaise that accompanied a recognition of this reality by reminding myself that such despair can sometimes still be a sign of naivete, of having unrealistic expectations about what an individual can accomplish. I took consolation in the conviction that at least I was not one of those critical

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intellectuals who espoused the most progressive of theoretical positions while treating students in an authoritarian manner, as if the classroom suddenly had become a site where faculty power was to be exercised decisively and unproblematically. I knew I was committed to decentering authority in my classroom, and that I had disrupted old models of teaching by introducing collaborative learning, group work, and negotiated syl- labi into the classroom. I held firmly to Tompkins’s (1990) words, which remind us all that

what really matters as far as our own beliefs and projects for change are concerned is not so much what we talk about in class as what we do. . . . [Tlhe classroom is a microcosm of the world; it is the chance we have to practice whatever ideals we may cherish. (P. 656)

Tompkins’s (1990) assertion now has precisely the opposite effect upon me. I still think she is right about how our classroom practices reveal who we really are; unfortunately, I no longer believe my own pedagogical behaviors paint a particularly pretty picture. As much as I claim to have allegiance to some version of a democratic pedagogy and the student-centered classroom, I still give grades in a manner that creates strict hierarchies, and my lower division courses still serve the university by weeding out those students who are not “sufficiently prepared.” I am committed to the idea that my class should help students to interrogate texts critically and develop an eye to the cultural work they perform, to assist them in learning to see through the “public transcripts” of our social and political discourse and instead understand them as “the self- portrait of dominant elites as they would have themselves seen” (Scott, 1990, p. 18). I hold tenaciously to the idea that “the most critical function of communication is transformation, or the capacity to suggest new possibilities for individuals to be together” (Eisenberg, 1998, pp. 99-100).

Unfortunately, I fear my pedagogical gestures do little to reshape the classroom into a real site of resistance. Students still do as I ask, not because they are enthusiastically committed to notions of liberatory education, but because they know it is what I want. They believe it is the easiest way toward a high grade, and they are probably right. I have an agenda in the classroom that students recognize and that in powerful ways I call them to mimic. In some essential way I still claim to know what is in their best interests, what they should be thinking. It seems that my every pedagogical gesture toward democratic practice results chiefly in the redeployment of power in ways that are admittedly more subterranean than in the “traditional” classroom, though I fear no less authoritarian in their ultimate impact on student^.^

In similar fashion, my very position in the university often compels

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me to work against the democratic values I espouse. For example, I am convinced that academic discourse is patriarchal, elitist, and deeply implicated in the maintenance of an unjust socioeconomic system. I also believe that one of my primary teaching responsibilities is to help students learn to deconstruct discursive conventions and become more sen- sitive to the political and cultural contexts of the language they employ (Eisenberg & Goodall, 1997). This is not a simple thing to communicate in the classroom; the demand for a critical perspective can initially be more disabling than empowering for many students. This has been a particularly acute problem when teaching developmental writing students, who are struggling to either master the conventions of academic discourse or face removal from the university at the end of the semester. I have had to choose between encouraging in them a kind of blind imita- tion of academic models (which tends to absolutize those conventions in their minds) or spend large amounts of class time on a more critical approach to this discourse, a pedagogical strategy that almost certainly dooms many to failure on their exit exams. I have always felt bound to choose the former path, though always with much misgiving about what my classroom has become. In the end, I have come to realize that power in the university classroom is a far more complex reality than I had ever imagined and that I have not done a very successful job of negotiating its complexities.

This is a somber, even gloomy, conclusion, to be sure. However, the longer I teach and work in the university, the more convinced I am of the fundamental truth of this judgment. In recent years I have found it more and more difficult to deny the reality of the situation, harder and harder to find ways to mitigate the cynicism that must accompany such a view of the ultimate meaning of one’s pedagogical practices. Even my scholarship, which might have served as a place of refuge from these feelings and as a kind of “pure’’ practice that could somehow compensate for other compromises I might make in other parts of my institutional life, now only heightens my sense of the ethical unease initiated by working within the university.

My research interests are chiefly in the organization of composition as an academic field of study and instruction during the late Victorian era in the United States. The dilemma raised by my scholarship is ultimately the same one that I experience in my teaching; the discipline in which I find my departmental home, the system of higher education that pays my salary, have equally long and deep ties to the ideology and value system that I would claim to oppose and even work against in my professional life. From its very inception in the years after the Civil War, composition has been intimately tied to the economic order’s demand for a professional and managerial elite that could communicate effec-

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tively in the business world. As the university began during the second half of the 19th century to align itself ever more closely with the needs of an industrializing economy, composition instructors were there to perform the role of “gatekeepers” (Berlin, 1984), to keep out the “unwor- thy” and to ensure that those with aspirations to positions of cultural authority had indeed mastered the language practices of the elite (Boyd, 1993).

The significant element for me in all this is precisely that so little has changed. The university remains today the essential institution of the professional middle-class (Ehrenreich, 1989), while the humanities themselves continue in the “clearly-visible and highly-successful function of accreditation for all the traditionally privileged professions and social functions” (Connor, 1997, p. 14). Composition programs still perform a gatekeeping function through practices like the developmental writing course that labels students as deficient and the administration of writing proficiency examinations that threaten students with removal from the university should they not pass these standardized tests. Furthermore, most lower division writing courses are charged with not only introducing students to academic discourse, but also with fulfilling a primary role in the assimilation of students into the university’s worldview, of helping students “to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (Bartholomae, 1985, p. 134). This strikes me as a particularly chilling institutional responsibility when I listen to Derrida’s claim that the “politics of research and teaching” must be evaluated within the broader “multinational military-industrial . . . [and] techno-economic networks” that saturate the contemporary university (as cited in Merod, 1987, p. 31).

The conclusions I must draw from my scholarship can in no way relieve my feelings of “dirty hands.” If anything, they have only deep- ened my sense of how thoroughly implicated I am in a system that works not toward empowerment and liberation, but one that has instead been organized for at least the past 125 years to promote conformity and containment. I suppose this realization has allowed me to feel that I have finally been able to overcome most, if not all, of my graduate student naivete. The cost of this achievement, however, has been high, as my present state of unhappiness must surely indicate. My relationship to the university is conflicted at best, deeply hypocritical and disingenu- ous at worst. At the end of most working days I feel powerfully the words of Bove (1986): “Even the most revisionist, adversarial, and oppositional humanistic intellectuals-no matter what their avowed ide- ologies-operate within a network of discourses, institutions, and de-

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sires that . . . always reproduce themselves in essentially antidemocratic forms and practices” (pp. 1-2).

It is with Bove’s words that the exploratory portion of this essay really begins. Most assuredly, I am not the first to think these kinds of thoughts, the first to grapple with the complicity of the critical academic with the complex network of power relations he or she would claim to oppose. The remainder of this essay aims to consider how others have responded to the challenges within this dilemma and to seek within their answers the possibility of renewal within my own professional life. Per- haps their,words and theoretical perspectives will not ultimately be able to resolve completely my sense of professional malaise, but they are most certainly deserving of my careful attention and respect.

Rosler has suggested that a “‘guerrilla’ strategy” remains possible in the postmodern world if one maintains a “position of marginality,” because “[ilt is only on the margins that one can still call attention to what the ‘universal’ system leaves out” (as cited in Connor, 1997, p. 258). These words pose a serious challenge to the academic, for how can some- one in the university, tenured, well paid, and comfortable, lay claim to the margins in any serious way? In the early pages of this essay I have sought to suggest how suspect such a claim of marginality must be for any oppositional academic. What we have at the end of the 20th century are instead articles in once-radical periodicals like Rolling Stone profil- ing the “most dangerous college teachers in America” (Slivka, 1998, p. 75), all employed at prestigious universities, all at or near the pinnacle of professional prestige. Is this really who Rosler has in mind when she reflects upon the possibility for a “‘guerrilla’ strategy” initiated from the margins of postmodern culture?

Whereas this question seems perhaps a rhetorical one, it need not necessarily be seen as such. The question seems closed only if one understands power as something exercised on a broad, large-scale basis, primarily from the top down. In such a model, power is a “contested op- eration, . . . the struggle of institutions, classes, powerful interests, and even powerfully situated groups (and, at moments, of uniquely situated individuals)” (Merod, 1987, p. 147). Within such a model, the university functions as part of a wider constellation of institutions devoted to sustaining and reproducing the dominant socioeconomic organization, and the critical intellectual finds himself or herself inevitably drawn into some form of complicity with these large-scale interests (Merod). As Merod points out, “the most radical critic . . . is close to things to be opposed because they are intimately connected to the work and the identity of the critic. They are entangled with the critic’s authority’’ (p. 132). Within such a context, the margin must disappear, at least as a site of resistance to be located within the university system.

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Michel Foucault (1 977a) would suggest that such a model of power is flawed, as is this version of the fate of the critical academic, though not because Foucault resists the notion that every critical intellectual is constrained by and composed within the networks of knowledge and power that swirl around and through the university. Indeed, Foucault is among the most vigorous of theorists when it comes to uncovering the complex ways by which “‘oppositional’ rhetorics are in complicity with the hegemony of power” (Bove, 1986, p. 224). His understanding of power, though, is radically different from the model outlined in the prior para- graph. Rather than seeing it as something involving large institutions and global interests, Foucault represents power as diffuse and “seam- less” (Merod, 1987, p. 154), as permeating the most microlevel relationships and structures of knowledge.

It is not a triumphant power, which because of its own excess can pride itself on its omnipotence; it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but per- manent economy. These are humble modalities, minor procedures, as compared with the majestic rituals of sovereignty or the great apparatuses of the state. (Foucault, 1977a, p. 170)

This power appears as “insidious” (Merod, p. 154) and beyond direct opposition because it has soaked into all our discourses and disciplines; it is omnipresent (Said, 1983). The pervasiveness of power, the way it operates on everyone (including the critical intellectual) in a manner that is primarily unconscious and beyond the seeming control of human agency (Merod), radically calls into question the kind of resistance pos- tulated in my graduate student hopes and present-day gloom. Again, I may have been proven naive, for Foucault theorizes that power “is dispersed among the relationships of social reproduction and actively di- rects human energies. Such things as choice and decision, the preroga- tives of the single situated individual, are subordinate to the institutional context of knowledge” (Merod, p. 154).

Within Foucault’s (1977a) model, academics are complicit with the operations of power by virtue of the very intellectual practices that define our professional lives. In our search for knowledge pursued under the guise of academic expertise, we participate in the organization of knowledge and power that is essential to the maintenance of the social and political order (Merod, 1987). In such a complex situation, where power exists not outside somewhere but deep within the social nexus, the idea that I can escape such a burden of complicity is little more than a childish dream, as is my desire not to be used by the dominant “powers that be.” Resistance must become something altogether different when power is widely dispersed throughout the culture and global action and forms of opposition are futile.

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What arises within this new model of resistance is Foucault’s version of the critical intellectual, a figure who, as summarized by Merod (1987), understands the implications of that collapse of any outside position from which to offer a broadly influential oppositional perspective and instead opts for “an internal attack on the images and practices of expert knowledge” (p. 148). This figure works on the local level, struggling against the operations of power and knowledge at those specific sites where he or she labors (Bove, 1986). Subversion and erosion become the key terms here, with intellectuals called to the task of uncovering the relations between truth and power upon which various institutions depend. Such practices can indeed be oppositional because they have the capacity to disrupt and subvert “‘normal’ professional activity” (Merod, p. 127). Contrary to my desires for an all or nothing version of my pedagogical and scholarly practices that would allow me to see myself as unsullied by the university’s ties to the dominant ideology, Foucault (1 977a) argues that the undermining of these “‘micropowers”’ must not be understood in absolute terms (Bove, 1986, p. 27). The operations of power are far more complex than that; so too are the possibilities of resistance.

This emphasis on formulating resistance at the microlevels of power bears a certain resemblance to the suggestions I often hear from my own students when they tell me to simply “subvert the system from within.” They tell me that it is in the day-to-day creative undermining of organizational constraints (Eisenberg & Goodall, 1997) that one finds the possibility for subversion and resistance. I would like to believe these suggestions, but as I have already suggested in this essay, it is extraordi- narily difficult for me to see how my daily professional activities disrupt much of anything. In fact, they seem to be much more easily understood as my contributions to the continuation of the organization’s agenda. I think even Foucault would reject my efforts at microlevel resistance (i.e., what I earlier described as my version of radical pedagogy) for their failure to come to terms with the full import of his disclosure of the complex relations of power and knowledge and the complicity of intellectuals with those operations. It takes more than having students sit in circles to disrupt the operations of knowledge and power, and it is no easy task for an academic to escape complicity with the very institutional authority he or she would oppose.

A similar, but I think more promising, avenue for thinking about resistance has been suggested by recent work in communication promot- ing the idea of “hidden transcripts” as a key to understanding the possibilities available to disempowered groups to subvert the dominant hegemony (Scott, 1990). It has been argued that through a kind of offstage conversation away from the control of the powerful, a “fugitive politi-

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cal conduct for subordinate groups” is possible and room can be made for “a dissident subculture” to “formulate patterns of resistance” (Scott, pp. 17, 108, 119). Scott’s ideas are attractive, as is Murphy’s (1998) suggestion of the potential within these “hidden transcripts” to enable the “seemingly powerless [to] effectively carve out discursive spaces for influence and control” (p. 500). Yet I remain somewhat skeptical of these noJions when I attempt to translate them into a form appropriate to my position as university faculty. My job requires that I be much more concerned with the capacity of students to reproduce the dominant discourse rather than with facilitating their subversion of it, just as I am in my professional life far more closely aligned with Scott’s version of the dominant elite than I am with any meaningful version of a subordinate group. Again, Foucault’s (1977a, 1977b) disclosure of the power- knowledge nexus and his critique of the educational system’s role in the production of that knowledge cause me to hesitate before embracing the notion of “hidden transcripts” as a satisfying resolution to the professional contradictions I feel.5 It remains for me more of a hopeful wish than a realizable possibility.

I must also admit, however, that Foucault’s rendition of the positionalities and possibilities of the critical intellectual does not resolve my deep misgivings about my place within the university. Whereas I appreciate what he has taught us all about the complex operations of power and about the function of the university as a primary site for the production of knowledge and power, his account of the critical intellectual and of specific instances of microresistances ultimately leaves me unpersuaded and unconsoled. It is difficult to conceive how Foucault’s intellectual can be understood as an agent for change. Such a figure seems to rely solely upon critical skepticism to initiate a subversion of organized power and knowledge (Merod, 1987). Foucault’s model of resistance depends heavily on a trust in skepticism to provoke change, a position emanating from what Said (1983) calls Foucault’s “flawed attitude to power” (p. 222) that avoids “the central dialectic of opposed forces that still underlies modern society, despite the apparently perfected methods of ‘technotronic’ control and seemingly nonideological efficiency that seem to govern everything” (p. 221). Dismissing the possibility of the academic critic as an oppositional agent capable of independent action, Foucault seems to surrender “to the postmodernist reading of a world so wholly bureaucratized, so closed by the hegemony of its ruling institutions, that opposition can take place only outside or beneath the political process” (Merod, p. 170).

Such a picture of resistance within the academy is admittedly not altogether uncongenial to the lessons I have learned from my own experi- ences, but this version of academic self-fashioning still seems too impov-

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erished to hold within it the potential for renewal. In particular, I share Said’s concern that such a representation of power is not only “politically inadequate [but also] easily academicized, assuring its believers of their own political commitment because of its apparent seductive opening to the world, while immuring them within comfortable and autho- rized dogmas” (Bove, 1986, p. 213). It is just this kind of self-assurance that is most alarming to me because for many years I made it a central component of my professional self-identity. As I well know, it has the power to wipe away feelings of disenchantment and even guilt.

Now I am compelled to ponder the implications of realizing how con- venient it was to believe in my “political commitment” while enjoying the rewards of working in an institution so closely aligned with the powers one claims to oppose. Has it just been the fortuitous good luck of a self- proclaimed critical intellectual to discover that I was (and am) able to use my scholarly disclosures of the nexus between knowledge and power for my own professional advancement? Admittedly, the scope and achievement of my scholarship and teaching appear inconsequential in relation to a figure such as Foucault, and it may be the height of professional vanity to compare his situation with my own. Yet I am convinced that the essential point of this comparison remains, for within his model of the critical intellectual there exists little that is all that disruptive to the powers that be or to the comfortable life of the contemporary academic. Merod (1987) writes,

Theory such as the complicated, self-disrupting theory Foucault has produced can continue uninterrupted because, distant from such work as Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s, unlike Gramsci’s prison writing in Mussolini’s Italy, it threatens no one in power. . . . it is content with an academic authority that it questions systemati- cally. (p. 165)

Hickey (1997) makes the same point in a more farcical but no less serious manner when he describes a surreal “nightmare version of [his] life,” wherein the author is condemned to an “interminable dinner party” at a late 20th-century fancy restaurant with none other than Karl Marx himself, who in the 1990s has become “a distinguished professor at Duke, pulling down something in the low six figures” (p. 82). This contemporary version of Marx remains a harsh intellectual critic of capitalism, but now he is defined more by the expensive shoes he wears than by the political fervor he exudes. Although I will never be a distinguished professor at Duke, I can not avoid the feeling that I too have opted for those “beautiful shoes” (Hickey, p. 82).

So I am returned once more to the paradox with which this essay began: How can my teaching and scholarship be understood as opposi-

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tional if they remain comfortably ensconced within the university system? Am I unavoidably co-opted by that which I would oppose? To be sure, in critiques like Baudrillard’s (1987) Forget Foucault, I recognize the convincing expression of a skepticism about the political efficacy of the Foucault’s critical intellectual, though such perspectives seem to offer little that might be experienced as immediately regenerative to my spirits. To follow Baudrillard is to acknowledge that “the techniques and strategies of a molecular micropolitics, far from tactically outflank- ing the authoritarian centres of social power, mimic the operations of a situation that is itself already imperturbably molecularized” (Connor, 1997, p. 253). Yet to combine such a tactical judgment with my own deep sense of being co-opted by the very system I would resist is to once again initiate those feelings of despair that so cloud my professional self-identity.

I do feel compromised at the most basic levels of my professional being. For example, like all good instructors, I attempt to assign grades in as fair and even-handed manner as possible. Within the structure of the university, this seems the only way to proceed. I also know, however, that my students do not arrive in my classroom on a level playing field, that they bring with them vastly different educational backgrounds, lin- guistic proficiencies, and economic circumstances that will dramatically influence their performance in my class (Shor, 1996). My own pedagogical agenda prominently features the critical interrogation of the unjust power relations in this society that produce many of the inequalities on display in my classroom. Yet, I give grades as if these differences did not exist and as if the university had played no historical role in their maintenance. I realize that I am one of those teachers described by Shor who “in an unequal society pretend that there is a universal student for whom single standards are fair” (p. 85). In my present situation I do not know how I can respond to this charge or proceed any differently; I can only register my strong sympathy with Docherty’s (1990) conclusion that “‘opposition’ . . . turns out to be itself fully implicated in the production and maintenance of the very principle of identity which it proposes to question” (p. 21 1).6

Such a conclusion leaves me cold, and I feel the need to develop a way of understanding my professional life that can begin again to posit itself as oppositional in a manner that can take fully into account the para- doxical situation of the critical intellectual within the university. Fortu- nately, such a path through the deep conflicts inherent within an academic life has been charted by any number of theorists who have been able to construct models of resistance that transcend Foucault’s kind of dependency on the sheer power of skepticism. Their stories of our professional lives sound a note of cautious hope in contrast to my own

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repeated dirge of “sulky gloom,” and the fact that their revisions call for a thorough and in some ways difficult transformation of our current ways of being encourages in me the conviction that they may be able to answer my own skepticism about easy answers that do not really dis- turb the professional and material comforts to which we have grown accustomed. I do therefore find myself listening attentively when some- one like Merod (1987) urges us to recognize that critical intellectuals “will not alter democratic institutions by intellectual dexterity alone,” for “professional critics will have to pursue a variety of collective scholarly and pedagogical practices across intellectual fields” (p. xi).

A primary reason for my sympathetic reaction to Merod’s (1987) words involves the central place he accords to the ethico-political component in the life of the critical academic. Merod, and many of the other theorists I find most persuasive, refuse the almost paralyzing skepticism of postmodernism’s “legitimation crisis” (Habermas, 1976), with its de- nial of all metanarratives that might provide a basis for arriving at some sort of principled course of judgment and action (Connor, 1997). Merod’s emphatic conclusion that “if the humanities are to become a force of persuasive dissent within our culture, they will have to manufacture moral commitment and political energy that relieve their embarrassed privilege as civilized but silent witnesses” (p. 63) seems to answer the challenge of Foucault, just as it salves my misgivings about my own prior unsatisfactory attempts to justify the choices I have made in my professional life. Krippendorff (1995) is equally helpful in this regard because much of his path toward “undoing domination” involves “reembodying [our notions of] power” and embracing a kind of resistance that erodes domination by, among other strategies, “invoking higher authorities” such as “moral principles” to justify the refusal of obedience to the powerful (pp. 125, 116). It also needs to be pointed out here that these calls cannot be dismissed as some naive return to some antiquated, pre- Lyotard, uncomplicated embrace of the metanarrative. Indeed, if any- one is to be judged as naive, it must be those who would deny the need for any recourse to principles that exist beyond the scope of pure tactics or a grim register of systematized, disembodied power (Krippendorff). As Connor (1997) remarks:

when inspected closely, it becomes apparent that the postmodern critique of unjust and oppressive systems of universality implicitly depends for its force upon the assumption of the universal right of all not to be treated unjustly and oppressively-otherwise, who would care whether metanarratives were false or not, oppressive or not, and what reason might there be for their abandonment when they no long compelled assent? Seen in these terms, the very “incredulity towards metanarratives” that Lyotard writes about is not a symptom of the collapse of general or collective ethical principles, but a testimony to their continuing corrective force. (p. 276)’

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I believe an embrace of the ethical holds the promise of an escape from my condition of disenchantment precisely because it forces me to transform the daily practices of my professional life even as I renew my commitment to what Said (1983) calls the “active, critical consciousness” that would carry forward into the academic life some meaningful “intention of alleviating human suffering, pain, or betrayed hope” (pp. 232,247). Thus, if our job as teachers is to encourage students to “think of critical activity as moral effort rather than careerist self-validation” (Merod, 1987, p. 134) and to see “communication ontologically [,I in terms of its impact on alternative ways of being in the world” (Eisenberg, 1998, p. loo), then we too must radically alter our ways of doing business, our ways of being in the professional world. Critical scholarship cannot simply be a means of professional advancement or the communication of arcane theory to an exceedingly small and elite academic audience. Rather, it must become a way of acting on the world, of initiating change. Such a reconceptualization might very well require different ways to evaluate scholarship. In such a world, the quality of a piece might not always be chiefly determined by the prestige of the academic journal in which it appears. Other factors, including its engagement with the world outside the walls of the university, might become important determi- nants of a scholar’s work, and this would thus require that our professional advancement depend on more than one’s visibility within a very select coterie of “experts” in the field. I would go so far as to second Krippendorff’s (1 995) proposal that “critical scholarship consider itself validated to the extent it actually does open new . . . possibilities for others to dialogically construct their own worlds” and that such an ex- plicitly ethical agenda be adopted as “a new validity criterion” to help keep us “socially responsive, dialogically enabling, individually emancipatory and embodied in social processes” (p. 130, emphasis added).* A scholar’s life would no longer be safely ensconced within the high walls of the academy, but then moral effort has meaning only if it is accompanied by the willingness to accept risk.

In a similar fashion, pedagogical practice must also be reimagined. Specifically, our teaching practices cannot remain as solitary and isolated activities, as rare instances of the “democratic” classroom adrift in a sea of educational practices otherwise devoted to the reproduction of the dominant ideology (McLaren, 1995), for as Eisenberg and Goodall (1997) suggest, “[tlhe more isolated an individual is in an organization, the more the leader’s communication resembles monologue and the more constrained the individual member’s decision premises become” (p. 80). Graff (1995) argues that oppositional pedagogy desperately needs to rethink its orientation toward the individual teacher working within the single classroom because “as long as teaching is assumed to be an activ-

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ity that is just naturally performed by a lone teacher in a classroom without any dialogical relation to other courses and classrooms,” the crucial “connection between the atomized course and the depoliticized, individualistic ethos of the curriculum” is reinforced, no matter how progressive the teaching of that solitary instructor may be (p. 275).

We must break away from our comfortable models of teaching that would place individual instructors at the center of their pedagogical fiefdoms. To do otherwise is to contribute to a “disconnection of the curriculum [that] enforces an apolitical ideology quite independently of the content of the courses that comprise it, and [is] probably more powerful in shaping the attitudes of students” (Graff, p. 281). We must take up the hard work and risk-taking that is part and parcel of developing integrated, cross-disciplinary programs of study (especially at the undergraduate level) that more closely resemble a dialogic, democratic version of what education can be. This is admittedly a first step and one that is in fact already the practice at a growing number of campuses across the country (one thinks immediately of the emergence of “learning communities” as a new component of undergraduate education and the pioneering work of the National Learning Communities Project centered at Evergreen State College in Washington). It is an important step, too, because as Scott (1990) points out, to work in solitude can be an exceedingly difficult and dispiriting burden for all but the most intrepid of ~ouls.~This kind of revisioning of the academic model cannot be the whole solution, however, for the contradictions faced by the critical instructor are far too intractable to be resolved by such relatively modest changes.

To begin to make a more ethical and democratic classroom, we must also be willing to read critically our own practices in the classroom, including such meat-and-potatoes issues as the development of course curriculum and the assigning of grades. We must therefore do more than simply talk about dialogue as we sit in circles. We must adopt workable means to enact more ethical practices in the classroom. It is here that models of “concrete . . . power-sharing” developed by scholar-teachers like Shor (1996, p. 219) seem especially helpful. Shor has experimented with what he terms an “after-class group,” a “voluntary committee of students who would stay after class to review the session [the class] just had so as to decide what was working, what was not, what to change, and what to do in the upcoming class” (pp. 102, 116). In response to this radical reimagining of classroom dynamics, Shor’s students even began to reveal something of the content of their own hidden transcripts that had previously been concealed from the instructor’s view. To be sure, Shor’s innovations were anxiety filled for the instructor and perhaps not ultimately as successful as he had wished, but I believe that it is only in such bold steps toward collaboration in class governance, grad-

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ing, and curriculum planning on a daily basis that the traditional power relations on display in our classrooms can be disturbed. Only then can we be said to have taken seriously the charge of Tompkins (1990) to recognize that “[tlhe kind of classroom situation one creates is the acid test of what it is one really stands for” (p. 656) .

At this point in the proceedings, after a good deal of triumphalist rhetoric concerning the efficacy of this model of self-transformation, it seems imperative to pause momentarily. For in looking back over the past few pages of this essay, it appears that I have been rushing headlong toward some sort of bildungsroman of the no longer unhappy academic, or that I am composing a quest narrative in which the protagonist (yours truly) not only achieves wisdom but also moves toward a powerful sense of personal renewal as well. However, seldom does the real world con- form so readily to a narrative structure, and in this story of my efforts to construct a more satisfying and ethically consistent professional identity, a similar admission must be offered. The program of action initiated by the call to affirm the academic’s political responsibilities carries its own set of perplexing and complicated contradictions that would again place under question the very possibility of reconciling such a vision of the critical intellectual with the realities of institutional life at the end of the century. Most assuredly, the path toward professional renewal seems an especially difficult one for me, which is why this essay must repeatedly wind back upon itself and take back with one hand what it has proclaimed with the other.

The idea of scholarship and teaching as profoundly ethical and political is not, in and of itself, a particularly revolutionary idea. All that we do in our professional lives unavoidably has an ethico-political component to it, just as all my actions must surely emerge out of my own ideological convictions and commitments. “A way of teaching is never innocent,” writes Berlin (1988), for “[elvery pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed” (p. 492). In- deed, several theorists in my academic discipline of composition have so foregrounded this recognition of our ethico-political selves that the classroom has come to be reimagined as a place where instructors “openly exert their authority as teachers to try to persuade students to agree with their values instead of pretending that they are. . . leaving students to draw their own conclusions” (Bizzell, 1992, pp. 272-273). Yet these representations still feel rather jarring to me, not because they are so different from what I have been proposing in the past few pages of this essay, but because they are so similar to what I have in mind, and I know that such conceptions of the academic’s role is most susceptible to a kind of critical interrogation that I find very persuasive.

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The fundamental criticism registered against those who would elevate the critical intellectual to such a prominent ethico-political role is that it assumes the right and responsibility of that figure to define and represent critical consciousness for others, many of whom may be far more marginalized than the well-paid academic. The academic assumes the mantle of the expert, presuming to give voice to those whom society has rendered voiceless. This professional self-fashioning, as Foucault ( 1977b) has pointed out, constitutes the height of arrogance (Bove, 1986). Foucault’s critique, though, goes further than a questioning of the critic’s humility, or lack thereof. His crucial point in the analysis of the role of the academic, in fact, returns us to that question with which my essay began: How can a critical project be initiated by one deeply complicit with the powers that be? As Bove summarizes Foucault’s thinking:

Leading intellectuals tend to assume responsibility for imagining alternatives and do so within a set of discourses and institutions burdened genealogically by.multifaceted com- plicities with power that make them dangerous to people. As agencies of these discourses that greatly affect the present lives of people one might say leading intellectuals are a tool of oppression and most so precisely when they arrogate the right and power to judge and imagine efficacious alternatives-a process that we might suspect sustains leading intellectuals at the expense of others. (1986, p. 227)

As should be evident by now, I have much trouble disputing such a representation of our-my-professional arrogance. For as much as I admire the bravery of Shor’s (1996) “after-class group,” I am not sure that even it fully resolves the anxieties I feel when considering my professional interactions with students. Thus, I would like to conclude this essay by extending the consideration of professional presumption to in- clude our dealings with students, where the contradictions of our situation seem to come most sharply into focus for me.

I enjoy teaching. Based on the student evaluations I typically receive, I believe most students enjoy taking classes with me. As I have already suggested, when I conceive of my goals for a particular course, I almost always begin with the notion that I am teaching for change, that I have a responsibility to help students develop a more critical understanding of and response to the postmodern world they inhabit, both inside and beyond the walls of the academy. I take seriously McLaren’s (1995) con- tention that “schooling is a form of cultural politics,” and I design my curriculum in large part with the goal of encouraging students to encounter and perhaps take on their own “modes of resistant subjectivity” (pp. 30, 73). Seldom do my students openly resist such prompts from me, and, as I have also discussed earlier, my students seem to willingly agree to sit not in rows but in circles, to engage in various forms of

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collaborative learning, and to cooperate in the redistribution of power in the classroom such that all eyes do not always and immediately turn toward the instructor as the source of all knowledge.

Despite these “successes,” however, I am left to wonder about the ultimate efficacy of my teaching, of even why my students are willing to participate in my agenda while voicing so little direct opposition. I find it hard to believe that my students are transformed by the experience of our class. Such an assessment seems inescapable based on the conversa- tions we have had about career goals or political allegiances. I believe their motives in my class are not any different from their motivations in their other classes: They want to pass the course, they want to get a good grade, and the easiest way to do that is to give the instructor what he or she wants. In my case, it seems evident that students do not enter my classroom hoping to encounter some sort of transformative pedagogy. Instead, they recognize that I have an agenda and that I have the power to impose that agenda on them. So they go along with it.lo Once one gets beyond the rhetoric of “liberatory pedagogy” with which I sur- round my teaching practices, it is difficult to discern how my students experience anything other than the typical undemocratic, normalizing functions of American education.

Of course, I remarked upon this state of affairs in the early pages of this essay, and nothing that has emerged from my broad survey of other critical voices has materially impacted my understanding of this most basic of professional realities. I remain stymied by the kinds of questions posed by Knoblauch (1991) when he considers the contradictions of “liberatory teaching” in the university:

What d o my students have to gain from a scrutiny of values and conditions that work to insure their privilege? Why should they struggle with the troubling self-awareness that one course aims to create when the culture of the university as a whole reassures them of their entitlements? (p. 19)

I do not know any way of answering these questions that can avoid the trap of falling into “antidemocratic forms and practices” (Bove, 1986, p. 2), that can be something other than my imposition of a liberatory agenda (or at least my version of one) upon students who are not particularly interested in pursuing such an agenda.

1 believe that part of a more ethical stance toward teaching involves the recognition that students are not blank slates when they come onto the university campus, nor are they stupid. The contradictions that I feel between my pedagogical agenda and the organizational objectives of the university in part exist precisely because students understand the real function of the university in the sociocultural order-that is why the

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vast majority come in the first place. They see the university for what it is: an institution organized for the “reproduction of relations of power and privilege” (Connor, 1997, p. 14). In this respect, they see more clearly than I apparently have. So beyond all the forms of complicity suffered by the oppositional academic and uncovered by theorists like Merod (1987) and Foucault (1977b), I am confronted by one overpowering and immediate fact: Any real project of teaching for critical democracy must be done against the wishes of most students, and that means I must presume to tell them not only what they need to know, but who they should become. Although this may always have been the essence of the American way of education, it is not a model that I can accept comfortably, particularly as it fits so easily into the university’s dominant culture of expertise and the authority of the instructor.

The classroom is, of course, part of a university whose position in the social life of the United States is a crucial one for a country whose world dominance begins to be exercised less through direct “imperialism” than by the propagation of “how to do things,’’ that is, by its role as instructor. (Watkins, 1981, p. 364)

I am not sure that any amount of room rearrangement or other strategies for redistributing classroom authority will alter this sociopolitical reality in the life of the university instructor.

Nor can they change my conviction that there have been.more than a few occasions in my teaching career when I have felt that the promulga- tion of my “critical” agenda was anything but dialogic in nature. Rather, I felt myself come perilously close to what Krippendorff (1995) describes as those

nondialogical constructions of power whose truths are predicated on claiming privileged access to facts and on dismissing the articulations of dialogically involved others as being unable to see their own oppression, as being ideologically biased, or as denying the truths only superior analysts can see. (p. 112)

What has become of my ethical stance when I perform this kind of expert role or when I insist upon a “dialogue” about resistance when a large majority of my students clearly have no real desire to discuss it and just as clearly hold profoundly different understandings than I do about what it might mean in their lives? These remain very difficult questions for me to answer.

Knoblauch (1991) concludes his meditation on “Critical Teaching and Dominant Culture” with an affirmation of those infrequent and “small, tantalizing moments” of student-generated critical reflection (p. 2 1) as the only authentic accomplishments likely to be gathered by the critical

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pedagogue. Perhaps I am still being too childish, but given all the compromises the university asks of its faculty, I am not sure these brief moments are sufficient to sustain, let alone renew, me. Perhaps the only genuinely ethical option for me is one that would enact itself outside of the university, in a space that might be more easily understood as a le- gitimate site of resistance. Perhaps no amount of self-proclaimed ethical behavior on my part as an individual instructor can overcome the institutional realities of my life in the university.

At this time, I do not know the answer to this dilemma. Right now, I cling tightly to Eisenberg’s (1998) important reminder that “we all pursue truth but find mostly contradiction; we struggle for authenticity and a coherent self but find life fraught with surprises” (p. 99). I would like to believe that the embrace of the ethical can occur within the academy and that I can achieve an acceptable kind of balancing act between my goals and the “organizational constraints” that most assuredly do limit my choices of how to make strategic responses (Eisenberg & Goodall, 1997, p. 30). My feelings of professional malaise have not yet become so strong that I have surrendered all hope, and there are even times when those “small, tantalizing moments” evoked by Knoblauch (1991) can indeed function as cherished moments of illumination for myself and I hope for many of my students as well. There are also days, however, when I am convinced that I am in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing. I suppose the final lesson in all this for me is that at this point in my career, everything remains as a paradox, a contradiction, and any clear resolution to my professional situation still feels very far away.

I See Murphy (1998) for an extensive documentation of recent studies in communication that have taken for their subject what Mumby calls “the relationship between communication and relations of domination” (p. 503).

See Bove’s (1 986) excellent discussion of Foucault’s (1977b) critique of this trope of the master- ful intellectual. ’ To be fair, the legacy of these professors also included my education as a reader capable of looking at a text with suspicion and a sharply critical eye toward the affiliations of a text with structures of power and domination. Of course, this capacity played an important role in my development into a self-described critical intellectual. However, my essential point remains that their fondness for the “outlaw” academic trope tended mainly to obscure the political situation of today’s university faculty. Did these mentor figures themselves struggle with the same sense of contradiction and paradox that I describe in this essay? I would like to think they did, though in my graduate school experience I never managed to see much beyond the public performances of these academic “stars,” and those faces always seemed to me to be assured and confident about the political choices they had made.

This realization about the meaning of my position as instructor takes on special urgency when one considers the claim by Evan Watkins (1981) that “criticism at its very center embodies what has become in the United States perhaps the most powerful means of control: the authority of instruction” (p. 363).

For a wonderful example of the appearance of these “hidden transcripts” within the college

Notes

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writing classroom and their co-optation by even the most progressive of instructors, see Brooke (1987).

These words are actually Docherty’s paraphrase of Baudrillard’s position. ’ For a sustained analysis of the modern refusal of ethics, see Maclntyre (1981). MacIntyre specifically critiques the dominant doctrine of “emotivism,” the belief that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling” (p. 11) . Obviously, such a critique is congenial to the embrace of the ethical that I urge in these pages. See also Fisher (1987), who extends MacIntyre’s ideas about the centrality of narrative in ethics into a comprehensive theory of “Homo narrans” that places storytelling and the composition of narratives as the crucial component in how individuals “come to believe and act on the basis of communicative experi- ences’’ (p. xi).

Krippendorff takes a much more hopeful approach than I to the possibility of “undoing power.” Nevertheless, I find his emphasis on the ethical (defined in terms of establishing a dialogue with and for others) an appealing antidote to Foucault’s dependency on the power of skepticism.

Mention also might be made here of the recent interest in service learning and especially the increasingly broad recognition of the need for greater “reflective teaching” (Tsangaridou & Siedentop, 1993). Amid this growing literature urging increased faculty reflection, there is considerable emphasis on the importance of “critical reflection,” wherein an instructor reflects upon “whether professional activity is equitable [and] just” (Hatton & Smith, 1994, p. 35) and considers closely the moral and political dimensions of teaching (Tsangaridou & Siedentop). At Portland State Uni- versity, the entire faculty merit program has been reorganized in the effort to support community service and a more engaged form of scholarship. (I am grateful to Eric Eisenberg for bringing the Portland State situation to my attention). l o See O’Reilly (1989) for a similar recognition of this phenomena, though her interpretation of its significance is rather different from mine.

Richard Boyd is an assistant professor at San Diego State University, where he teaches in the De- partment of Rhetoric and Writing Studies. The author wishes to express his appreciation to the anonymous reviewers of this paper and to Patricia Geist for their most helpful and compassionate responses to earlier drafts of this essay.

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