We take the position that the professor be seen as a poet of pedagogy. Drawing upon the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Samuel Beckett, as well as contemporary poets, the argument is made for a drawing upon dialogic relationships to promote education within the classroom. The professor need be sensitive to the radically contingent nature of relationships within the postmodern classroom. It is proposed that the professor cultivate the sensitivity of a carnival classroom by being present in a manner that assumes a posture of poetic 'not knowing.'
Teaching can be a confining activity, bounded by specific blocks of time and the rigidities of classroom space. Further constraints descend, requiring that we teach toward truth and knowledge that promotes the diffusion of the universalizing reason of the Enlightenment. Teaching from an Enlightenment perspective is based on the belief that reason, empiricism and right methods will lead us from darkness into light. But what if we thought about teaching as a much more uncertain and indeterminate activity? In this article we try to get aloft the image that classrooms can provide places/spaces for intellectual tumult that can be facilitated by conversations, confessions and carnival. We argue for an approach to teaching that values permanent unresolve; proceeds by indirection, obliquity and unknowing; revels in scrambled, broken moments; and enjoys recursive undecidability. The posture of the professor is one of 'not knowing': a positionality that celebrates nonmethodical methods, abandoned meanings, insurgent, incomplete meanings, an “intoxicated midnight” in Nietzsche's phrase (1961, p332). The professor who draws as much from poetry as from the science of education knows this type of classroom. We suggest the professor be seen as a poet of pedagogy and a co- creator of carnival classrooms.
One of the basic premises undergirding our educational practices, deriving from Greek, Cartesian, Humanistic and Enlightenment traditions is that we are rational beings living in a rational universe. The function of reason, our defining faculty, is to know and make intelligible. The first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics (trans., 1952, p. 3) reads, “All men naturally have an impulse to get knowledge.” Further, Aristotle maintains, “so intellect finds fulfillment…in its exercise of knowledge” (trans., 1952, p. 260). From this perspective achievement of knowledge is what gives us dignity and nobility as human beings. Plato adds to this the need for self, inner knowledge when he has Socrates in the Apology (trans., 1961, p. 23) remark that the unexamined life “is not worth living” and in the Lesser Hippias (trans., 1961, p. 210) Socrates says, “for you will do me a much greater benefit if you cure my soul of ignorance than you would if you were to cure my body of disease.”
Seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes's Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Reaching the Truth in the Sciences (1637) came down with an axe swoop separating mind and body, and entrenching metaphysical foundationalism as one of the essential tenets of modernity. The eighteenth century Enlightenment project caught up these threads and produced out of them a dense weave of cultural reference. The century was replete with references both visual and metaphorical to the ‘light' of reason that would dispel “the mists, veils, and darkness of error and superstition” (Bates, 2001, p. 1; see also, Reichardt, 1998). This view of knowledge would prevail until well into the twentieth century when an emerging postmodern cultural aesthetic began to unhook the snaps of reason reaching back to Nietzsche's (1974) pronouncement in The Gay Science that “delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge” (p. 163).
Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and Samuel Beckett we depart from the light of Enlightenment reason, and promote a flourishing of dialogic relationships using the metaphor of carnival for personal and classroom transformation. The classroom, however configured, can expand to reflect our postmodern contradictions, ambiguities, multiplicities and complexities. Rather than trying to help students tidy up experience, the classroom itself can be seen as an aesthetic and carnival project of undoing identities and helping us to inhabit the chaos, fragments and messiness of a postmodern world. We go so far as to suggest that the postmodern classroom is an emerging space of intensity for articulating endless uncertainty about both the professor's and students' positions, identities and stances. Alert to the spirit of confession, we (students and teachers) embrace an uneasiness about the degree to which we can identify even with beliefs we hold to be true. Bakhtin, Foucault, and Beckett lead us in the same direction: these dissolvers of Enlightenment boundaries support our argument that, if there is a necessary posture for the professor, it is the stance of 'not knowing' within a carnival classroom atmosphere.
On a metaphorical level, carnival for Russian philosopher and literary critic Bakhtin (1895- 1975) is a way of thinking about how we can create “an alternative ‘social space' of freedom, abundance, and equality, expressing a utopian promise of plenitude and redemption” (Gardiner, 1993, p. 767). Robert Stam (1989, pp. 86, 95) suggests that carnival “is more than a party or a festival; it is the oppositional culture of the oppressed, a countermodel of cultural production and desire…where all that is marginalized and excluded takes over the center.” Everything that was completed, fixed, determined and too narrowly defined was, Bakhtin maintained, dogmatic and repressive; the carnival sense of the world is one where openness and incompletion are in the ascendancy. One of the defining traits of carnival is the suspension of “hierarchical structure,” that allows people to work out, “in a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-play acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival life.” Carnival life is “life drawn out of its usual rut and to some extent life turned inside out,” allowing us to see “the reverse side of the world.” A carnival approach to teaching could create spaces that permit and encourage “eccentricity, the violation of the usual and the generally accepted….” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.122-26). Another of the complex meanings of carnivalization for Bakhtin is “a peculiar form of heuristic principle making possible the discovery of new and as yet unseen things” (Bakhtin, 1984, 166). Carnival refreshes our sense of the world and brings us to threshold teaching spaces where we begin to understand that a multiplicity of differences finds no ending. If we accept Bakhtin's evocation of a world of unfinalizability our vision as teachers may extend to a vast pluralism, a heterotopia, an exalting that banishes racism, sexism and homophobia (Bell and Gardiner, 1998, p. 108).
Foucault's thought draws us away from the temptations of the pursuit of “true” knowledge to focus upon the knowledge that is manifest in classroom relations. Foucault troubles the use of abstractions in terms of understanding the historical record. He argues that there has been a tendency among some historians to think of the play of history as if it is influenced by pure, structural realities. These structures of history are concepts the historian employs to understand history in a manner that is abstracted from the historical play of relations. So too, the Enlightenment understanding of the classroom relies heavily on structural abstractions which are named as irrefutable truth. These abstractions exist outside the interplay of classroom relations. Rather than being preoccupied with the conceptual abstractions or categories of thought Foucault argues for an approach that endeavours to understand the event (Foucault, 1973).
By focusing on the event in the classroom we become concerned with the play of forces as they unfold in the classroom setting. The educator is freed from the need to introduce ideas in the classroom that allude to a unitary necessity. A unitary necessity is a teachable concept that exists without reference to the play of classroom forces; it is a concept that exists outside the classroom yet it is assumed to be essential or necessary to learning truth (Lyotard, 1984). These unitary constants are explanatory concepts that are meant to have a wide variety of applications. When the professor is freed up from those ideas that must be introduced she/he can consider more freely the classroom setting. In addition, the professor can better reflect on how those ideas that have been presented as a unitary necessity influence the play of relations in the classroom.
There are a number of temptations for the university educator to invoke historical constants or unitary necessities. One temptation is to provide an answer to understand the interactions and practices in the classroom with a frame that is constructed outside the classroom. The temptation in this case is to look for patterns of interaction that can be changed through replicable teaching method. Also the educator is constantly tempted to provide the classroom with 'content;' 'content' is assumed to be other than the classroom participants' ways of knowing. By invoking content or the correct answer, however, the professor in many cases invokes an historical constant. This constant is equivalent to an understanding of history based on broad abstract structures (Foucault, 1973). These professorial pronouncements rely on legitimation that exists outside of the play of relations within the classroom (Lyotard, 1984). A further temptation is the attempt to understand classroom interactions through sociological constructs such as classism, homophobia or psychological constructs such as hysteria, neurosis, and self-esteem. Although useful for understanding the classroom, these conceptualizations can be applied without nuance when treated as if they are historical constants.
Rather than importing knowledge as unitary necessity or using knowledge to interpret the classroom, the task of the educator differs when focusing on the event in the classroom; in this case, the professor's task is to make visible singularities. We try to understand a single incident, a single interaction as it occurs in the classroom. Rather than succumb to the teaching temptation to tidy up and fully understand the classroom event we are allowed an ambivalence. The ambivalence can entail an unfolding of knowledge as it is constructed in the classroom between participants.
Focusing on singularities in the classroom such as a student's story, an intonation of voice or an imaginative play of words involves “a breach of self evidence.” Reliance on unitary necessity involves the professor in a search for the self-evident. Ironically this search could mean the professor is not present for the meanings being constructed in the classroom. To have an 'evident' explanation of the event offers a certain comfort; we are distracted from the dangerous interplay of relations, signs, languages that construct the event. By invoking the self evident, we do not have to face ambivalence, struggle and worry in the classroom. We focus our attention so that we do avoid seeing power strategies, blockages in communication, a mulitiplicity of voices, and the privileging of certain knowledge. Unfortunately, we avert our gaze (Foucault, 1973; Foucault, 1980a; Foucault, 1980b). Terrible confusion is avoided by invoking an “empty sameness throughout the course of history” (Foucault, 1980c, 117). This invocation of the self-evident has as much to do with our own discomfort at the risks associated with the carnival classroom as it does with providing a right answer.
The challenge for the professor is to refocus on the event on the one hand; on the other, it is to let the event happen, and unfold. By resisting the temptation to provide the obvious answer, we avoid forcing our imposed meaning upon classroom life. The event does not disappear by invoking the self evident, it is merely transformed by the professor's intervention. The event becomes transfigured (Foucault, 1980b). Truth is not discovered. The play for the professor is to watch for those languages, ideas that are most surprising. It is in the surprise perhaps that we can avoid the self evident and promote the “violation of the usual” (Bakhtin, 1984, 166). This posture for the professor can be very discomfiting. The temptation to be resisted is the temptation to further obscure the event through an appeal to universal necessity rather than create a carnival space.
This act of education--watching for and cherishing the event--is likely to lead to a different type of classroom. Teaching from a student's humourous interaction, the professor's sigh, or a prolonged silence is to understand the classroom as polymorphous. The classroom is more likely to appear to the professor as a confusion of voices, signs, and language (Foucault, 1973; Harvey, 2000). Foucault (1970) and Lyotard (1984), following Wittgenstein, speak of language games. The signs that are invoked, the languages that are spoken and written construct the classroom reality. There are many constructions of reality co-existing simultaneously. We can build upon the event to conceptualize the classroom as a heterotopia. In The Order of Things Foucault (1973) outlines the qualities of heterotopia as a site where incongruity is present. Heterotopia is that space defined by “incongruity, the enigmatic multiplicity and fundamental disorder of which language is capable” (Harvey, 2000, 183) and this wild disorder of life, this polyphony, these poetic elements are the carnival classroom.
Students who have felt marginalized in the classroom are likely to welcome heterotopia, since they are well aware of the nature of reality construction in an academic setting. They are keenly aware of how language has been used to explain their existence. With the tendency of professors to introduce ideas about social relations as if they are universal, students who have experienced marginality are likely to find the ideas absurd and nonsensical as an explanation of their lives. In some cases, the students have to talk themselves into existence, since they are invisible in terms of the existing play of language in the classroom (Johnstone, 1997). The classroom as heterotopia characterizes the classroom as an amorphous space where change is possible and new meaning constructions can be created.
Instead of constructing the classroom ahead of the experience, the professor can become interested in a particular place (the classroom). Within the place called the classroom the professor can lead by making obvious particular practices such as student/professor power strategies, or expressions of kindness and humility. Those practices can be explored from a variety of points of view including signs, language, and interpersonal interaction, leading to the co-construction of knowledge (Harvey, 1989).
In the face of the event that constructs the classroom as heterotopia, certain professorial understandings of the classroom become meaningless. The classroom as utopia, progressive place or “safe space” becomes less important. In fact they may be fallacious constructs. Many professors are concerned that the classroom be a special place. The specialness of the classroom setting is viewed as a construction of the professor who then takes credit for successes of the class or inversely worries over classroom tensions. The difficulty with such a preconception of the classroom is that we must think of 'good' knowledge. The 'good' knowledge is knowledge that is tied to our conception of the proper advancement of the classroom experience; the' bad' knowledge disrupts the preconception.
The challenge of the classroom as heterotopia is that we live among or even encourage the multiple play of language. We do not work from a preconceived notion of the class to which students are expected to conform. We can avoid taking a corrective stance to the students that demands the readjustment of the student to the space as constructed (based on empty sameness) by the professor. The corrective stance forces the students to stand as witnesses to the professor's 'superior' intellectual construct (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982; Foucault, 1988).
The correction of the student by the professor can be viewed as “pulling back” from the confusion of heterotopia. Heterotopia is obscured rather than avoided, since it is always present in a classroom marked by diversity. Correction of the student is based upon the notion of the good knowledge which in turn has a role of invoking the shadow of the idealized space that has been constructed by the professor. This correction by the professor probably contributes to a suffocating presence of the instructor's neuroses and anxieties. (Those anxieties that are socially constructed in fact are the story of the professor not the student). This suffocating presence restricts the full development and anarchistic confusing pleasure of imagining new plays of relation, new language games.
The classroom as heterotopia allows for both professor and student to work against the norms and structures that are helpful for one group but may be problematic to the expression of another grouping of individuals. Heterotopia is a manner of conceptualizing the classroom that avoids the inhibition of imagination assumed by classroom norms, procedures, or structures (Foucault, 1973). The classroom as heterotopia also allows for porous moments. These porous moments are zones of exchange that suggest new discussion, unimagined language, and new cultures (Emerson, 1997). All matters in the carnival classroom are open to question including classroom interactions, classroom norms, the nature of knowledge, and the identities of the participants.
The stature of the professor in a classroom that treasures the event and heterotopia is likely to be very different from the traditional expert educator. The professor might imagine a constant posture of 'not knowing.' Along with the students, he or she might explore matters such as the fractures in classroom practices, and the confusion in the text that exists between language games. In fact, the professor might be interested in disappearing into the network of relations that are the classroom (Jameson, 1999). The professor will be most surprised when knowledge that has previously viewed as 'bad' is welcomed into the play of events, practices and language. The posture of 'not knowing' is not sloppy or irrelevant to the lesson at hand. Rather, the posture of 'not knowing' requires the careful and diligent presence of the professor.
In Anne Carson's (1998) narrative poem Autobiography of Red the protagonist ruminates on the constrained structure of the academic knowledge in the classroom:
but the examples dried away into la consecuencia
which got louder and louder as
the yellowbeard strode up and down
his kingdom of seriousness bordered by strong words,
maintaining belief
in man's original greatness- (1998, p. 92)
There is little to illuminate the classroom as heterotopia with such a posturing of knowledge. Instead the professor might keep one skeptical eye on the constraints such as the clock. The protagonist sitting in the professor's classroom allows his eyes to travel to the clock but ultimately falls into the comfort of his own thought:
his eye travelled to the clock at the front of the room and he fell into the pool
of his favorite question (Carson, 1998, p. 92).
In contrast to the restrictions of the clock, the rigidities of time, space and serious strong words, the protagonist falls into the “pool of his favorite question” which is a form of 'not knowing.' The academic rigidities and the professor's “kingdom of seriousness” are suffocating. The “pool of his favorite question” is the possibility of carnival. An attendant professor might travel with classroom participants into the pool.
While Foucault's concepts of event and heterotopia help us to reimagine the classroom, Beckett challenges us to rethink the nature of knowledge imparted in the classroom.
No writer has done more to disable the long Enlightenment tradition of truth, knowledge and method than Samuel Beckett. Both the possibility of external knowledge of a world out there and internal self- knowledge are, in Beckett, given a passport to regions of obscurity if not obliteration. In novels such as Molloy and many other works Beckett punctures the entire Western tradition of reason/method/knowledge/truth and intimates that the supreme motive of human existence rather than to know is not to know: “to be beyond knowing anything, to know that you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker” (Beckett, 1958b, p. 64). On another occasion he commented that “anyone nowadays, anybody who pays the slightest attention to their own experience, finds it the experience of the non-knower” (Shenker, 1974, p. 198). Beckett had a deep distrust of rational efforts to shape, explain, and dispel the chaos of human affairs. Casting a weary eye on the Enlightenment philosophers and their sunny view of reason he remarked that “they give reason a responsibility which it simply can't bear, it's too weak” (quoted in McMullan, 1994, p. 200). Beckett was of the view that “it is not even possible to talk about the truth. That's part of the anguish” (Juliet, 1989-90, p. 17). Once too, when asked about his high regard for the mystics he said, “I admire their disregard for logic, their burning illogicality – the flame that consumes the rubbish heap of logic” (Juliet, 1989-90, p. 26). In Molloy all the cherished certainties – reason, knowledge, truth – at the beginning, are, by the end reduced to nothing more than “wretched trifles (Beckett, 1958b, p.161)…a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing…” (Beckett, 1958b, p. 148). Theodore Adorno (1969) writes that for Beckett “the Western pathos for the Universal and Permanent is relentlessly demolished” (p. 82).
Beckett shatters all our structures of reason and presents us with ontological decay, leaving only the purgatorial here and now, taking us in his plays and novels on a relentless tour of the finely sifted rubble of our post-Enlightenment ruins bereft of all foundational landmarks. By the end of Waiting for Godot we at least know that the truth will never arrive; we are always at the place/space of “finality without end” (Beckett, 1958b, p. 111). In Beckett's universe there is no unfolding of a core or authentic self towards self-realization, actualization or completion, a telos to be fulfilled. Instead, there is only incompletion, “of a world collapsing endlessly,” (Beckett, 1958b, p. 40) for as Hamm says in Beckett's (1958a, p. 53) Endgame “You're on earth, there's no cure for that!”
But perhaps the metaphysical disintegration, ontological decay and Enlightenment ruins in Beckett can make room for that which is concealed by the rational to emerge into expression. Can we teach out of not knowing? Yes. But it would be very different than most of our current practices. Beckett speaks of the need to throw away intellectual solutions and move away from the destructive need to dominate life. The opening pages of Beckett's novel, The Unnamable (1958) twice uses the word aporia, which means lack of passage, so that in an aporia the intellect has no passage and can make no headway. There are, however, other ways of proceeding and constructing multiple truths that lie outside the Enlightenment paradigm.
We are all, students and faculty subject to experiential uncertainties and acknowledging the central role of absence and silence in teaching leads us to an understanding of the human condition as being in a suspended state of incompleteness close to a borderland state of something more. Poet Jorie Graham (1997) in her collection The Errancy sees error as a heroic ‘method' in finding one's way – “a wandering toward truth” (dust jacket notes). Graham sees poetry “not as a way of depicting the word but as a way of conversing with it, trying to know it” so that even silence can feel “like it's in conversation with you” (Schiff, 1997, pp. 62, 63). Can we choose silence for teaching, for the classroom, for conversation? Graham believes that “we construct ourselves out of the stuff we take in through our senses;” we look not just with our brain, our intellect but with our whole body (Schiff, 1997, p. 66). Playwright Tom Stoppard in The Invention of Love (1997: 93) has the character of Oscar Wilde say that truth has nothing to do with facts - “truth is quite another thing and is the work of the imagination.” In the early novels of postmodern writer Thomas Pynchon - V (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973) – uncertainty and indeterminancy predominate, arising from narrative ambiguity and the constant scattering of meaning in the discourse. These few examples from literature point to the possibility of creating classrooms and teaching spaces that are as polyphonic and endlessly inventive as the poetry of John Ashbery who implores us: “please don't tell me if it all adds up in the end” (quoted in Simic, 2000, p. 10). Foucault, Beckett and postmodern literary authors provide a convincing argument for the posture of 'not knowing' – such a posture troubles our self-evident pedagogical methods.
We can imagine that if postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty was asked what teachers should tell their students about truth he would reply with alacrity: ‘we should drop the topic' (Rorty, 1982, pp. xiii-xiv). The classroom method most based in notions of certainty, and abstract rationalism, the legacy of the Enlightenment, is the practice of grading. We could make an argument that in many ways grading is an act of violence just as all forms of representation of the other can be viewed as a kind of violence. Grading depends on the modernist view that we can come up with a universal set of standards that everyone could agree to. We could, for example, all read the same student paper and apply our ‘objective' standards and reach similar conclusions about the paper's merits and whether to assign it an A or something less. What if our grading criteria included the following: does the work move the reader, is it inspiring, does it stay in the mind, is it different, does it display an ethic of caring or a profound sense of humility, does it raise larger questions? When the poet Robert Frost was teaching at Dartmouth College he once asked his students who had handed in their first assignment if anyone had written anything they could defend with passion. No one responded and Frost tossed all the papers into a wastebasket and left the room (Parini, 1999, pp. 359-360). He was applying a standard but not a usual one. Frost's approach to teaching was instead to have one long, wild conversation.
Frost believed in teaching by presence and made the case many times that informal contacts between teachers and students were far more important than anything that happened inside the confining walls of a classroom. Once he told his students, “I'm looking for subject matter, substance in yourself.” We need, he said, “to get over our little- mindedness.” To get an education Frost maintained, “you have to hang around till you catch on” (Parini, 1999, p. 185). How do you grade hanging around? Yet hanging around might mean a deeper immersion in what really matters.
From a postmodern perspective grading to some universal, ‘objective' standard does not reflect the complexities and textures of students' lives nor does it capture the fallen wonder of the world. The promotion of nonmethodical methods is akin to the classroom as heterotopia where boundaries fade into pastiche and bricolage. Former Duke University English Professor Jane Tompkins' (1996) . Life In School: What the Teacher Learned makes of unknowing a passionate countercurrent in approaching teaching. Tompkins (1996) sees the pressure to perform silencing the creative and emotional life of students. Instead she promotes an attitude toward learning that accepts the importance of the inner life: our pedagogy “needs to comprehend the relationship between the subject matter and the lives of students, between teaching and the lives of teachers, between school and home” (p. 127). Our classrooms do not usually provide a nurturing environment where the emotions, body, spirit and mind can all be present and engaged. Teaching and the classroom as a space could be a place for liberation, transformation and abundance if we confessed that students and teachers have bodies that feel pain and are mortal, “hearts that can be broken, spirits that need to be fed” (Tompkins, 1996, p. xiii). Tompkins recognizes that there is no final source of knowledge or authority outside the many selves and identities that is an individual.
In the key chapter, “Ash Wednesday,” Tompkins (1996) describes how she began to teach courses where there was no syllabus and began to feel a great reluctance to impose her ideas on her students: “there was no knowledge apart from the situation. All I could do was respond; I couldn't prepare. I could only be in a state of preparedness. Everything became a throw of the dice. I called it teaching nothing” (p. 122). She describes in poignant detail how she moved to the position as a teacher where she “wanted to be in the moment. And to be there, I couldn't have a program or prepared text, a thing that I put between me and whatever was happening. Between me and the students. The thing – knowledge, would get in the way” (p. 122). The way (not method) that began to appeal to her then was to have no knowledge: “To know nothing, nothing solid, preexisting” (p. 123). Here we come back to 'not knowing' as a way, a nonmethodical method, that reflects a deep counter strain of the moral radiance of unknowing which runs through western culture. There is wonderful promise here. As poet Charles Wright (1998) writes, “the metaphysical world is meaningless today, south wind retelling its autobiography endlessly.” (p. 29).
When the classroom is conceptualized as heterotopia we cannot know outside the play of relations in the classroom and through the event. Beckett challenges the notion of course content through his perception of the decay of Enlightenment knowledge. We are drawn, like Tompkins, to the necessary posture of 'not knowing.' In the face of this dissolution of the class as we know it, Mikhail Bakhtin offers ways of thinking about how we might go on together as students and faculty. Two of Bakhtin's ideas, dialogue and, as we have suggested throughout the article, carnival, provide ways of thinking about postmodern classrooms and teaching. Bakhtin was concerned throughout his life with the oppressive and subjugating nature of monologue, a way of being in the world that suppressed all competing voices:
Monologism at its extreme denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach…another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change everything in the world of my consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons (Bakhtin, 1984, pp. 292-93).
Out of his deep dislike of monologue Bakhtin developed his distinctive vision of dialogue or dialogism as he often called it. What allowed human life to flourish for Bakhtin is ongoing, unfinalizable dialogue taking place at every moment of our daily existence:
The dialogic nature of consciousness. The dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open- ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 293).
Dialogue in Bakhtin's view is more than just two people talking; the more a word is used in our speech the more contexts and nuances it gathers and the word's meanings proliferate with each encounter. Our utterances (another of Bakhtin's words) do not forget but rather carry fragments from all our previous speech acts as well as the significance from the current context and this includes even forms of intonation. All utterances are double-voiced, bringing meanings with them, perhaps trailing them, but spoken into the here and now into the ongoing dialogues of our lives. “Every word,” Bakhtin wrote, “gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived its intense social life” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 262). Utterances therefore resist unity and homogenization and closure, states that Bakhtin regarded as smelling “a bit of death” (quoted in Emerson, p. 36).
We can perhaps begin to imagine how dialogue envisioned from a Bakhtinian perspective can become another way of engaging in creative teaching/learning activities. Our very beings, body and mind if they are to thrive and bloom, depend on a continual interaction with other voices, different personalities and a multiplicity of worldviews. Dialogue in Bakhtin's universe is not ever final, there is no last word, no one interpretation, no single code, no definitive truths. For as Bakhtin tells us: “to be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 252). Dialogism draws us to difference, contradiction, ambiguity, and open-endedness as features of the human condition. In dialogic engagement all former certainties crisscross under our feet in a fluctuating and destabilized landscape but this uncertainty opens the way to fully embrace the ever unstable relationships between and among self and other(s). Why not think of classrooms as spaces for fusion and dissolution, for a questioning of contexts, for a retrieving, renewal and transformation of memories and meanings, a blurring of boundaries, and spontaneous moments of wonder?
The Beat poets and writers of the 1950s fostered a carnivalistic lifestyle that has been described as Bakhtinian in their rebellion against the stultified and repressed present. Jack Kerouac extolled spontaneous creativity, Allen Ginsberg cultivated a sensibility that was transcendent and visionary, and William Burroughs was ablaze with contempt for linear thought patterns that held the self captive in webs of power and control. The Beats had a great fondness for nonlinear montage, cut-up texts, and intuitive poetic incantations, in their wish to destabilize a world drowning in its orderly thoughts (Sterritt, 1998). Burroughs' prose work most vividly illustrates a radically unfinalized world of chaotic flux populated by selves that are brimming with ambiguity and contradiction. This could be our classrooms too.
Carnival classrooms are places of rupture, fragments, indeterminacy and 'not knowing.' Despite our attempts to impose some kind of unity at the intellectual level of truth, disintegration lives its intense life and our classrooms break up into the discontinuous and abyssal. But we can be poets! In The Gay Science Neitzsche (1974) implores us to become poets of our lives (p.240). French author and cultural theorist Helene Cixous draws us to consider that “what is most true is poetic because it is not stopped – stoppable” (p.4). We can think about our presence/absence in the classroom bearing in mind the poet Eamon Grennan's (2001) lines “the radically contingent presence things have in the moment to moment passage of their happening” (p.30).
Why not approach our teaching/learning as an unfinalizable poetic work? A lesson from the poets for the professor is how to be present while 'not knowing' for as Cixous writes, “what interests me is what I do not know. And it leaves me first of all silent” …then “a search or an explanation will unfold” (p. 71). Students and teachers might then begin to feel their existence together in different frequencies than the rational, and the categorical. Working as poets, we can engage in a process of arranging and rearranging the fragments of our ruin into what might aesthetically please us, since one way or another our lives are lived in our aesthetic experiences. Fragments offer us alternative possibilities of difference: stays against the repressive tendencies of cohesion, unity, the linear and sameness. One of the keywords in Beckett's texts is on, a word brimming with movement and perhaps not much else (Uhlmann, 1999, p. 21) In the midst of the chaos and clutter of our classrooms, through our 'not knowings' we can find ways to go on together.
Critical to our finding ways is to move away from self-evident judgements, marking as well as correcting students. Foucault (1997) offers a way to rethink how we judge in the carnival classroom:
I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes- all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I'd like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of possible storms (p. 323).
Since we are immersed in the ruthless passage of time, why not spend it, teachers and students, creating a multiplicity of poems. As poets we are not so much concerned with what we bring to class but rather are diligently present in our vigilant 'not knowing' as we work together to fashion carnival classrooms and 'intoxicated midnights.'
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