Many will remember the story of Walter Benjamin’s chiasmatic crossing of the politicization of art with the aestheticization of politics. He wanted to recover a time when news of the world didn’t come to us already shot through with explanation. The notion of an impoverished narrative tradition beyond journalism persists in non-marginalized cultures, the implication being that such cultures lack not the penchant or the patience for story-telling but the naivete needed to appreciate the form (Friedman 1998).

Loss of naivete here means a view of human dignity as a bourgeois construct used to make more felt humiliation as a means of social control. It regards transcendence in an absolute ironic sense whose cost is destruction or undoing of all that went before it (Wilde 1987). It sees as antithetical claims that marginalized groups are the de facto source of yearning for justice in an otherwise dehumanized and unjust technoscape (Freire 1970). Here the measure of privilege is not wealth and influence alone. It isn’t the freedom to speak one’s conscience or to think in a creative capacity but the opposite of these. As with the MPs during the time of George Orwell’s British Raj, “culture of silence” means something different than what’s diagnosed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, to say the least. The former fears reciprocity for a reason. Even academics who comb through the canon for its promised windfall of more if not new things to say seem to know the limits placed upon what may be said or invented at any given time as a self-imposed and regulated, historically situated discursive community, as Foucault pointed out in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s 1972 Anti-Oedipus.

But non-marginalized cultures do seem to work according to a naivete. Alan Wilde cites the “only ostensible” contradictions and the “apparent paradox” in Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn as an example. There, “We are directed not to the genuinely but to ‘the apparently contradictory and conflicting elements of experience.’” Brooks was said to be interested in the “apparent paradox” and “not the irrefrangibly self-contradictory oppositions of the perfected dilemma” (Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination, p. 23).

The ‘naïve’ approach to contradictions seems to have a different objective than the work of conscientizacao, a term denoting “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Freire 19). This difference brings to bear the question of whether contradictions are always the hallmarks of oppression. Sometimes they are mere scaffolding for the understanding, to be disassembled afterward. It also suggests that critical pedagogy can get by with only apparent contradictions, that there’s no need to take education hostage by turning to the pull of the Real. That might be why pedagogies of this type tend to be viewed as top-down power grabs. Where they inject evidence of real past injustice or ongoing injustice, they not only miss the point of facilitating understanding, it’s disingenuous where there is no real way to effect change from outside of spheres of influence. This last point is critical in correcting for the illusion that certain kinds of privilege marked by centers of wealth and the power to effect policy extend beyond their restricted scope in an essential way. That may be why talk of threats to such privilege outside of this scope is regarded as absurd, in a sense similar to Richard Shaull’s calling “absurd” the “copying” in technologically advanced countries the method of teaching “illiterates” in Latin America (Forward to Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

Paulo Freire wrote in an inspired way of a “lost humanity” in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

“…while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the first is man’s vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity” (28).

The problem that I have with this positioning is what I stated earlier. It’s presented as though the purpose of struggling, suffering nations is to provide the element of humanity to an advanced technology state said to be void of this. It’s a self-perpetuating problem whose solution would be to bring down the whole thing and to expect resistance along the way.

Rhetoric aside, I think what Freire was advancing also can be thought in the way French philosopher Henri Bergson presented. He argued that the blinded part of pure states of consciousness conceived as process was always present and can be made present again. He said it was for the convenience of language and referentiality they were cut off:

“…but our regard of them as having been truncated merely indexes our own forgetting of them as alive and constantly changing. This habituated regard and consequent forgetting on our part does not in and of itself bring about the realization of such a condition…We can speak of these processes as ‘recoverable’; put them back in communication with each other and that this can be done should serve as proof of their always having been present…” (Matter and Memory, 1991 paperback, p. 196).

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