JAC Volume 17 Issue 1

Judith Goleman's Working Theory is an exceptional attempt to theorize a counterhegemonic praxis that avoids the pitfalls that have so easily beset radical pedagogy. Goleman argues for a strong dialectic between theory and practice that leads to a deeply "critical" pedagogy. Central to this work is her uncompromising insistence that reading and writing (like teaching) are historically determined, always already ideological. For Goleman, effective writing pedagogy (as well as productive composition scholarship) can derive only from rigorous ideological critique.

Goleman's insistence on the dialectic between theory and practice places her squarely in the debate over the role of theory in a postmodern world (and classroom). This is no surprise coming from someone so thoroughly committed to Marxist theory, Freirean pedagogy, and Foucauldian analysis. Such a position does, however, put her at odds with postmodern scholars who claim that theory has no power to inform local practices. Consequently, Goleman takes issue with Stanley Fish's contention that antifoundationalist orientations will not have a positive (or any) effect on the teaching of composition. She makes the point that because Fish and others discuss student writing in such unexamined terms as "good writing," and discuss the teaching of composition in equally unexamined terms like "doing a good job," it is not surprising that antifoundationalist theories as applied to composition are found "lacking." She contends, however, that antifoundationalist compositionists can reinvigorate our scholarship if they insist on talking about "what to write" before discussing "how to write."

Throughout Working Theory, Goleman demonstrates how we might approach the issue of "what to write." She intersperses in-depth discussions of the theoretical work of Bakhtin, Marx, and Althusser with the work of composition scholars (Susan Miller, Kurt Spellmeyer, and Lester Faigley, for example) and with students' writing in order to demonstrate the conjunctures of various discourses that compositionists "work." Goleman uses these conjunctures to develop a pedagogy that, through ideological analysis, both reveals the discourses that "work us" and our students and opens up possibilities for "working" those same discourses for particular cultural effects.

Within the academy and the composition classroom, students are confronted with various authoritative discourses that radical pedagogies—including Goleman's—attempt to examine. Proceeding from the work of Bakhtin, who "links the ability to look relatively at one's movement among languages with the possibility for political action and awareness," Goleman posits that recognizing heteroglossia is "a prerequisite for choosing one's own language orientation," for taking on subject position (45). Confounding the process, however, is the very fact that authoritative discourses discourage questioning and resistance. Goleman departs from Bakhtin, then, who characterizes relations to authoritative discourses as passive, and she proposes a "negative dialogics," an active process of attempting to keep authoritative discourses in check, thus opening up the possibility for discussing student-teacher relations in ways that do not rely solely on issues of authority since both students and teachers are subject to the effects of such discourses.

A critical pedagogy incorporating a negative dialogics such as that which Goleman proposes would not attempt to reject authoritative discourses (since we are always already part of them) but would try to cultivate, as part of a more complex practice, an awareness of the language relations we are in. Clearly, encouraging students to engage in ideological critique and to interrogate their relations to authoritative discourses leads to a question that has always been at the center of radical pedagogy: the balance of authority between teacher and student. One way to help students exercise more authority over their own learning and to empower them as subjects is to encourage them to question the very forms we as composition teachers ask them to write. But Goleman doesn't stop there, as many have; rather, she thoroughly maps out a pedagogy that includes "the double activities of `learning about' and `making something of' social determinations" (100). Where this two-fold practice occurs, according to Goleman, "critical education is taking place" (101).

Students, she writes, must reflect critically on their own specific historical situatedness within a discourse as well as on, for instance, how the essay, as a form of authoritative discourse, helps shape their thoughts. Nevertheless, she wisely cautions against assuming that historical knowledge of academic forms will necessarily lead to raised critical consciousness because a critique of an academic form can easily take the shape of yet another authoritative discourse. When students learn to perceive hegemonic relations in texts (broadly conceived) and understand that any text carries with it a specific, interested way of representing the world, they are participating in a new kind of discourse—a critical, dialectical, self-reflexive discourse that resists a pedagogy of mastery and constructs new subject positions for both students and teachers.

Through a form of ideological analysis that she calls critical effectivity, Goleman's pedagogy "presupposes that knowledge of one's subjectivity cannot be learned in the fixed or static manner of a `history lesson' but rather must be understood over and over again in its effects" (18). In other words, like Althusser, Goleman insists on both the "incessant recognition of ideology's effects" and the knowledge of the mechanism of that recognition (20). It is not enough that students understand the historical nature of situationality; in fact, citing the work of Susan Miller, Goleman asserts that "the assumption that historical knowledge of academic forms will alter one's subjectivity and affect one's present situation is an idealism and must be rethought." The concept of historicity, she warns, threatens to "become the key concept of a new, authoritative discourse" (71).

Goleman's point is well taken: the insistence on students' reflecting upon the history of discursive forms as the way to produce more awareness of one's situated knowledge and subjectivity ignores not only the overdetermined student-subject, but the overdetermined pedagogical response to it as well. The analysis of discourse relations can, Goleman argues, be significant, but the opportunity to historicize the discourse relations that students are in guarantees neither that they will gain critical consciousness, nor that they will not merely replace the authoritative discourse "out of favor" with one more in keeping with the teacher's radical pedagogical objectives. As an illustration, Goleman provides several examples of writing in which the student, attempting to be "reflexive" and to "situate" herself historically, falls into a "before and after" personal narrative that constructs the student's "prior" self as an object of analysis in direct contrast to the "present" self—older, wiser, unified, and beyond analysis. Goleman argues that process pedagogy—despite its more progressive, liberatory forms—has assumed a view of writing that places a high premium on showing students that meaning is situational but that often stops short of demonstrating just how historically situated meaning-making is. Goleman asserts, on the other hand, that "without a rich and sympathetic understanding of their investments in certain signs and signifiers, students (and their teachers) are likely to fall into writing formulas based on the ahistorical polarity of the false self and the true self" (94).

The strength of Working Theory lies in its ability to blur the not uncommon binaries of theory/practice and teacher/student, and in its recognition of the difficulty of enacting a pedagogy that does not rely on these binaries. Too often the authors of pedagogical theories touted as radical and liberatory, for all their good intentions, fall short of developing a practice through which students can transform—and, more importantly, continue to transform—their worlds because these binaries are central to pedagogical practices. The possibilities for students to develop critical consciousness through reading, writing, and interpreting are limited when the subjects of "practice" and "theory" and of "teacher" and "student" are defined over and against one another in ways that defy the notions of border-crossing and multiple subjectivities that postmodern and radical pedagogical theories espouse. Working Theory is a stimulating and important book that contributes greatly to conversations on critical pedagogy and suggests new ways of thinking not only of theory's relation to practice, but also of the relationship between teachers and students.