Smug Pedagogy
Thinking of last night’s South Park episode “Smug Alert! Hybrid owners have not cornered the market on smugness. As my lovely partner often notes, cultural studies, too, has its own brand of smugness. That smugness often materializes in the triad of race, class, gender. What was initially a set of reading tools for better understanding the ways ideas are constructed (the complexity of cultural coding) has since transformed into a set of standards for any reading or writing of place, popular culture, signs, and so on. “The standard object refers most easily to things that are mass-produced,” Matthew Fuller writes in Media Ecologies. To his list of material things (cars, houses), we might add conceptual things. Beyond many of the other ideological problems standards pose for pedagogy and research, the smugness that can accompany a standardized approach is often unsettling and troubling for innovative thought.
And what triggers this thinking? Nothing in particular, and yet everything critical pedagogy and some aspects of cultural studies work demonstrate when it comes to this triad. Watching the characters of South Park smell their own farts in last night’s episode (the ultimate sign of smugness), I was reminded of how much of contemporary issues and problems are quickly reduced to the “problem of capital,” “resistance,” and “power” in ways that feel more smug than informational. “We resist hegemony!” “We fight capital!” “We fight racial oppression” feel more like chants of smugness (”Aren’t we righteous?”) than movements towards action. They feel smug for the “rhetorical stances” we hear, but also for the very standard ways they circulate as “pro” or “anti” positions.
And that’s a broad, unfair claim. Ok. I’ll accept that retort. But I’m not yet ready to say that this type of pedagogy doesn’t smell its own farts. It does. We are learning less and less from the tools critical pedagogy and cultural studies offers; and this is where I might return for one second to Fuller’s book. Taking up the question of networks, Fuller explores - not the computer network - but the various cultural and informational networks that are seldom noted. One such network is the general concept of the apparatus. There is more to the text than this point. Still, Fuller taps into a model for learning that doesn’t fall back on the smuggness of decoding or deciphering, and the consequent path the holiness such decoding often results in. The network never promises standard results the way cultural studies often does (”Hey, you are not talking about race! What gives?”). In that gesture, it moves around smugness and moves closer to what Katherine Hayles calls in her last book the intermediation of subjectivity.
I say that because the standard, for Fuller, demands relations. Without relations - ones that go beyond race, class, gender - the result is not the understanding of a meaning’s process, but the admiration of smugness.
Hey Jeff,
I don’t know if others are having this problem, but your sidebar cuts off the right side of your posts. I usually have to wait a couple days until it moves below the bottom end of your sidebar to be albe to read the entire thing.
Just fyi.
cd
Comment by chris — March 30, 2006 @ 11:55 am
Hmm. Could be browser compliance. When I read in Firefox, it’s fine. I’ll have to check the css against other browsers. Do you use IE?
–
now check and tell me if it’s ok.
Comment by jrice — March 30, 2006 @ 12:03 pm
Looks good! Yeah, I usually use explorer.
Btw, good to meet you at Cs.
Oh, and re: this post on smugness. Over at my place I’m not interested with cultural studies so much as i am in body studies, but as i’ve begun to track themes of “embodiment” in comp studies i’ve noticed something similar to the reduction of categories that you talk about here. I don’t think that the category of embodiment is being reduced to a standard for mass consumption in the same way the triad of race, class, gender is. Or, maybe it is. The issue that i have with the category of “embodiment” isn’t that it’s being reduced, but that it isn’t used to analyze the place/role of the body so much as it is for locating bodies in the triad you critique above.
Right now i’m struggling to articulate exactly what i think/feel about the embodiment papers i listened to in Chicago as well as some embodiment literature. Just thinkin some still-forming thoughts out loud…
Comment by chris — March 30, 2006 @ 2:15 pm
Dear Jeff;
This is really interesting, but I guess I am not sure how you are defining “cultural studies.” In my experience with cultural studies as I know it, there’s a lot of watching for the sites where race/class/gender no longer obtains. These sites are productive.
In terms of pedagogy, I am reminded of an essay by David Sedaris where he notes that in Michigan, the blind are legally permitted to hunt. The really important question, according to Sedaris, is how they find their game and het it back to the car. You see why this is amusing. But it’s also, perhaps, a good point for cultural studies: we need to be able to see the field and what’s populating it, and then shoot at something, before we can start worrying about how to find the body and bring it home.
Does that make any sense?
Comment by sarah — April 2, 2006 @ 1:05 am
It seems to be a human failing for people to allow beliefs to turn into marks of virtue and inhibit their ability to connect with people who travel the road differently. In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby tells Malvolio, a smug puritan, “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there will be no more cakes and ale?” When political positions become marks of virtue– rather than an ethical committment to looking someone in the face without insisting they assume yours like a mask– you get proselytizing instead of critical teaching, and a weird kind of teleology, the smugness of an elect.
Comment by rdanberg — April 4, 2006 @ 11:30 am