on the masterful anti-master

Music: Iron & Wine: Our Endless Numbered Days I am sad. Yesterday I said goodbye to Angela Ray, a graduate school friend whom I have known for twelve years. She was in town to deliver a talk and to visit with my graduate seminar on rhetorical criticism. She was smashing, brilliant, all the things one would expect of Angela. We had a marvelous visit, and after having her around for three days the house suddenly seems empty. It's not devoid of love---Janet the foster kitty snoozes close by; I have email to catch up on and recommendation letters to write---but certainly there looms a palpable absence.

In our late night discussions, the topic of our mutual mentor, Robert Lee Scott, came up a great deal. We both had Scott in many classes together. And both Scott and Campbell served complimentary roles on our dissertation committees. Scott was my advisor and Campbell was Angela's, but these labels are really just only that---labels---as each mentor was essential to both of us. Anyway, Scott's retired now but wouldn't ya know, he's still teaching, a decade or so after he retired.

Angela said she enjoyed seeing me running a graduate seminar, and pointed to certain behaviors and ways-of-doing that reminded her of Scott. We talked about how we have internalized Scott's teacherly attitude in conscious and unconscious ways. We teach very differently, Angela said, but there is a similar communal mood in our classrooms. A celebration of curiosity. A respect for difference. For me, the irony of this observation is that Scott has infinite patience, and I'm typically impatient. Anyhoo, if my classroom even approaches the atmosphere of curiosity and mutual respect that Scott helped to create, I would be very happy.

Angela's remarks led me to reflect on my own pedagogy in the last couple of days, comparing it to the way Scott taught me. I often find myself remarking to graduates and undergraduates alike that lower division classes are skill-based and focused on a semblance of mastery. These courses focus on so-called lower order thinking skills, primarily that of knowledge and comprehension (as detailed on Bloom's taxonomy, illustrated here on the right; props to Laura Sells for introducing me to Bloom). Higher order thinking skills are supposed to be addressed in upper division and graduate courses. These classes begin with application, and move toward critical thinking (e.g., dialectical thinking that ends in "evaluation"). To this end, lower division courses supply readings at the eighth grade level (most textbooks are written at this level), since comprehension and eventual application is the telos. Higher division courses offer readings that are much more difficult to comprehend, and this is because critical thinking, not necessarily application, is the goal. The difference between these foci is one of mastery.

So what is mastery, exactly? According to the OED, mastery is defined as, "superiority or ascendancy in battle or competition, or in a struggle of any kind; victory resulting in domination or subjugation; an instance of this, a victory." In other words, the primary meaning of mastery is militaristic. Secondarily, mastery is defined as "more generally: the state or condition of being master, controller, or ruler; authority, dominion, control; an instance of this." Obviously in an educational context mastery is not reducible to a competitive sense of control, although certain testing practices tempt the charge. Rather, mastery in a educational context often concerns achieving a level of comprehension so that one has the basic knowledge one needs to control application. If anything, (undergraduate) college should teach students to apply their knowledge to real-world situations, or at least, to their existential experiences as a human being (I'm thinking here of the appreciation of art, spiritual pursuits, and so forth).

The character of mastery changes in graduate school. For my colleagues in the social sciences, mastery---particularly that which concerns "massaging the data," as my former colleague Jim Honeycutt would say---is still an important goal. Learning to control SPSS software and to run various statistical analyses are important skills one must master. It is on the humanities side of the aisle that mastery starts to become a problem. It seems like in the humanities, graduate school setting, mastery can easily tend toward "superiority or ascendancy in battle or competition." That is, mastery can become a form of warmongering, tapping into more primal urges and drives in a way that makes the pursuit of a Ph.D. both exhilarating and humiliating, depending on one's character.

Enter Lacan: I've discussed Lacan's concept of "the Master's discourse" from time to time on the blog already, so I won't get terribly technical this time. I have to say, though, that Lacan's thoughts and arguments about mastery have directly informed my pedagogy, not so much at the undergraduate level, but definitely in my graduate seminars. Basically, Lacan says that in the mode of knowledge production, there are four basic "discourses," sort of like genres, all of which are operative in any given rhetorical encounter, yet one of which tends to dominate or order the other three. They are: the Master's discourse, the University discourse, the hysteric's discourse, and the analyst's discourse. The most fundamental of these four discourses is the Master's, and this is because this discourse is the default or primary one.

Lacan's understanding of the Master's discourse is Hegelian, based on the Master/Slave dialectic. Basically, Hegel's understanding of self-consciousness is inherently agonistic; mythically speaking, recognition of difference will lead to a competition between subject and object that results in some sort of hierarchy, e.g., the Master and the slave. This mythic story, we note, is homologous to early, infantile life, in which an infant is dependent on a parent for basic needs; the teenage years begin the "struggle" when the kid recognizes the artificial servitude of adolescence, and so on. Lacan uses a fancy formula to describe this discourse, but the gist is this:

• The master is obeyed for no good reason, only because he says "obey me, or else!"
• The slave/worker/subservient develops knowledge as a result of servitude; she harbors the knowledge necessary to produce a surplus for the Master.
• The master does not care for knowledge, He only wants the surplus produced by the subservient person, as well as unquestioned servitude.
• The master has a secret: He knows he is just like everyone else, that he is just as subservient to signifier. He is secretly beholden to the slave, since the slave must recognize his power for him to continue as Master.

I could go on, but I think the gist of this is obvious. We have many examples of people adopting the Master's discourse. The most conspicuous right now are presidential candidates and certain kinds of religious leaders, as prophecy is ultimately a sub-genre of the Master's discourse.

Now, when we move back to the example of education, we see how the Master's discourse is operative in the classroom. This is the primary structure of the classroom setting for undergraduates, unquestionably: the student is subservient to the Teacher-as-Master. The Master's power is, of course, the grade. Technically, the classroom should demonstrate the University Discourse, in which the Master is replaced by Knowledge as the ultimate authority, with teacher and student below, but in most cases this is a shell game. Undergraduate pedagogy consists of the teacher becoming the Master with the power to recognize the worth of the student; the student produces a surplus for the master with the promise of eventual freedom (reminds me of the Indigo Girl's "Closer to Fine": "I spent for years prostrate to the higher mind/got my paper and I was free"). In other words, the Master teaches others to become micro-masters (of sorts).

In graduate school the role of the Master is different. When I think of Scott, his Mastery was sort of Buddha-esque. He was fond of citing a quote from Nietzsche (which I have forgotten) that said, essentially, one should go beyond one's teachers, one should distinguish oneself from one's teacher. Scott ruminated aloud a lot, but the point was never "I know something you don't know," nor did he do that silly Socratic "guess what's in my head" stuff. Instead, he tried to guide us down what seemed to be like our emergent paths, he nudged, and then sort of walked away. He never set himself up as a Master; he never engendered what I would term "guru pedagogy."

As I teach rhetorical criticism, it's obviously that guru pedagogy was the norm about thirty years ago, and that Mastery was taught and encouraged in terms of its first meaning: competition, domination, subjugation. A friend who graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-eighties said that a conscious decision was made among many of my current colleagues to operate the department on a "boot camp" model, "survival of the fittest." There were competitive basketball games among grads that got testy; classroom dress-downs; in general, it sounds quite unpleasant. Fortunately, our program has changed so much in the past twenty years that (at least from my vantage) this boot camp mentality has eroded. Iowa and Wisconsin's programs both had reputations for this as well, admitting more students than could possibly be funded, and then letting them battle it out. Key figures in our disciplinary history set themselves up as the Absolute Master, and graduate programs became little Mecca's toward which one worships. You applied to a program to sit at the feet of the Absolute Master, who whipped you into shape, or totally demoralized you to the point you could produce no surplus, cowering in one's intellectual inferiority.

I know this is unfashionable, but Edwin Black was one such Absolute Master, as was Michael C. McGee. I could name more, but many are still alive.

As no doubt some readers would note, guru pedagogy or the pedagogy of the Absolute Master is also very male or phallogocentric in orientation. Students become objects of exchange in the larger economy of the field. I think this is why none of Scott's advisees possess anything more common than a set of values; we study things that are all over the map. We are very different from one another.

Well, I see I've been writing here for an hour, which is much too long to devote to a blog. To bring this to a close, I guess I should say that if one notes a commonality between my graduate classroom and that of Scott's, I hope it is one of anti-Mastery, or at least, one that seeks to avoid the Absolute Mastery. The point of graduate-level reading is not control, but humility, a recognition of one's own ignorance, and an ability to give up a quest for Mastery in exchange for unbridled curiosity. Perhaps pie-in-the-sky (as there will always be Masters, and there will always be longings for one), but still, I think that's my graduate level pedagogy. Everyone enjoys being Master for a little while, but it's not a position one should occupy forever, or for any duration. Teachers learn from their students too. Creating a cooperative classroom, seems to me, means that teachers should step down sometimes and defer to the authority of students (they have the knowledge, after all, in the end). Creating an anti-Mastery pedagogy means that one reads difficult texts, not to master them, but to open one's mind to new ways of thinking. It means giving up the pedagogy of warmongering, sadistic competition, and fear.