Beyond Intellectual Slut Shaming: Traversing Cartesian Dualism,Shame,and Self-Blame in the Neoliberalized Post-Structuralist Critical Classroom

The “Economically Rational Subject of Neoliberalism”

Neoliberal logic intensifies the focus on rationality and sets the conditions for a subject prone to intellectually slut shaming herself and others. Bronwyn Davies and Peter Bansel (2007) draw out some of the key features of the neoliberalist subject. For the purposes of this article, two salient features we should draw our attention to are individualism and rationality. Drawing on theory from Michel Foucault (1975/1995) and Nikolas Rose (1999), Davies and Bansel (2007) explore how neoliberalism produces

docile subjects who are tightly governed and who, at the same time, define themselves as free. Individuals, we suggest, have been seduced by their own perceived powers of freedom and have, at the same time, let go of significant collective powers, through, for example, allowing the erosion of union power. Individual subjects have thus welcomed the increasing individualism as a sign of their freedom and, at the same time, institutions have increased competition, responsibilization and the transfer of risk from the state to individuals at a heavy cost to many individuals. (p. 249)

Davies and Bansel (2007) continue on and explain how the “economically rational subject of neoliberalism” (p. 255) is shaped through individualism:

Further, as Foucault observed, heightened individualism (which marks neoliberal systems) is registered in terms of individual freedoms, of autonomy and choice. Within this discursive framing the individualized subject of choice finds it difficult to imagine those choices as being shaped by anything other than his/her own naturalized desire or his/her own rational calculations. (p. 251)

The Neoliberal Subject Echoing the Cartesian Subject

The above qualities and characteristics, although not exhaustive of what characterize a neoliberalist subject, hit on some definitive points. In particular, we see one’s freedom affirmed by taking on the role of responsible consumer and the valorization of his or her ability to choose rationally, wisely, and independently. These qualities also strongly echo a subject that can be constructed through Cartesian philosophy, particularly exemplified in the famous phrase, “Cogito ergo sum” (more commonly in English, “I think therefore I am”). Right away, we see that Descartes frames both his thinking and existence individually, simply by observing the grammatical structure of his central philosophical thesis. The agency and responsibility of thinking are placed within himself as an individual. In this, we can see the early building blocks for both an individual and rational nature that have come to structure the neoliberal subject.

It would be prudent to note here that this is not to say that the neoliberalist subject is directly a result of Descartes’ philosophy, or that different subject formations cannot be drawn out of Cartesian philosophy—but rather that individualism and rationality are strong characteristics of both subjects. Furthermore, certainly, many progressive values can be attributed to Cartesian philosophy that are not so readily found in neoliberalism, as Davies and Bansel (2007) point out:

This is not simply a reactivation of liberal values of self-reliance, autonomy and independence as the necessary conditions for self-respect, self-esteem, self-worth and self-advancement but rather an emphasis on enterprise and the capitalization of existence itself through calculated acts and investments combined with the shrugging off of collective responsibility for the vulnerable and marginalized. (p. 252)

Neoliberal logic exasperates the infamous mind–body dualism: Rationality, reflected in the “bottom line” or profits, is placed above material conditions—the real, lived condition of people’s lives that reflect the true conditions of social justice and equality. Although mutated and taken to a new extreme in our contemporary context, this logic of mind over matter can certainly, and is most often, linked back to Cartesian philosophy (Leafgren, 2011).

Such a logic leads to a strong tendency in Western educational contexts for one to experience a discrepancy and disconnection between knowledge of the mind and knowledge of the body. Furthermore, such a discrepancy can lead one to experience shame, guilt, and self-blame and a misplaced sense of responsibility—as I have called it, intellectual slut shaming. For the neoliberal educator and learner, this means that the classroom can become a space of fear, anxiety, and self-doubt, rather than a celebratory space of knowledge co-creation. Both students and teachers alike can find themselves second-guessing their intellectual capacities to the point of silence and inertia. While grasping for rational and “correct” answers, we can sometimes be afraid and embarrassed to feel the thoughts and questions that are readily available in our bodies, in our hearts, and on the tips of our tongues.

Neoliberal Post-Structuralist Agency and Intellectual Slut Shaming

Unfortunately, the critical classroom is not immune to intellectual slut shaming. Although post-structuralist feminists have been at the forefront of challenging the sterilized neoliberal subject and drawing attention to the problem of mind–body dualism—when theory meets practice, it often fails to escape neoliberal ideology. Agency within the post-stucturalist framework turns to discourse analysis and deconstruction. Freedom, or “resistance,” lies in disrupting dominant discourses, and taking up unfamiliar ones (Barrett, 2005). Here, the body is understood as a social construction that is represented through multitudes of discourses. Certain discourses of the body are more culturally dominant than others, resulting in a lack of recognition available to those taking up less dominant discourses. Resistance here is premised on the ethical imperative of taking up less dominant discourses to make recognition more available to those performing less dominant discourses.

This ethical demand to take responsibility for our discursive practices poses many problems. Post-structuralist feminists are certainly aware of many of these problems. For example, Barrett (2005) discusses the complexity of negotiating conflicting discourses and the angst and confusion this can entail. She also addresses the role of the body and its desires, but the body and its desires are only ever viewed as discursive barriers. Unlike neoliberal choice, which deceivingly appears limitless, post-structuralist agency here is limited by discourses available (Barrett, 2005). This conceptualization of agency, however, fails to account for limitations imposed by our material bodies, their desires, and the material world within which we are embedded. Here, agency is too often understood as being premised on rationally choosing one’s discursive practices and can easily become conflated with neoliberalist agendas of “choice” that can result in intellectual slut shaming.

What happens, however, when our bodies affectively interrupt our well-meaning discursive practices?

We can see this problem as pertains to feminist practice as Megan Dean (2012) so aptly illustrates:

Ostensibly progressive discourses about embodiment certainly play on one’s Cartesian sensibilities—Love your body! Accept yourself! After all, you were born this way!—as if we could simply will ourselves to do so now that we know our bodies are “socially constructed” or recognize that despising ourselves helps capitalism and patriarchy thrive. As Elspeth Probyn and Michelle Meagher point out, the conflict between progressive discourses about embodiment and persistent feelings of disgust can generate feelings of guilt and frustration, perhaps especially in socially conscious people who may feel like imposters or failures for claiming to reject patriarchal body standards while nonetheless finding themselves judging bodies against them. . . . (p. 244-245)

The fact that we can judge certain discourses as dominant and oppressive and, thus, requiring resistance seems to imply a sense of responsibility implicitly based on an individual and rational choice-making process. In one of her several writings about post-structuralist agency, Davies (1990) frames her argument about agency by asking the question, “How do we become one who takes up or resists various discursive practices, who modifies one practice in relation to another-who chooses between the various positions and practices made available?” (p. 345). In Bodies That Matter, Butler (1993) is adamant that

the reading of “performativity” as willful and arbitrary choice misses the point that the historicity of discourse and, in particular, the historicity of norms (the “chains” of iteration invoked and dissimulated in the imperative utterance) constitute the power of discourse to enact what it names. (p. 187)

Despite this theoretical intervention, in the neoliberal classroom, post-structuralist agency is nonetheless repeatedly linked back to “a discourse of personal ‘choice’, itself embedded in modernist notions of consciousness, rationality, autonomy and wilful action” (Ringrose, 2007, p. 268). This is an underlying principle within public education on which the very notion of discipline is based, and Western students are immersed in such discourses from young ages. Young university students tend to have trouble challenging this notion of agency “because of continuous, unremitting recourse to discourses of choice in [even the critical] classroom” (Ringrose, 2007, p. 268, my addition in brackets). Without taking matter into consideration, the ethical demands of post-structuralist politics sometimes risk appearing to be implicitly predicated upon a notion of autonomous will—where “will” is framed as a purely rational capacity. This is further compounded when neoliberalist discourses of personal choice tend to dominate contemporary understandings of agency in education. Dean’s (2012) quoted example above illustrates a major limit of post-structuralist resistance—by denying matter its own existence outside discourse, post-structuralism has the conditions for intellectual slut shaming built into its very foundation. In my pursuit of being a critical and ethical educator, I have found myself at this limit on several occasions as a subject who has been shaped by neoliberalism. I’ve experienced moments self-blame and regret because I felt I had failed at creating a more equitable and joyful classroom. What I lose sight of when I intellectually slut shame myself in this way is that I am located in an immanent web of desires that shape the bodies and space that I inhabit.

A Spinozist Agency of “Renaturalization”

Foundational to the integrity of his immanent framework, Spinoza challenges a conceptualization of will premised on rational and individual choice. In terms of the human, will is only understood in relation to the mind; it is only a mode of thinking that imagines the possibility of choice in hindsight. The finite human mind is necessarily determined in an infinite line of causation, which can only exist through the power of God or Nature. God or Nature, here, refers to the whole of existence: every material thing, every thought, and whatever else we as finite beings cannot even fathom that can possibly exist; there is no outside to this existence, it is purely infinite, immanent, and self-constitutive (Spinoza, 1677/2000, I). Henceforth, will in this case is never free but always determined by previously occurring factors (Spinoza, 2000, II). This denial of choice, however, does not deny the human some form of agency.

According to Spinoza, our actions are born out of the embodied desire to preserve ourselves, rather than a rationalist, choice-making process. We do not control our desires, but desire is not innate or natural either. Desire is not interiorized or individualized, but is always relational. Our desires are shaped through infinite and complex collisions with other bodies and the ideas of these bodies. Thus, Spinozist agency may be located in the radical self-reflexivity in which we learn to actively understand our desire in relation to other bodies, an act that relies on an understanding that is embodied. Thus, self-reflexivity here bridges the gap between the mind and the body. Understanding here is both rational and full-bodied. I find that such a concept of desire is useful to bring into the conversation about choice in a neoliberalist context, where the word “choice” has been appropriated to signal the very opposite of agency. People want and need power in their lives, and embodied desire is a useful way to reconceptualize how and why we act in a way that does not give us recourse to intellectually slut shaming ourselves and others.

Choice implies a dualism, as if there are two (or more) parallel universes that exist, but this is impossible in Spinoza’s immanent world. Conceptualizing agency through dualist notions creates the conditions for intellectual slut shaming, and as Sharp (2011) puts it, “inflames hatred, as we expect ourselves and one another to exhibit powers of infinite self-control, acting in radical contradiction to our circumstances” (p. 5).

A Spinozist approach to agency “does not necessarily invalidate post-structuralist feminist or antiracist practices of resistance, even as it reimagines and approaches them with new criteria of success” (Sharp, 2011, p. 184). This new criterion of success is founded on the experience of mutual joy. Joy here is much more than just an emotion—although it can be considered a “feeling.” Joy, is an affective indicator of collective ethical political action for Spinoza; an indicator of the mutual expansion of the capacities of all bodies involved in an encounter, or what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980/1987) might call a “becoming.” Joy is not to be conflated with happiness, an individualized and interiorized emotion. Although positive emotions such as happiness can be a part of joy, they are not mutually constitutive. Furthermore, joy can be experienced even in the presence of negative emotions, such as anger or sadness, as these emotions can increase affective power when commonly shared and actively understood with others. Conversely, both positive and negative emotions can constitute a decrease in affective power. Although negative emotions might be a strong indication of a decrease in affective power, this is not always the case. ² This is especially critical for us to recognize within the neoliberal context. Because we are discouraged from expressing certain compositions of affects, we may not experience a whole range of joy that exists in these more negative affects. To enact more ethical forms of subjectivity, we need to be open to the entire range of affective expression. A whole range of affects is needed to create the conditions for social justice: Affective compositions such as humility or courage can be filled with awkward, uncomfortable moments, but are essential for growth to occur. Our experience of joy will remain limited if we only understand it in relation to positive affects. We need to open up a space to freely engage with the negative affects to learn how we can use them toward increasing our capacities for ethical joy. As Andre Lorde (1984) warns us,

To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd. (p. 59)

Rather than intellectually slut shaming ourselves for our experiences that are less than joyful—experiences that do not fit neatly and rationally into neoliberalist criteria—we can instead reflect on such experiences as collisions that serve to relate to us affective knowledge of our ethical limits and pave the way for a more active understanding of our mutual joyful capacities.

An Affirmative Pedagogy of “Renaturalization”

Practically speaking, “renaturalization” means welcoming our bodies and the material into our intellectual lives. However, we want to welcome bodies and matter without reducing them to essentialized notions of nature. Here, I am drawing on Hasana Sharp’s (2011) work on the term renaturalization. The term’s significance lies in the acknowledgment that we cannot simply take Spinozist philosophy and “apply” or “paste” it upon our current historical moment; we must take account of the deep influence of the post-structuralist turn and re-examine nature in a critical manner that does not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

To renaturalize ourselves means to have an adequate understanding of ourselves within Spinoza’s Nature. To understand ourselves within Spinoza’s Nature, we must engage in a radical self-reflexivity in which we learn to renaturalize ourselves; that is, to affirm ourselves in the current conditions of reality as they are, not as we wish they were.

I am exploring a pedagogy of renaturalization here not as new form of pedagogy—much of my work on renaturalization draws on a rich background of affect theory in education and critical pedagogy—rather, I hope to enrich the current field of critical pedagogy by supplementing anti-oppressive pedagogical theory and practice with affective criteria, found in a Spinozist conceptualization of mutual joy, for justice. My intention is that the radical self-reflexivity of renaturalization might allow us to understand our minds and bodies in new ways that may enable us to more effectively enact becomings of ethical joy in and outside of the classroom in our current historical condition.

Renaturalizing Myself in the Neoliberal Classroom

There is a complex axis of power relations between students, teachers, and institutional surroundings in the neoliberal university. Inequities between class, gender, race, and ability all play a role in inscribing and ordering our bodies and affective capacities into a causal immanent network that Spinoza might have us understand as God or Nature. Most poignantly, however, is the further axis of power I have as a teacher who grades and assesses students. Unless I give out grades of 100%, I am reinforcing my own status and authority as the master arbitrator of rational knowledge in the classroom.

Representing my students numerically, through the act of giving out grades, is only one example of an overarching power relation that shapes the affective environment of the classroom in ways that can be less than joyful, and reinforces the conditions for intellectual slut shaming. This top–down power relation is further shaped in subtle ways by gender, race, ability, and so on, and the cultural capital attached. Identities that represent our bodies have affective counterpoints that are reinforced and reproduced through the oppressive structures of the neoliberalist university. Understanding our relationship with the affective dimension can help us bring both matter and representation productively together to understand our classrooms better, and the limits of our capacities so that we may work to better transform them.

Such a process requires patience and, what Albrecht-Crane refers to as “sneakiness” in pedagogy. “Sneakiness implies a different mode of pedagogical ethos, one that works with student and teacher identities and seeks ways to subvert them in an effort to engage difference more productively” (Albrecht-Crane, 2005, p. 498). As educators, then, we must pursue the dangerous task of radical self-reflexivity to, ironically, use some of our authoritative power to relinquish some of this power. This requires an affective understanding of student and teacher identities in the classroom. This sort of understanding is challenging to engage in, as it requires experimentation that may not always lead to readily felt joyful affects.

I try to create a more open classroom to challenge my privileges and power as a teacher. I’ve experienced moments of failure and self-blame where I wished I could have served my students more effectively. What I tend to forget in such moments of intellectually slut shaming myself, however, is that this is not an individual issue—I’m caught in a systematic, intricate causal web. My students (and myself to a certain degree) are accustomed to top-down student relations, and they themselves resist my efforts to equalize the classroom. For instance, I often will switch which seat that I sit in in the classroom to decenter the room so that I am not always sitting at the front of the classroom. It’s amazing how this never fails to throw everyone in the room off. I will usually explain to my students why I change seats, and we will discuss how spaces can shape and reinforce certain types of power relations. This is usually an interesting conversation, and from the discussion, the students seem to understand the point I am making. But on an affective level, the power relations in the classroom do not change—if I sit somewhere other than the front of the room, the students still all look at me, rather than at each other. This is not a pedagogical failure that I alone am solely responsible for.

Rather than attempting to subvert my power completely, I have found more success by considering how my discursive position as the “rational knowledge-holder” in class affects my students: I have power to encourage and discourage new ways of thinking and being. I often strive to encourage being wrong in class to open up discussion and generate as many ideas as possible. One way I try to do this is to shift the focus to questions rather than answers. I do this by using my authoritative power to model behavior, but also to simultaneously challenge my position as the “rational knowledge-holder” in the classroom. When I don’t know something (which is often!) I say so. “I don’t know” is a phrase I have learned to use authoritatively. I often preclude discussion by stating that I don’t know the answer to whatever question I’m asking; it’s just something I’m wondering and possibly even confused about. Rather than focusing on a rational agenda in the classroom, my teaching starts by affirming the negative effects in the classroom and welcoming them by using my authority as a teacher. I allow the affective knowledge of the bodies in the classroom to shape the learning and discussion.

I find this approach can affect an increase in discussion and confidence in students. I’ve observed quieter students becoming more vocal and confident in their opinions and have seen them modeling my own behavior: starting sentences with “I’m not sure, BUT . . .” and then often continuing to voice critical view points and creative issues and questions. In this way, I affirm and renaturalize myself in the affective structures of the neoliberalized classroom.

This is a strategy that has taken much painstaking reflexive work over the years. Giving up one’s privilege as “knowledge holder” in the classroom is difficult, because, as a teacher, you are “supposed” to know. Such a process can create feelings of great discomfort and fear as it surpasses neoliberal expectations of rational calculability. What if my students think I’m stupid and don’t take me seriously? Radical self-reflexivity is required here to work through the insecurities of letting go of some privileges, but it is also important to strategize where holding onto power is effective. This is what it means to actively seek joy—I cannot give all my power away, but I can use it to expand and share it. Moments of mutual joy occur as I actively open spaces where students might (if they so desire) insert themselves into an assemblage of power expansion.

This involves not just a rational process of reflection but also an affective process guided by intuition and classroom experiences with particular dynamics of students. As a teacher invested in a pedagogy of renaturalization, I need to understand that many of my students desire the rational identifications that reinforce top-down power relations on an affective level. I cannot individually relinquish my power in the classroom; my students need to consent to unraveling oppressive power relations with me. One has to understand and affirm the oppressive power relations and work within their boundaries to produce new ways of being and becoming.

As an educator committed to renaturalization, I have learned how to inhabit unequal power relations fully—affectively and through their discursive productions—to understand more fully what I/we can do with them. Rather than succumbing to self-blame and feelings of failure for not enacting more radically equalized power relations, I affirm and renaturalize myself within them.

I think in Western educational contexts, we are used to imagining our thinking as occurring outside or inside our heads in a cartoon thought bubble detached from our (individual) bodies. When we imagine ourselves thinking and learning in this way, so much of our individual and collective wisdom can be overlooked. In actuality, the thinking process is fully embodied. When you have a thought, there is a simultaneous neural transmission that is occurring on a physical level in your brain, as well as in other parts of your body through the nervous system. The whole body thinks.

When I renaturalize myself, I create the space for others to renaturalize themselves, and together, with our bodies, we open up a new world of thinking, being, and becoming together. When we think with our bodies, rather than against them, we feel, we empathize, we connect to others. It is through the body, from the “heart,” so to speak, that we connect to others and the immediate reality that we are creating together. This is important because from this space, together, we can locate the joy of compassion for ourselves and others. These become the moments in the classroom that permeate our cells and inhabit us wherever we may go next. Our rational identifications are simultaneously fully inhabited and temporarily suspended. There is no room for shame and blame here. Here, knowledge meets love, and together, we do not rationally “choose,” but rather, we embody the desire for social justice for ourselves and others.