I have found that I can learn to do things I never did before. I, too, can meet life creatively and help to make it a better place for me and my fellow men. It is the most wonderful, most encouraging and hopeful feeling one can have! I think I can understand a little better why Walt Whitman always wanted to sing about everything. (Gordon 197)
In intelligently progressive ways, Weber placed the creative inquiry of her students within the boundaries of community relationships. While the task of learning engaged individuals in their specificity, its orientation repeatedly emphasized the social perspective that prepares citizens to live in a democracy. Weber was not ambivalent or apologetic about this purpose. She stood firmly for an education that sensitively acknowledged and negotiated the differences among people. The patterns of her lessons, the configurations of her classroom, tell a story of teacher and students living within the care and respect of relationship.
The reason Weber speaks with such joy and affirmation is that she deeply understood how confidence serves as bulwark for competence. Every student desires attention, but this attention is really a call for being taken seriously, for being seen as a distinct person by the teacher. In straightforward, open conversation with students, which incorporated their responses, Weber gave to each her full concentration. What she discovered in making this talk reciprocal, in being a good listener, was that students came to feel invited into a joint endeavor. Because their words counted, the students learned to develop confidence in conversation. Through the give and take of conversation about what mattered crucially in their lives, the students came to participate in the community within which they lived, discovering capacities and possibilities that otherwise, remaining in silence, they would never have known.
What Weber accomplished as a teacher stemmed directly from her commitment to democratic relationships. The secret entailed cultivating within her students the confidence to both speak out and listen. In her school, Weber enacted "the vital habits" of democracy that John Dewey had outlined: following an argument, grasping the other's point of view, expanding mutual understanding, and discussing alternative objectives that might be pursued. "Strange as it may seem to an era governed by mass-market politics," William Greider tells us, "democracy begins in human conversation." Through talk people might "question the conflict between what they are told and what they see and experience." For, as Greider concludes, "the simplest, least threatening investment any citizen may make in democratic renewal is to begin talking with other people about these questions, as though the answers matter to them."(1) Such conversations of inquiry within a democracy acknowledge the fact that people are willing to talk through their "unalterable" beliefs and opinions.
Uncertainty and Tolerance
Literary works have the power to unsettle readers. In democratic fashion they invite interpretation, change, and innovation--that is when readers actively converse with texts, not just passively receive them. Poetry, in other words, confirms, even while it disconfirms, or at least extends, our perceptions and conceptions of the world. We are bound together as we enact and share the irony of our repeated differences and contradictions. Texts exist in terms of our social conversation with them. This means that we are able to learn from them precisely because they are different from us and therefore provoke our sense of alternate beliefs in the world. Only by according the "difference" of the text its due can we reach outside our own confining beliefs and prejudices and encounter other points of view.
A democracy of readers and readings draws on the imagination, which might be defined as our ability to construct alternatives worlds of human experience. Once there is room in our consciousness for more than one conception of human motives and actions, we've begun to constitute space for the other. The humanities' plea for tolerance--perhaps the central invention of Western thought--emphasizes how hard it is to live with difference and how much more comfortable we feel with the kind of "straight thinking" that would keep difference safely contained. How frightening a democratic, post-structuralist sensibility must appear to persons who drive down the highway sporting, with no hint of irony, bumper stickers that proclaim, "God said it/ I believe it/ And that's the end of it." People who yearn for the homogeneity of a completely common culture, who deeply need a devil to hate, cling to cultural absolutes that often make it hard for them to respect, in the spirit of democracy, the dignity of the other person.
When one side is tied firmly to all-encompassing beliefs and the other side is tolerant, collective action is difficult. This is why "we must not," Isaiah Berlin emphasizes, "dramatize the incompatibility of values--there is a great deal of broad agreement among people in different societies over long stretches of time about what is right and wrong, good and evil."(2) The liberal position, which makes democracy possible, grows out of a long Western tradition of attempting to live with uncertainty, of attempting to incorporate the doubt of the other. This tradition does lead to certain forms of relativism by not insisting on absolute beliefs; still, without its foundation of tolerance, all other competing values war themselves to death.
But advocating tolerance and understanding, we cannot ignore the corresponding urgency of active commitment--a tolerance for ambiguity need not be a cover for weakness or inaction. Indeed, politely and indiscriminately granting every right demanded by others can quickly lead to conflict, especially when the rights of the deeply prejudiced are not somehow held in check. This often occurs when the "multicultural" agenda is expressed as demands and divisions, rather than conversations. When the point of diversity is to issue ultimatums and promote isolated fragmentation, then the desire of democracy becomes subverted. Edward Rothstein, in fact, sees this movement in terms of entrapment:
Multiculturalism has no use for the heritage of liberalism . . . or for the energies of modernism. It is, at bottom, folkish Romanticism gone bad. Its calls for equity derive not from recognized unity, but from enforced difference. It takes other cultures seriously only as representations of the merely particular. Multiculturalism fails to see the Other within us, or us within the Other. As a result, it undoes the very notion of Western culture. (33-34)
This suggests that the debate about pluralism must not center on the specific artifacts of a culture; rather, it should encourage broad cultural conversations as part of each citizen's experience. Conflicting loyalties, and the deep passions that lie behind them, may, of course, obstruct social encounters, but these loyalties need to be placed in some larger context committed to democratic relationships.
The democratic process of reading as a social activity cannot overcome the potential impasse between tolerance and belief, but it can keep us focused on the difference between genuine claims for fairness and intolerant fundamentalist doctrines associated with transcendental belief systems. Liberal tolerance itself has to be militant or dominance and submission will come to characterize our public relationships. We must be clear just how fragile our democratic ideas and institutions are. When certainty is the primary value, it is "natural" for each person to want their viewpoint to triumph. Yet such a triumph can only happen when other viewpoints--and thus uncertainty--are completely silenced. When he talked about the deterioration of the mind that occurs under a "ban placed on all inquiry which does not end in the orthodox conclusions," John Stuart Mill succinctly located the real tragedy of an intolerant contemporary society: "The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy" (39).
It has never been easy protecting the rights of unpopular minorities, though a starting point continues to be the reading responses that might occur in a literature class. Reading literature with students is an opportunity for using the uncertainty of response and interpretation to democracy's advantage. Because a reader's responses and interpretations are not unalterable, not infallible, he or she might move toward realizing alternatives. Selves potentially proliferate. To be locked into any one interpretation, no matter how fitting for the moment, is to surrender the genius of our mental capacities: our ability to celebrate simultaneously difference and similarity, even in the face of socializing traditions that seek to predetermine each stage of our response. In this sense reading literature can be the grandest, if most frustrating, of curriculum endeavors precisely because it can continue to entertain the riches of contradiction without destroying itself.
Acknowledging the rightful claim of each reader's uniqueness begins the practice of democracy, which then includes sharing responses across persons and tentatively exploring mutual understandings--shifting between what separates and what ties together. We may begin as other, as stranger, but the goal is to join a conversation and reach points of contact rather than conform to the certainties of answers already provided. The teaching/learning task is to place and negotiate in some safe middle zone the meanings evoked during the reading of literature. Culture, age, experience, class, gender--they are all opportunities to interweave positions of both difference and similarity. Without tolerance--without any understanding of the role each reader's prior script plays in the process of reading--it is difficult to experiment with the kind of talk required to ensure that reading proceeds as a social activity.
Entertaining ambiguity and complexity nudges the reader into a space of uncertainty, which in turn is rendered safe because it is a shared space. To read in solitary fashion is to miss the multiplicity of possible responses and interpretations others might contribute. In our social capacity as reader, we discover that often our interpretations are actually invented to stay in conversation with others. In responding to texts we are amazed to find the sociality of our individuality.
One of de Tocqueville's concerns was that "in modern society, everything threatens to become so much alike, that the peculiar characteristics of each individual will soon be entirely lost in the general aspect of the world" (326). He also noted that in a democracy, "literature will not easily be subjected to strict rules, and it is impossible that any such rules should ever be permanent" (161). By encouraging readers to live with uncertainty, democratic reading uses literature as a way of keeping each individual reader in sight. Because its rules resist permanence, the "unfinished" text keeps alive the hope that democracy, in giving birth to the "individual," will not also preside over her death.
Alive in Each Other
In a democracy the text stands poised among competing points of view. Returning to it again and again is our fundamental way of adjudicating disagreements and dissension. Thus, to consider reading--and writing--as a transactional social act is to recognize reading as a deliberately constructed stance, one that grows out of a commitment to democratic social arrangements. Exchanging and modifying reading responses through discussion with others is no more "natural" than keeping everything locked up within us.
So what advantages result from discouraging isolated, competitive reading? Certainly, many will claim that they do not consider, nor have ever encountered, reading as a social act; but this is the result of hierarchical socialization, something many students experience as alienating. Irma Maini, an NYU graduate student born in India, gives this account of how a cultural system can rigidly constrain any open and free exchange:
Sharing one's writing or showing it to someone other than the instructor, is a concept which is practically non-existent in the Indian education system. Nobody even thinks of sharing his/her writing with his/her peers, for the purpose of getting feedback. If at all papers are shared, as they sometimes are amongst friends, it is not with the intention of seeking a response to help revise the paper, but simply to glean the contents of it and not offer anything more than a cursory remark or two. It took me a while to get used to the idea of showing my writing to my peers, but now that I am more comfortable with it, I find it to be an immense help in revising my papers. Also, It has somewhat dispelled the notion of writing as a totally private activity.
Democracy, by its very nature, is in a struggle with alternate ways of organizing both knowledge and people. We cannot escape the consequences of the relationships we establish, if we hope to widen avenues of access.
The social relationships within which we share our readings of literature inevitably inform our practices as teachers. Wanting these relationships to be democratic constitutes a specific commitment to shaping conversational encounters in the classroom. If we are to live up to democracy's promise to encourage the full development of all individuals in the group, then, in the literature class at least, we begin by ensuring that all students have the right to their own reading responses as part of a continuing social conversation. What matters most about the reading of literature in a democracy is not what the text actually means, but how together we go about making it mean whatever it does. Inadequate meanings will be winnowed out when each of us has our say in relation to the other.
Literary response need not search for the closure of a final personal meaning. What is wanted is collaborative negotiation so we can share and learn from each other's interpretations. Yet negotiation fares badly when the precise preferences of the parties are fixed in advance. In reading texts socially, readers shift among many responses in order to keep the process open. Thus interpretations become more satisfying because they are both anchored in and developed beyond our original "response" positions.
Within the teacher-student reading relationship we might begin to redistribute power more equitably. This in turn would encourage students to take a second look at what is happening in the classroom. Exploring issues of control, students might become aware of the ideological constraints that will determine their motives and actions when their turn comes to hold power over others. When the teacher explicitly builds into the curriculum collaborative strategies of negotiation, students learn to manage the crisis of authority, especially when it is raised in matters of textual interpretation. Because texts and assignments are partially indeterminant, and therefore problematic in the sense that they exist as social constructions, the teacher's real authority derives from preventing readings from becoming reified. Students mostly do not like living in this state of uncertainty, so they demand a hierarchical system, one where they can unquestioningly fit in. This, however, blocks the route to responsibility. With someone else setting the lessons, students remain dependent. They fail to gain the autonomy they need to blossom as citizens in a democracy.
Teachers and students come confidently to each new poem when their previous experiences with poems have been affirming. This happens when each of us is allowed to trust and share the meanings we have found within the words we've been reading. The sense of security required for this trust to occur is fundamental to democratic living. A social approach to the reading of literature invites us all to honor multiple perspectives. We value ambiguity and indeterminacy because it allows us to combine our unique individuality with our profound desire for correspondence. In the reading matrix, we establish meanings that link us to other readers also developing their interpretations. Democracy presupposes that an individual's freedom and possibilities are best expanded when there is a creative balance between self and group. This happens through imaginative recognitions of one another.
When I first began as a teacher of literature I believed I alone was responsible for supplying the interpretations in the classroom. I felt I could stand apart from the mess of democratic negotiation and just float safely in realms of abstraction--distant from the conundrums of difference. But eventually I awakened and found I was missing the affirming pleasures of vulnerability and intimacy within the classroom conversation. No longer blind to the reciprocal quality of reading encounters, I began to invite students to share in their enactment. It took the readings of others to balance the frustrations with the satisfactions of democratic relationships. "So I said yes. Now we are alive in each other."
2.
As quoted by Michael Ignatieff, "The Ends of Empathy," New Republic (April 29, 1991): 34.