Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 41, No.

5, 2009

doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2007.00391.x

2009 The Author
Journal compilation 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK EPAT Educational Philosophy and Theory 0013-1857 2007 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia XXX Original Articles

Absurd Conversations ClaudiaW. Ruitenberg

Absurd Conversations: On the educational
value of interlocutionary misbehaviour

C

Lacbia

W

.



R

ci1cNncnc

University of British Columbia

Submitted: 07 July 2007; Accepted: 17 September 2007

Abstract

This essay argues that there are educational situations in which interlocutionary misbehaviour
in the form of withholding good will can have educational value. It describes an exchange
between a teacher and a student in which the teacher withheld good will, and analyzes
this exchange through conceptual frameworks of performative contradiction and differend,
provided by Derrida and Lyotard, respectively. It further analyzes how context, power,
and ethical considerations affect the evaluation of instances of interlocutionary misbehaviour.
The essay ends with the ironic observation that even in cases in which refusing to extend
good will to ones interlocutor is educationally pertinent, good will is not absent from the
exchange altogether.

Keywords: good will, performative contradiction, differend, Gadamer, Derrida,
Lyotard

Expectations of Good Will in Pedagogical Encounters

In educational settings such as classrooms it is commonly expected that students and,
in particular, teachers will make an effort to understand rather than misunderstand
each other. Deliberately derailing the conversation, responding with

non sequiturs

,
or otherwise interrupting the smooth exchange of ideas and arguments, questions
and responses, is seen as interlocutionary misbehaviour. To put it differently, the
ideal classroom encounter or dialogue seems to be based on the, often implicit,
expectations of what Hans-Georg Gadamer called good will.
Gadamer (1984/1989) writes that in written and spoken exchanges alike, both
partners must have the good will to try to understand one another (p. 33). He
claries that the reader or listener takes what is said as it is intended, that is, he or
she understands because he or she

lls out

and

concretizes

what is said and because
he or she does not take what is said in its abstract, literal meaning (p. 34, my italics).
As Lawrence Schmidt (2000) explains, the reader or listeners obligation to ll out
or concretize what is said or written is based on the fore-conception of complete-
ness (or, in Schmidts translation, preconception of completion), a condition of
understanding that Gadamer outlines in

Truth and Method

(1960/1989, p. 294).
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A reader or listener acts with a fore-conception of completeness if s/he approaches
the spoken or written text with the charitable assumption that it is complete and
intelligible. Sometimes, adds Schmidt (2000), due to a difference in language
use, an individual word may be used differently from how the I who is the reader
or listener uses it. The I is able to hear this difference by using the preconception
of completion. That is, the I projects another meaning, another prejudice, than his
own for the other

so that what the other says makes sense

(p. 367, my italics). The
expectations of good will are based not just on practical considerations of expedi-
ency, but on ethical norms. For this reason, Schmidt refers to the expectation of
good will as hermeneutic virtue, and it is a virtue that is expected of teachers
perhaps even more than of others. The teacher ought to make an effort to under-
stand what students, in spite of their awkward phrasing or word choice or muddled
formulation, are trying to communicate, because the teacher has a perceived moral
duty to meet students where they are in order to help them be the best they can be.
One assumption underpinning this expectation is that it is the content of the
students question that matters rather than its form; a good teacher can hear what
a student is trying to get at even if the student has not got at it yet. This assumption
is connected with a view of language as, ideally, a transparent medium that does
not get in the way of the communication of content. With the exception of language
classes where the explicit objective is the teaching of correct grammar, spelling,
and other matters related to the form of language, in most classes both students
and teachers are expected to make a genuine effort to engage the content of their
interlocutors communication as these interlocutors intended it.
A second assumption underpinning the expectation of the teachers interlocutionary
good will is that the most signicant power difference in student-teacher exchanges
is the difference in institutional power. Since the teacher has more institutional
power than the student, the teacher carries most of the burden of the expectation
of interlocutionary good will. Charles Bingham and Alexander Sidorkin (2001)
draw on Gadamers hermeneutic framework to propose pedagogical relations in
which the domination of teachers over students is decreased. The Gadamerian concept
of prejudice (

Vorurteil

), the culturally shaped prejudgement that both enables and
hinders interpretation and understanding, plays a central role in such pedagogical
relations. Earlier I quoted Schmidts (2000) explanation of interlocutionary good
will, in which the reader or listener, when confronted with language use different
from her or his own, projects another meaning,

another prejudice

, than his [or her]
own for the other so that what the other says makes sense (p. 367, my italics).
Bingham and Sidorkin translate this into the pedagogical encounter and write that
teachers need to become involved in an interpretive to-and-fro with their students
as text (p. 26). In this interpretive to-and-fro, they further explain, teachers can
learn to uncover, identify and try to decrease the instances where we tend to
dominate the Other. ... Excavating our own pre-conscious prejudices by interacting
with [students], we can learn how not to be dominating (p. 26). The difference in
institutional power is presented as the primary source of domination in teacher-
student relations, and the obligation to excavate prejudices as resting primarily on
teachers.
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In this paper I will argue that there are situations in which it is educationally
justiable, perhaps even commendable, for a teacher to withhold the preconception
of completion and, instead of offering good will, deliberately misunderstand the
student. In other words, I will argue that under certain circumstances interlocu-
tionary misbehaviour is educationally pertinent. My argument will focus on the two
assumptions that I briey outlined above: that language is a transparent medium
that provides access to the content of the message and the intentions of the speaker
or writer, and that the teacher is more powerful and more likely to dominate than
the student. In order to build my case for educationally pertinent interlocutionary
misbehaviour, I will begin by describing and interpreting an exchange I had with
a student in a teacher-education program. I will then analyze this exchange through
two theoretical lenses, provided by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Franois Lyotard,
respectively. Finally, I will consider the various power differences in this exchange,
and compare them with the power differences in the cases of interlocutionary
misbehaviour on the part of students recounted by Herbert Kohl. Before I get on my
way, I should point out that I am using the term absurd in absurd conversations
not in a deeply existentialist sense, as philosophers Sren Kierkegaard or Albert Camus
did, but more simply as a descriptor of actions or events that defy or, more often,
deliberately thwart the desire to interpret and make sense of those actions or events.

What If You Dont Agree?

I had been invited to give a guest lecture on gay and lesbian issues in education to
several sections of a mandatory teacher education course on social issues in educa-
tion. I had titled my presentation Im Not an Issue, Im a Person! and subtitled
it Gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersex, transgender, and two-spirit persons and issues
in the classroom. I had started by telling the students how I would be using the
terms sex and gender, how sex categories included intersex, female, and male,
and how gender categories included transgender, woman, and man. I had explained
to them how what is called sexual identity is a complicated composite of sexual
desire and attraction, sexual practice, fantasy, emotional and social preference, and
so on, and how these elements need not be congruent with each other, or remain
stable over a persons lifetime. I had also asked them not to use the trivializing
term sexual preference, telling them that the only sensible use of that term I had
ever witnessed was by a woman in a Pride Parade who held up a big placard that
read, My sexual preference is

often

.
Before I could go on to talk about coming out or heteronormativity, a young
white man raised his hand, and I signalled to him to go ahead and ask his question.
What if, as a teacher, you dont agree? he asked.
The auditorium fell very quiet and I paused briey to collect my thoughts.
Dont agree with

what

? I asked him.
Well, you know, that

lifestyle

, he said, emphatically and somewhat impatiently.
What

lifestyle

would that be, exactly? I enquired. I have some lesbian friends
who are really into canoeing and hiking and so on; I would call that an

outdoor

lifestyle. I have more of an urban, yuppie lifestyle myself.
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The student had now grown visibly irritated at my feigned ignorance and refusal
to answer his question.
What if you dont agree with gays and lesbians,

homosexuality

? he rephrased his
question.
You saying that you dont agree with my being lesbian is like me saying I dont
agree with your being male. Theres not much point to it, I replied. You wont
stop being male if I disagree with you being male, and I wont stop being a
lesbian if you disagree with me being a lesbian.
By that point, I still had not answered the students initial What if? question.
I surmised, although I could not be sure because I had not asked him, that his
question was intended to give teachers with particular religious and/or moral
beliefs permission not to consider my presentation, or presentations by other anti-
homophobia educators, seriously. I did not want to give those teachers, of whom
I suspected he was one, that permission. But in addition to refusing to give him
and/or the other teachers of whom he spoke permission to remain comfortable in
their homophobia, something else had happened: I had refused to show good will in
the conversation. Reecting upon this exchange, I asked myself what the educational
and ethical dimensions of this exchange were. Who might have learnt what from
this exchange, and at whose expense? What power differences had played a role in the
exchange? And what had been the educational signicance of my interlocutionary
misbehaviour?

The Case of the Misbehaving Scholar

In 1981, German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and French philosopher Jacques
Derrida participated in an exchange of scholarly papers and responses at the Goethe
Institut in Paris. But in the eyes of those who were expecting a traditional scholarly
exchange, something went wrong in this encounter and an absurd conversation ensued.
Gadamer started off with a presentation of the paper Text and Interpretation, in
which he addressed the challenge that Derrida posed to hermeneutics. There were
many claims about interpretations of Heideggers and Nietzsches work in Gadamers
presentation with which Derrida could have disagreed and to which he could have
respondedand in fact, that is precisely what many expected him to do. As Michelfelder
and Palmer (1989) recount, however, Derrida responded to Gadamers presenta-
tion with several questions that, at least on the surface, appear to have been
misdirected (p. 3). Instead of paying attention to what Gadamer considered to be
his central claims, Derrida chose to focus on:
... something Gadamer covers almost in passing, what he takes to be the
obvious and necessary condition for any understanding to be achieved in
dialogue, namely the willingness of each partner in a conversation to be
open to what the other has to say. (Michelfelder and Palmer, 1989, p. 3)
Subsequently, in his own paper, Derrida did not offer claims or a critique that
seemed addressed to Gadamer and, note Michelfelder and Palmer (1989), at no
point in his formal paper [did] Derrida even bring up Gadamers name (p. 4).
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Derrida seemed simply to refuse to understand Gadamer, or at least to engage the
content of Gadamers paper, which raises the question: Should we conclude that
because a genuine debate did not unfold, the whole encounter was of no value
and the meeting between Gadamer and Derrida was unsuccessful? (Michelfelder
and Palmer, 1989, p. 4). Might there be a philosophical or even pedagogical
explanation for Derridas apparent interlocutionary misbehaviour?
If Derrida had addressed his disagreement with Gadamers assumption of good
will in the content of his own paper, he would have written and talked in some manner
that conformed to Gadamers expectations, and conrmed the assumption of good
will. This would have amounted to a performative contradiction in Derridas work: a
contradiction between what his paper

meant

and what it

did

. Instead, Derridas
paper

performed

his disagreement with Gadamer, in particular on the requirement
of good will in conversation. As teachers know well, students tend to do as the teacher
does rather than as the teacher says, even when the teacher asks the students
explicitly to heed her or his words rather than deeds. Although Derrida would contest
any sharp distinction between speech and action, his decision to demonstrate his
argument by refusing to display good will is pedagogically much more effective
than expounding these differences in a style that matched Gadamers conception
of dialogue. The many papers and discussions that have sought to analyze and
understand what precisely happened and didnt happen in the Gadamer-Derrida
encounter testify to this effectivenessespecially when using Derridas own criterion
that a text should continue to teach well beyond the moment of its pedagogical launch:
There is a certain I hope that not everyone understands everything about
this text, because if such transparency of intelligibility were ensured it
would destroy the text, it would show that the text has no future [

avenir

],
that it does not overow the present, that it is consumed immediately.
(Derrida, 1997/2001, p. 30)
Derrida disputed a clear boundary between speech and writing, and his spoken
words at the Goethe Institut (and in other lectures) were based on, as well as
informed, his written words. Therefore, text and writing should not be taken in
too limited a sense, and also include spoken words in seminars and other forms of
teaching. Derrida, it appears, did not teach with a desire to be fully and immedi-
ately understood, because if his teaching were completely transparent and consum-
able, it would reduce the teaching to the immediate and take away the possibility
of effects to come [

avenir

], as yet unforeseen. When one writes a text, one tries to
write in such a way that the reading is

immediately

affected by it, and also
something irrecuperablein such a way as to produce long term effects, a kind of

short runlong run

(Derrida, 2002, p. 28).
In my exchange with the student, I sought to avoid performative contradiction:
if I had answered the content of his question without contesting his language, my
answer would have had the effect of accepting and conrming the language he
used. The language of agreement and lifestyle suggested that sexuality is a matter
of choice in the same way ones political convictions or aesthetic preferences are
choices. Although, in my view, the moral status of ones sexuality would not change
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even if it were a choice, I suspected that was not the case for my interlocutor or
for some of his colleagues in the auditorium. Moreover, if I had approached his
question with a preconception of completeness and responded to it as if he had
formulated it in different termsfor instance, What if I believe that heterosexuality
is the only divinely sanctioned sexuality?I would have reinforced the idea that it
is the content of the message that counts, and that language is merely a neutral
carrier. Instead, I want to teach students that the language one uses produces
effects and that these discursive effects are produced regardless of the intentions of
the speaker or writer. This is why I believe it is justiable to dislocate or refuse to
engage language that one believes has harmful effects, even if one does not know
with what intentions the speaker or writer used that language.
In theoretical analyses of communication it can be easy to lose sight of the context
in which the particular exchange took place. In the case of my exchange with the
student-teacher, it matters that this exchange took place in an auditorium with another
hundred or so student-teachers as well as several instructors. If the exchange with the
student had taken place in my ofce, with no other students or instructors present, this
would have changed the dynamics (although I do not know if and how the actual words
we exchanged would have been different). Having accepted the invitation to give a
lecture, I had accepted responsibility for addressing not just this one student but
also everyone else in the auditorium. In analyzing my interlocutionary misbehaviour,
I must therefore consider the effects both on my interlocutor and on those who
witnessed the exchange. Moreover, the effects of the exchange exceed the time and
place of the exchange itself. By performing rather than describing the signicance
of the language we use, I disrupted the common view of language as neutral and
transparent. Much like Derridas hope that his texts are not fully and immediately
consumed, I hope that the unexpectedness of my answer echoed after the lecture.

Good Will and the Differend

Derridas emphasis on the form of the text allows me to understand the exchange
with the student in terms of its performative integrity or contradictoriness. In

The
Differend: Phrases in Dispute

Jean-Franois Lyotard (1983/1988) offers another
compelling theoretical framework for analyzing this exchange and disagreement.

1

Lyotard introduces the concept of the

differend

as a particular type of dispute or
disagreement. Differing from the type of dispute he calls litigation, in which a
plaintiff has suffered damage, in a

differend

a victim has suffered a wrong.
This is what a wrong [

tort

] would be: a damage [

dommage

] accompanied
by the loss of the means to prove the damage. This is the case if the
victim is deprived of life, or of all his or her liberties, or of the freedom
to make his or her ideas or opinions public, or simply of the right to
testify to the damage, or even more simply if the testifying phrase is itself
deprived of authority. (Lyotard, 1983/1988, 7, p. 5)
In litigation the two parties agree on the rules by which the dispute should be
settled; in a

differend

these rules themselves are part of the injustice suffered. A
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differend

can occur, for instance, when a plaintiff, in order to be heard, is forced
to use the very language that causes the damages s/he wants to contest; the only
language in which the case can be heard is language that undermines the credibility
of the plaintiff, who, as a result, becomes a victim.
Lyotard provides several examples of

differends

. The rst is the hypothetical dis-
agreement between a person who complains that some literary works of major
importance have not received the attention they deserve because editors have
rejected them, and the editor who claims that no such works exist.
Can you give me, says an editor defending his or her profession, the title
of a work of major importance which would have been rejected by every
editor and which would therefore remain unknown? Most likely, you do
not know any masterpiece of this kind because, if it does exist, it remains
unknown. And if you think you know one, since it has not been made
public, you cannot say that it is of major importance, except in your
eyes. (Lyotard, 1983/1988, 3, p. 4)
What is at stake in this dispute is not just the evaluation of certain works as of
major importance or minor importance but the very criteria that are used in
such evaluations. The editor suggests that a work is of major importance if mem-
bers of the editorial profession judge it to be so; the other party suggests that other
criteria, independent of the editorial profession, ought to be used. The plaintiff
becomes a victim because the very terms of the disagreementthe criteria by
which editors have judged certain works not to be of major importancehave been
declared to be internal to the editorial profession. The victim is reduced to self-
contradiction, a form of silence.
A more prominent example with which Lyotard opens

The Differend

and to which
he returns in several places is the Holocaust denial of Robert Faurisson. Faurisson,
a professor of literature at the University of Lyon, published articles in 1978 and
1979 in which he claimed that the gas chambers used by the Nazis to exterminate
the Jews never existed. The disagreement with those who claimed they had existed
was a

differend

because of the truth criteria Faurisson stipulated. According to
Faurisson, only eyewitnesses could successfully contradict his claims, but, of
course, if any such eyewitnesses were to come forward, their very survival of the
gas chambers would contradict claims about the chambers lethal effects. Anybody
disagreeing with Faurisson had thus been reduced to a victim, because Faurisson
had ruled out all terms in which they might cogently phrase their disagreement.
The only acceptable proof that it was used to kill is that one died from it. But if
one is dead, one cannot testify that it is on account of the gas chamber (Lyotard,
1983/1988, p. 3).
Another stark example of a

differend

, not discussed by Lyotard, is marital rape.
Until 1991 in the United Kingdom, 1993 in the United States, 1997 in Germany,
and still in many countries today, the rape of a woman by her husband was or is
not considered a criminal offence. If a woman lived or lives under a regime in
which marital rape is not a legal possibility, she cannot be a plaintiff but only a
victim because the very terms in which she would want to phrase her dispute have
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been declared unintelligible. Either she wasnt raped, or she is mad for insisting
she was; she is caught in a

differend

.
The category of the

differend

elucidates my dispute with the student-teacher. I
had very deliberately introduced the lecture with the title slide Im Not an Issue,
Im a Person!: Gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersex, transgender, and two-spirit persons
and issues in the classroom. The student refused to engage the language of ident-
ity I had brought into circulation and repositioned sexuality as a lifestyle with
which others can disagree. I, in turn, refused to engage this language of choice.
In order to have legitimacy as a speaker in the students mind, I would have had
to use language that would have undermined and trivialized me as a lesbian; in
order not to be undermined and trivialized, I had to use terms that, in the students
mind, denied me legitimacy as a speaker. By the same token, the student, in order
to have his question legitimized, had to rephrase his question, only to have me
reply that there was not much point to it. Both of us denied the others testifying
phrase of authority, but were both of us victims in this

differend

?
As is clear from the examples of

differend

I provided earlier in this section, the
position of victim in a

differend

need not be occupied by those in a numerical
minority. In the case of Faurissons Holocaust denial, for instance, Faurisson was
well aware that not many people shared his views on the Holocaust. Nevertheless,
he was able to make use of a positivist epistemology that has remained powerful, and
in which falsication by eyewitness accounts, no matter how unjust in this case, can
be made to seem a reasonable requirement. From the outcome of Faurissons
trialhe was found guilty of defamation and incitement to racial hatred and given
a suspended three-month prison term as well as a neit should also be clear that
the person using the force of the hegemonic genre need not have institutional
power on her or his side.
Although I spoke from a relative position of institutional authority as university
professor

vis--vis

a teacher-education student, the students discourse chimed in
with heteronormative discourse that remains dominant in society at large. More-
over, the students implicit suggestion that the individual freedom of conscience of
the teacher who believes that homosexuality is morally wrong should trump the
right to equal treatment of the sexual minority student, parent, or colleague, draws
on a hegemonic neoliberal discourse in which liberty takes precedence over equality.
The question of power is, therefore, multilayered and complex, and the difference
in institutional power may not be the primary source of domination in the teacher-
student relation. Although it may not be a sufcient condition for justifying the
refusal of good will, the hegemonic or counterhegemonic nature of the interlocu-
tionary misbehaviour must certainly be taken into account.
To add another layer to the potential of counterhegemonic interlocutionary mis-
behaviour, let me return to the context of the exchange, an auditorium in which
many other students and several instructors were present. After the lecture, a
student who had not been directly involved in the exchange came to me and
recounted how she had responded viscerally to the exchange, feeling her heart
begin to beat faster as her colleague asked his question, then letting up as the
exchange unfolded. She had responded as if it were she, and not I, who had been
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asked the question, and her response had been emotional and physical, precisely
as Lyotard describes the experience of silence imposed by the

differend

:
The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein
something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This
state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon
phrases which are in principle possible.

This state is signaled by what one
ordinarily calls a feeling

: One cannot nd the words, etc. A lot of searching
must be done to nd new rules for forming and linking phrases that are
able to express the differend

disclosed by the feeling

, unless one wants this
differend to be smothered right away in a litigation and for

the alarm
sounded by the feeling

to have been useless. What is at stake in literature, in
a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by
nding idioms for them. (Lyotard, 1983/1988, 22, p. 13, my italics)
One of the effects of my refusal to extend good will to the student who asked the
question was that at least one other student saw possibilities beyond being reduced
to silence.

I Wont Learn From You

So far I have focused on professors who engage in interlocutionary misbehaviour by
withholding good will from peers or studentsbut what about students engaging
in such misbehaviour? American educator and scholar Herbert Kohl (1994) has
documented several interesting cases of students refusals to learn and speak on the
teachers terms. He calls such refusals willed not-learning and warns that they
should not be mistaken for an inability to learn:
Learning how to not-learn is an intellectual and social challenge; sometimes
you have to work very hard at it. It consists of an active, often ingenious,
willful rejection of even the most compassionate and well-designed teaching.
It subverts attempts at remediation as much as it rejects learning in the
rst place. (Kohl, 1994, p. 2)
Rather than a blanket refusal to learn or a rejection of all education, willed not-
learning occurs when the (potential) student refuses to learn something particular,
and has good reasons for doing so. Not-learning tends to take place when someone
has to deal with unavoidable challenges to her or his personal and family loyalties,
integrity, and identity (Kohl, 1994, p. 6).
I am interested in particular in the active refusal to learn, participate in and perpetuate
racism by one of Kohls African-American students, and the active refusal to learn,
participate in and perpetuate sexism by one of his female students. In both cases,
the willed-not learning resulted in interlocutionary misbehaviour, most often in the
form of interruptions of the ow of the dialogue. The African-American student:
read all of the [course] material aggressively, looking for sentences or phrases
that indicated or could be interpreted to imply racism, ranging from uses
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of the words black or dark to signify evil to sophisticated arguments
that implied the superiority of Western culture. (Kohl, 1994, p. 18)
In class, he would question and rephrase those parts of the text, thus delaying or
interrupting discussions about psychology, the course theme. Similarly, the female
student in another seminar Kohl taught, constantly corrected anyone in class who
used masculine references to represent all people and would insist upon class time
to rephrase every sentence in a story or article we read to make gender references
exact (Kohl, 1994, pp. 2021). In this course, too, both Kohl and the other
students noticed that this refusal to understand text that contained sexist language
took up a signicant amount of class time.
The students interlocutionary misbehaviour signalled their refusal to be caught
in the double binds of the

differend

and performative contradiction. The African-
American student refused to become a successful black student in the ways in
which success for a black man was dened by the racist system he rejected. Like-
wise, the female student refused to become a successful female student in the ways
in which success for a woman was dened by the sexist system she rejected. Kohl,
by validating their resistance and acknowledging the difference between a failure
to learn and willed not-learning, heeded the responsibility to justice laid out by
Lyotard: Ones responsibility before thought consists ... in detecting differends and
in nding the (impossible) idiom for phrasing them. This is what a philosopher
does (Lyotard, 1983/1988, 202, p. 142).

Questions That Remain

After this analysis of my own exchange with a student and of other situations in which,
I have argued, interlocutionary misbehaviour is educationally pertinent, I am left
with three questions. The rst is whether interlocutionary misbehaviour is always
effective. What comes to mind immediately is the hypothetical situation in which
the student in my lecture had continued to ask questions, with the effect (if not
the intention) to take away class time from discussions that made him uncomfort-
able. Other strategies may be necessary to complement interlocutionary misbehav-
iour in such cases; in particular, I would refer to Megan Bolers (2004) afrmative
action pedagogy. This approach, explains Boler, seeks to ensure that we bear witness
to marginalized voices in our classrooms, even at the minor cost of limiting dominant
voices (Boler, 2004, p. 4). Boler and I share an understanding of marginalized
and dominant here not as referring to numerical majorities or minorities in the
classroom, but to institutional and discursive power relations in society at large. If
a student continues to ask questions that oppose counterhegemonic teaching, and
the educational costs of giving more airtime to these questions are perceived to
outweigh the benets of what I have called counterhegemonic interlocutionary
misbehaviour, then the teacher may explain to the student that space needs to be
given to other students.
A second, more difcult question is whether, in spite of my arguments for
counterhegemonic practices, it is ever ethically acceptable to sacrice the comfort
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of one student for the educational benet of many others. Of course the answer to
this question depends on the ethical framework one adopts: in Kantian deontology,
for instance, it is never acceptable to treat a person merely as a means to an end
rather than as an end in her or himself, whereas in a utilitarian framework it may
be justiable to do so. Since I have made use of the work of Jacques Derrida for
parts of the preceding analysis, let me turn to his work for a perspective that is
perhaps closer to Kants than to the consequentialist perspective that has been
implicit in my analysis so far.
One of the effects of interlocutionary misbehaviour is that the other is treated as
an example. In Derridas own encounter with Gadamer, Gadamer served merely
as an example of any author who expected good will from a respondent. In my
encounter with the student, the students question was merely an example of
questions others could have asked in those terms, and some might even say that
I made an example of the student. Neither Gadamer nor the student who asked
me a question was received in his singularity. Derrida explains,
... an example is always a kind of substitutable substitute: when I say for
example, I immediately say that I could substitute another example; if I
say you, for example, I imply that it could be someone else; which is why
it is such a terrible phrase that says to someone you, for example, since
it inscribes chance and substitution, possible replaceability in the address
to the other. (Derrida, 2002, pp. 409410)
By treating a person as example, one treats her or him as substitutable and this is
a violation of her or his singularity. I have no answer to this quandary and my raising
it here serves only the purpose of acknowledging that even in cases where inter-
locutionary misbehaviour is educationally valuable and serves counterhegemonic
purposes, other ethical considerations may lead one to reject it as a pedagogical
strategy.
The third question I am left with pertains to the role of good will. In Herbert
Kohls accounts of students refusals to learn, he recounts how he often met these
students after their interlocutionary misbehaviour had been misread by others and
they had been labelled as having learning difculties, behaviour problems, or both.
Kohls accounts of these students are remarkable precisely because he is the excep-
tion to the rule, because he as a teacher extended good will to these students and
assumed that their interlocutionary misbehaviour had a purpose. Likewise, Derridas
response to Gadamer was not dismissed by his audience as nonsensical or unintelligent

because he was Derrida

, and the audience extended good will to the very interlocu-
tionary misbehaviour that disputed the necessity of good will as a interlocutionary
condition. In my exchange with the student, neither he nor other students started
yelling, plugged their ears, walked out of the auditorium, or signalled their dissatis-
faction with my interlocutionary misbehaviour in other ways, and I surmise that
had something to do with the fact that I was a faculty member and an invited speaker.
They cut me slack or, to use more Gadamerian language, offered a preconception
of completion in listening to my responses. This raises the ironic possibility that a
certain degree of good will is required to get away with interlocutionary misbehaviour,
538

Claudia W. Ruitenberg

2009 The Author
Journal compilation 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

and for it to have educational value. This does not mean that interlocutionary
misbehaviour is meaningless, but rather that even in cases in which refusing to
extend good will to ones interlocutor is educationally pertinent and valuableand
I have described several of such casesgood will is not absent from the exchange
altogether.

Note

1. Having introduced the term performative in its discursive sense in the previous section
and now turning to the work of Lyotard, I should note that the term performativity
plays an important role in Lyotards

The Postmodern Condition

. There, it refers not to the
discursive force of language, but to the economic criterion of efciency and productivity.
I will not consider performativity in this sense here.

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