"Orthodox Marxism and Pedagogy: The "Molecular" and The "Molar"
Pedagogues and Why They Teach"

Brian Ganter

Pedagogy is a theory of the intellectual and its role in and social
change.  In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels
obliquely point to this when they write:  "[I]n times when the class
struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on
within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society,
assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of
the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary
class, the class that holds the future in its hands.  Just as,
therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over
to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to
the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois
ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending
theoretically the historical movement as a whole." (Gramsci's remarks
on the organic intellectual as the ally-pedagogue of the people are
too well-known to need elaboration here.) Not only do Marx and Engels
offer an outline of the class position of the intellectual/pedagogue
but they also argue that the intellectual/pedagogue is able to
understand his/her class position and by means of "theory" is able to
grasp the world in its social-historical totality and thus become an
ally of the people.  In resistance to the sentimental pedagogies of
the bourgeois the Orthodox Marxist pedagogue teaches knowledge of the
social totality and thus puts pedagogy on the side of people and
struggles for and end to economic inequality.  Orthodox Marxist
pedagogy is seen as dangerous by the left - the sentimental,
compassionate and ethical left of the "post" -- because it unweaves
the fabric of sentimental pedagogy that reifies the ruling ideas and
teaches acquiescence to the world as it is.

One of the most effective sentimental pedagogies today is the one
argued by Deleuze and Guattari. They found their pedagogy on the two
axes of the "molecular" and the "molar" (A Thousand Plateaus).  The
"molecular" pedagogue (that has its genealogy in Foucault's idea of
"specific intellectual") is the preferred agent in their reading for
teaching both the signs of culture and processes of social change as
activities of radical immanence--fluidity, multiplication, subversion
and re-invention from "within".  In the dominant terms, the
"molecular" is routinely opposed to and privileged over a "molar"
Leninist pedagogy, which is founded instead on the need for an
intervention from "without", an intervention undertaken on the basis
of an "outside" to the very terms of the system in need of
transformation. The "other" of the "molecular" pedagogue is the
"molar" teacher--which is Deleuze and Guattari's reading of the
Leninist teacher and her teaching.

  The aim of this paper is to bring back the revolutionary Marxist and
Leninist concepts of critique-al citizenship such as "ideology",
"false consciousness", "class consciousness", "labor" and
"revolution" for the purpose of reactivating a Red Pedagogy in a
moment when the reformist left has discredited such practices as an
outmoded form of "molar" thinking and politics.  As Lenin argues in
What is To be Done?,--as part of his critique of what he calls
"spontaneism"--workers have never "immanently" developed class
consciousness as a spontaneous result of their daily life "within"
capitalism; class consciousness has always had to be introduced and
imparted from "without" (and inevitably through a relentless struggle
against those pedagogues who teach, speak and write in the name of
the ruling classes).

The paper will elaborate on the ways in which the Leninist Red
Pedagogy is routinely marginalized as yet another form of dangerous
"vanguardism", as Judith Butler puts it.  Butler continues to
dogmatically follow the Foucualdean clich=E9 of spontaneous activism
within the system ("where there is power there is resistance") and as
part of her skill-full and subtle defense of the interests and
desires of capital, warns her readership against the dangerous
"resurgence of left orthodoxy" - a code word in her writings for
Orthodox Marxism and its vanguard pedagogy ("Merely Cultural").
Butler is, of course, not alone in her marginalization: this
rear-guard position is quite popular in the academy and is
translated, by various anti-conceptual performatives into pedagogies
of citationality by such pedagogues as Giroux, Kipnis, Taussig and
others whose work are collected in the collection Poetics/Politics:
Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom. What is "radical" about this
collection, I will argue, is its relentless legitimization of
neoliberal politics and libertarian epistemology.

The "molecular" pedagogy, from the reformist-libertarian left
standpoint, is the applied art of making the student more attuned to
his spontaneous subversiveness -- her inherent resistance.  What is
affirmed as spontaneous resistance in this pedagogy is, of course,
the dominant ideology and in normalizing pedagogy as an art of
self-acceptance, the left molecular pedagogue in effect reduces
pedagogy to therapy. The sentimental pedagogy becomes in effect, the
pedagogy of comfort(ing).  Of course one must point out, as this
paper will, that the "outside" of Red Pedagogy - the source of its
dis-comforting effect -- is not the moral-ethical "outside", the
compassionate consciousness of the post-Kantian cosmopolitan now
being brought back in the writings of Bruce Robbins and other
post-leftists to deliver on the promise of a "compassionate
capitalism".  Rather this "outside" is the outside of historical
possibility, the possibility of a sustained intervention in the
machinations of "false consciousness" through the production of what
Marx and Lenin have each, in various ways, theorized as "class
consciousness": world-historical guidelines for social change that
can lead from a society of production of profit to a society for the
production and meeting of need (which is the aim of all revolutionary
pedagogy).