Abstract
Films depicting educational relationships typically emphasize personal connections between students and teachers over the educational goals that such relations facilitate. In doing so, these films raise the question of how teachers stand in relation to their institutional roles in such a way as to inspire students’ desires for knowledge. In this paper, in order to examine the influence of institutional roles in defining teacher–student relationships, we analyze “The Paper Chase,” a film in which teacher and student have no personal connection but in which the drama of student desire is nonetheless clearly featured. Drawing from Plato’s erotics, in which the soul is shaped by desire for that which it lacks, and from Jacques Lacan’s theories of desire and transference, we argue that “The Paper Chase” portrays educational desire as rooted in the differential of authority between teacher and student.
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Notes
The replacement of curriculum with personal relationships is as prevalent in films that highlight the hard-working teacher in the struggling school (Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers) as it is in films where the teacher stands as the object of desire.
The idea that love, in some form, is essential to teaching and learning has recently been explored by educational thinkers from a wide variety of perspectives (Hooks 1994; Gallop 1997; Garrison 1997; Todd 1997; Fried 2003; Goldstein 2004; Martin 2004; Cho 2005). Some of these positions have been critiqued as incommensurate with the goals of education more generally (Stillwaggon 2005b).
Consider, for instance, the conflict inherent in our most recognizable images of teachers: between the state propagandist Socrates of Plato’s Republic and the social critic of the Apology; the image of Jesus of Nazareth as both omnipotent God and suffering man, or David Blacker’s image of the teacher as both giving himself up to the purposes of his students and society, while gaining immortality in the process (Blacker 1997).
The appropriateness of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory to educational thought, particularly due to its emphasis on the agency of language in the unconscious, has been argued and demonstrated most notably by Felman (1982) and by a number of theorists who have followed her lead (Brooke 1987; Davis 1987; Schleifer 1987).
While this point has been a fundamental tenet of much educational thought, the dissolution of an underlying self into the complexes of discourse, and some understanding of how language shapes the developing subject, has been the major contribution of Lacanian psychoanalysis to educational theory (Lacan 1977, pp. 42, 286).
Lacan’s (1981, p. 232) own definition of transference is infamously (and perhaps intentionally) vague: “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere … there is transference.” Lacan’s (1961) extended investigation into transference takes Plato’s Symposium as its primary source, relying on the relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates to illustrate the relationship between transference and desire.
Lacan’s (1981, p. 235) insistence that transference engages the desires of both the student and the teacher (the analysand and the analyst) is significant for any consideration of teacher identity insofar as it asks us to reconsider a corollary to Britzman’s cultural myths: that the teacher is beyond desire.
In Britzman’s (1986, p. 451) analysis, our failure to question teacher identity leads to an equation of pedagogy and personality that distracts us from the problem of authority: “In the supposedly self-made world of the teacher, pedagogy becomes a product of one’s personality. As such, pedagogy is replaced by teaching style.”
“The ego, whose strength our theorists now define by its capacity to bear frustration, is frustration in its essence. Not frustration of a desire of the subject, but frustration by an object in which his desire is alienated and which the more it is elaborated, the more profound the alienation from his jouissance becomes for the subject…even if he achieved his most perfect likeness in that image, it would still be the jouissance of the other that he would cause to be recognized in it.” (Lacan 1977, p. 42)
Other films have achieved the same sense of belatedness through their characters literally showing up late to class as Hart does later in the film, beginning at a school with a long tradition, or entering upon a school where problems are so established that no academic progress can be made.
Alternatively, some school films attempt to provide a conclusive ending while acknowledging that the very fact that the film is set in a school means that the story is not over. Consider, for instance, the device used in Animal House and later in The History Boys, in which the audience is given information on how each principal character’s life turns out.
Higgins (2003) reads the tearing of the letter as a renunciation of selfhood in Thackeray’s foregoing the path of self-interested flourishing. Higgins is correct in pointing out that Thackeray’s tearing of himself from the outside world also tears him from the lifeblood of his teaching, insofar as his identity as a dynamic teacher is based upon his rejection of the very order that provides him with authority over students. Whether we can say the same of a teacher like Kingsfield is doubtful, insofar as his identity is so tied to his place within the school that it allows for no ‘outside’.
Thanks to Gert Biesta and to our anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticism of our manuscript. Thanks also to Amy Brooks Snyder, John Broughton, Maxine Greene, and John Knapp for their helpful commentary on early versions of this essay.
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Stillwaggon, J., Jelinek, D. Legal, Tender: The Deferred Romance of Pedagogical Relation in The Paper Chase . Stud Philos Educ 30, 1–17 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9201-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9201-z