Keywords

‘Those Teachers’

‘I don’t think you know what it’s like’.

She spoke those words clearly, audibly enough for everyone to hear, with a confident overtone, yet skirted by a slight tremble only perceptible to those who were sitting close by. The other students in the class sat quietly for nearly a minute, which had the effect of keeping her words suspended in the air of the small, poorly ventilated room where we spent those Monday afternoons together for 12 weeks.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to shut down the chat’, she said, punctuating the muggy silence. ‘I just wanted to share what it’s like to have a shit teacher who puts you down for being poor’.

‘Don’t apologise. Thank you for being honest and sharing’. I moved instinctively to reassure her—or was it to reassure myself?—that this was precisely the sort of discourse we should be having in a sociology of education classroom. She had just told a story about the humiliations she had experienced at the hands of a teacher in high school for not having the right equipment (i.e., a laptop that was powerful enough to run a taxing design program), for not attending excursions (e.g., to ticketed art exhibitions), and for not blending the colours adequately in her studies leading up to her final visual art work (because she did not have the right range of markers that retailed for $12 each). Hers was the sort of experience that made real our discussion of the topic for that week: on the impacts of social class on education.

‘Yeah, thanks for sharing’, came a voice from the back corner of the classroom. ‘I can’t say I’ve had the same experience, but I know the sort of teacher you are talking about’, he said.

There were a few nods around the classroom. It seemed as if the discomfort and awkwardness was dissipating a little.

‘I had a teacher in primary school that told me that all the kids in my suburb grow up to do drugs, get pregnant in high school, and wait around for handouts from Centrelink’. Another student chimed in. I remember thinking that surely no one in their right mind, regardless of what suburb they are from, would but for utter desperation choose to spend their days subjected to the terrifying paperwork and notoriously long wait times that are the flaming swords guarding Australia’s welfare coffers (Henman, 2017; Vincent, 2019). Given the ways in which the western suburbs of Sydney are commonly perceived, that student’s primary school teacher was likely ventriloquising the ways that classed, raced, and gendered tropes interlock with geography in long-standing stereotypes of the region (Collins, 2000; Powell, 1993).

‘What is wrong with them?!’ A young woman sitting near the front of the class called out. Her exasperated and slightly dramatic question would induce its intended rhetorical effect. The tense mood that had held the room only a few moments ago was now palpably shifting towards indignation and disdain.

‘What are those teachers even doing there? They are just jaded and hanging on for the pay or something’.

‘They are traumatising and retraumatising their students’.

‘I bet they are probably old teachers. Were they old?’

‘I wonder if they were taught subjects like this when they were training to be teachers’.

‘They should be sacked!’

I wanted to channel the class back to the discussion on social class and importantly, on what could be done both personally in our pedagogical practice to mitigate its impacts on student learning and institutionally to reduce the barriers for students from less well-to-do homes. Surely, I figured, these soon-to-be teachers needed to think more about how their theoretical understandings of social justice can be operationalised in actual classrooms and schools—‘they need to be able to imagine what that might look like and sound like’, as Comber (2016, p. 413) urges.

‘So now we understand a bit more about how social class impacts students’ experiences of education, what would being a “good teacher” look like? And how could we change the ways schools do things to make them more inclusive?’ I put to them. Not a small ask for a mid-afternoon on a Monday after lunch.

A hand was raised tentatively, soon accompanied by a voice that was surprisingly assertive. ‘But can we change the ways schools are? I mean, if they are full of those jaded teachers who talk trash about their students… can we change their minds?’

‘Can we?’ I repeated, hopefully.

‘As if they would listen to us’. She retorted. ‘They are set in their ways’.

Chantal Mouffe and the Uses of Identity

The vignette offered above is composed from fragments of discussions that I have had in sociologically focused teacher education classrooms over the past few years. Sure, the topics under discussion—ranging from social class as illustrated above to religion and race to sex and gender—might vary week to week. And of course, the experiences that students bring to bear on the discussion of these topics are marked by the concatenation of innumerable conditions, relations, contingent life events, and personal proclivities that come together to make each of them unique. Yet the broad contours of many discussions do follow to the pattern I have narrated above: the courageous disclosure of a difficult personal experience of an issue, emboldening those who have similar experiences to chime in while uneasiness ripples amongst those who do not, then—based on a mixture of aggregation and abstraction—focalising on a type of person who might be responsible for the difficulties, and whom the class can then collectively agree is ‘the problem’ that needs to be resolved (or not uncommonly, just gotten rid of). Students often walk out after class continuing their chat in twos, threes, and fours, bonding with one another in ways that contrast starkly with the individuals who were silently scrolling on their phones or tapping on their laptops just before class. And I often get the sense that they are galvanised with purpose after these sessions—a determination to be among the ‘good teachers’ and not the ‘shit’, ‘old’, ‘jaded’, ‘undereducated’ ones who traumatise their students and should be cast onto the scrapheap. Yet I am often left with a gnawing, subterranean current of discomfort after these classes.

When I am trying to make sense of social dynamics like this, I sometimes turn to social theorists. During my doctoral studies and in the years immediately after, I drew a lot of inspiration from the work of political theorist Chantal Mouffe. She had helped me conceptualise how religious identities—diverse as they are within and between groups categorised as such—coalesce in complex and contingent ways around political issues (e.g., Low, 2013, 2016). So, having experienced her work as a raft to navigate the choppy waters of religion and politics, it was to her that I turned for help to make sense of the abovementioned social dynamics in my classrooms. Over several decades, Mouffe has theorised how the microcosmic forces that play out in small spaces like my classrooms can be seen more broadly in how diverse social movements operate to change society. While a complete account of her work is not the aim of this chapter, a brief outline of its key contours will show how it is germane to classrooms like the ones I am usually in.

Any society, according to Mouffe, is nothing but the institutionalisation of political outcomes achieved through struggle. What this means is that everything we take for granted about the society we live in—encapsulated in phrases like ‘this is just how are’ or ‘this is how we do things here’—are nothing more than historical settlements established by those who have been successful in gaining power over others, especially by taking control of state and representative institutions. There are two immediate implications of this foundational, ontological premise. First, that there is no such thing as ‘society’ as such. Yes, this sounds eerily like Margaret Thatcher’s notorious declaration made while pillorying those who make demands of the state and society: ‘[T]hey are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families’ (Thatcher, 1987). I raise Thatcher’s anti-welfare screed because I wish to use it as a foil to show that while on a superficial level Mouffe’s claims about society chime with the former Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, they are radically divergent in how they understand this and the implications it bears. For Thatcher (1987), because there is ‘no such thing as society’, the onus is on hardworking and moral individuals to make life better. Beyond this, we can hope for no more. For Mouffe, the non-objective status of any society—or what she prefers to call ‘social order’—means that everything is up for grabs (i.e., contingent): the way we structure the economy and distribution of resources, the way we relate to one another, and what constitutes ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’ behaviour, even how we think about ourselves. Mouffe labels this ‘up for grab-ness’ of any social order the political dimension, the action of ‘grabbing at’ social and representative institutions she calls ‘hegemonic practices’, and ‘hegemony’ the state of having ‘grabbed’ those institutions successfully. So, in short, every society is the institutionalisation of a hegemony. In her words:

To speak of hegemony means that every social order is a contingent articulation of power relations that lacks an ultimate rational ground. Society is always the product of a series of practices that attempt to create a certain order in a contingent context. These are the practices that we call ‘hegemonic practices’. Things could always be otherwise. Every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. A particular order is always the expression of a particular configuration of power relations. It is in this sense that every order is political. A given order could not exist without the power relations that give it shape. (Mouffe, 2013a, 2013b, p. 131)

For those who have encountered the writings of Antonio Gramsci, this passage appears as an updated version of the Italian Marxist’s own Machiavellian modification of Marx, which emphasised the revolutionary imperative of forging a ‘collective will’: ‘winning over’ people from different classes and social groups in civil society by proposing shared political objectives based on new beliefs and practices (Gramsci, 1971; also, Howarth, 2015). While Gramsci theorised to make sense of a failed revolution from a dank fascist prison cell from 1926 till his death from illness in 1937, for Mouffe it was to make sense of coming to maturity in the mid-1960s and 1970s when the post-war consensus on the welfare state in Europe was fraying and when the so-called new social movements like feminism, anti-racism, and environmentalism challenged the primacy of social class the main vector of political action (Martin, 2013, pp. 1–2). So, while for the former the main question can be crudely put as ‘Why did the masses not join the working-class revolution?’, for the latter it is ‘How do all these disparate groups and causes come together to change society?’ It is her attempts to work this question out that mark her development of Gramsci’s thought and which leads us to the second implication of her foundational premise that society is nothing but the outcome of political struggle.

Consider how one might answer the question: Who are you? Of course, how we answer this question depends on who is asking and the context in which it is being asked. So, if it is in an educational institution, one might respond by saying ‘I am a student’ or ‘I teach here’ or ‘I am in charge of making sure that all the classrooms are cleaned and tidy’. If it is at a wedding or funeral, we might declare that ‘I am her son’ or ‘I am a family friend’ or ‘I am their secret lover’. If it is at a dreary professional conference, then ‘I am a historian of eighteenth-century esoteric practices’ or ‘I am a cryptocurrency trader’. If at an interfaith event, we might profess to be Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, or secular (notwithstanding an undying faith, despite all empirical evidence, in a chronically underperforming football club). Note two things about all these responses and the many other possibilities about how we might respond depending on context: one, that we can be many identities simultaneously (e.g., a Hindu teacher who is a daughter and sister to two brothers in a family of diehard Manchester United fans); and two, that all these identities are given to us by social institutions sanctioned by the prevailing social order. As such, we are all bearers of multiple social identities none of which is necessarily our ‘true selves’ (i.e., we occupy different ‘subject positions’) and that all those identities are not stable or given but constructed at some point in history—they do not spontaneously arise from biology or from experience (i.e., there is no ‘essence’ that underwrites identity) (Mouffe, 1993a, 1993b, pp. 84–85). We learn to identify ourselves in one way or another in relation to others, and importantly, we identify what we are with reference to what we are not. This holds for individual identities and for collective identities:

Once we have understood that every identity is relational and that the affirmation of a difference is a precondition for the existence of any identity (i.e. the perception of something ‘other’ than it which will constitute its ‘exterior’), then we can begin to understand why such a relationship may always become a terrain for antagonism. Indeed, when it comes to the creation of a collective identity—basically the creation of an ‘us’ by the demarcation of a ‘them’—then there will always be the possibility that this ‘us/them’ relationship will become one of ‘friend and enemy’, i.e. one of antagonism. This happens when the ‘other’, who up until now has been considered simply as different, starts to be perceived as someone who is rejecting ‘my’ identity and who is threatening ‘my’ existence. From that moment on, any form of us/them relationship—whether it be religious, ethnic, economic or other—becomes political. (Mouffe, 1994/2013, p. 148)

Beginning with the landmark work she co-authored with Ernesto Laclau—Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985)—and continuing into the present, a consistent argument advanced by Mouffe is that change to any social order requires this dimension of antagonism. That is, any change to society that seeks to replace an existing hegemony with a different way of doing things (i.e., a counter-hegemony) requires this ‘political’ dimension, the drawing of a ‘political frontier’ that unifies people with different identities and interests into an ‘us’ against a ‘them’: ‘Political discourse attempts to create specific forms of unity among different interests by relating them to a common project and by establishing a frontier to define the forces to be opposed, the “enemy”’ (Mouffe, 1993a, 1993b, p. 50).

Yet given the horrifying historical evidence of precisely such dynamics as exemplified in ethno-nationalism, religious extremism, and reactionary populism, is this not a dangerous political theory? Does arguing for the inescapability of antagonism in every society and the necessity of harnessing its dynamics for social change not amount to flirting with the worst excesses of collective life? The baseness of this is something that Mouffe does not shy away from. Indeed, against her liberal interlocutors who seek to forestall this conflictual dimension of social life—whether it is other theorists like John Rawls who appeals to what is ‘reasonable’ and Jurgen Habermas who calls for ‘communicative rationality’, or ‘third way’ social democratic political parties that seek to achieve a non-conflictual consensus between historical adversaries (e.g., employers and workers)—Mouffe (2005, p. 2) argues that: ‘The aspiration to a world where the we/they discrimination would have been overcome is based on flawed premises and those who share such a vision are bound to miss the real task facing democratic politics’. What is this ‘real task’? It is to mobilise the dynamic of antagonism to create a collective ‘we’ that advances progressive social causes against a ‘them’ who stand in our way. In her more recent works, against the liberal bias against ‘passion’ as ‘referring to affects of an irrational and undesirable nature’, she has further argued that such passionate affects are a key component in this collective identity formation: ‘A counter-hegemonic politics necessitates the creation of a different regime of desires and affects so as to bring about a collective will sustained by common affects able to challenge the existing order’ (Mouffe, 2014, p. 155, 157).

And yet the pointy question that undergirds liberal objections to such an antagonistic politics fuelled by passion remains: Does this not open the door to identity-based violence (e.g., Sen, 2007; Appiah, 2018)? Mouffe agrees that this is an ever-present possibility, so she suggests two strategies to tame it for the purposes of deepening democracy and pluralism. The first is to posit an ‘us’ identity that stands above and beyond particularistic associations like family, ethnicity, or religion and which can accommodate an ever-expanding number of people who are committed to progressive social causes. Her preferred identity category for accomplishing this is ‘citizen’ (e.g., Mouffe, 1992, 2006; 2013)—an identity that presumes upon the modern nation-state (Mouffe, 2005, pp. 90–118; also 2012). The second way to subdue the violent excesses of identity-based politics advanced by Mouffe is to reframe ‘antagonism’ as ‘agonism’, which means seeing ‘they’ who do not abide by ‘our’ political causes not as ‘enemies’ to be eliminated, but as ‘adversaries’ to be defeated within the bounds of democratic procedures: ‘Democratic politics requires that the others be seen not as enemies to be destroyed but as adversaries whose ideas should be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas will never be questioned’ (Mouffe, 2002/2013, p. 185). Here again, affects are to be encouraged:

the prime task of democratic politics is neither to eliminate passions nor to relegate them to the private sphere in order to establish a rational consensus in the public sphere; it is, rather, to ‘tame’ these passions by mobilizing them for democratic ends and by creating collective forms of identification around democratic objectives. (Mouffe, 2002/2013, p. 186)

By this point, it might be apparent why Mouffe has been helpful to me for understanding the dynamics I experience in my teacher education classrooms that explore the different social dimensions that shape young people’s experiences of educational institutions. Depending on the topic under consideration each week (e.g., social class, race, gender), students inevitably occupy different subject positions. During class discussions, antagonism is an ever-present possibility when it becomes evident that one’s identity—and one’s life experiences that are attributed to that identity—is constituted in relation to those who share it (‘us’), those who sympathise with it (‘allies’), and others who are seen as its opposition (‘they’). It is only by sublimating these differences under a broader identity (‘good teachers’) so that those with different subject positions can come together, and the emotions accompanying each (e.g., anger, stupefaction, guilt, awkwardness) can be displaced into a generalised indignation, against those others who stand in the way (‘bad teachers’). The payoff from all this is the force it generates: the drive towards camaraderie and the political will to change educational institutions. There is something simplifying, invigorating, and seductive about it. Yet it is also this force that unnerves me. While I have previously also encouraged the unleashing of this force in educational contexts (Low, 2016), I now wonder whether Mouffe’s theory of radical democratic politics, which relies on the ‘taming’ of passions and the domestication of antagonism (seeing others as enemies) into agonism (seeing others as adversaries), is as easy to accomplish as she suggests.

Oxytocin and the Janus Face of Social Bonds

What follows is not meant to be (pardon the pun) a killer argument against Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy based on incontrovertible biological evidence. On the contrary, I draw on some of recent findings in social neuroscience both to support her philosophical intuitions about the power of identity to bring people together to achieve political goals and to confront the challenge of being agonistic rather than antagonistic.

There are many bodily processes involving multiple systems implicated in any human action in its context such that no single brain region or chemical can be said to cause it (Barrett, 2017). Bearing this in mind, I turn to research involving the hormone oxytocin—what has been (misleadingly) popularised as the ‘love hormone’ or the ‘cuddle hormone’ (Harvey & Pappas, 2021). Oxytocin is a neuropeptide (i.e., a huge class of signalling molecules in the nervous system of many groups of animals, including humans; see Larhammar, 2009) produced mainly in the hypothalamus and secreted through the posterior pituitary gland. It has played a key role throughout mammalian evolution in the regulation of complex social cognition and behaviours such as attachment, parental care, pair-bonding, and social exploration and recognition (Kumsta & Heinrichs, 2013). In human groups more specifically, it has been linked to enhanced facial recognition (Guastella et al., 2008), emotional empathy (Bartz et al., 2010), generosity (Zak et al., 2007), and trust (Kosfeld et al., 2005)—even after betrayal (Baumgartner et al., 2008). Oxytocin works by inhibiting the central amygdala, suppressing fear and anxiety, and activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which produces a calm state and less cardiovascular startle responses (Sapolsky, 2017, p. 112). Unsurprisingly, then, it is often associated with the mitigation of stress and pain and hence the enhancement of wellbeing (IsHak et al., 2011). To boot, it is one of the few hormones that operates on a positive feedback mechanism—that is, the release of oxytocin enhances positive social interactions and bonding, which in turn triggers the further release of oxytocin (Bethlehem et al., 2014).

What this detour through oxytocin suggests is that Mouffe’s intuition about the importance of identity formation and its accompanying affects checks out at a biological level. In the face of marginalisation, discrimination, and stigmatisation—all of which trigger biological stress responses and tax the body’s metabolic system (i.e., allostatic overload)—neurobiological processes like oxytocin release both enables and is enabled by group identity formation, which enhances social connectedness and support-seeking that lead to better wellbeing outcomes (Matheson et al., 2016). The oxytocin released during such group identity formation also lubricates cooperation within the group when social information and incentives are clear (Declerck et al., 2010).

Herein lies the rub: all these prosocial effects of oxytocin only hold for those within the group. For those regarded as the out-group—those ‘others’, enemies, or adversaries as Mouffe prefers—the oxytocin produced through group formation is increasingly shown to have the opposite effect. It is linked to in-group favouritism and out-group derogation (De Dreu et al., 2011), promoting in-group favouring dishonesty (Shalvi & De Dreu, 2014), escalating defensive aggression in intergroup conflict (De Dreu et al., 2010), increasing coordination of attacks on out-groups to exploit their vulnerabilities (Zhang et al., 2019), and heightening envy and pleasure derived from the suffering of out-group members (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009). Basically, oxytocin works in concert with an array of bodily process to accomplish many things, one of which is to bolster the ‘us’ against the ‘them’.

Conclusion

What all of this suggests, as mentioned above, is that Mouffe’s theory goes some way to explaining why identity formation around an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ can be so energising, comforting, galvanising, and strategic for effecting social change. And this is in no small part due to the affects and passions involved with such identity formation, as she also rightly indicates. However, what the research on oxytocin cautions is how once unleashed, it may not be so easy to tame the affects in order to domesticate antagonism into a workable, non-violent agonism that sees ‘others’ as political adversaries and not threatening enemies to be eliminated (Triki et al., 2022). In addition, the favouritism it underwrites may well colour the acceptance of bounds established by democratic procedures, their fairness dependent on whether they are perceived to benefit ‘us’ (Radke & de Bruijn, 2012). Or, to bring it back to my classroom discussion, once ‘we good teachers’ take over from ‘them bad teachers’—those ‘shit’, ‘old’, ‘jaded’, ‘undereducated’ ones—what further obligation do we owe them who are responsible for our suffering? What hope should we afford to them who are irretrievably ‘set in their ways’? Maybe it is this teacher’s naivete and lingering humanism to believe that everyone—even those we despise—can learn and change and that it is my job to help with that.