A few semesters ago now, I taught a section of Business and Professional Speaking (or so they tell me) where this sentence—That’s subjective!—became a kind of tagline of one of the students. I really enjoyed his presence: he was willing to openly question and challenge the premise of the class, asking for its foundation in knowledge. Some of the other students, however, were not as amused. One woman found him especially prickly, and they would often get into arguments in class, arguments that I felt enriched what we were doing. Paradoxically, it was his very objection to the appearance of subjectivity—in evaluating speech or anything else—that showed his own subjectivity, his particular and often surprising way of dividing the world up into categories that he claimed as universal, despite the protests of that part of the universe assembled in the class.
Beyond simply enjoying the charm of someone willing to express a strong view and entertain arguments upon it, I appreciated this mantra because it brought into focus a problem that I believe is central to education, and perhaps even especially higher education, today. We have a disordered relationship to subjectivity, teachers and students alike. On the one hand, we are ashamed of it: wherever judgment appears, we pretend that it is objective, creating metrics, rubrics, point systems that are increasingly arcane. The technical, legalistic language of a syllabus is not designed to communicate but to obscure the relations of power within the student-teacher relationship. They say, It is not me who speaks here, who evaluates you: I too am constrained everywhere by impersonal forces beyond my control. Or they say, The knowledge in this classroom is already known. It has been achieved, but elsewhere, by those like me who have completed more courses than you ever can. It is the knowledge, and not me, that you suffer under.
But this shame also has a converse of enjoyment. Since what is subjective is placed beneath all knowledge, it is also the only thing that remains free from claims to knowledge. That’s just your opinion. You have yours, I have mine. We are all perfect sovereigns over our kingdoms of dunghills, free to reign over the realm of personal experience that, evacuated of any common value or interest for others, nevertheless possesses one immense value: it is mine.
Or worse: we deny it. The problem is subjectivity, but my subjectivity. If only I could find that reservoir of will that successful people have, if I had had better luck on the wheel of fortune, if I could get my visa to the Promised Land. (Is American English more subject to these delusions because it cannot distinguish the conditional from the optative?) Here we find a secret solace: the problem in my soul cannot be remedied, but at least it can be objectified. When I am armed with a diagnosis, a personality type, when, born under a bad sign, I can now see all of it as a sign of the one central fact: pathology. Pathology is, definitionally, not normal, and in this all that is elliptical in my peculiar orbit at least discovers an ersatz individuality. There may be nothing worthy of a biography, but there are many tales within the case notes…
Here the figure of another knowledge—someone, somewhere, could know me—this omniscience without benevolence, is a substitute for lovelessness. To be known is better than to be loved, for love has its illusions, involves me, asks things of me. Knowledge is impassive presence, assuring, “anti-anxiety.” Love is nothing but a storehouse of anxiety.
It is possible for the teacher to step into this role, readymade and available, even demanded, by students. You must know: there is ambiguity here, but nothing to interpret. The demand that one knows reduces anxiety for everyone. The insecure teacher, aware that they are awash in ignorance, not only of the living development of their subject but also the development of their living subjects, can take comfort in the pseudo-knowledge of the student who is certain that there is knowledge here, to be had. If you do not possess it, someone does. It then becomes an easy exercise to fulfill this demand, or fill it—like a prescription. Assignments, reading lists, references, allusions, homework, textbooks, labs, lectures, discussion sections, discussion boards, prerequisites, mandatory electives, internships, teaching assistantships, extracurriculars, postcurriculars, and on and on and on. Anything may fill the gap. Note that phrase that itself has been taken up as part of what might fill the demand: the gap year. Another thing one ought to do.
Or one may swagger into the demand, fill it with self, ego, pride. One can flash the grin that is a threat, showing that whatever knowledge the students have is so much chaff to be threshed away. Both hated and beloved professors may appear in this role, both the popular high school teacher and the burnout cynic, the one who knows what the children need and the one who knows that the children do not need it. It does not matter who the people are who fill the desks: they are so many problems, roles, future citizens.
What could even possibly be left if we abandon these positions? What position can be taken that’s safe? Where is the right place for subjectivity in education—or anywhere for that matter?
Samuel Beckett was fond of quoting a certain line of Augustine’s, giving it as an example of the “shape of ideas” that interested him even when he did not believe them: “Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned.” The “shape” of this idea could be that of faith, or a reformed anxiety—perhaps these are the same shape. Poised between salvation and damnation, we are also prevented from knowledge of our own fate as much as anyone else’s.
I hope to teach again in a classroom where the interjection—That’s subjective!—can be heard as a truth and a joke, a misunderstanding and a revelation. I believe that it is the question of where the subject should appear where the subject should appear.