freire meets gurdjieff and rumi - okcir.com pdfs/tamdgidifreiregurdjieff.pdf · gurdjieff...

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NTRODUCTION

The newly established Social TheoryForum (STF) at UMass Boston, of whichthis is a first gathering, was conceived forthe purpose of fostering and publishing on-going dialogues within sociology andacross the academic disciplines and beyondon the nature, relevance, limits, and pros-pects of classical and contemporary socialtheory in the rapidly changing social con-text of the turn of the twenty-first century.The topic chosen for the first event, “Liber-ating Social Theory,” was intended to con-vey a double-meaning: on one hand, that inorder for social theory to remain relevant tothe new global historical conditions itneeds to continue addressing human liber-atory themes, for which, on the other hand,

it needs to liberate itself from habituatedand outmoded conceptual structures notcorresponding to the new world-historicalrealities at hand. To address these practicaland substantive concerns of social theory, itseemed appropriate—especially given theapplied nature of the sociology program atUMass Boston—to begin our dialogueswith explorations of some immediate ped-agogical questions surrounding learning,teaching, and advancing social theory inapplied settings. In this context, we hopedthat critically drawing inspirations fromthe works of Paulo Freire,, the late Braziliancritical theorist and educator, in the area ofeducational philosophy and liberatory so-cial pedagogy and praxis would provide apreliminary intellectual scaffolding aroundwhich we could begin building our ongo-ing conversations.

The central question raised by Profes-sor Siamak Movahedi in his opening state-ment this morning—”Can Social Theory beLiberating?”—is what any scholarly explo-ration of “Liberating Social Theory” shouldbegin with. Both the practical question of

1.©Copyright 2004, by Mohammad H.Tamdgidi. Presented to the 1st Annual Confer-ence-Workshop of the Social Theory Forum,UMass Boston, April 7, 2004 (Panel: “Transfor-mations of the Self: Pedagogies from the Mar-gin”).

Contact information: [email protected]

Freire Meets Gurdjieff and Rumi:

Toward the Pedagogy of Oppressed and Oppressive Selves1

Mohammad Tamdgidi

University of Massachusetts Boston

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whether social theory can be liberating ornot, and the substantive question of how,for the purpose, it should liberate itselffrom outmoded conceptual structures, inother words, should be guided by a schol-arly spirit that does not presume any liber-atory function necessarily assigned tosocial theory. Of course we may addressthis good question with a simple yes or noanswer from the outset. But I would like tothink that any a priori position on the mat-ter, one way or another, would itself tend todistance us from providing scholarly an-swers to the question. Responsible scholar-ship would instead seek plausible answersnot in an predetermined fashion butthrough close and critical examination ofhistorical and/or theoretical efforts previ-ously undertaken. The question is a goodone, not because it closes dialogue andthereby freezes pre-existing positions butbecause it opens new generative themes,questions, and issues to explore in lights ofactual practical and intellectual efforts car-ried out in the past. So my hope also is thatthis conference and forum asa whole servenot to close the question with which theybegan this morning, but to continue ad-dressing it in different ways and forms inall the series of future conference-work-shops to follow.

Paulo Freire insisted that every newgeneration must re

invent

his ideas—as isobviously a task any new generation mustperform with regards to its preceding cul-tural and intellectual heritage. An impor-tant component of the Freirean educationalheritage, however, is its critical edge to-wards the word and the world. We wouldtherefore be more faithful to his work if inthe process of reinventing him we main-tained this critical edge not just towards theworld but also towards his own words.One may argue, in fact, that any conformistreading of Freire’s thought would serveonly to misinvent him in the context of newglobal historical realities which have un-doubtedly outgrown his own contribu-

tions. Freire left a vast legacy of literary andexperiential works by and about him thatwould certainly take as well more than alifetime to critically reinvent. The modestpurpose of the present paper, therefore, isto focus on his path-breaking work,

Pedago-gy of the Oppressed

, as a window of entryinto the rich legacy of educational philoso-phy, pedagogy, and liberatory praxis he leftbehind.

In what follows I will first try to recon-struct the essential argument advanced byPaulo Freire (1921-1997) in the

Pedagogy ofthe Oppressed

(first published in 1968 in Por-tuguese, and in 1970 in English). I will thentry a critical reassessment of his conceptualstructure through a comparative dialoguewith the thoughts of George IvanovitchGurdjieff (1872?-1949), a Middle-Easternphilosopher, teacher, and mystic whosework I think provides a critically balancingcontribution towards the reinvention ofFreirean pedagogy in a comparative east-west framework. Following an effort incontextualization of the Freire-Gurdjieff di-alogue in terms of the meeting of Newto-nian and quantal sociological imaginationsfor the purpose of development of a peda-gogy of oppression, I will close this paperby reciting Rumi’s poem “Song of theReed” as both a theoretical as well as an ap-plied psychosociological exercise in libera-tory pedagogy of the oppressed andoppressing selves.

F

REIRE

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S

P

EDAGOGY

OF

THE

O

PPRESSED

For Freire, world-history is a process ofhumanization, a process in which “unfin-ished humanity” seeks becoming “fully hu-man.” Becoming “fully human” means forFreire becoming a being of praxis, i.e., anintegrated being of critical reflection andpractical action. A being of praxis is an in-cessantly liberating organism in that it is ca-

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pable and in need of constantly changingboth the objective and the subjective condi-tions of its existence in order to survive. Infact, Freire argues that it is this existentiallynecessitated transformative power in thehuman being that distinguishes it from therest of known nature. Animals can only sur-vive in limited and limiting environments;humankind can and needs to constantlytransform the world and itself, through thecriticism-action dialectic. In many ways,Freire derives the proposition of human lib-eratory powers, in theorizing and practicealike, from the human species being—notfrom a preferential desire imposed on thehuman organism from without. Liberationis not simply a possibility, but a necessity,for humanity. It is the unity of these capac-ities of critical reflection and practical ac-tion in the organism, in other words, thatactualizes a fully human potential; any one-sidedness either way would bring aboutonly “verbalism” on one hand, or “activ-ism” on the other—both equally regardedby Freire as being deviations from the pathof humanization.

Moreover, praxis for Freire is not an in-dividual or isolated phenomenon, but a so-cial and collective, and hence inherently adialogical, process in both its dialectical as-pects. In a fully human society, Freirewould argue, human beings treat them-selves not as things or objects, but as co-subjects, as co-authors, of their commonworld-history. This co-authorship mustnecessarily be an intersubjective and dia-logical process in both thought and action,i.e., a process whereby people engage withone another in posing problems, in identi-fying ever-generative and open-endedquestions and themes for critical reflectionon the nature, causes, consequences andpossible future trajectories of those prob-lems, and in taking practical action to re-solve the problems and shape reality inways collectively envisaged—

ad infinitum

.Being fully human means living in an in-cessantly liberatory process of intersubjec-

tive dialogical praxis, of united criticalreflection and applied action. To be humanis to be liberating in theory and practice—to be creative.

What does it mean to oppress? Whatare the characteristic features of an oppres-sive society, according to Freire? What isthe process of liberation from oppressivesocial conditions? The notion of oppressionin Freire is derived directly from his notionof what full humanity is or should be, i.e.,an intersubjective and dialogical being ofcreative and liberatory praxis. To oppressmeans, for Freire, to prevent humanity or apart thereof from being fully human, i.e.,from being creative, a being of liberatorypraxis. This is done by splitting, by divid-ing and separating, the parts which consti-tute the intersubjective and dialecticalhuman liberatory praxis as a whole. Morespecifically, the intersubjective, the dialogi-cal, the critical reflective, and the practicalactive components of the human praxis as awhole are isolated and negated, deprivinghuman praxis of its integral creative andliberatory nature. Some, a majority, are pre-vented from developing their critical-re-flective powers and thereby reduced tobeings of isolated and alienated, unreflec-tive and mechanical action, anesthesizedinto living as things and objects serving toperpetuate and reproduce their oppressivesocial structures. These dehumanized andalienated “beings for another,” and not “be-ings for themselves,” are forced directly orindirectly to reproduce and accumulate thematerial and social conditions for oppres-sors who assign the capacity of praxis onlyto themselves. In contrast to the dimensionof reducing common folks to beings of pureaction and activism as a deviation fromtheir fully human potential, oppressive be-havior also reduces yet others, the intellec-tuals, to verbalism, equally mechanical andanesthesized in character, in order to per-petuate and reproduce the mental condi-tions of oppressive society throughoppressive educational practices. Having

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been educated in oppressive educationalsystems, mainstream teachers and educa-tors themselves pass on their oppressivesystem-maintaining knowledge to the new-ly “educated,” thereby perpetuating thestatus quo.

The splitting of the dialectical oppositecapacities of critical reflection and actionacross separate human organisms, is thefundamental “divide and rule” strategyadopted by oppressors in order to manipu-late the population at large for the purposeof perpetuating their own world-historical-ly produced privileged position in society.Invading the class and ethnic culture of theoppressed with their own self-serving op-pressive class or ethnic culture and educa-tional behavior, the oppressors helpimplant in the oppressed (aided by the op-pressed’s own unreflective internaliza-tions), oppressor identities in theoppressed. Oppressors see only themselvesas beings of praxis, and others as thingsand objects, material or mental, to be ma-nipulated as tools for the purpose of repro-duction of oppressive material, social, andcultural relations. The oppressed personsare often divided and dualized, one self ex-pressing the objective oppressed conditionsin which they find themselves, and anotherself expressing what they imagine and de-sire to be, at least in the initial phases oftheir liberatory struggles, the misconceivedideal goal of their liberation—i.e., to be-come oppressors themselves. It is onlythrough struggle that the oppressed realize,or should begin to realize, that they canonly liberate themselves by liberating thewhole humanity—and not by promotingthemselves to the position of oppressors.The oppressors cannot liberate the op-pressed, Freire insists. In his view, it is onlythe need for liberatory praxis arising fromthe objective conditions of the oppressedthat can generate sufficient momentum andforce for the liberation of humanity as awhole, of liberation of the oppressed andthe oppressors alike towards the actualiza-

tion of their species being as creative beingsof praxis.

In contrast to the problem-posing edu-cational strategy deserving the fully humanspecies, the oppressive educational strate-gy is styled after what Freire calls the“banking system.” The assumption is that apart of society, as represented by the tradi-tional educators running the oppressive ed-ucational system, assumes to have thetruth, the knowledge, and wisdom, and as-signs itself the mission of implanting it onother parts of society from without. Knowl-edge production is thereby antidialogical inthe banking system of education—anotherway in which a component of human prax-is as a whole is isolated and negated. Teach-ers teach, students learn. Teachers giveknowledge, students gain knowledge. Theeducational process is not seen as a co-au-thored process in which the teacher-stu-dents and student-teachers share acommon, problem-posing, problem-re-searching, and problem-solving, experi-ence. The oppressive educational systemthereby serves, not just in substance, butalso in its institutional form and structure,to perpetuate and reproduce the alienationand division of human critical-reflectiveand practical-action powers from one an-other. The result is that the students, them-selves potential future teachers, arereduced to things and objects serving thereproduction of the oppressive educationalsystem in particular, and of oppressive so-ciety in general.

For Freire, the liberatory process can-not ignore the alienated and alienating con-ditions of human labor and praxis alreadypredominant in the oppressive society. Theoppressive structures of economy, politics,and culture, and the educational systemthat reproduces them across generations,inevitably influence the attitudes of boththe oppressed and their leadership in theliberatory process. As much as the op-pressed are divided, housing oppressor

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selves within them, the intellectual leaderswho themselves often arise from oppressorclasses but awaken to the reality of oppres-sive society from an intellectual standpoint,carry with them also a divided selfhood,rendering their struggle with the oppressedas a journey full of reactionary hazards. It isfor this reason that Freire’s model for revo-lutionary and liberatory struggle is funda-mentally dialogical in nature. Freire arguesthat the radical leaders, in contrast to thesectarian ones, can only fulfill their task ifthey seek liberation

with

the oppressed, not

for

them. From the very beginning, and notjust in the aftermath of a momentary sei-zure of power, the leaders and the op-pressed must engage in dialogicalpedagogy and cultural action, jointly co-authoring their liberatory experience as acontinual, openly shared, problem-posing,problem-researching, and problem-solvingprocess. It is only this revolutionary modelas dialogical cultural action that fosters di-alectical reintegration of the previouslyalienated and split critical-reflective andpractical-active dimension of human spe-cies being as a being of creative praxis. Re-jecting and overcoming oppressivestrategies that aim to split their ranksthrough implanting feelings of mistrust,elitism, arrogance, cult of personality, etc.,the joint forces of the oppressed and theirleadership cannot help but practice trust,humbleness, and camaraderie towards oneanother in the liberatory struggle. Freire in-sists that in the postrevolutionary period,as in the prerevolutionary phase, it will beimpossible to engage in dialogue with theoppressors, since the oppressors’ inclina-tion has been, and will continue to be, tomistrust and to reject the humanity vestedin the oppressed. However, he also empha-sizes that the oppressed can only liberatethemselves and others in society by puttingan end to oppressive social relations in so-ciety—not by exchanging positions withtheir oppressors.

As can be noted from the above recon-

struction of Freire’s argument in the

Pedago-gy of the Oppressed

, the book is hardly onelimited only to the critical reexaminationand rectification of student-teacher interac-tions in a classroom setting. The latter sub-ject, which actually comprises only thesecond (and shortest) chapter of the book,can be understood properly in the contextof Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed in itstotality, i.e., as a dialogical theory and prac-tice of social revolution and liberatorypraxis.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

does claimrelevance in the narrower field of academicteaching and learning, but only becausesuch an academic concern is a componentof a larger call addressed by Freire to theradical left to abandon their elitist, propa-gandist, sloganizing, communique-writ-ing, and top-to-bottom organizing habitsand embrace a praxis of radical socialchange pivotal to which is the fostering of adialogical pedagogy of the oppressed. Byredefining the liberatory agenda from itsvery first steps as a dialogical cultural in-ter/action between the oppressed and theradical intelligentsia, Freire hoped to rectifythe errors committed in the past across thesectarian leftist spectrum, encouraging theleft to make revolution not

for

but

with

theoppressed in transforming oppressive so-cial relations in favor of social structuresmore conducive to the actualization of fullhumanity—positing the pedagogy of theoppressed as a co-authored ongoing workaimed at synthesizing and integrating thedichotomized reflective vs. activist compo-nents of liberatory human praxis.

G

URDJIEFF

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“H

ARMONIOUS

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EVELOPMENT

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… to understand clearly the pre-cise significance, in general, of thelife process on earth of all the out-ward forms of breathing creaturesand, in particular, of the aim of hu-

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man life in the light of this interpre-tation.” (Gurdjieff, [1933]/1973, 13)

… while I did not arrive at any def-inite conclusions, I still becameclearly and absolutely convincedthat the answers for which I waslooking, and which in their totalitymight throw light on this cardinalquestion of mine, can only befound, if they are at all accessible toman, in the sphere of “man’s-sub-conscious-mentation.” (Gurdjieff,[1933]/1973, 18-19)

I began to collect all kinds ofwritten literature and oral informa-tion, still surviving among certainAsiatic peoples, about that branchof science, which was highly devel-oped in ancient times and called“Mehkeness”, a name signifyingthe “taking-away-of-responsibili-ty”, and of which contemporarycivilisation knows but an insignifi-cant portion under the name of“hypnotism”, while all the litera-ture extant upon the subject was al-ready as familiar to me as my ownfive fingers. (Gurdjieff, [1933]/1973, 19)

It is instructive to compare and contrastFreire’s perspective with the views of theMiddle-Eastern philosopher, teacher, andmystic, G. I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff, born toparents of Armenian and Greek ancestryliving in the Caucasus, grew up in a regionlong established as a crossroad between awide array of eastern and western religiousand spiritual traditions. Having been deep-ly influenced during his childhood by thesongs and stories recited by his bard fathertransmitting ancient belief systems and tra-ditions in art forms, Gurdjieff’s upbringingand educational experience was stronglyinterwoven with an obsessive desire to un-derstand the purpose and meaning of hu-

man life and death on earth. Throughpainstaking readings and travels to remot-est corners of the earth to seek spiritualknowledge and wisdom from a vast arrayof open and secret esoteric traditions, Gur-djieff developed a highly idiosyncratic butsynthetic cosmology, spiritual system, andeducational philosophy and practice whoselegacy has been preserved in the body ofhis writings and embedded in the mentaland physical movement exercises and emo-tionally-laden esoteric dances collectedduring his travels and passed on to his pu-pils and students. Time and space does notallow a full and detailed rendering of Gur-djieff’s views here.

1

For the purpose athand I will limit this exposition of Gurdji-eff’s views only to those components thatare immediately relevant to and shed lighton Freire’s philosophy and pedagogy.Therefore, rather than presenting Gurdji-eff’s perspective separately in this section, Iwill try to weave it into a comparativemeeting of the two approaches.

As a modern teacher of mysticism, G. I.Gurdjieff is widely credited for havingmade mysticism accessible to the west andfor having been one of the founding fathersof the so-called “new religious move-ments.” Depending on whether the physi-cal, emotional, or intellectual dimension ofhuman organism is exercised in retreatfrom social life as the initial launchingground for efforts towards the ultimategoal of all-rounded individual self perfec-tion, broadly three traditional ways of thefakir, the monk, and the yogi were distin-

1.For those interested, a detailed recon-struction and critique of Gurdjieff’s views basedon his primary writings may be found in mywork “Mysticism and Utopia: Towards the Soci-ology of Self-Knowledge and Human Architec-ture (A Study in Marx, Gurdjieff, andMannheim)” (Tamdgidi 2002). J. Walter Driscoll,the major bibliographer of sources by and on G.I Gurdjieff for many decades, has regarded thisdissertation as “an original critical assessment ofGurdjieff’s system” (http://www.Gurdjieff-Bibliography.com/Current/index.html).

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guished from one another by Gurdjieff.Suggesting that these three “ways” to self-perfection are more prone to failure sincetheir trainings take longer (thus often unre-alizable during a single lifetime) and thustheir retreating adepts become often vul-nerable to habituating forces upon reentryinto social life, Gurdjieff himself favored analternative “Fourth Way” school in worldmysticism. He characterized this approachas one concerned with the parallel and si-multaneous physical, emotional, and intel-lectual development of individual selfknowledge and change to be pursued notin retreat from, but in the midst of, life. Inwhat follows, I will selectively explore fivemajor aspects of Gurdjieff’s teaching in re-lationship to Freire’s pedagogy.

A. The Problem of Subconsciousness

Like Freire, Gurdjieff was also con-cerned with human history as a process ofhumanization, or with what he called the“harmonious development of man.” How-ever, Gurdjieff’s notion of what Freirewould call the state of “full humanity,” i.e.,the dialectical unity of critical reflectionand practical action, also involves a recog-nition of the existential and paradigmaticchallenge posed by human subconscious-ness as a mediating region between matterand mind. There is a crucial difference herewhich problematizes the very assumedmutual fluidity and translatability of con-scious and practical human energies consti-tuting human praxis. In Freire, one is eitheranesthesized, unconscious, and ignorant,or awakened, conscious, and knowing, andthereby acting—if one wills to do so. InGurdjieff, one may be critically awakened,say to an oppressive situation within orwithout, but continue, given the force ofsubconsciously conditioned habits, to me-chanically act as if such critical awarenessnever even existed. In fact, both theorizingand practice can be subjected to subcon-sciously grounded habitual forces. The

pedagogical implications of the differencebetween Freirean dyadic notion of praxis,and Gurdjieff’s triadic notion are notewor-thy. It is essential in the Gurdjieffian peda-gogy to consciously and intentionally learnand deal with how the human subcon-scious mind works, how one is habituated,and how one can dehabituate oneself con-sciously and intentionally.

1

Praxis shouldnot be simply critical and practical, butmust be conscious and intentional as well,recognizing the existential and paradig-matic challenge posed by the subconscioushabitual forces resisting liberatory critical-practical efforts, both within and without,i.e., in relation to others in collectivity whoare themselves also subjected to such sub-conscious and habitual conditioning. Inter-subjective dialogical interaction whichFreire prescribes, in other words, is itselfsubjected to subconscious habitual fetters.Freirean human praxis cannot really ad-vance without taking human subcon-sciousness as a central challenge. Humanevolution, Gurdjieff taught, is the evolutionof its consciousness, will power, and pur-poseful action; so evolution cannot happenunconsciously, unintentionally, or acciden-tally (Ouspensky 1949).

To illustrate the significance of the sub-conscious factor and how it may interfereor compromise the pedagogical process, letme draw from an example from Freire’sown text. In

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

, a ma-jor, carefully written, numerously reprint-ed, literary work by Freire as an educatorwho is particularly sensitive to all kinds ofelitist and condescending attitudes by intel-lectuals towards the oppressed, one wouldexpect a conscious effort on his part to treatthe views expressed by the oppressed atleast in par with various intellectual sourc-es he meticulously quotes throughout the

1.How Gurdjieff himself used his knowl-edge of this matter as a “professional hypnotist”in his teaching, is a very important question thatI have extensively dealt with in my previouswork (Tamdgidi 2002).

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text. Freire does an admirable job through-out the text of quoting various peasants al-ready in the process of critical awakeningto the oppressive nature of their conditionsand the liberatory struggles they need towage to transform those conditions.

However, while Freire names and fullycites in his book the name of every knownor unpublished intellectual and scholar heconsults to develop and enrich his ownviews, there is paradoxically not a single in-stance throughout the text where any of the“peasants” he quotes from are actuallyidentified with a personal name. The quoteis simply credited to “a peasant” here and“a peasant” there—while the context ofsuch citations clearly indicates that Freirewas in personal contact with those whoseviews he integrates into his narrative. Thisbecomes even more surprising, when wefind Freire saying, in the same book (p.175), how the liberatory struggle by the op-pressed necessarily involves an awakeningfrom a state of thing-hood to a state of self-awareness as a person, signified by the useof names:

Proposing as a problem, to a Euro-pean peasant, the fact that he is aperson might strike him as strange.This is not true of Latin-Americanpeasants, whose world usuallyends at the boundaries of the lati-fundium, whose gestures to someextent simulate those of the ani-mals and the trees, and who oftenconsider themselves equal to thelatter.

Men who are bound to nature andto the oppressor in this way mustcome to discern themselves as

per-sons

prevented from

being

. And dis-covering themselves means in thefirst instance discovering them-selves as

Pedro

, as

Antonio

, or as

Jo-sefa

. This discovery implies adifferent perception of the mean-

ing of designations: the words“world,” “men,” “culture,” “tree,”“work,” “animal,” reassume theirtrue significance. The peasantsnow see themselves as transform-ers of reality (previously a mysteri-ous entity) through their creativelabor. … (Freire, 1970, 175)

In one of his later dialogues with MylesHorton (Horton and Freire, 1990), Freirereminisces about the significance of achiev-ing literacy and the ability of writing one’sown name by the awakening oppressed:

Bernice talks about the happiness awoman experienced when shecould write for the first time. It is asif I were in Brazil twenty-four yearsago. It is as if I were now in Brazilbecause I am reading now aboutexplosions of happiness among il-literates who have begun to writeand to live. It’s Latin America also.It’s the world. …(Horton andFreire, 1990, 89)

The moment in which Anna dis-covered her name has such an im-portance in our lives. We alreadyforgot that you are Thorsten and Iam Paulo. It is obvious for us, butfor the illiterate, it’s not obvious.She was Anna. She could write“Anna,” she found another dimen-sion of herself. She found a piece ofher identity. … (Horton and Freire,1990, 90)

Given such a critical awareness on thepart of Freire of the significance of literacy,words, and names in the awakening of theoppressed from the state of thinghood tothe state of personhood and subjecthood, itseems puzzling to find him depriving theco-authors of his quoted text of their propernames, when he does so systematicallywith well-known or not-so-well-known

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theorists, authors, and scholars throughoutthe text. This example is cited not to ques-tion the depth and the sincerity of Freire’slifelong devotion to the cause of the op-pressed, but simply to illustrate the signifi-cance of the challenge posed by humansubconscious and habitual behavior, whenin the midst of most careful and consciousauthorship of a text about the pedagogy ofthe oppressed, literary styles are subcon-scious practiced “between the lines,” so-to-speak, which are at odds with the spirit ofthe pedagogy advocated at the consciouslevel in the same book.

Another example may be cited fromthe very title of Freire’s book, actually. Thenotion of the “Pedagogy

of

the Oppressed”implies, paradoxically, a “banking system”approach in which the oppressed are edu-cated by others. Contrast this to the alterna-tive formulations “pedagogy

with

theoppressed,” “Pedagogy

for

the Oppressed,”or even just simply “pedagogy of oppres-sion” in which a more dialogical, dialecti-cal, or processual notion of the relationshipbetween the educator and the educated isconveyed. This again points, even tangen-tially, to the need for conscious problemati-zation, in the pedagogical process, of thesubconscious factor.

B. The Problem of the Three Centers

The difference between Freire and Gur-djieff regarding the subconscious mind isclosely related to and brings up another dif-ference in their conceptions, that related tothe three-fold nature of the human organ-ism.

Gurdjieff actually distinguishes be-tween three forms of awareness, the in-stinctive (or unconscious), the wakingconscious, and the subconscious aware-nesses which he broadly attributes respec-tively to the physical-moving, intellectual,and emotional centers constituting the hu-man organism as a whole. However, he also

reminds us that these three forms of aware-ness are present in each of the three centers.In other words, the physical body is said tobe constituted primarily of instinctive, butalso of consciously performed, and subcon-sciously learned/habituated behaviors.Likewise, our intellectual activity is regard-ed as being predominantly conscious, butalso accompanied by instinctive and habit-ually performed dimensions; and so ouremotions are considered as involvingmainly subconscious, but also of consciousand instinctive dimensions. These three-fold conceptions of human centers, aware-ness, etc., are in fact concrete expressions ofwhat Gurdjieff identities, at the ontologicaland epistemological levels with the Laws ofthe Three and of the Seven, which in manyways are quite original and sophisticatedrenderings in precise mathematical lan-guage of what we in our more familiarscholarly vocabularies know as the dialecti-cal method.

Gurdjieff calls the strange creaturesroaming the earth “three-brained beings,”existentially constituted of three in-bornand relatively independently functioningcenters whose energies are not automatical-ly blended into one another by nature butrequire conscious and intentional effort onthe part of the human individual through-out her/his earthly lifetime in order to har-moniously develop the organism into atruly individual, indivisible, being. Draw-ing upon the esoteric teachings he gath-ered, Gurdjieff used the analogy of apassenger’s carriage driven by a horse anddriver in order to illustrate the three-partarchitecture of the human organism. In anideal state, the master “I” represented bythe passenger can effectively communicateand direct the actions of the intellectualdriver, carriage body, and the emotionalhorse, by a functioning mediation of thelanguages of words (between the passen-ger and the driver), motion/break lever(between the driver and the carriage),shafts (between the carriage and the horse),

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and reins (between the driver and thehorse). The ideally developed organism canact in conscious unison, as an indivisiblewhole, because the forms of consciousnesscorresponding to the carriage, the driver,and the horse, namely the physical instinc-tive, the intellectual waking conscious, andthe emotional subconscious minds are ableto mutually blend into one another at thewill of the master “I” represented by thepassenger. However, in actual conditionsfound on earth, Gurdjieff argues, the organ-ism is often excessively alienated and frag-mented within to such a degree that thebody carriage is drastically out of shapeand abused, the driver intellect is in a stateof perpetual sleep, drunkenness, and falseimagination, and the emotional horse iscompletely out of control; the supposedmaster “I,” the permanent passenger, issimply not there—the organism takes anypasser-bys as its “true self,” submitting to itfor a short while until the next wanderingpassenger comes along.

Freire is of course aware of the emo-tional and physical-sensuous dimensionsof the educational and liberatory praxis,alongside the more obvious intellectual di-mension. His emphasis on the importanceof emotions such as love and fear in thepedagogical process point to his awarenessof the pre- or post-verbal dimensions of theeducational experience. However, the intel-lectual domain seems to preoccupy his cen-tral attention in the pedagogy of theoppressed, the emotional and sensuous di-mensions regarded as being aspects con-tributing to the intellectual learningprocess, not independently approached assubjects of pedagogical practice. Gurdjieff’s“harmonious” pedagogy, in contrast, paysequal attention to the three dimensions, de-vising specific learning and training tech-niques that consciously and intentionallytarget the physical-moving, the intellectual,and the emotional dimensions of the hu-man psyche in turn. Among others, in fact,Gurdjieff was a teacher of esoteric dancing

and inspired the composition of many mu-sical tunes he gathered in his searches.Freire was certainly not involved in thiskind of pedagogical praxis. For Gurdjieff, itwas absolutely crucial since the harmoni-ous development of all the three physical-moving, intellectual, and emotional cen-ters, to which diverse aspects of fragment-ed human awareness corresponded, was aparadigmatic essence of his teaching phi-losophy and pedagogical practice.

The point is, the carriage does not un-derstand the language of words, only of thelever and shafts. The horse cannot under-stand the language of the words, only of thereign and shafts. Alongside learning theideas of his teaching and various mental ex-ercises, Gurdjieff devised and applied vari-ous physical exercises and emotionally-laden dances on one hand, and physicallychallenging, real life emotional exposureand learning situations on the other hand,in order to awaken the learner to the habit-uated and mechanical functioning of all thethree centers of her or his organism, asequally important steps towards all-round-ed efforts at self-knowledge and self-trans-formation. He is reported to have actuallyhired on occasions people with especiallyaggravating and irritating personalities toroam the school grounds so the studentswould be able to conscious observe and re-main equanimous to the reactions evokedin them towards those persons. And cer-tainly he recognized that each person react-ed differently to the same (irritating)stimuli artificially planted in the environ-ment. In fact, using a complex enneagra-matic

1

typology of human beings derivedfrom his theory of human organism as a“three-brained being,” Gurdjieff insistedon very specific and individualized systemof training for every student.

1.Gurdjieff’s knowledge of the Enneagramhas been overly used and often distorted in theself-help and popular psychological literaturetoday.

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The implication of this Gurdjieffianpedagogical consideration for the Freireanproject is that it highlights the fact that op-pressive behaviors on the part of the op-pressors, and the behaviors on the part ofthe oppressed that allow and make possiblethe perpetuation of oppressive relations insociety, are rooted not only in the intellectu-al center to be simply made literate andknowing, but also and equally in the emo-tional and physical-sensuous gestures andpatterns of behavior of the organism ofthose involved. Adding to the picture the“cardinal problem” of subconscious habit-uation present in all centers, the pedagogyof the oppressed, and the struggle againstoppressive relations, become a much morecomplex and multidimensional projectthan otherwise considered. Objective livingconditions of the oppressed and the op-pressors, in other words, do not necessarilyand automatically translate into their pre-sumed corresponding forms of conscious-ness. The predeterministic notion of classstruggle in Freire which may be considereda variant of Marx’s historical materialistmethod of historical analysis—that objec-tive conditions giving rise in the final anal-ysis to the subjective conditions of classawareness that correspond to those objec-tive conditions—faces a much more formi-dable set of obstacles for actualization thanpromised in a straightforward process ofhonest and well-intended dialogical ex-change. Human propensity to physical-sensuous, intellectual, and emotional habit-uation due to the working of the subcon-scious mind poses a significant challenge tothe pedagogy of the oppressed (and op-pressors, one may add), which needs to beaddressed directly and explicitly.

C. The Problem of Multiplicity of Selves

The combination of the fettering forceexerted by the human propensity to habitu-ation on the conduct of liberatory praxis, onone hand, and the complexities introduced

by the multiplicity of physical-sensuous,intellectual, and emotional centers consti-tuting that praxis, on the other, point to an-other important difference between theFreirean and Gurdjieffian pedagogies—that related to the issue of multiplicity ofselves.

In Freire, the personal self is a singular-ity. He of course does recognize, and re-peatedly emphasizes, the divided anddualized nature of the oppressed person inoppressive society. Freire does suggest thatthe oppressed often internalize images ofthe oppressors within, housing them with-in as their immediate notion of what theirideal self would be when liberated. He citesthis as an example of the tendency of the di-alectical poles to become their opposites,rather than forging new syntheses. Howev-er, the assumption here is still that of a sin-gular selfhood representing the objectiveconditions of the oppressed and anotherrepresenting the internalized (false) identi-ty of their liberated condition, projectedfrom outside. Freire does not explicitly ar-gue in parallel for the divided subjectivityof the oppressor persons; a symmetry is notconstructed as such across the oppressiverelationship. However, from his recogni-tion that many of the leaders of the op-pressed actually arise among the oppressorclass, one may deduce that at least somemembers of the latter, in the course of socialstruggle, also experience a divided self, in-ternalizing images of the oppressed andtheir need and desire for liberation. Mem-bers of the oppressor class, however, isoverall regarded as possessing a monolithicself-structure representing their objectiveclass position, identity, and interests. If wewere to draw a diagram of Freire’s concep-tion of the personal self-structures of theoppressed and the oppressors, we may per-haps arrive at an image as presented in Fig-ure 1.

In Figure 1, note the yin-yang structureof the relationship between the emerging

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intellectual vs. oppressed/activist coali-tion, where each pole, inheriting self-iden-tities from their objective classmembership, internalizes the oppositeclass self within. The point of the diagramas a whole is to graphically illustrate theways in which Freire crafts his pedagogy ofthe oppressed within a materialist concep-tual environment that more or less followsthe base-superstructure model borrowedfrom Marx, though with more emphasis onthe role played by the cultural and educa-tional sphere in the shaping of oppressiverelations and liberatory struggle. The clas-sificatory system of oppressor class mem-bers here and oppressed class membersthere, identified by their embodiment inseparate collectivities of persons, is some-what elaborated by recognizing the possi-bility of internalization of opposite self-identities from across the class poles in thecourse of member socializations and partic-

ipation in the oppressive or liberatorystruggles. But the singularity of the indi-vidual self is taken as an assumptionthroughout.

Here is where another significant dis-tinction between the Freirean social psy-chology and that implied in Gurdjieff maybe discerned. In Gurdjieff, in actual condi-tions of every day life the individual isfound to be a legion of “I”s, a multiplicity ofselves, each of which manifests particularforms (and degrees of solidification andcrystallization) of habituated physical-sen-suous, intellectual, and emotional charac-teristics. Beyond the false appearance ofsingular atomic bodies and persons, thereis a sub-atomic social structure of fragment-ed selfhoods whose particular structures,gravitating more or less to one or another ofthe three main physical, intellectual, oremotional centers of the organism, rendersa much more complex, sub-atomic picture

Oppressed ClassOppressor Class

Oppressorperson with self

Oppressedperson with self

arising from objective oppressed

class conditions

arising from objective oppressor

class conditions

OppressorSelf

OppressedSelf

Figure 1: Freire’s conception of the personal

Person/leaderSympathizingWith the Oppressed

ActivistAmong

the Oppressedstruggle

“with” the oppressed

oppressive

relations

InternalizedOppressed

self

InternalizedOppressor

Selfpossibility ofoppressed becomingoppressors

self-structures of the oppressed and the oppressors


of personality structures that are too idio-syncratic to make it possible to classify theperson as a whole in one or another largerscale social classificatory scheme. In theGurdjieffian sociology, it is possible for aperson to possess, and have internalized, awide variety of what Freire would call op-pressive and oppressed selves at the sametime. A person may be rich, say a rich moth-er in a well-to-do household, yet have inter-nalized numerous oppressed selves interms of say gender, ethnic, or age charac-teristics. A worker may be quite oppressedat work, but quite an oppressor at home.The worker does not potentially become anoppressor in the aftermath of a momentousrevolution, but may actually become so atthe very same time in everyday life whenhe or she is also oppressed.

If we were to draw a diagram of this sit-uation, it would perhaps resemble one rep-resented in Figure 2. Here, a close up ofthree persons in oppressive society, we mayfind a sub-atomic, sub-individual, social

structure where a person may be both op-pressed and oppressor. The larger groupingof what an oppressed or oppressor “class”is may be different, depending on whatform of oppression is taken into consider-ation (work, gender, ethnicity, age, religion,belief, sexuality, handicap, … ). Dependingon the degree and extent of socialization,also we may find much simpler or morecomplex, more or less fragmented intraper-sonal self-structures across persons.

The unique nature of personal historiesrelated to the development of multiple self-hoods found in assumed “individuals,” inother words, would make it impossible todevelop an adequate understanding of theperson without significant, conscious andintentional, effort on the part of persons tounderstand their own selves and self-struc-tures in the process of liberatory struggles.Each person, potentially having the mostaccess to her or his own personal memo-ries, histories, every day interactions bothwithin and without, is empowered in the

Figure 2: Hybrid Oppressed and Oppressor Persons in Oppressive Society

Oppressed Self

Oppressor Self

Relation of Oppression

Oppressed or Oppressor Person?



… broadersocialcontext


Gurdjieffian pedagogy to seek liberatoryself-knowledge and change as a fundamen-tal precondition and prelude towards theliberation of others—to whatever extentpossible.

D. The Problem of Intra- vs. Inter-personal Oppression

This is where another, and one mayconclude to be the most important, distinc-tion between the Freirean and Gurdjieffianpedagogies can be discerned: the distinc-tion of inter- vs. intrapersonal oppression,the possibility of personal self-oppression.

A close and careful reading of Freire’stext shows that he tries, implicitly and attimes even explicitly, to divert attentionfrom the need for personal self-knowledgeand change. For Freire liberation is “not aself-achievement, but a mutual process.”Persons liberate one another in a mutualstruggle, since oppression itself is per-ceived and noted in its interpersonal formonly. It is not just that in Freire there reallyis not a conception of multiplicity of selvesin the person. In the cases of divided anddualized persons which he does recognize,the relationship is almost always consid-ered in its interpersonal dimension. This isapparent in Figure 2 above, where, if con-sidered closely, one notes that relations ofoppression are all interpersonal, acrossbodies. For instance, consider the fact thatwhen Freire points to the situation where apeasant houses the image of his oppressorboss within as an ideal of his future liberat-ed situation, the implications of this is not-ed only in terms of what the peasant wouldor would not do to others if and when hefinds himself in the pre- or post-revolution-ary struggle. The question is not posed interms of intrapersonal dimension of op-pression, of what an oppressed person doesto her/himself, or what an oppressor per-son does to her/himself. Because oppres-sion is always perceived in its interpersonal

form, it is no wonder that Freire sees it, andthe liberatory praxis itself, only in its “mu-tual” interpersonal form, and thereby notonly ignores, but often discourages effortsmade in personal self-knowledge andchange—of course not as an exclusive ef-fort, but as a complement to the interper-sonal dimension of liberatory struggleagainst oppression.

Gurdjieff’s conceptual structure, how-ever, makes it possible to envisage intraper-sonal oppressive relations. This is depictedin Figure 3. This conception makes it possi-ble to take into account the possibility thata person may occupy multiple positions onboth ends of oppressive relations in societywithout and within; in one, he or she maybe oppressive, in another oppressed, andyet in another, he or she may actually op-press him or her self, through practiceswhich may, theoretically speaking, have rel-atively little to do with interpersonal socialrelationalities. A “looking glass self” dy-namic may be at work, for instance, wherethe person continues to demean him or her-self simply because of a misinterpretationor misimagination of a comment heardfrom a parent. The self-oppression wouldbe a real result, the lowering of self-esteemmay be an actual fact, but may be found tobe, upon closer analysis, to be a unique ex-perience made by the person whose knowl-edge and healing may only be possible, inthe final analysis, through the person’s ownefforts at seeking self-knowledge.

In the Gurdjieffian pedagogy, the soci-ality of oppression is not seen purely in in-terpersonal, but as well in intrapersonaldimensions. The unique terrain of personalinner landscapes, often inaccessible to oth-ers interpersonally, is much more seriouslytaken into consideration in the Gurdjieffianpedagogy. In Freire, dialogical praxis isseen only in its interpersonal form; in Gur-djieff the intrapersonal realm is a centralarea of investigation in the course of per-sonal self-observation, self-remembering,


and external considering—i.e., the peda-gogical strategies he proposes as dimen-sions of efforts in personal self-knowledgeand self-change. In fact, the lack of conver-sation, or the ability to converse, across thephysical-sensuous, intellectual, and emo-tional centers, constitutes for Gurdjieff afundamental cause of personal inner frag-mentation and self-forgetfulness, and lackof ability by the organism to know andmaster its own praxis. The lack of inner di-alogue and dialogical interaction amongmultiple selves habitually imprisoned bythe imbalanced and alienated workings ofthe centers, in other words, is what funda-mentally precipitates the inner divisionwhich Freire may consider as another man-ifestation of the “divide and rule” logic thatallows the person to be oppressed in thefirst place. This may better explain, then,why in the same oppressive situations,some may decide to conform, and others re-sist and opt to change the oppressive situa-tion. Only a pedagogical strategy thatdialectically articulates both the intra- and

interpersonal dimension of oppressive andliberatory praxis can arrive at a full andconcrete understanding which may pro-duce real emancipatory results.

E. Disempowering the Oppressor Status

A final significant difference betweenthe two pedagogies, and this may challengethe heart of what Freire’s pedagogy of theoppressed sets out to do, is that Gurdjieff dis-empowers the privileged in assuming thatthey are themselves masters of their livesand social destiny. A majority of Gurdjieff’spupils, interestingly enough, were peopleof privilege, status, fame, and power, whohad otherwise come to see the painful real-ity of the meaninglessness, alienation, andpowerlessness of their own lives.1 In Gurd-jieff, oppression, which he may define interms of what leads to prevention of theability of the organism to “do,” to be able toblend human physical, intellectual, andemotional energies as preconditions for cre-ative human praxis, is equally absent in

Figure 3: Intrapersonal Oppressive Relations

Oppressed Self

Oppressor Self

Interpersonal



Intrapersonal



broadersocialcontext


most members of society, oppressed or not.That the oppressors assign to themselvesthe privilege of praxis, does not really meanthey have it.. By subconsciously assigningthe privilege of praxis to the oppressors,Freire in effect gives them a credit they maynot deserve.

The most valuable contribution of theGurdjieffian pedagogy is its personally self-reflexive nature, encouraging us to realizethat at the very same time we judge andstudy others for being oppressor or op-pressed, or not, at the same time we thinkwe are teaching others about the evils ofoppression across class, gender, ethnic, etc.,lines, we subconsciously and habituallypractice it nevertheless, and we do so notjust in our relations with others, but evenmore paradoxically to our own selves, ev-ery day, here and now.

The Freirean notion that only the op-pressed can liberate themselves and societyas a whole is framed in a Newtonian socio-logical framework in which oppressive andoppressed agencies are easily separated asbodies from one another and classifiable inseparate camps. A quantal sociologicalimagination does not necessarily negate thenotion that only the oppressed need andseek to liberate themselves; the differencehere is that those agencies are no longer as-sumed to be mechanically separable acrossbodies, but are found to be intricately criss-crossing one another across and throughsocial bodies of divided, multiple, self-hoods. This provides a much richer, dialec-tical, and dialogical sociological landscapeto study and practice liberatory pedagogy,

for in this alternative view, all are populat-ed by both oppressive and oppressedselves, if we care to see ourselves as whoand how we really are, not as how we liketo be. Pedagogy of the oppressed, then,would transition into a broader pedagogyof oppression, a pedagogy of the oppressedand oppressive selves.

FREIREAN AND GURDJIEFFIAN PEDAGOGIES: TOWARDS A SYNTHESIS OF NEWTONIAN AND QUANTAL SOCIOLOGICAL

IMAGINATIONS1

In the preceding discussion, my effortswere focused on setting forth those aspectsof the Gurdjieffian pedagogy which in myview may help enrich and complement theFreirean approach. However, it is also im-portant to consider the limits of Gurdjieff’sapproach and the inspirations which mayitself draw from the Freirean formulation.Again, space does not allow me to fully ex-plore this question here, but as brief as itmay be, I find it necessary to dwell on thisquestion as an opening to some broaderconclusions to be drawn regarding thecomparative meeting of the two pedago-gies.

Gurdjieff’s pedagogy helps to fill a sig-nificant gap in the Freirean approach, bydrawing attention to the habituation factorin human organism, the division and frag-mentation of physical, intellectual, andemotional centers, the multiplicity of per-sonal selfhoods, and the intrapersonal di-mension of human oppressive relations—all of which point to the significance of the

1.Even the young Marx of 1844 recognizedthis dual nature of alienation in class society:“The possessing class and the proletarian classrepresent one and the same human self-alien-ation. But the former feels satisfied and affirmedin this self-alienation, experiences the alienationas a sign of its own power, and possesses in it theappearance of a human existence. The latter, how-ever, feels destroyed in this alienation, seeing init its own impotence and the reality of an inhu-man existence. (Tucker 1978:133)

1.For a fuller treatment of my distinctionbetween Newtonian and Quantal sociologicalimaginations see “Rethinking Sociology: Self,Knowledge, Practice, and Dialectics in Transi-tions to Quantum Social Science” (Tamdgidi2004).


central emphasis he lays on the need forconscious and intentional efforts on thepart of the individual to know and trans-form her/himself. Gurdjieff of course wasaware of and did emphasize the collectivenature of the liberatory struggle to knowand change oneself. His emphasis on“schools” and the need for students to helpone another in the practice of various peda-gogical techniques of learning and transfor-mation points to the fact that his vision andpedagogy was not a purely introspectiveparadigm. I have even argued elsewhere(Tamdgidi 2002) that in his writings onemay find a macro vision and recognition ofthe need to bring about fundamental trans-formation of inherited societal conditionswhich have precipitated the mechaniza-tion, anesthesization, and imprisonment ofhuman life.

However, I have also pointed to thelimits of Gurdjieff’s pedagogy in recogniz-ing the social structural forces which alsoconstitute what he naturalizes and essen-tializes to be an existential inner conditionof alienation and fragmentation of the hu-man being. Freire’s pedagogy of the op-pressed, as one-sided as it may beregarding the interpersonal dimension ofoppression and liberatory struggle, doescomplement Gurdjieff’s cosmology andpedagogy in recognizing the constructednature of the alienating broader social con-dition world-historically inherited and con-stantly reproduced in everyday life.Interpersonal and intrapersonal pedagogi-cal strategies as espoused by Freire andGurdjieff can only reinforce and enrich oneanother in forging a dialectical and dialogi-cal cultural synthesis necessary for learn-ing, teaching, and advancing liberatorysocial theory in applied settings.

I have also distinguished (Tamdgidi2004) between what I call Newtonian andquantal sociological imaginations, andhave argued for the need to forge a singularimagination which articulates the two mac-

ro and micro views of self and society intoa singular framework. The dialogical meet-ing of Freirean and Gurdjieffian pedagogiesprovide another opportunity for the recog-nition of the distinction between the twoimaginations, and for the forging of the twointo a common framework which, for thepurposes at hand, may be characterized asa pedagogy of oppression (not just of theoppressed), directed at both the oppressedand oppressing selves alike, considered in-tra-, inter-, and extra-personally (with re-spect to the natural and built humanenvironments—i.e., how we oppress our-selves by destroying and abusing the natu-ral and built human habitat).

The sociological conceptual environ-ment informing Freire’s pedagogy is New-tonian. In this classificatory environment,society is divided into oppressive and op-pressed classes, themselves comprised ofcollectivities of persons possessing singularoppressive or oppressed selves emergentfrom objective conditions of their sociallives. Freire does recognize the yin-yang di-alectic of identities in the course of oppres-sive and liberatory interactions across classlines. He does recognize that oppressedpersons often internalize (and “house”) op-pressor identities, and oppressor personsmay internalize (and “house”) oppressedidentities (such as in leftist leaders sympa-thizing with the cause of the oppressed).However, the “billiard ball” Newtonianmodality of the oppressive society at largeis retained, to the point where only the op-pressed are assigned the historical missionof social liberation because of the objectiveconditions of their lives producing theneed, the motivation, and the will, to liber-ate themselves, and with it, society as awhole. The schema is a deterministic sche-ma, more or less constructed using theMarxist historical materialist method, withan added useful emphasis on the part ofFreire regarding the dialectical interactionof the cultural and educational superstruc-ture on the course of objectively given so-


cial oppressive vs. liberatory socialpractices.

There are numerous occasions in whichFreire’s theoretical schema implies and pre-scribes predictability in the pedagogy ofthe oppressed. When he says that only theoppressed (meaning only a part of society)can liberate society as a whole (and therebythe ex-oppressors, by implications)1—aproposition which, in many ways, contra-dicts his otherwise stated proposition thathuman liberation cannot be given as a giftto others, but mutually produced—Freire issetting up and imposing a deterministicNewtonian modality on the course ofstruggle which in a way may act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. To say and act upon thenotion that history of the world has been ahistory of class struggle, which Marx andEngels did, and more or less Freire ascribesto, could be, true or not, a force which mayturn history into one of class struggle inter-preted using a particular sociological andclassificatory model whereby classes areseen as collectivities of human personssharing a common objective position in re-lations of material relations and subjectiveorganization corresponding to that posi-tion. Such a deterministic model can easilyassign a person to this or that class, andthereby predict a particular mode of behav-ior in society, and in social liberatory strug-gles, derived and deduced from thatmodel. The Newtonian objects of Freireanpedagogy remain persons, and collectivi-ties of persons, whose behavior are more orless predictably derived from the dialecti-cal materialist modality borrowed from theMarxist doctrine.

Gurdjieff’s pedagogy, although alsoNewtonian in many respects (such as withregards to its law-based religious cosmolo-gy of creation and maintenance of the uni-verse), at the micro level advances a

perspective which is more akin to a quantalsociological imagination. His emphasis onhuman conscious intentionality as the coreof his evolutionary requirement and thecorresponding problematization of humanpropensity to habituation (which implies aproblematization of mechanicality, predict-ability and predetermination of human be-havior), his problematization of the“individual” as a singular unit of analysisand advocacy of sub-atomic vision of theperson as a fragmented landscape of multi-ples selves, his resulting paradigmatic em-phasis on the need for conscious andintentional efforts on the part of the indi-vidual to know and change her/himself aspreconditions for a broader collective liber-atory project—all point as elements to a po-tential quantal psychosociologicalimagination which fruitfully challengesand complements the model used in Freire-an pedagogy.

Using Gurdjieff’s scheme, we can beginto envision oppressive social relations notin terms of monolithic or at most dualizedpersonal selfhoods, but in terms of socialrelationalities of diverse intrapersonal, in-terpersonal, and extrapersonal (in relationto nature and the built environment),kinds. Persons would house many morethan one or two selves; they are seen as le-gions of “I”s, resulting from more or lessalienating and fragmenting process of pri-mary and secondary socializations in themidst of equally divided and conflicted so-cial contexts. Their self-structures, more orless disintegrated, would manifest diversetendencies of often contradictory behaviorthat cannot easily be predicted using sim-plistic macro theoretical models. We mayfind the same personal self oppressive to-wards another person, but oppressed in re-lation to another person’s self—here andnow oppressed, there and then oppressor.The person may actually oppress him/her-self, and allow her/himself to be oppressedby others and society at large, but at timesmay also have its own relatively indepen-

1.For my critique of Marx’s theory in this re-gard and his theory of proletarian revolution ingeneral, see Tamdgidi, 2002.


dence in relation to the surrounding socialenvironment. If oppressive relationship arereconceived in the rich variety of their in-tra-, inter-, and extra-personal forms, itwould be impossible to easily classify oneor another person as being oppressed oroppressor and thereby predict predeter-mined behaviors from them apart from in-ductive and phenomenological efforts onthe part of those persons in concrete dialog-ical situations within and without.

The point here is not to discard themacro Newtonian theoretical structuresthat inform Freire’s pedagogy, but to beginusing them critically with constant reflec-tive concern about the applicability of theirsweeping generalizations in concrete inter-actions of everyday life. The macro theoret-ical propositions would be used as such, asmere propositions and hypotheses, in theconduct of concrete everyday efforts instudying and transforming oppressive rela-tionships. The oppressive tyranny of large-scale and all-encompassing sociologicalimaginations are thereby replaced with aself-critical and reflective use of all avail-able social theories, concepts, and perspec-tives for a better understanding of theminute ways in which oppressive societyperpetuates and reproduces itself withinand without. Pedagogy of the “oppressed,”would thereby give way to a more flexibleformulation of the pedagogy of “oppres-sion” whereby the oppressive relations arereconceived in terms of the relationalities ofoppressive and oppressed selves, selvesthat may reside simultaneously within andacross easily discernible bodies. Pedagogyof oppression will direct the attention of all,and not just the oppressed, to the alienated,mechanical, anesthesized nature of theirown inner and outer lives, and fuel a self-reflective and self-practical need, motiva-tion, and will in each to question the op-pressive nature of society as particularlyexperienced by the person in the uniqueconditions of her or his intra-, inter, and ex-trapersonal selfhoods.

The preliminary answer we may arriveas a result of the above discussion to thequestion “Can Social Theory be Liberat-ing?” may be that it may be useful to bringunder scrutiny the assumed predictibilityimplicit in the question itself.

CONCLUSION: RUMI’S “SONG OF THE REED” AS A PEDAGOGY OF OPPRESSION IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Our predictable and predeterminedNewtonian sociological imaginations maynot allow us to note the diverse creativeforms in which social theory may be theo-rized and practiced in applied settings.Theories, in our habituated sociologicalimaginations, are sets of abstract, dry, andformulaic propositions that aim to help usinterpret, explain, predict, and at best trans-form social realities in which we find our-selves. It may seem odd that we wouldperceive, say a poem, as a theoretical con-struct, and even more so, its recitation as anexercise in learning, teaching, and advanc-ing social theory in applied settings. Thedeterministic and lawful notions of realitybuilt into our scientific ideologies, whosealienation from the humanities and the artsitself may be regarded as a large-scale insti-tutional manifestation of our intellectualand cultural alienations and oppressions,does not allow us to see how simple worksof art, such as poetry, may have the powerto motivate and help us know and changeourselves in unpredictable ways, whetheror not we have been engaged in oppressedand/or oppressive behaviors in our everyday lives.

In closing, I would like to draw uponand recite the example of Rumi’s “Song theReed” which usefully illustrates the way inwhich a poem can simultaneously advanceour theoretical visions while influence ouremotional and physical sensibilities in the


applied setting of a conference gatheringsuch as this. Rumi’s Song of the Reed, theopening poem of his vast collection of mys-tical tales rendered in couplet form, tells thestory of each of us as allegorical reeds sep-arated and alienated from the reedbeds ofour humanities within and without. Thesubstantive content, its tropological form,and its rhythmic sound, establish a multi-ple dialogical interaction with our intellec-tual, emotional, and sensuous selves, inorder to engage the whole of our organismto awaken to the mechanical and habitualconditions of our earthly lives and seek lib-eratory self and broader social knowledgeand transformation.

Rumi’s Song of the Reed

Listen to how this reed is wailing; About separations it’s complaining:

“From reedbed since parted was I, Men, women, have cried from my cry.

“Only a heart, torn-torn, longing Can hear my tales of belonging.

“Whosoever lost his essence, For reuniting seeks lessons.

“In the midst of all I cried For the sad and happy, both sighed.

“But they heard only what they knew, Sought not after the secrets I blew.

“My secret’s not far from this, my cry; But, eye or ear lack the light to seek and try.

“Body and soul each other do not veil But there is no one to hear his soul’s tale.”

What blows in reed’s not wind, but fire; Whoever lost it, is lost entire.

What set the reed on fire is love, love; What brews the wine entire is love, love.

Reed comes of use when lovers depart; It’s wailing scales tear love’s veilings apart.

Like reed both poison and cure who saw? Like reed comrade and devout who saw?

Reed tells of the bleeding heart’s tales, Tells of what mad lovers’ love entails

With the truth, only the seeker’s intimate, As the tongue knows only the ear’s estimate.

Days, nights, lost count in my sorrow; Past merged in my sorrow with tomorrow.

If the day is gone, say: “So what! go, go! But remain, O you pure, O my sorrow!”

This water’s dispensable—but not for the fish. Hungry finds days long without a dish.

Cooked soul’s unknowable if you’re raw; Then there is no use to tire the jaw.

(pause)

Break the chain, . .. be free, … O boy! How long will you remain that gold’s toy?!

Say you have oceans, but how can you pour All oceans in a single day’s jar, more and more?!

The greedy’s eye-jar will never fill up; No pearl, if oyster’s mouth doesn’t give up.

Whoever tore his robe in love’s affair Tore free of greed, flaw, and false care.

Joy upon you! O sorrowful sweet love! O the healer—healer of ills! love! love!

O the healer of pride, of our shame! O Galen in name, Platonic in fame!

Earth’s whirling in heavens for love, love; Hill’s whirling round the earth for love, love.

Love’s the soul in hill. It’s Love in the Hill That brought the Hill down and Moses the chill.


If coupled my lips with friend’s on and on, I’ll tell tales, like reed, long, long.

Uncoupled, though, these lips will cease wails, Lose tongue, though remain untold tales.

If the rose is dead, garden long gone, No canary can recite her song long.

The lover is veiled; beloved’s the all. The veil must die to hear the beloved’s call.

If you do stay away from love, hear, hear! Like a wingless bird you’ll die. Fear, fear!

How can I stay awake and see the road, If lover’s light shine not on my abode?

Love always seeks ways to spread the light.Why, then, does your mirror reflect a night?

Your mirror takes no tales—if you need to know—’Cause your rust keeps away all lights’ glow.

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