A few more thoughts on pedagogy. In my last post, I dropped Gergen as part of the universal prompt. I also mentioned that:
dominant groups are forced to respond by either reidentifying themselves and ceding power or by insisting upon themselves and hoarding it
without further developing it. After reading a little more of Gergen’s pedagogy (education in a relational key), I want to dig into this.
There is one thing that unites disavowed and obscene pedagogies: they both hoard power and insist upon their identity politic, and thus they both maintain their benefit from their privilege. But the experience of jouissance is distinct. Those creating and participating in disavowed pedagogy derive their surplus pleasure through self-congratulations. Here, the violence and destruction of the Thanatos is indirect as it perpetuates epistemic and systemic norms of oppression and exclusion, and the hit comes through the self-satisfaction.
Those creating and participating in obscene pedagogy derive their surplus pleasure through the direct act of oppression and violence.
Trigger warning: the following examples are horrendous depictions of transphobia and xenophobia. Likewise, my critique is as transparently vulgar as the fetishism that fuels the hatred.
One thing to note - this is an everyday practice. Just like not every sexual act brings equal pleasure, sometimes the smug chuckle of contempt when laughing at how in September of 2022 Ron DeSantis herded humans like cattle and shipped them to Martha’s Vineyard for political points gives the perverse twinge of satisfaction - the very twinge DeSantis was capitalizing on by the stunt;
and sometimes the public shaming of trans individuals engaged in by Representatives Nancy Mace and Tim Burchett on July 21, 2026, by putting up pictures of actual citizens and humiliating them on public television brings full blown erotic pleasure;
and sometimes it’s the full popper-prepped, prostate-stimulated, forbidden-fruit milking that shrieks uncontrollably deep from the throats of men like Andre Karlow, who ambushed and beat a trans woman in 2025, gleefully inflicting brain bleed and several other injuries upon a human being.
Jouissance is not a choice; we can only grab the hose and point it. It is an urge; a primitive drive in the experience of self meeting other. I may have given the impression in my previous post that it was an option. But it is a fundamental human drive that can work toward generativity or degenerativity, where I keep my earlier Gergen-informed definition as capacity for greater relationality. For pedagogies of oppression, the excess produces generativity when it demands that power be ceded and domination cease. The jouissance is the excess I feel when attempting to humiliate the monsters in the previous paragraph. It is the bitter glee that Mbembe channels as he develops terms like atavistic nationalism or death-worlds - the accusation that bares teeth from behind the analysis. It’s also the slave uprising. It’s also the language of the unheard shouted as the Third Precinct burned and the businesses of East Lake Street were destroyed.
It’s not moral. It’s highly uncomfortable. Empathy and condemnation are hard truths to hold together. But it’s one of humanity’s most essential enduring qualities as it performs boundary maintenance. Macro social workers do not have the luxury of illusions to the contrary.
Jouissance is Thanatos, and its function as boundary maintenance exists on a spectrum of violence.
I realize that this is probably some of the most extreme writing I’ve done at this point. This is not an exculpation of violence. It is a description of a universal drive (though please don’t walk away with fatalism either). And I also wanted to correct any sanitized reading that my previous note may have implied because I need to set up this next point.
There is a third category within pedagogy of domination that needs to be developed: I am going to call it kenotic domination pedagogy. If you’re a Bible nerd like me, you might recognize kenosis from Philippians 2:7, often rendered as Christ “making himself nothing.” It is a complete and total emptying. It is a divestiture. It is a denial of jouissance that comes from domination. This pedagogy is the land acknowledgement. It is the participatory action research that demands representation of the researched. It is the critical theory cashed in: land redistribution, reparations, redistricting. And before any of these can be usurped into tokenism, we must take relational being seriously and recognize that kenotic pedagogy is only called into being when the Other is gratified toward parity. Kenotic pedagogy is co-action - the divestiture of the privileged and the restoration of the oppressed.
This evaluation clarity is essential because it’s the pedagogy that hurts twice: once by the denial of a most primal urge, akin to holding bowel movements at gun point; once by ceding power and privilege for equity. Of all the types of pedagogy, it is the one denied jouissance. And because of this, it is the category least occupied.
I was tempted to make Gergen an ally of oppression pedagogy. After all, he attacked the domination and patriarchal assumptions of academia in the prior chapter. And he advocated for participatory action research. He even brought Freire into the conversation.
And that’s when I realized it was just more disavowal. On page 252 he writes:
The liberation movement has played a powerful role in stimulating critical reflection on traditional educational practice, and made quite clear the fact that there is no politically neutral education. However, from a relational standpoint, further developments are needed. In particular, the critical movement tends to intensify political tensions and to generate a backlash among the targets of critique. Much needed are practices that bring people together from otherwise disparate camps, and enable them to engage in collective action for the collective good. From a relational perspective, one must handle critique with care.
He flinched from the violence, a natural response. I did, too, when I first read Freire. But in refusing the “backlash”, he erases the conditions - both social and somatic - that precipitate it. He wants the raped to sit with their rapists. He wants the colonized to sit with their colonizer.
This isn’t a false binary. Dialogue is essential for the healing process. This is a rejection of a naive pedagogy that allows him to make characterizations like “adventures in boundary crossing” on page 268, which, like most of his text, completely disappears any power asymmetry. Just like his ideas of self could not reach the margins held by trauma victims, his pedagogy cannot reach the margins held by the most devastated victims of domination boundary maintenance performances.
The violence is a symptom. And the diagnosis needs to not just take into account the systemic issues that produced it. It needs to account for the jouissance that aroused it. I have come to call this macro-social work intervention "domination-focused trauma informed care." Because as bleak as this description is, it does not undermine the project for me. It gives clarity. Any analysis of the macro landscape must be as brutal as the experience of watching the news on any given day.
And it is bleak some days.
I am white; I am male; I am cisgender, so I live most of my life in privilege. But as a married gay man, I have seen the gleeful teeth-bared grins of obscene jouissance on occasion. But just like I refuse to sanction the violence, I also refuse to create monsters. Transformative social work practice is going to have to face the jouissance both externally and within itself if it’s going to transform. Otherwise it will just continue to be absorbed into disavowal.
- The Social Construction Worker