Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 40, No.

3, 2006

The Literary Life of Educational Authority

CHARLES BINGHAM
This article looks into the workings of educational authority.
While scholarly debate in education usually promotes
authority as either good or bad, the same debate seldom asks
questions about how authority works. This article is, then, an
answer to the question How? How does educational
authority operate? It operates, it is suggested, in much the
same way that literary authority operates. To make the case
for educational authority as literary authority, the paper uses
the philosophical work of Jacques Derrida and the literary
work of Franz Kafka.
Scholarly debate over educational authority usually ends up in an impasse.
On one hand, progressivists hold that authority is best dealt with by giving
it up (see Shor, 1987, 1992). In progressive camps of educational thought,
it is assumed that authority is harmful to the student. It is thought that the
more authority a teacher has, the less of a chance the student will have to
gain autonomy or agency. In the context of progressive education, one
hears such things as, How can we share authority with our students?,
How can we try not to be authority figures in classrooms? and She is a
very personable teacher; she really doesnt flaunt her authority. The
traditional argument, on the other hand, holds that authority must be
embraced. Traditionalists contend that authority is a moral good that
comes when one acquires knowledge and institutional responsibility.
Following this line of thought, a teacher is a beneficent authority figure
because of what she knows, what she is asked to do by the school. The
traditional argument asks us to recognise that some folks are in a position
to help others (see Hirsch, 1999; Ravitch, 1985). Can authority be wrong if
it is employed in a thoughtful manner? Authority, following this
traditionalist logic, is completely acceptable as long as one uses ones
authority to help those who are not in authority. By using ones authority,
one can cultivate the capacities of those who are themselves not yet
authority figures.
Against the backdrop of a progressive rejection of authority and the
traditional acceptance, the critical argument maintains that authority must
be used, but only for the purposes of teaching for social justice (see
Giroux, 1997, 1998). The critical argument suggests a qualified use of
authority. It is qualified in that it does not embrace authority per se, but
embraces only the authority of those who speak for social justice. So
unlike traditional perspectives that embrace the practical necessity of the
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various versions of educational authority (personal, institutional, scientific, cultural, etc.), the critical perspective embraces only those versions
of authority that promote freedom and social change. And unlike
progressive perspectives, the critical perspective does not assume that
the use of authority is somehow naturally at odds with social justice. The
critical argument advocates the use of authority when teaching for human
freedom is at stake.
Progressives argue against authority. Traditionalists embrace it.
Criticalists embrace it at certain times. Granted these are stereotyped
positions that I have laid out, it still strikes me that these sorts of
arguments fail to deal with the most important of all questions concerning
educational authority: How does educational authority work? In this
article, I propose that we think about educational authority in a way that is
a bit uncommon at present. I propose that we consider how educational
authority operates. For while progressivists argue against it, while
traditionalists embrace it, and while criticalists warn about using it
judiciouslywhile these various perspectives are being articulated, none
of them looks deeply into the question of How? To ask the question How?
is a different matter altogether than arguing for or against. To ask How? is
to look for a model that serves to illustrate the workings of authority.
In what follows, I propose that the literary relation serves as such a model.
I will look at the literary life of educational authority.

BEFORE THE LAW

To get at the literary life of authority, I retell a short story by Franz Kafka.
In Kafkas tale Before the Law, a man from the country approaches a
building where a doorkeeper is standing watch.1 In front of the building,
the man asks if he might be allowed inside in order to meet the Law
inside. The doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot admit the man at the
moment, but that it is possible that he will be allowed to enter later. The
door to the law is open during this inquiry, but when the countryman tries
to peer through, he is met with laughs by the doorkeeper. The man is
dismayed: The Law, he thinks, should be accessible to every man and at
all times (Derrida, 1992, pp. 183184). The man is told that there are
more doors inside and more doorkeepers even more powerful than this
one. The man from the country is relentless, though. He waits for days and
years. He gives gifts to the doorkeeper on occasion but to no avail. Finally,
the man grows old and approaches death, still waiting to be let in to the
law. At the end of his life he asks why there has been no one else who has
joined him, during all those years, to seek admittance to the law. To this
the doorkeeper answers: this door was intended only for you. I am now
going to shut it (p. 183).
To approach the literary understanding of authority, I will begin with a
general overview of the similarities between Kafkas tale and the present
state of educational authority. In other words, I will stress that Before the
Law is also about educational authority. Then, informed by the work of
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Jacques Derrida, I will suggest some of the ways that this tale is not only a
tale about educational authority, but is also about the ways people engage
with the authority of literature. Educational authority, I will put forth, is
usefully treated as a literary matter. Finally, based on this literary analysis,
I will suggest a few ways that students and educators might think in new
and agentive ways about educational authority. Ultimately, a literary
conception of educational authority shows that remaining stuck in front of
Kafkas door is not such a bad thing after all.

EDUCATIONAL AUTHORITY AND THE KAFKAESQUE: FORCE

WITHOUT SIGNIFICANCE

The short stories and novels of Franz Kafka, having introduced into the
English language the term Kafkaesque, are famous for the enervating,
paralysing quality that they evoke. Kafkas narratives generally present
the struggles of a protagonist who is faced with a pressing condition, but
the protagonist generally does not know the content of that condition. The
man in search of the law in the short story under consideration, the man
who is being punished but does know why he is being punished in In the
Penal Colony, the man who is trying to get into The Castle but does not
know how, the man who is served with papers to appear at a trial without
being told of the accusation against himin most cases, Kafkas fiction
tells of a protagonist who is highly compelled but unaware exactly what
his compulsion is (Kafka, 1995, 1998, 1984). Giorgio Agamben has
accurately called this Kafkaesque predicament being in force without
significance (in Santner, 2001, p. 40). There is a lot of force in Kafkas
fiction. His protagonists are highly motivated. What the significance of
their motivation is, though, is always difficult to discern.
It is striking to me how easy it is to discern this Kafkaesque quality in so
many cases where educational authority is being enacted. I do not consider
it a stretch to think about the many instances when educational authority
impinges on students and teachers as instances that have force without
significance. From the student perspective, one need only think of the
processes by which one obtains degrees, diplomas and grades. As many a
student can tell you, one works for a degree, perhaps for years and years.
When the degree is finally obtained, there often lingers a certain
dissatisfaction that the precise thing that one coveted for so long is really
not much more than a shiny piece of paper with fancy print. One tends to
wonder, in the end, if there was really any content to the very goal of all
that travail. To be sure, on the way towards that goal, a student often
projects into the degree, the diploma or the certificate a magical sort of
content. But in the end, havent most students felt a sort of Kafkaesque
realisation that there was plenty of force to the degree but not so much
significance? The parallel between the tales of Kafka and student
experience seems to break down only insofar as the Kafka protagonist
feels this lack of significance even on the way towards his goal. While
in education, students usually sense that authority is hollow only once
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they have experienced the full dose of what authority has to offer,
Kafkas countryman is persecuted with such hollowness from the very
beginning.
From the teachers perspective, one might think of the authority enacted
when grades are given. Havent many teachers felt the intense irony of the
grading procedure? To be sure, grading is one of the central processes by
which teaching authority is wielded, but is there not a distinct lack of
content to grading? While grades are, at least as far as institutional rhetoric
is concerned, supposed to reflect the achievement of students, it is really
very difficult to say that grades actually do such a thing. As most teachers
would, I think, acknowledge, one never actually knows how much a
student has or has not learned. A teacher can hardly hope to know some of
the more intangible aspects of student learning, like whether the student
puts her learning to use some time in the future, or whether the student
uses that learning to shape her future life in empowering ways. Grades are
also said to have significance insofar as they motivate students. But the
final grade at the end of an academic semester, however full of force it is,
is particularly lacking in such motivational significance. At such an
endpoint, the grade can no longer serve its ostensible purpose as motivator
because there is nothing to be motivated for when the course is already
completed! And even when interim grades are given out, from the very
beginning of the academic semester or quarter, isnt there often a certain
Kafkaesque sense in which the grades have a lot of force but very little
content? Grades really do not mean much of anything. Many experienced
teachers will say, if not in these precise terms, that they have felt a sort of
Kafkaesque pang that coincides with the allotment of grades. As one longtime primary school teacher recently told me, When it comes to giving
grades, I often feel like a charlatan.
Or, let me tentatively venture another example: Can one not sometimes
be made uncomfortable by the suspicion that there is a similar forceful, yet
content-less quality that typifies the teaching of the famous educator
Socrates? When Socrates acts as a torpedo fish, when he refuses to give
content to his interlocutors but instead answers their questions with more
questions of his own, he enacts the sort of educational authority that leaves
them, much like the man in Kafkas story, without anywhere to go. When
Socrates shows that he is the wisest of the Athenians because he knows
not how much he knows but rather how little he knows, he once again
enacts a very powerfulyet content-lessshow of authority. And again,
when in the Meno he uses his skill at questioning to evoke from the slave
boy geometrical knowledge without teaching him any new knowledge, per
se, there is a sense in which the authority of Socrates comes not from any
meaning, but from some sort of pure force. It might even be said that the
doctrine of anamnesis, far from being an obtuse and unbelievable myth of
the existence of some collective memory, is more properly conceived as
that enigmatic quality of educational authority that Kafka illustrates so
well. What I mean by this is that perhaps the Greeks noticed exactly what
Kafka noticed about authority, namely, that there are many instances when
authority seems to function even in the absence of propositional meaning.
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Upon noticing such a magical occurrence, it is not at all unreasonable, at

least in a society where myths are common, to explain away such a thing
with recourse to mythology. In general, the force of the entelechus, with
its refusal to give answers, to give meaning, can well be described in the
same way that Agamben describes Kafkas world, as force without
signification.
I see in Kafkas fiction the beginnings of an analysis of how educational
authority works. Following the examples of authority that fill the works of
Kafka, I would say that educational authority most often works on the
basis of a certain force without significance. What I mean by this is that
educational authority acts as if there is propositional significance to its
force, but, in actuality, the very force of educational authority derives
from a certain absence of propositional meaning. Degrees, diplomas,
gradesthese are just three examples of instances where there is an
implied content to authority, but, in actuality, there is very little direct
correlation between that which is achieved and that which was actually
learned. Educational authority, rather than relying on some content, most
often works precisely where there is a lack of content, a lack just where
the content was supposed to be. In order to further illustrate the force
without significance of educational authority, it is very helpful to look at
Jacques Derridas analysis of Kafka. Following Derrida, we can understand the force without significance of educational authority in a literary
way.

DERRIDA, AUTHORITY, LITERATURE

Turning to the work of Derrida, I propose that authority that operates with
force but little significance can also be construed as the sort of authority
enacted through the readers encounter with literature. That is to say, the
workings of authority such as are found in Kafkas fiction, such workings
are not necessarily derived solely from the power of the person who is in
authority. Such workings are not, in the case of Before the Law, simply
about the power that the man at the door has at his disposal. The workings
of authority are also indebted to the sort of relation entered into when one
encounters authority. This relation should be construed as a particularly
literary one. That is to say, in Before the Law, the man from the country
is not only unsuccessful at understanding and gaining access to the Law,
where the law is an example of authority. In addition, the man from the
country also typifies the reader of literature who does not understand and
thus cannot gain access to a work of literature. The man from the
country, writes Derrida, had difficulty in grasping that an entrance was
singular or unique when it should have been universal, as in truth it was.
He had difficulty with literature (Derrida, 1992, p. 213). Derrida thus
draws the helpful analogy between authority in general and the authority
of literature. Why does this analogy hold?
This analogy holds for a few reasons, all of which derive from the very
difficult task of actually discerning where the authority of a piece of
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literature resides. When getting at the authority of a piece of literature,

when an attempt is made to know what its authority really is, a number of
barriers exist. One is often held at bay, barred from entrance. First of all,
there is the temptation to judge a work by its content, a judgment that is
bound to fail. Take, for example, two stories that are about the exact same
thing, one that is judged literary and another that is not. It may be the
case that all of the facts of the literary narrative are also included in the
story that is not considered literary. But content alone is never a guarantee
that a piece of writing will be admitted into a literary canon. One is in a
similar situation when it comes to making an assessment based on the
form of a piece. As many a copycat author is aware, two works may be
written in the same style, but even so, one may not end up being deemed
literary. It is easy to conceive of two works, both written in the same style,
of which only one has been deemed literary. It may be the case that the
one that is written later will be deemed derivative rather than literary.
When it comes to discerning literary authority, the very matters that seem
so central to a great piece of fictionits style and its contentfail to
provide an entrance for the work.
In reality, the authority of literature always lies elsewhere. The content
and form of a work are necessary but not sufficient conditions for its
literary authority. What differs from one work to the other, notes
Derrida, is not its content, nor is it the form (the signifying expression, the
phenomenon of language or rhetoric). It is the movements of framing and
referentiality (ibid.). A whole range of variables is involved in the
authority of literature. The name of a works author: A literary work may
be authorised by the fame of its author rather than by its quality per se.
The legal accoutrements of publication: A work may become authorised
because a famous publishing house decides to include it in its canon of
literary publications. Academic assessment: A work may be authorised as
literature as soon as it is discovered by a well-known literary critic. The
cultural interests of a particular group: One country may deem a work to
be literary while another country does not. Other variables may be at work
as well. At any rate, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint the
conditions that suffice for the literary authorisation of a particular work or
opus. The literary matters of framing and referentiality are slippery at
best and Kafkaesque at worst.
Indeed, it can be said with regard to authority in general that this
problem of framing and referentiality is at its core. For, when one is
faced with authority, it is unlikely to be the case that one can discern the
nature of that authority by scrutinising what it is (its content) or how it is
presented (its form). Thus one never acceded directly to the law or to
persons, one is never immediately before any of these authorities; as for
the detour, it may be infinite (p. 196). One never has direct access to
authority. Faced with authority, one is also faced with the ways that
authority is instantiated in the people who enact, interpret, embody and
employ that authority. One cannot reach the law, and in order to have a
rapport of respect with it, one must not have a rapport with the law, one
must interrupt the relation. One must enter into relation only with the
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laws representatives, its examples, its guardians (p. 204). In short, a

rapport with authority in general is as deferred as a rapport with literary
authority. In literature, as in education, authority is a relation of force
without significance.

EDUCATING WHEN AUTHORITY IS LITERARY

But how does this Derridean understanding of authority/literature speak,

in a practical way, to the matter of educational authority? Against this
backdrop of deferred access to authority, let us return to Kafkas story. It
seems that we can now describe the countryman as a sort of student. The
man stands before the law in much the same way a student stands before
educational authority. In this new version of Kafkas tale, we might say
that it is the student who is barred entrance to authority. Why is he barred
entrance? It is because he mistakenly thinks that the primary attribute of
educational authority is that it is generally available. He thinks that
authority is somewhere within, that it is written inside on a tablet, like
some moral code.2 He believes that if only he is patient enough, then he
will be let in and will be able to discern authoritys true content. But, the
student never gains entry into the house of educational authority because
he never learns that such authority has no specific content, that it has no
identifiable form. This students misunderstanding of the nature of
authority leads to the unfortunate and unsatisfying ending of Before the
Law. This student has a problem with educational authority because, as
Derrida reminds us, he has a problem with literature.
My point is that educational authority is in a literary situation. The
relation between student, teacher and curriculum is one where authority
cannot be accessed merely by understanding the content of the curriculum
under consideration. Nor can it be accessed by recourse to standard
evaluations of that content. Nor can it be accessed by a thorough
understanding of the set form that curriculum takes. Nor can it be accessed
by looking to the charismatic authority of the teacher, to the teachers
power. Rather, access to educational authority is a matter of
interpretation not unlike the sort of interpretation that a good novelreader practises. The relation of authority between student and teacher, if
it is to be entered properly, is one wherein student and teacher must
engage in interpretation rather than direct knowledge. Students and
teachers, so considered, are akin to readers of novels.
Take, for example, the student as literary interpreter. It is a mistake on
the part of the student to think that facing education entails facing a canon
of knowledge that is already there, that is waiting to be understood in a
particular way. When faced with authority in education, one should not
ask to gain such a straightforward entrance to that authority. One will
never gain such entrance. Authority is always once removed by virtue of
its various interpreters (its various teachers), by the academic procedures
that govern it, by the scholastic protocol that gives it its weight. Thus, a
student will never be able to gain direct entrance.
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Rather than trying to gain direct entrance, a student might do much

better to engage in the very staging of authority, to engage in its
referentiality, to engage in the effects it has on herself. A student might
understand that confronting education is much like gaining access to a
great novel. To access the authority of a novel, one does not dwell strictly
on its content, nor does one dwell strictly on its form, nor does one dwell
strictly on what so-and-so (say, a teacher) says about the novel. To try any
of these straightforward measures is to be left standing before the law
rather than gaining access to it. To read and interpret James Joyces
Ulysses, for example, it is absolutely insufficient to understand its content.
Its content is, after all, only one day in the life of a fairly unremarkable
man, Leopold Bloom. To read and interpret Ulysses, it is also completely
insufficient to know that, in its form, Ulysses traces the pattern of Homers
epic poem. To read and interpret Ulysses, it is furthermore insufficient to
learn precisely what Dr. X, the professor, has to say about the novel. To
read and interpret Ulysses, one must engage with all of the extras that
allow one to be moved by the reading. One must enjoy the story, one must
make ones own judgments about its worth, and one must interpret the
novel in a way that is ultimately unlikely to be communicable, and
certainly not assessment-able, to borrow a buzzword from current
educational policy.
It is not a coincidence that many readers of novels do so late at night in
the comfort of their sleeping room and indeed do not discuss the contents
of the novel with anyone else. In fact, the interpreter of a novel ultimately
meets the authority of the novel by virtue of his or her own personal acts
of staging and referentiality. Reading a novel successfully, one will enter
a personal relation with the mechanisms of literary authority. One will
enter into a relation with the always-deferred authority that canonises
novels and satisfies readers. One will enter a personal relation with the
doorkeepers of literary insight rather than remaining a frustrated
countryman.
We might best consider the student in this same literary light. Faced
with a way to enter the curriculum, the student might best be aware that
it will not be solely a matter of knowing the content of what is being
taught. Nor is it strictly a matter of knowing the form of curriculum. In fact
one does not enter the curriculum in such a straightforward way. Rather,
one must enter an interpretive relation wherein the person who learns acts
as her own guide, as her own literary interpreter, doing her own staging
and her own establishing of referentiality. This is not to say that the
learner does not look to other sources in order to interpret curriculum. In
fact it may be precisely those other sources where one finds insight that
will bear on ones interpretation. One may go to a teacher, to a text of
reference, to a dictionary, to a friend, to an instructional text, to a text of
criticism, etc. But while it may be in one of those other sources where one
finds the means to stage the interpretation, it will, ultimately, never be in
these sources where one actually reaches some authoritative source.
Authority in education is a process that becomes enacted in the
interpretive act itself; it is not a thing that lies hidden, waiting to be
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found. A student will never reach educational authority, but she does
have the chance, like the reader of a novel, to stage an event of curriculum
that becomes meaningful and enriching. Like the reader who is
transformed by a novel by virtue of her own interpretation of that work,
the students own interpretation of curriculum is the only way that she can
partake in the process of authorisation. This is not to say she enters its
house, but she does achieve a relation with one or more of its doorkeepers.
But if the student never has direct access to authority, does that mean
that the teacher does have direct access? Not at all. A literary
understanding throws into question many current assumptions about the
educational authority of the teacher. For example, educational accounts of
authority often assume that a teacher who has more authority is one who
does a lot more direct instruction of content. It is often said that dialogic
pedagogies or progressive pedagogies are able to eschew authority
because they do not force-feed students with content that is prepared
beforehand by the teacher. Informed by our literary understanding of
authority, this is simply wrong-headed. Authority can neither reside in the
content itself nor in that contents delivery. This very popular,
conventionally accepted perspective makes the same mistake as Kafkas
countryman made. Scholarly arguments about whether or not to use such
authority will never get anywhere because they misconstrue the way that
authority is necessarily an interpretive relation. Such descriptions of
teacher authority never get through the first door. They are as ill conceived
as are the notions of the student who assumes she can access that
venerable, carved-in-stone version of authority.
The authority of the teacher does not depend upon the extent of the
teachers knowledge, nor does it depend upon the approach the teacher
takes to his or her subject. By way of illustrating this fact, havent many
teachers had the same experience that the countryman has had? That is to
say, is it not a very common feeling to be barred entrance to teaching
authority? Are there not many times when one tries to get through to
students, but one just cant? And yet one knows that the very content that
is being taught should be available to all people at all times. At such a
point, after a feeling of being barred entrance, many teachers make the
same sort of content-based mistake that is made by the countryman: they
just try all the harder to make the content clear to their students. This is
where pedagogies of content and teaching style get it all wrong. It is not
true that authority derives from pedagogical content knowledge
(Shulman, 1986). When teaching the novels of Toni Morrison, for
example, one can know all there is to know about Morrison, and one can
polish up ones teaching style to be as shiny as can be. These are matters
of content and form that do not guarantee in any way that the students
interpretation of content will be successful. These matters of content and
form will not guarantee a teacher access to authority because authority is
not a particular thing waiting to be accessed.
Authority only gets enacted through a meaningful interpretation on the
students part. It is the student who must actually practise the staging and
referentiality of this interpretation. The best that the teacher can do is to
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act as an aid to the reader. Of course, it may happen that it is precisely the
content knowledge or the teaching style of the teacher that the student uses
to make her interpretation meaningful. Or it may not happen that way. If,
at least, a teacher knows that content and style are not sufficient, then he or
she will not make the same mistake as Kafkas countryman. He or she will
not continue to expect that the aim of the teacher is to let in the student.
As teachers, we should not aim to give over authority, nor should we aim
to keep our authority. Authority is not a substance that one has. The
best we can do is to encourage students to establish relations between
themselves and the deferrals that enable authority to circulate. We can,
ourselves, avoid making the same mistake as the man from the country.
We can avoid trying to get through to our students. And, we can help
students to avoid making the same mistake by pointing out that they will
never get through to us. They will never get through to some illusory
authority that the teacher is supposed to have.
This literary understanding of authority also sheds light on the common
claim that authority comes in two forms, that there is, on the one had, the
authority of the teacher, and, on the other, the authority of the text. One
finds this claim being made by traditionalists, progressives and criticalists
alike. According to this claim, there is supposed to be a qualitative
difference between the two principal types of authority, that of the teacher
and that of the book. Namely, the authority of the teacher is supposed to be
more of an unwanted imposition while the authority of the book is more
educative, more benign. After making this claim, it is not uncommon for
educators to advocate pedagogies that encourage students to engage
primarily with the authority of the text rather than with that of the teacher.
Unfortunately, this claim is often made without the realisation that
educational authority is never clearly one or the other of these two types.
Indeed, authority is not simply a mixture of these two types either.
Authority can never be located precisely in the charisma or imposition
of the teacher, nor can it be located precisely in the academic content
under consideration. Rather, authority is always enacted on the frontiers of
staging and interpretation. Authority always happens by means of deferral,
by means of the deferral that happens between the various regimes of
knowledge where education takes place. Authority happens between
teacher and text, between text and institution, between institution and
teacher, between so many of those educational events that take their turn
at setting up the circumstances for learning.
To say that one type of authority is more beneficial than another is to
fail to recognise that authority does not have a type. Authority acts
through deferral, through interpretive detours rather than through the
acquisition of textual knowledge or through the transmission of teacherly
knowledge. It may indeed act through an interaction with the content of
texts and through an interaction with teacherly charisma, yet it is not the
text or the teacherly charisma that define some sort of type of authority
that one can cleanly identify as better or worse. We should not prefer the
authority of texts just because they seem less likely to dominate the
student than does the fleshly teacher; nor should the authority of the text
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be preferred because its content is more carefully prepared and more timehonoured than is teacher talkthese are the reasons given in conversations that advocate the authority of the text. Yet importantly, with this
said, I would not go so far as to say that we can no longer talk at all about
textual content or teacherly charisma. That is not my point at all. Indeed, I
would say that text is preferable to teacher talk, but this has nothing to do
with authority inherent in one or the other.
Rather, the text is preferable to teacher talk because it is more likely to
lend itself to interpretation. Texts are preferable because they are already
situated within a set of discursive practices that encourage reading and
interpretation, rather than because of some mistaken trope of a pure, nonauthoritative experience of knowledge acquisition on the part of the
student. Given the deferred, interpretive life of a students interaction with
texts, the act of reading is more likely to enable one to participate in the
literary life of educational authority.

CONCLUSION

In sum, I have offered a description of authority that, building on the work

of Kafka and Derrida, asks us to stop thinking of authority as a matter of
substance and style, and asks us to start thinking of it as a matter of
interpretation and reading. I noted first how authority in education enacts a
certain force without significance that the fiction of Kafka helps us to
understand. By claiming that there is a certain force without significance
that is prevalent in authoritative matters, I have not meant to say that
authority is simply a matter of power and therefore to be eschewed
whenever possible. Nor have I meant to say that the paralysis that extends
through Kafkas novels shows us the extent to which educational
aspirations will become paralysed should too much authority be used.
Instead of making a judgment about this understanding of authority as
force without significance, I have tried to understand how this force
without significance might function. To that end, I have drawn from the
work of Derrida to consider authority in a literary way.
Kafkas short story depicts a countryman who has trouble both with
authority and with literature. It is my hope that, in education, we might
avoid having the same problem as this countryman. To deploy authority in
ways that avoid the countrymans problem would mean to tend to the
interpretive conditions under which authority becomes successful. And by
authority becoming successful I mean precisely that it becomes a means
for student agency, for student flourishing. Kafkas countryman, and many
educators and students of today, misunderstand authority because they do
not consider that authority is as literature. Authority, like literature, is not
something that one is going to get ones hands on in any tidy way; it is not
something that one is going to get to the bottom of; it is not something that
one meets directly, after entering its room. Rather, educators and students
are in a position much like Kafkas countryman. This position is one
where enactments of authority will always be deferred by the keepers of
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C. Bingham

doors, by the educational interventionsthe pedagogies, the institutions,

the dispositions, the degrees, the assessments, etc.without which
education would not be education. Without these interventions education
would rather be an unmediated relation between person and content (as if
there were such a thing, even outside of education). But when we note that
educators and students are in a position like the countryman, that is not to
say that there must be paralysis. The key is not to misunderstand authority,
not to misunderstand literature.
From the teachers perspective, the key is to realise that it is not the
direct enactment of authority (or for that matter, the direct dis-enactment
of authority) that will give one access to the student. Rather, it is ones
ability to facilitate a successful interpretation on the part of the student
that will create the circumstances wherein authority has force. From the
students perspective, the key is to realise that there is no authority to be
accessed directly. One can at best attain an interpretation that has great
meaning for the one who is faced with this authority, which seems so well
guarded. There is, in reality, no substance. There is no stable, authoritative
meaning behind the door over which the doorkeeper stands guard. There is
actually no way to enter the room guarded by the doorkeeper. The
entranceway itself is the venue where one learns, where one becomes
educated. Even if a student were to attain the authority of the teacher,
such authority ultimately has no meaning other than the literary relation,
the interpretive relation, which one has entered into by virtue of being one
who learns. One cannot get in. One can at best, one can only, enter a
relation with the doorkeeper. When the doorkeeper (or the teacher) says to
the man (or to the student), This door was intended only for you, it
makes sense to settle for the door. Why? Because there is nothing, nothing
certain, behind the door. Everything hinges upon ones own interpretation.
Correspondence: Charles Bingham, 1371 Borthwick Road, North
Vancouver, BC, V7K1X9, Canada.
Email: cwb@sfu.ca

NOTES
1. The version of Kafkas text to which I am referring can be found in Derrida, 1992, pp. 183, 184.
2. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

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