ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author wants to pursue the issue of evaluation in reference to what constitutes cultural authority in the array of postmodern cultural production. Partiality becomes the basis for recognizing limits built into all discourses and necessitates taking a critical view of authority. Within this discourse, students must engage knowledge as border crossers, as people moving in and out of borders constructed around coordinates of difference and power. Arguing for the primacy of partiality and the usefulness of aggregate narratives in envisioning the discontinuities of cultural authority does not mean that alternative pedagogies must be a matter of micropolitics and local narratives, in which totality can only serve as a model of how not to collapse difference. Peter McLaren insists that certain conceptions of totality certainly universalize to the detriment of specific subcultures, but that understanding the totality of cultural production, if only in relational terms, should be one of the primary objectives of radical pedagogy.
