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This chapter continues the historical appreciation of theoretical curiosity within the North American cultural context. Theoretical curiosity is presented as a process that poses challenges and opportunities for critical interventions. A peculiarly utilitarian and instrumental management of the potentials of theoretical practice is described as a tradition instituted through the institutional structures of what I identify as "pedagogies of curiosity." The social sciences, especially experimental psychology and the influence of drive-based psychoanalysis, are singled out as forces for the containment of the affective and intellectual depths of desire and the pursuit of knowledge. This chapter extends the notion of a critical curiosity to questions of pedagogy and socialization in modern life. It begins with a historical sketch of early and eighteenth-century American cultural politics. Aspects of pragmatism and the thought of William James, C. S. Peirce, John Dewey, and T. Veblen situate the philosophical values placed on the development of theory and inquiry. Reviewing twentieth-century experimental studies of curiosity it considers psychological reductions of curiosity in the social and behavioral science tradition. I claim that the social sciences, including experimental psychology and psychoanalysis, have served to contain the potentials of inquiry. Their pervasive effect of a therapeutic culture continues the taming of the passions reviewed in the previous chapter. Their influence has been a disciplining of desire. This chapter surveys Freirean critical pedagogical approaches and their invocation of a sustained "epistemological" curiosity. Freirean critical and epistemological curiosity accent a resistance to all closure and abstraction from the material conditions of everyday existences and the potential for pedagogical communities to act in the interest of its transformation. The ambivalent values associated with curiosity are scrutinized as aspects of its institutionalization in public education. Curiosity and a theoretical interest in the nature of the actual conditions of everyday life are hostage to an actuarial surveillance of the working class. I argue for considering theoretical curiosity as a desire for knowledge emerging within situated contexts of activity that call into question the nature and democratic legitimacy of existing social relations.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-2117-3_3

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