Silencing Ivan Illich Revisited

A Foucauldian Analysis of Intellectual Exclusion

David Gabbard

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781975502300
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1993, Silencing Ivan Illich fell out of print when the original publisher went out of business in 1995. The author, David Gabbard, states that the book was pivotal in the evolution of his understanding of schools. Delving into Foucault's work to forge a methodology, he wanted to understand the discursive (symbolic) forces and relations of power and knowledge responsible for the marginalization of Ivan Illich from educational discourse. In short, Illich was "silenced" for having committed the heretical act of denying the benevolence of state-enforced, compulsory schooling. In Silencing Ivan Illich Revisited, Gabbard revisits the text as a means of opening the question of what schools should be. Inspired by Slavoj Žižek's call for a Positive Universal Project, the book provides an alternative vision of what our species ought to be doing in the name of collective learning.

CHAPTER ONE

To Explain an Exclusion

I HAD TWO purposes in mind when developing this work. On the one hand, I sought to contribute toward an understanding of a particular discourse that was originally enunciated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On the other hand, and more importantly, I wanted to present a thorough understanding of how and why the discourse in question has since been reduced to silence. My investigation proceeds by asking two very general sorts of questions. First, what characteristics of the silenced discourse could have stimulated such a suffocating response? And second, what is the nature of the forces that have imposed such a penalty?

At a very fundamental level, these are questions of power and knowledge. Appropriating a Foucauldian mode of interpretive analysis, I view power and knowledge as being inseparable, and the significance of the relationship between the two is brought to the fore when discourse is conceptualized as a practice. The individual statement, then, is treated as the product of some discursive practice, an activity that delimits a field of objects, defines the legitimate perspective of the agent of knowledge, and fixes the norms for the elaboration of concepts and strategies. Moreover, the statement is the product of some specific discursive practice governed by particular rules of formation. These rules determine which objects, concepts, functions, and strategies are formed within discourse. They also determine how these discursive elements are formed. Such formations are never neutral, but are laden with power/knowledge relations.

To investigate the first of the aforementioned questions (what characteristics of the discourse in question could have stimulated such a suffocating response?), I take the rules of formation governing the discursive practice responsible for the statements in which the silenced discourse is embodied as the fundamental objects of my concern. Through an analysis of these rules and discursive elements that they give rise to, I reveal the characteristics rendering the discourse in question susceptible to being silenced and excluded from the discursive community of education.

Future references to the discourse in question, I shall use the terms primary discourse and core discourse, interchangeably. This facilitates a deeper understanding of its relationships to a whole series of other discourses that have proceeded from and have silenced it. It is useful to think of these as secondary discourses or peripheral discourses, for they constitute a sort of multi-layered discursive shell around the core. In general, however, I shall refer to them as commentaries.

What does it mean to comment on a discourse? First, it is to make that discourse speak again, to make that which has already been said speak again. Second, to comment on a discourse is to make it say something that it did not say before. Insofar as it speaks the never-before-said of an already-said, a commentary poses as a definitive restatement of some primary discourse. And, as a definitive restatement, it brings the already-said primary discourse into a condition of finality. It contains a covert declaration to the effect of, “Now that I have interpreted this discourse definitively, it has nothing more to say.” It is in precisely this manner that the commentaries proceeding from the primary discourse have functioned to reduce it to silence.

As discourses, commentaries are also the textualized embodiments of discursive practices and are likewise guided by rules of formation. Though there may be some commonalities that can be established between the rules regulating the discursive practices behind the various commentaries, they each formulate the discourse qua object in their own unique fashion. In stating this, then, I am committed to analyzing a number of disparate discursive practices. This breadth of analysis is essential for adequately describing the full spectrum of silence-inducing forces that have been brought to bear on the primary discourse, though brevity does not allow for a complete genealogy of those practices.

The rules governing the formation of these commentaries legitimate different views of the primary discourse. These commentaries are characterized by different functions and adopt different strategies in bringing the primary discourse into a condition of finality, in restraining it, in impeding its circulation, and in restricting the wider consideration of its meanings. At the level of commentary, then, I am concerned with the control of discourse.

Michel Foucault (1982) has stated that:

in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality. (p. 216)

And he identifies commentary as one means by which discourse is controlled (p. 221).

Insofar as I have yet to disclose the name of the writing subject, the appellation attached to the primary discourse, it becomes significant to describe a second mechanism of discursive control distinguished by Foucault. Although this mechanism operates neither universally across all fields of discourse nor constantly within these fields, at the present time within the discursive field of education, the author-function does, in fact, operate. This is one reason why the author-function is relevant to this discussion. Another reason of more immediate significance lies in the recognition that the author-function has enabled various commentators to contribute toward the exclusion of the primary discourse from the educational community.

That discourses have names attached to them at all should be recognized as a matter of historical contingency. According to Foucault (1977), “speeches and books were assigned real authors only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that her/his discourse was considered transgressive” (p. 124). While it is important to recognize that the most severe form of punishment (death) is still imposed upon those speakers and those authors whose transgressive discourses cannot be silenced by either marginalization or intimidation, the mechanisms of penality functioning within the discursive community of education and other academic disciplines do not generally operate directly upon the body of the writing subject. Rather, the forces of these mechanisms operate more typically upon the collective body of potential readers, those who may come into contact with a transgressive discourse.

Within the context of the primary discourse that is the object of this work, the author-function operates as a sign of transgression. In identifying this discourse as a practice that violates the rules governing their discursive practices within education and the community of educational discourse, the commentators whose works are described here have contributed toward its punishment by investing the name of the author with a pernicious aura. Because the dangerous individual’s name is attached to the textualized embodiment of that discourse, having been invested with meanings assigned by others, the author functions on the surface of the text as an assemblage of “scarlet letters.” It is a sign of the sinful. Those who have been made familiar with the name of the author as a dangerous individual will have, thereby, been forewarned of the perils that lurk within the text that rests behind the sign. The discourse itself has already been identified as a transgression by the potential reader without her/him ever having engaged it. Its meanings have, therefore, been effectively restricted, for their reputation, as invested in the name of the author, precedes them.

Various commentators have exerted similar forces of constraint and silence on Foucault’s discourse/s by affiliating his name with transgression. In response to these forces, Foucault expresses a desire to have remained anonymous. He claims that this desire arose “out of nostalgia for a time when, being completely unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. The surface contact with some possible reader was without a wrinkle. The effects of the books rebounded in unforeseen places and outlined forms I hadn’t thought about” (1989, p. 193).

It also arose out of his recognition of how commentary and the author function work together to order, classify, distribute, and control discourse so as to avert its powers and its dangers. By enshrouding his discourse in anonymity, Foucault would have, in effect, been making an attempt to avert the powers and dangers that the author-function provides commentary qua discourse.

Though these powers and dangers have already been brought to bear on the discourse with which this project is concerned, though they have already reduced it to silence (it was out of print at the time that I wrote this in 1991), in the delineation of that discourse to be provided here I will attempt to lift the veil of oppressive silence from it in order to allow that discourse to speak again. To the extent that this involves an act of interpretation, I do not feign to be capable of reestablishing the unwrinkled surface and the primarily discourse in its originality. Short of this, I can only hope to make it “speak” again via a different method.

One component of this method involves isolating the statements by the primary discursive practice from the name of the author. This tactic will serve to avert the powers and dangers that previous commentators have exerted on it through their deployment of the author-function. While it is possible to avert the powers of previous commentators, the problem remains that, in making the primary discourse speak again, this work itself is a commentary. As stated in the opening paragraph, one of the purposes of this project is to determine the characteristics of the primary discourse that have stimulated the formation of a series of secondary discourses (commentaries) which have induced this silence. It is the characteristics which previous commentators have found to be transgressive of the rules governing “proper” educational discourse that I will focus on. The understanding I will contribute toward, therefore, is not devoid of its own set of rules of discursive formation. The extent to which the primary discourse can be liberated, then, is somewhat limited by the fact that all discursive practices involve the deployment of power/knowledge relations.

While acknowledging this problem, I do not intend to contribute toward the already dense shell of commentary that has suffocated the primary discourse. Neither do I intend, in my desire to re-enunciate that discourse, to valorize the writing subject who produced it. To do so would amount to little more than an inversion of the author-function. To invert the author-function by valorizing the writing subject would entail silencing those writing subjects who produced the secondary discourses surrounding it. It would mean situating the commentary that I am producing in competition with theirs.

I completely agree with Foucault when he states that “education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse” (1982, p. 227). The intent here, then, is not to challenge the validity of the arguments made by previous commentators, but rather to diminish the effects they have induced. In other words, I am not proposing that we should recast the hierarchy of discourse that exists within the field of education by situating a previously excluded discourse at the top of that hierarchy. I am simply arguing that we should refrain from conceptualizing that field of discourse in hierarchical terms. In order that education can become the sort of instrument envisioned by Foucault, all discourses must be granted inclusion within its discursive field. As it stands now, however, education is but yet another means for controlling discourse:

In its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents. [education] follows the well trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it. (Foucault, 1982, p. 227)

When conceptualized in hierarchical terms, the discursive field of education can be viewed as being constructed from “politically correct” discourses at the top of the hierarchy and “politically incorrect” discourses at the bottom. By no means am I suggesting that there is any broad consensus within any given field of academe, especially within education. Different individuals within the academy have different definitions of which discourses qualify as politically correct or incorrect. Nevertheless, whether it is affected by the faculty of an academic program as a whole, or whether it is affected by a single mentor, the socialization of the student into some version of “politically correct” discourse or set of discourses entails learning to associate names with those discourses. More often than not, the result of this socialization is that apprentices learn whose discourses they should appropriate in order to receive legitimation themselves. Their legitimation is cast not in terms of their competence as productive writing and speaking subjects, but in terms of their political correctness. Moreover, apprentices are socialized to choose the foundations of their own discursive practices carefully.

Being socialized into a discursive community also involves being socialized to recognize certain other discourses as “politically incorrect.” Names, of course, associated with the discourses as well. And, it is often the case that names themselves come to represent transgressions. An apprentice can, thereby, easily claim to reject the theory put forth by some writing subject without ever having examined the discourse which elaborates that theory. The direct association of a name with transgression impedes the proliferation of discourse and restricts the full consideration of its meanings. In other words, apprentices are socialized away from certain discursive practices as they are socialized into others. Even when they are encouraged to investigate transgressive texts, they are forewarned of the improprieties that await them. If a pernicious discourse is to be cited in the work of the apprentice, that citation must be made for the sheer purpose of allowing the legitimate discourse to demonstrate its efficacy as a vehicle for commentary. Hence, both commentary and the author function are of extreme importance at the level of discursive appropriation. Due to this significance, I have chosen to leave anonymous the writing subject who produced the primary discourse that has been labelled within current educational discourse as “politically incorrect.”

Therefore, the significance that I attach to this project lies not within the primary discourse itself, but in its exclusion from the broader field of educational discourse. I want to describe the discursive forces originating from within that field that have resulted in this exclusion. At the heart of this work, therefore, is deeper level of concern for the more universal rules of formation with the discursive community of education that permit some discourses to be included within its boundaries while excluding other discourses. It becomes useful, then, to think of the discursive field of education not as a hierarchy, but rather as an archive in which some discourses are included and others are excluded. This makes it possible to describe the method that I will employ in investigating the commentaries activated by those discursive practices comprising the archive and the primary discourse that they have excluded from that archive as an archaeology. Though such a description is in some sense problematic, I will attempt to recast this description through an elaboration of the methodology that I have adopted in the next chapter.

References

Foucault, M. (1977). What is an author? In D.F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, counter-memory and practice: Selected essays and interviews with Michel Foucault (113–138). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Foucault, M. (1982). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1989). The masked philosopher. In S. Lotringer (ed.), Foucault live: Interviews 1961–84 (302–307). New York, NY: Semiotext(e).

CHAPTER TWO

Theoretico-Activism

I HAVE PURPOSEFULLY chosen, as one of the central objects of this analysis, a primary discourse that has been excluded from the archive of educational discourse. My motivation for having selected such a discourse is that it provides me with the opportunity to investigate the rules of discursive formation from which the commentaries that have facilitated this exclusion emerge. From this investigation, I expect to be able to define a dominant principle of inclusion that regulates the composition of that archive, and a concomitant principle of exclusion that prohibits certain discourses from attaining any degree of legitimacy within educational debate.

In the closing paragraph of the previous chapter, I stated that there are certain difficulties involved in drawing an analogy between the methodology that I employ in conducting this investigation and archaeology. Like the methodology itself, the term archaeology is borrowed from Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1982), which was his account of his own mode of analysis. Foucault used the term archaeology to signify a

description of the archive…, the set of discourses actually pronounced; and this set of discourses is envisaged not only as a set events which would have taken place once and for all and which would remain in abeyance, in the limbo or purgatory of history, but to provide the possibility of appearing in other discourses. (1989, p. 45)

Though it enabled him to distinguish his mode of analysis from that employed by historians of ideas, Foucault’s discomfort with the implications of describing his endeavors as archaeological (as if he were involved in a process of excavating facts) caused him to later drop the term from his language of methodological self-representation. He found that, along with its essentialist implications, it did not adequately communicate what he was trying to accomplish through his investigations. To ascribe greater specificity and accuracy to his description of his own discursive practice, he came to characterize his methodology as theoretico-active.

What, then, was Foucault attempting to accomplish by developing this method of analysis? More importantly, what am I attempting to accomplish by adopting it? To address the latter and more immediately significant question, I must elaborate the a priori assumptions inherent within theoretico-activism.

First, it is important to recall that I described the two principal questions guiding my investigation as being questions of power and knowledge. I also stated th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to Revisited
• Preface (1993 Edition)
• Chapter 1: To Explain an Exclusion
• Chapter 2: Theoretico-Activism
• Chapter 3: To Deny the Pastoral
• Chapter 4: Practices of Exclusion
• Chapter 5: An Analogous Exclusion
• Chapter 6: The Archive and Other Transgressions
• Index
• About the Author