Rethinking the Politics of Education

Nick Peim

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781351675178
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Pedagogía
• Categoria: Investigación en educación

Rethinking the Politics of Education provides an entirely original rethinking of the modern and contemporary mythology of education. Problematizing the ideas concerning education as fulfilment and redemption, the book critically reviews the association of education with projects of social justice, democracy and improvement.

This book argues for a fundamental rethinking of what education is, exploring how things stand with education and educational apparatuses in the contemporary world. It examines relations between educational discourses and their implied ontological stances and offers new ways of thinking that draw on ontological positions from psychoanalytical, philosophical and social discourses. The book contends that education is an essential form of politics and must be understood through a careful examination of its history modes of operation and its basic structures, rather than an idealized version of what it might be.

Presenting an original and alternative account of a theoretically informed political ontology of education, the book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in the philosophy of education, the politics of education, educational theory and the sociology of education.

1What is politics?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315164786-2

Politics everywhere

It seems that something happened during the second half of the last century to gradually insist that politics was relocating, reforming itself. Some processes in this transformation had begun long before, first wave feminism, for example. From some indeterminate point onwards, perhaps the 1960s, it would become difficult to draw a clear boundary between politics and human activity that was not political. Semiotics had a part to play in this expansion of the politics. The realization dawned, derived partly from Nietzsche and de Saussure, that language itself was not a neutral medium, it was always loaded with meanings reflecting collective ways of being in and understanding the world, and further, it played its part in organizing the very identity of things. This linguistic, semiotic dimension potentially extended the field of politics indefinitely. It was tied up with the correlation between language and being, between, as ancient Parmenides would have it, between being and thinking. Speech and all sign systems were implicated in this ontological shift of politics. The realization was revelatory. What could possibly be more politically powerful than articulating the nature of things? Who would have thought everyday language, in all its mundanity, was freighted with politics? Numerous thinkers had pointed out that language was to be understood as an absolute horizon of meaning. We could not, ever, step outside of language to apprehend things or the world independently of language: to do so would be to relinquish everything we had been and known and would be impossible anyhow. ‘Reality’ – or ‘the Real’, as Lacan would have it – or however we wished to refer to the essence and totality of things, could only ever be apprehended through our symbolic ordering. Language, in whatever guise, and however mysterious we might find the phenomenon, is synthetic: our grasp of reality depends on it. Language is a significant component of the political realities we dwell with and within.

We have become used to the idea that language is political in some fundamental ways. This is not just because Wittgenstein insisted that all our language practices belong to specific ways of life. As Wittgenstein pointed out, we differ radically from lions, so that if we could imagine a speaking lion, as many have, they would not, contrary to Hollywood wisdom, speak like us. Living quite differently from lions, inhabiting what we might refer to as different worlds, we would not be able to speak across the life mode barrier. But the determination of things in language has emerged as an arena for political dispute in a quite explicit way in recent times. We are used to being more careful about the language we use. In certain context – gender identity relations, for instance – we must express ourselves very carefully. We have learned, much to the bemusement of gruff common-sense, that it is not so easy to call things how they are, plain and simple. It turns out to be impossible, in fact, without being guilty of cultural exclusion. We have learned to be suspicious of anyone claiming that they can speak the ‘unvarnished’ truth, pure, straightforward and unadorned.

But semiotics didn’t only address what we commonly refer to as language. Semiotics revealed that language was everywhere and everything was, in its own specific way, a form of language. Life itself, it turned out, was the product of a code, was inherently entrenched in, to borrow de Saussure’s terms, ‘a system of differences’. This also turned out to be the case with materiality in general. Science offered no respite from the suffocating realization that everything came down to language. Where was the rough ground, to paraphrase Wittgenstein? The secrets of the universe could be unravelled only by revealing the implicit codes (equations) that governed the identity of things and the relations between them. In the process, science itself declared its findings could not be the final word, could not ever be the final word, on the nature of things. There could be no final word. In its absence, metaphysics just wouldn’t go away. As all final words turned out to be drastically unscientific, as Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend and Kuhn all in their different ways declared, thinking had to have its space. More recently, while expressing a strong commitment to science as a form of knowledge, Bruno Latour has likewise insisted on the social – ultimately – political dimension of science, where a differentiated field is populated by areas that are governed by sometimes intersecting, sometimes radically differing tenets, laws and truth regimes. Whatever claims you might make for science as knowledge, science could never escape from the dimension of discourse and so itself had to be fundamentally semiotic to the core of its ‘nature’, even while the very idea of an essential nature was being problematized by theories of meaning and theories of science at the same time. Knowledge, science, nature were all intricated with the social. We have already learned from Saussure that the semiotics is social and from Benjamin and others that the social is inescapably political.

Nevertheless, politics remains and cannot be entirely substituted by semiotics. Recognition of and emphasis on the semiotic dimension of the social-political interface is part of the rethinking that means that politics is not where we are customarily encouraged to identify its dwelling. Politics transmogrified and migrated at the same time. The semiotic dimension has far-reaching implications for ontopolitics: for the politics of being and identity. In addition, new ways of understanding the institutions of modernity, their social meaning and the kind of politics they brought with them forced a further rethinking of what constituted the space of the political. A ‘great transformation’ had occurred, not just at the level of ideas and language, but in terms of social and political practices themselves. This realization not only represented an exciting challenge for thinking but also represented a problem for political understanding and practice. If politics can no longer be thought of as inhabiting the institutions we are used to associating with it in the way that we habitually think; if politics isn’t the same as what is represented as politics in the conventional academic accounts and the media; if politics (and our understanding of what it is) has become diffusely distributed through spheres of life, how can we get a purchase on what politics is and what we might do with that fresh understanding?

Education as politics

Such a transformation in our thinking of what politics is must mean that we at least review habitual ideas and modes of thinking in relation to collective existence. We might ask if engaging with the practices of (so-called) daily life that the capillary version of the political dimension is minutely and intimately at work encourages or discourages intervention. The approach taken here is concerned less with unrealizable proposals for intervention than with political understanding, on the grounds that rethinking politics seems to problematize the sanguine, everyday ethic of reform. The approach offered here seeks to rethink the politics of education and to rethink politics in terms of education, to re-envision education as the sphere of politics par excellence. On this view, education is not principally concerned with learning, say, or personal growth or with realizing potential. The language of educational understanding misrepresents the meaning of the massive educational apparatuses of our time.

The consequences of such a rethinking of what education is are far more drastic than the currently dominant ethic of reform could possibly envision. What is on offer here is a political ontology of education, concerned to understand the politics of thinking in relation to the apparatus that education has become, concerned with the ontotheological dimension that renders education a world-dominating force. This is where mundane practices – what occurs in the most ordinary everyday educational settings, what goes on in nursery schools, for example, the daily social commerce of universities, the everyday delivery of the National Curriculum – allegedly apolitical everyday entities and practices – are entwined with massive forces of social organization. The social forces enacted through and beyond educational institutions very significantly determine our mutual relations but also our relations with our wider environment. The minutiae of education are political. But so are the grander, global arrangements. To realize the political force of education has enormous repercussions for immediate and urgent global issues. It is no coincidence that the rise of the Anthropocene with its attendant and intensifying ecological catastrophe runs in parallel with the changed relations of governments and populations that occurred over the past 200 years or so. Education as we know it, as idea, apparatus and practice, has been essential to this massive political change.

Political ontology

Some tendencies in western thinking point towards the radical transformation of politics and our understanding of politics or political ontology. This shift includes questions concerning truth and its determination. In recent times, we have become used to the association of truth and politics, but this relation has been around for some time. It is impossible to point to a moment when what we might call the politics of truth emerges, but we can see tendencies already occurring in the split in Kant (in the eighteenth century) between epistemological concerns (and other issues for critical philosophy) and questions of faith, although in Kant’s discourse on enlightenment it is clear that, as Michel Foucault was later to recognize, Kant had positioned himself, as a philosopher, in the guise of the bearer of the critique of modernity in what was to become in effect a great tradition (Foucault, 2007a). Following Kant, Hegel makes the blatant intrusion into philosophy of a conventionally political dimension in claims for the rights of the state, in the tradition of Hobbes, as essential to collective being. But in the discourse on master and slave, a classic exercise in dialectical thinking in The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s account of the logic of recognition indicates, powerfully if implicitly, that there is always already a politics at play in any embodied relation. The logic of the master-slave discourse exerts a fascination for Lacan, psychoanalytic heir to Freud, who incorporates it into his account of the complexities of identity in a field of understanding that we might refer to as a politics of the self. The Lacanian remapping of identity and being, in turn, has decisive resonance for what Althusser later makes of the logic of the self as politics in the idea of interpellation, the mechanism of misrecognition that is fundamental to the politics of identity in modernity.

Both epistemology and ontology enter modernity caught up with a rethinking of collective living. This tendency intensifies through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In philosophy a modal break occurs in philosophy with Nietzsche who eschews the systematic approaches of predecessors for a radically aphoristic mode of presentation. This break problematizes the possibility of truth as a determinate category uncontaminated by the vagaries of any political order. Western philosophy had wrestled with how to constitute truth through its history, preferring to systematically address its provenance. Nietzsche’s engagements with questions of truth are directed towards the situated ‘eye’ that cannot be substituted by some fictional all-seeing, all knowing ‘eye’ on the grounds that the latter couldn’t possibly exist. All knowledge, then, claims Nietzsche with some hilarity that it could ever have been doubted, is always already positioned. And the same goes for morality. Nietzsche effectively proposes an affirmation of truth as an artistic category, albeit in a special sense. Truth is to be forged: something to give oneself to through an act of faith that knows that it is wilfully chosen, as in Nietzsche’s compelling ‘amor fati’. Truth in its public sense is to be rethought as an affirmation of the validity of a certain way of life, the more life-affirming the better.

It is probably oddly paradoxical to declare Heidegger as perhaps the most politically subtle thinker of modern Europe, partly because of his disastrous association with Nazism, but also given his attempt to construct a pre-political, fundamental ontology in Being and Time. The implications of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, though, are politically far-reaching – through a number of keys, associated categories (‘dasein’ or ‘being-there’, ‘care’, anxiety, and particularly ‘mitwelt’) for the development of an expanded understanding of the political. These apparently ‘purely’ existential categories help to reveal the political dimension of the mundane. Some dimensions to this articulation of the essentially political dimension of fundamental ontology are:

• ‘Dasein’ as radically situated (not transcendental capable of apprehending the world all at once) being; this means that dasein’s horizon is always partial, in all senses of that word. This way of rethinking individual and collective subjectivity has big implications in terms of language, as later indicated by thinkers as various as Foucault and Chomsky and earlier by Sapir and Whorf; language has to be understood as a mode of being-in-the-world, rather than as a transparent mode of access to the world;
• ‘Dasein’ is historical through and through, meaning that we always inherit a world not of our own making, even while, as Heidegger later affirms, dasein is ‘world creating’. This dual character of being of the world is still troubling for questions commonly framed in relation to agency. World in this sense means both the material substance of being and the ideational dimension;
• As already implied, ‘dasein’ very much owes its existence to and is defined by ‘mitsein’. Heidegger is the pre-Lacanian philosopher whose fundamental ontology declares the significance of this idea of ‘being-with’. ‘Mitsein’ in this strong sense is well illustrated in the epigram of Marcel Mauss who declared that the world can be divided into those who sit and those who squat – a politics of comportment, as it were. That we tend to do one or the other habitually is not a matter of personal preference but entirely a matter of ‘mitsein’, of the accidental circumstances of our being-with-others. ‘Mitsein’ suggests an anthropolitics and so anticipates the politics of identity articulated, for example, by Bourdieu through the category of ‘habitus’ or by Bernstein through code theory, where our ingrained habits are seen as the product of our interactions with the specific orientations to meaning of our immediate world. Mitsein, habitus and code theory reveal how the outside (social) becomes the inside (personal). This inside/outside relation, where the two are in constant interaction with one another, is a reverse of the classical political formulation of subjects forming worlds and represents a powerful problematic for contemporary ideas of education as liberating.

The politics of meaning

Semiotics emphasizes the social dimension that holds collective meaning together. Saussure’s imagined a science of signs in society founded on the fundamental arbitrariness in the very logic of signification. The arbitrary relation of signifier to signified (in Saussure’s compelling account) means that nothing means what it means except by convention, via ‘mitsein’ that is neither engineered nor controlled. In addition, the arbitrary structure of the sign also means that signification is interminable. This is no merely abstruse pondering, though: it has far-reaching implications for the social politics of meaning that has become a major concern of our times. Meaning has no terminus, apart from what is socially agreed, accepted or enforced. This is as true for science as it is for football commentary. The politics of identity, strongly associated with Lacan, and the politics of being and meaning, strongly associated with Derrida, are both motivated by this realization. This semiotic is strongly identified with the political.

For Lacan, the structure of the sign is related to the idea of a lost object of desire: this lost object is not necessarily a real ‘thing’, a person, say, or an actual object, so much as it is a nearness to what Lacan refers to as the Real. This proximity to ‘the thing in itself’ is properly speaking imaginary anyhow, but that doesn’t make its loss felt any less strongly; in fact, it is the experience of being in language that best explains this sense of loss. For Lacan, language is what hollows being into desire. In a powerful echo of Heidegger’s articulation of fundamental ontology, especially in relation to ‘mitsein’, Lacanian ontology proposes that we inhabit three orders of being simultaneously: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and ‘the Real’, although, perhaps oddly for common-sense, the Real is the most difficult dimension to get in touch with, while at the same time it is omnipresent.

Lacan’s three-way ontology has big implications but came to be applied in the new form of knowledge of the social that was cultural studies. Lacanian ontology implies that there is no essential self and that what we are is predicated on a chain of signification that has no end. At the same time (drawing on Hegel and on Heidegger), identity is conferred upon us in dynamic relations that are fundamentally fabricated through the symbolic order. Lacan’s ontology enabled Louis Althusser, the French Marxist theorist of identity, to indicate the political constitution of subjectivity and the strong subjective dimension of the political. While our access to ‘the Real’ is limited – and poignant – our lives are lived out significantly in a social symbolic order that is always already freighted with a certain intensity. We cannot detach our rational selves from our emotional selves. We cannot know anything independently of our position within a symbolic ordering that is embedded in our very mode of language. Our being in the world is structured by a sense of ourselves that is primarily imaginary. Identity is the partly unconscious perception we have of how others perceive us through symbolically available categories and is significantly structured by strangely spectral surveillance. Education with its emphasis on profiling, assessment and self-regulation is clearly heavily implicated in its own psycho-politics of the person.

Lacanian ontology has far-reaching political implications. It enacts an extension of politics and significantly shifts the political into the realm of meaning. The sources of identity are at stake in this political dimension – sources of the identity of all things, from very mundane things to the ‘things’ that are most powerfully at stake in our world. At the same time, the realm of meaning (the political/symbolic) is intricated with our, apparently, inner most intimate emotional life. Inner and outer here seem to dissolve into one another, the distinction no longer clear. Politics has to be understood anew in relation to this rethinking of psycho-social being. Our thought, our ideas, our conscious intentions and schemes are not separable from the less formal, less accessible but no less powerful dimensions of our being.

The semiotic turn insists on this intertwining of public meanings and ostensibly inward identities. Deconstruction, associated with name of Jacques Derrida, revels in this complex relation while at the same time highlighting the politics of meaning. For one, deconstruction acknowledges of the interminability of meaning, the idea that meanings never come to a stop or achieve closure. We may happily live with a range of determinate meanings that are rarely, if ever in dispute, concerning pencils, oak trees and tables, for instance: although none of these wooden things are quite as simply what they are as that trite assemblage might suggest. Some meanings, however, are far more obviously fraught and carry heavy political implications. The names of places, for instance (consider Israel/Palestine/Derry/Londonderry); but recent movements in personal and cultural politics have insisted that some everyday meanings – ‘normal’, ‘woman’, ‘free’, for example – are equally complicated and subject to challenge, redefinition, dispute. In fact, Derrida’s practice of deconstruction enacts a relation of the mundane realities we habitually live with to philosophy. It turns out that philosophy, or what we might call formal thinking, is always a matter of both reading and re-reading the inherited meanings that we live among. Heritage here is to be understood as the key resource, like a bank for meaning but one that is always incomplete, always allowing for adjustments, refinements and some new additions or investments. Stored texts represent a range of meanings and a potential. Plato is not finished with because of the business of reading. This heritage business though, of course, doesn’t only pertain to great names of the philosophical canon; it also involves all the mundane inherited ideas and meanings we live with and by. Its darker side entails the rather gloomy recognition that the archive of meaning acts like a kind of enclosure that enframes our m...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 What is politics?
• 2 Dimensions of the politics of education 1
• 3 Dimensions of the politics of education 2
• 4 A historical ontology of education
• 5 Apparatus
• 6 The politics of knowledge in our time
• 7 Education and the politics of the self
• 8 The world of education
• 9 The politics of sovereignty
• 10 Conclusion: Education after the death of God
• 23 theses for rethinking the politics of education
• Bibliography or indicative reading
• Index