POSTSTRUCTURALISM, PHILOSOPHY, PEDAGOGY

VOLUME 12
Series Editor: Robert E. Floden, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, U.S.A. Kenneth R. Howe, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, U.S.A.
Editorial Board David Bridges, Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K. Jim Garrison, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, U.S.A. Nel Noddings, Stanford University, CA, U.S.A. Shirley A. Pendlebury, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Denis C. Phillips, Stanford University, CA, U.S.A. Kenneth A. Strike, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, U.S.A.
SCOPE OF THE SERIES
There are many issues in education that are highly philosophical in character. Among these issues are the nature of human cognition; the types of warrant for human beliefs; the moral and epistemological foundations of educational research; the role of education in developing effective citizens; and the nature of a just society in relation to the educational practices and policies required to foster it. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any issue in education that lacks a philosophical dimension.
The sine qua non of the volumes in the series is the identification of the expressly philosophical dimensions of problems in education coupled with an expressly philosophical approach to them. Within this boundary, the topics—as well as the audiences for which they are intended—vary over a broad range, from volumes of primary interest to philosophers to others of interest to a more general audience of scholars and students of education.
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy
Edited by
JAMES D. MARSHALL School of Education, The University of Auckland, New Zealand
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
Sold and distributed in North, Central and South America by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A.
In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 200 Kluwer Academic Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
ISBN 1-4020-1894-7
4
DEDICATION
but did not see the final product, and to my colleagues who have stood with the project.
To my late wife Bridget who lived with this from 1994,
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction xiii JAMES D. MARSHALL / French Philosophy and Education:
World War II-1968 1 GERT BIESTA / Education after Deconstruction 27 MICHAEL PETERS / Lyotard, Marxism and Education: The Problem of Knowledge Capitalism 43 MARK OLSSEN / The School as the Microscope of Conduction: 57 Doing Foucauldian Research in Education
JOHN R. MORSS / Gilles Deleuze and the Space of Education: Poststructuralism, Critical Psychology, and Schooled Bodies 85 STEPHEN APPEL / Lacan, Representation, and Subjectivity: Some Implications for Education 99 LYNDA STONE / Julia Kristeva’s ‘Mystery’ of the Subject in Process 119
vii
of Conduction: Doing Foucauldian Research in Education
PREFACE
This book has been quite long in the making. In its original format, but with some different chapters, and with the then publisher, it foundered (as did other volumes in the planned series). At the in press stage, when we obviously thought it was going ahead, it was suddenly canned. Quite distraught I closed it away in a desk drawer for a year or so. But then Joy Carp of Kluwer Academic Publishers expressed an interest in it, and we were in business again. Most of the contributors to the original volume have stayed with it, only to be delayed by myself, for a variety of reasons (but see the dedication).
I had been writing on Michel Foucault for a number of years but had become concerned about mis-appropriations of his ideas and works in educational literature. I was also concerned about the increasingly intemperate babble in that literature of the notion of postmodernism. Indeed at one major educational conference in North America I listened to a person expounding postmodernism in terms of ‘Destroy, Destroy, Destroy’. Like Michel Foucault I am not quite sure what postmodernism is, but following Mark Poster’s account of poststructuralism - as merely a collective term to catch a number of French thinkers – I thought that what we had to do in education was to look at what particular thinkers had said, and not become involved in vapid discussion at an abstract level on ‘-isms’.
Thus the book was conceived. Jim Marshall
ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my colleagues who have contributed to this volume for their persistence and perseverance. I am most grateful to the original contributors, to Lynda Stone for coming on board, and of course to Kluwer Academic Publishers for their support.
In the Introduction and Chapter One, I have drawn upon material previously published in 1995 and 1996, particularly upon chapters 1 and 2 of my Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996).
I wish to thank Ho-Chia Cheuh, Jean Gibbons and Andrew Lavery for their assistance in formatting the text.
Jim Marshall
1. POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM
In contemporary philosophical and social thought we are being challenged by ideas and practices referred to by the terms ‘postmodern’ and ‘poststructural’. Traditional Anglo- American analytic philosophy has been mainly hostile to these ideas. For example the recent proposal to award Jacques Derrida an honorary doctorate at the University of Cambridge was met by considerable hostility and objection (see e.g., Smith, 1992). Given that burst of outrage a comment on philosophy by George Simmel would seem to be quite appropriate: “philosophy is its own first problem”. Simmel’s point is that philosophers do not seem to agree either on what philosophy is, or on how to do philosophy, culminating in a myopic, if not paranoic tendency by them to turn their skills and methodology inwards and upon themselves to settle such disputes and arrive at the nature of philosophy. Instead Simmel described philosophy as “the temperament expressed by a certain world view” (Simmel, 1959, p. 294).
But what is also at stake is the authority of philosophy and the status of academic philosophy, for if there is no grand meta-narrative such as philosophy to provide firm foundations for other forms of thought, then philosophy becomes at best but one narrative amongst others. Ludwig Wittgenstein had made this point in his approach to doing philosophy. For him philosophical puzzles arose (Wittgenstein, 1953) when language “went on holiday”. To do philosophy then was not to puzzle over some grand conceptual schema but to resolve the puzzles generated from language. Philosophy could not therefore operate from a position of authority. Because of this there was little point in philosophy as conceived by academia, according to Wittgenstein. The making of this point did not endear him to the philosophical establishment.
The aim of this book is to provide an historical and a conceptual background to post-structuralism, and in part to post-modernism, for readers entering the discussions on poststructuralism. It does not attempt to be at the cutting edge of these debates nor to be advancing research in these areas. Instead it concentrates on the historical and intellectual background whilst at the same time introducing some of the key French poststructuralist thinkers. However each of the chapters also looks at the educational implications of the ideas discussed.
Michel Foucault, who can be described as a poststructuralist (although he resisted all attempts to categorise him and his work [e.g., 1977, p. 114]), comes close to
J.D. Marshall (ed), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy, xiii-xxvi. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
JAMES D. MARSHALL
XIV
Simmel’s and Wittgenstein’s views on philosophy in interpreting Kant’s notion of the Enlightenment not as involving a universal world view, or as laying firm epistemological foundations for knowledge, but as representing an attitude towards the present (Foucault, 1984). Kant had posed the question concerning Man as to where we were at the present, of understanding the meaning of our own life. For Kant the improvement of mankind was to be achieved through the critical use of reason in its universal applications. While Foucault agreed with Kant on the importance of reason, that reason must be critical, and that we must have the courage to use reason, he disagreed with him on the notion of a universal reason. The failure by philosophers post-Kant to question the application of reason which had pretensions to universality in applications to human dilemmas had produced what Foucault called the post-Kantian slumbers.
Foucault resisted the term ‘postmodern’ often claiming that he did not understand it. If postmodernism is a movement which is rapidly increasing in influence, both within and without education, it is far from clear what “it” is, as that term is used by writers in a number of different and often conflicting ways. Whilst it is an increasingly familiar term for describing intellectual tendencies or eras its use nevertheless remains controversial.
The term ‘postmodern’ surfaces in the 1930s and 1940s mainly in relation to the arts, including history, and architecture (Rose, 1991). However to talk of modernism and post-modernism as periods or epochs, may be itself to adopt a modernist stance, namely that it is possible to delineate the characteristics of a period and, thereby, to be beyond that period. As periods are always past this may be to fall into a modern trap. It may be better to see it as a complex map of late 20th century thought and practice rather than any clear cut philosophic, political and/or aesthetic movement (Marshall and Peters, 1992).
Is the distinction between the modern and the postmodern merely polemical or does it indicate major and important philosophical differences? If it is the latter philosophers will have to worry about it, for something like a Kuhnian style paradigm shift may be occurring in philosophy. If so some philosophers may be left behind. The paradigm shift question has been formulated explicitly, and debated, by Jean François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas. Whereas Lyotard rejoices in the shift away from post-Enlightenment thought, totalising thought, and the philosophical ‘certainty’ of meta-narratives, Habermas wishes to preserve what was important in the Enlightenment’s view of reason.
Fredric Jameson begins his forward to (the [1984] translation of) Lyotard [1979]) with this observation:
(postmodernism) involves a radical break, both with dominant culture and aesthetic, and with a rather different moment of socioeconomic organization against which its structural novelties and innovations are measured: a new social or economic moment (or even system). Lyotard’s (1979) well known definition is that ‘postmodern’ is an “incredulity towards meta- narratives” but in the main this position is also held by poststructuralists.
INTRODUCTION XV
In summary then we can note an antagonism towards poststructuralism and postmodernism by both Anglo-American analytic philosophers and also by social theorists, e.g., Habermas and some marxists, who hold still to the tenets of the Enlightenment message of emancipation through critical reason. To a large extent the focus of this criticism has been on French philosophy, and on those thinkers caught by the term “poststructuralist” and who are represented in this collection.
2. POSTSTRUCTURALISM
The emphasis in this volume is on poststructuralism because it is easier to catch a group of thinkers with this term than with the term ‘postmodern’. It also catches a group of thinkers/philosophers who have provided alternative ways of doing philosophy and whose work has considerable implications for education. But first something more needs to be said in general about poststructuralism.
If it is very difficult to define postmodernism it is also very difficult to define ‘poststructuralism’ (and indeed structuralism) in any homogeneous manner, and to classify philosophers normally caught by the notion of poststructuralism. If it were thought that poststructuralism could be defined against, or in opposition to, the philosophical movement called structuralism which had emerged in the 1960s, unfortunately, there is no one doctrine that can be called structuralism either, and there is no homogenous set of thinkers caught by the term ‘structuralist’. To treat structuralism and structuralists homogeneously is to make a mistake which, according to Michael Peters (1996, p. 22), “has been compounded indefinitely”.
If there is no one thing called structuralism to define poststructuralism against, a search for a definition might turn then to identifying some set of characteristics, or an essence. But no definition is forthcoming from this turn either, as there is little caught by the term ‘poststructuralism’ other than a widely differing, diverse and multi-faceted group of theses and thinkers. Those caught by the term do not necessarily define themselves consciously against aspects or versions of structuralism for, in some cases, their positions had developed from structuralism (e.g., Jacques Lacan), and for others their positions had been developed elsewhere. In July 1967 a cartoon by Maurice Henry appeared in La Quinzaine Littéraire, depicting Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Roland Barthes and Foucault as structuralists by their tribal costumes. But that is hardly to provide a definition (for the tribal costume depicts shared characteristics, and it is not obvious what they are), and as a definition by enumeration it was false as, arguably, Foucault had never been a structuralist and Lacan was to become a poststructuralist.
Mark Poster (1988, p. 8) points out that in fact the term ‘poststructuralism’ was coined by North American academics to pull together a group of diverse thinkers. In his work on the mode of information (Poster, 1993) he draws upon Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean François Lyotard, But also caught in the net are, amongst others, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and arguably Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan. Most of these thinkers are discussed in the following chapters.
JAMES D. MARSHALL
XVI
At best we might use the terms ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’, as part of a putative definition, but they hardly lead to an homogeneous grouping able to provide a core definition. Perhaps in France we can look at the linguistic turn taken by poststructuralists. This was not the logico-linguistic turn taken by Anglo-American twentieth century philosophy. It was more like the turn taken by the later Wittgenstein who forcefully argued that the linguistic turn, in so far as it sought to furnish meta- narratives which were foundational, was mistaken. Structuralism had taken a linguistic turn earlier in that language took on a life of its own in which meaning was not given by a conscious being but was given by its place in a total language structure. Poststructuralism departs from this. As Lyotard puts it in “Wittgenstein ‘After’”:
The examination of language games, just like the critique of the faculties, identifies and reinforces the separation of language from itself. There is no unity to language; there are islands of language, each of them ruled by a different regime, untranslatable into others. This dispersion is good in itself, and ought to be respected (Lyotard, 1993, p. 20).
Lyotard uses the plurality of language to launch attacks on any conception of
universal reason and the unity of the subject. In Foucault’s hands language or discourse constitutes the subject in Discipline and Punish through what seems to be a performatve effect (Austin, 1962) though Foucault does not use this idea himself. The subject is neither unified nor an individuated substance in the later Foucault. Instead it is said to be a form which can be filled out by different linguistic descriptions, not all of which are identical (Foucault, 1984b, p. 290).
However in my view it is best to look in detail at some individual poststructuralist philosophers, their approach to philosophical issues and their approach to education, and not try to encapsulate them in any broad encompassing definition. This is an implicit theme of the collection as it prevents distortion of their differences and diversity, and contributes to the preservation of their individual and unique philosophical positions. For these reasons the introduction will be brief, though I provide a considerable background to the emergence of poststructuralism in France since World War II in chapter 1.
But difference and diversity have further dimensions as these poststructuralists were not particularly friendly to one another. Their personal differences were not just promoted by versions of Parisien chic, petty jealousies, and disputes of an academic kind but, rather, they were to do with how the life of the public and general intellectual in France is to be perceived and lived. As Simmel noted philosophy is a temperament exhibited as an aspect of a world view.
3. ANTI-HUMANISM
Henri Bergson, who was the first French philosopher to launch attacks against the social sciences, was influential upon Merleau-Ponty who lectured upon him. Both Sartre and
INTRODUCTION XVII
Foucault reacted to Bergson, but in different ways, with Foucault taking an anti- humanist position. Poststructuralists do share at least this feature -anti-humanism - though even this was shared with others, e.g., the structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the marxist structuralist Louis Althusser. Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism was one of the anti- humanist attacks in French philosophy which had begun in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The particular targets of these attacks were humanistic existentialism and the marxist existentialism of Sartre (Claude Lévi-Strauss launched almost a personal attack upon Sartre).
Humanism, which purported to liberate human beings, had, according to Martin Heidegger’s critique of humanism, only oppressed them. Heidegger had a considerable influence upon French philosophy and upon thinkers as diverse and opposed as Sartre and Foucault. This anti-humanist theme of the 1960s can be characterised as involving (see chapter 1) a theme of the end of philosophy, which was to be replaced by genealogy, its universal theses were to be replaced by the historical and the concrete, and absolute truth (especially the correspondence theory of truth) was to be abandoned. The basis of this rejection is well summarised by Deleuze in his very influential book Nietzsche and Philosophy, originally published in 1962 (see chapter 1).
For some commentators poststructuralists are the heirs of Nietzsche, and Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche the key Nietzschean text (see e.g., chapters 3 and 5 below by Michael Peters and John Morss respectively). We should note then the importance accorded by poststructuralists to the pessimism of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the decline of Western civilisation (this pessimism is to be found also in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein), and the critiques of humanism and its promises of development, improvement and emancipation.
In the Universities in the 1950s and 1960s the philosophical curriculum followed two broad paths. The first, which most students followed, was based upon a revisionism of the philosophy of Descartes and Kant through the works of Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger, and the early teaching and translations of Kojève and Hyppolite. In general terms we are talking about humanism and marxism, and existentialism and phenomenolgy in particular. In the 1950s this was to be exemplified by the writings of Sartre and the writings and teaching of Merleau-Ponty. The second general, but less fashionable strand in France, was to be developed from Nietzsche’s reading of Kant through Heidegger and, Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski. It built also upon the ideas of philosophy of science, developed from Jean Cavaillès, but in the work of Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser. Foucault sites himself firmly in this second strand and it is this teaching which had strong influences upon the poststructuralists.
Habermas (1981) notes and rues this direction of thought, seeing it as involving a return to conservatism.
JAMES D. MARSHALL
4.…