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POSTSTRUCTURALISM, PHILOSOPHY, PEDAGOGY Philosophy and Education 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. ISBN 1-4020-1894-7 ISBN 1-4020-2602-7 (eBook) Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AADordrecht, The Netherlands. Sold and distributed in North, Central and South America by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AHDordrecht, The Netherlands. Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved ©2010 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. DEDICATION To my late wife Bridget who lived with this from 1994, but did not see the final product, and to my colleagues who have stood with the project. 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 MARK OLSSEN / Erratum to: The School as the Microscope E1 of Conduction: Doing Foucauldian Research in Education vi i 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 xi JAMES D. MARSHALL INTRODUCTION 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 xiii J.D. Marshall (ed), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy, xiii-xxvi. © 2010 Kluwer Academic Publishers. XIV JAMES D. MARSHALL 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.
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