After Postmodernism

Education, Politics And Identity

Richard Smith, Philip Wexler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135718077
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This work presents a set of thematic essays aimed at clarifying the educational problems and paradoxes of postmodern educational conditions and theory. The major concerns of the book are the possibility of achieving substantive political objectives and of theorising such possiblities. These concerns arise from a dissatisfaction with the organisational and political conditions of postmodern educational practice.; The seeming inability of academics to intervene in the public sector, especially in matters of equality, provides a driving force to the book. For individuals who care about the future of education and its role in social reconstruction, the pessimistic nature of postmodern theories of society and education is an additional impetus for the book.; All the chapters exemplify the issues that confront lecturers in contemporary university teacher education contexts. A notable feature of the book is a theme that current theorisation about education and society are historically outmoded and that the future lies in "post" postmodern theories.

Part 1
Theory of Education

1
Liberalism, Postmodernism, Critical Theory and Politics¹

Robert Young

The Failure of Liberal Models of Critical Learning

Liberal theories of criticism, including educational criticism, celebrate the idea of critique, but both poststructuralist and Habermasian views of education find common ground in rejecting liberal models of critique, albeit for partly different reasons. Both approaches may be subjected to a reading which pragmatically seeks to find complementary moments between them. There may be advantages to a reading of this kind, advantages that more oppositionary readings lack.

The central concern of liberal models of education has been the avoidance of ‘indoctrination’. The term itself was coined by one of Dewey’s students (Garrison, 1986). Avoiding indoctrination has generally been defined as so ordering the educational experience that learners come to accept views only on the basis of reasons which seem valid to them as individuals (see Young, 1984). The crucial issue for this account is that of the possibility of the kind of rational autonomy that the theory calls for.

The liberal view of indoctrination leads to a kind of paradox. Reasons cannot be assessed atomistically. As Quine/Duhem and other holistic analyses make clear, reasons take on meaning systemically, because of their imbeddedness in a theoretical context.² Derrida’s view is rather similar. His account of significance leads us to a seamless web of semiotic relations, an archi-écriture rather than to an architectonic. Foucault makes similar points about the systemic character of regimes of power/knowledge, which include complex sets of institutional and discursive relations. Constructivist learning theory rests on a similar schema-related understanding of meaning. Habermas’ view of the ontological implications of discursive redemption of claims has a similar implication. The upshot of all this is: learners cannot understand reasons until they have already acquired a view. Another way of stating the same point is that criticism always presupposes a schema, background, worldview, vorhabe, or tradition. It always works from within a historical/biographical horizon, to borrow Gadamer’s terminology (Gadamer, 1975). Put crudely, in order to be critical you must first be indoctrinated.

This paradox has also been called the paradox of learning (see Bereiter, 1985). In this form, it is expressed as the problem of the conflict between schematically based interpretation of incoming ‘information’ and schema change. The problem is that since interpretation can only occur within a schema, schema transcending experience should be uninterpretable.

Suspicion of the liberal model centres on the adequacy of the notion of the autonomous judgment with which learners already possessed of a worldview, however limited, are supposed to evaluate incoming claims and reasons for their validity. That is no doubt why Foucault makes the otherwise surprising statement that in the issue of pedagogy and power he was ‘…not certain that self-management is what produces the best results. Nothing proves,’ he went on to say, ‘…on the contrary, that that approach isn’t a hindrance.’ (Foucault, 1984). The reason for Foucault’s doubts here must be excavated archaeologically from his works, since he does not comment further, but the gist of it follows Bernauer’s interpretation of Foucault as a ‘mystic’, and Foucault’s own assertion that his thinking about subjectivity rested on a refusal to accept the explicability of either freedom or obedience to a tradition (see Bernauer, 1988; Bernstein, 1991).

The Political Task of Critique

While the psychology and micro-sociology of rational autonomy remain problematic, the macroscopic political task of critique is clearer, at least for perspectives other than liberal ones. There is convergence among various kinds of critical theory on the questions with which a theory of critique and the possibility of critical agency must grapple. Questions of colonialism, power and patriarchy, have joined questions of economic class in the reexamination of the rather transparent notions of rational agency that tended to characterize what Toulmin has called ‘high modern’ understandings of constructive agency (and associated liberal theories of citizenship and politics). Despite differences in the source and kind of power implied by distinctions among patriarchy, political power, power/knowledge, colonialism, and class it might be useful to gloss all of these as problems of ontogenetic power—the power to create ‘reality’.

Accordingly, critique becomes a problem of freedom or access to some opportunity to intervene in creating or inscribing reality. For instance, it is implicit in Derrida’s claims for deconstruction that it offers a means of ‘taking a position’. Derrida states that ‘Deconstruction is not [politically] neutral. It intervenes’. (Derrida, 1991). Similarly, Foucault has more than once endorsed what he calls the ‘critical principle’ of symmetrical dialogue as the means whereby intellectuals can have a role in undermining the networks of power/ knowledge in modern societies (Foucault, 1984). And in recent discussions of colonialism by poststructurally influenced thinkers such as Spivak (1987), Niranjana (1992), the possibility of a form of critical dialogue, although earlier condemned, has again been canvassed, as it is recognized that colonized peoples must go beyond ‘nativist’ responses which simply react by rejecting the colonizer and by uncritical celebration of myths of the colonized.

Habermas, as is well known, has always endorsed the possibility of more or less critical dialogues. In his own linguistic turn, post-1978 (Habermas, 1978), he has theorized the possibility of interpretation in terms of critical validity judgments of speakers and hearers. For Habermas, to understand what someone is saying it is necessary to understand the claims of an ontic, ethical and personal kind being made. These claims go beyond the semantic content of what is being said to the implied claims of a background of commitments—a world—in which the speech concerned finds its frame of reference. Interlocutors, as a normal part of understanding speech or writing, understand not only in what worlds the specific claims of the present talk are being made, but also to what extent these claims are in agreement or disagreement with their own understandings of those worlds. As I pointed out recently, this means that interlocutors ordinarily are aware of the weight of any particular claims, if by weight we stipulate: the logical ramifications of a claim within a world.³ In turn, the weight of a claim is a part of its meaning. Claims mean partly by virtue of their weight. Of course, Habermas goes on to elucidate the assumptions of interlocutors about communication when they are oriented to understanding each other, pointing out that these are counterfactual or as if assumptions. Initially, he tried to elaborate this dimension of his theory using quasi- Kantian categories, such as the notion of communicative universals or the ‘ideal speech situation’, but since 1986 he has abandoned these, retreating to a more modest analysis of the presence of counterfactual thinking in communication, the details of which need not delay us here, except to say it would be reasonable to gloss this thought as the assertion that would-be communicators hope for an as yet unachieved state of understanding and proceed in the present in the light of that hope.

There is also something of a convergence on the issues which must be dealt with in any account of the conditions that a theory must satisfy if it is to be critical—in the political dimension this means that the theory has to account for the possibility of a communicatively achieved undermining of communicatively constructed domination, since the problems of politics are essentially problems of the tension between power and freedom. The convergence concerned can be constructed as a recognition of the significance of the attitude toward ‘the other of dialogue’. Some theorists go little beyond acknowledgment of respect for the otherness of the other (see Bernstein, 1991). Other theorists explore the many ways in which apparent dialogic openness can mask various forms of surreptitious denial of the other’s right to make claims in discourse from their own genuine starting point (see Derrida, 1992). In Foucault’s final works, the possibility of knowing this starting point and the ethical disciplines for discovering it when it is hidden from us were the focus of theoretical attention (Foucault, 1986).

What we can learn from many sources, from Nietszche, through Adorno and Heidegger, to Habermas, Foucault and Derrida is that the conditions necessary for fully open dialogue cannot exist in real, historically and biographically situated dialogue. Openness is at best, a matter of degree. The problem of the other in dialogue is central in any critical conception of dialogue. If situations where the parties to talk around a problem do not have equal rights to communicate, or do not have equal freedom from internal constraints are unavoidable, how can we speak of some process of critique through openness to the other of dialogue? In such situations, learning cannot be critical, it would seem, because both problem-definition and schema-change for at least one class of participants will not reflect the success criteria of that class of participants. What results is domination in class, patriarchal or colonial terms. As we will see below, where different critical theories differ, is in the account they give of the possibility of overcoming distortion in this dialogic process. However, I would like to signal a crucial distinction here. It is the distinction between an absolute criterion, even if it is a hidden absolute, and an historical, developmental one. Some readings of postmodern thought display a tendency toward a kind of absolutism of relativism, where a cautious, evolutionary perspective might be more appropriate, as Derrida’s discussions of emergent teleology would indicate.

Scepticism and Hope

Poststructuralist statements about the immersion of knowledge in power, or about the ineffability of meaning, may be felicitously read as methodological devices of a sceptical trajectory, rather than as absolute claims. If so, there is room for the hidden humanism of these approaches to be read between the performatory detail of their writing.

In the light of this form of reading, we need to go beyond characterizing poststructuralism as simple scepticism, as Bernstein did (Bernstein, op. cit.). A closer examination of the sceptical traditions reveals Foucault’s position as a subspecies of scepticism called ‘fideism’. The (academic) sceptical position, following Arcesilas c.315–241 BC, holds that no true belief is possible through reason. The fideist variety of it nonetheless holds that it is possible still to simply adopt a position on faith, and that would appear to be just what Foucault does. He rejects the model of the self as capable of potentially autonomous reason and replaces it with a fideistic model of the care and creation of the self through aesthetic, ethical and ascetic means. Derrida’s fideism is more open.

Derrida addresses the possibility of rational autonomy more indirectly. He speaks of ‘letting be’ whereby we allow the other sufficient respect to be other and of the relationship of this letting be to freedom. He writes of ‘choosing’ to accept an inscription directed toward our identity or of rejecting it. But he undercuts the liberal idea of a responsive, reasoning dialogue by deconstructing the idea of claim and response, as well as by deconstructing the idea of intended meaning:

The overweening presumption from which no response will ever be free not only has to do with the fact that the response claims to measure up to the discourse of the other, to situate it, understand it, indeed, circumscribe it by responding thus to the other and before the other. The respondent presumes, with as much frivolity as arrogance, that he can respond to the other and before the other because, first of all he is able to answer for himself…(Derrida, op. cit., p. 17)

Nevertheless, he also affirms the possibility of authorship. He does not fly straight to the opposite position to that adopted by liberal thought but rather moves toward a displacement of its oppositions.

Habermas deals with these issues more clumsily, but not necessarily less powerfully. First, the idea of transparent giving and evaluating of reasons in Habermas’ theory is an idea of counterfactual conditions of dialogue (Habermas, 1990). In a number of places he describes the empirical conditions that prevent genuine dialogue from occurring, including aspects of the development of subjectivity (Habermas, 1982). The purpose of struggles around these empirical conditions, both personal and social, is not to achieve the counterfactual state, nor are they to be measured by comparisons with an ideal of perfectly reciprocal and open dialogue. The purpose of struggles around issues of voice and who gets the speaking parts in the drama of the social construction of reality is strategic. And strategy is a fallible, pragmatic art—a social art as well as an individual art of the care of the self.⁴ Strategy can be guided by models for thinking, and the counterfactual idea of unconstrained communication is a model for thinking with—in an apophatic way (and therefore in a way functionally quite similar to the tropes of poststructuralist sceptical fideism) (see Bernstein, op. cit.).

While Habermas now allows that his model of the ideal speech situation was too static and detached to be useful, he nonetheless continues to argue for the necessity of the counterfactual imagination in critique (Habermas, 1990). With this imagination we are able to engage in an ethic of care for the other through communicative respect—one which tackles both obstacles to autonomy and to solidarity (without domination). To hyperinflate the ‘otherness’ of the other without a corresponding recognition of desire or passion—a unitative emotion—is to give in to a universalization of the sense of alienation characteristic of French intellectuals. Derrida honours the other, Foucault honours the self, both effectively stumble when they reach toward the possibility of bridging the gap between persons. They reject the liberal account of the autonomous reasoning agent because they take the classical sceptical position that all knowledge claims must be asserted in bad faith, but in rejecting liberal claims on these grounds they also reject the very possibility of communicatively achieved ethical progress. They nonetheless reaffirm this possibility fideistically, each in his own way.

Certainly, Habermas does not theorize dialogue convincingly or fully. Foucault’s agonized attempts to come to some rapprochement with his own sado-masochistic and self-destructive sexuality, led to his final reflections, which offer us more insight into our inwardness and our inner dialogue; Derrida’s ‘affirmative interpretations’ offer us more insight about the many forms of imposition of our self upon the other of communication. But Habermas is right to insist that we desire more. Perhaps Richard Bernstein’s injunction for us to hold the thought of Derrida and Habermas in productive tension—not as a synthesis, but as a constellation—might be appropriate, if minimalist, advice for us to follow, at least as far as the account of dialogue and its role in pedagogy is concerned (Bernstein, op. cit.). If so, we must be concerned in pedagogical dialogue with the desire for oneness and the problem of otherness, and keep open the possibility of ‘letting difference be’ as a pedagogical outcome. In other words, we must keep liberal hope alive, whi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part 1: Theory of Education
• Part 2: Pedagogy
• Part 3: Identity
• Part 4: Politics