Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject

An Educational Philosophy and Theory Post-Structuralist Reader, Volume I

Michael A. Peters, Marek Tesar, Michael A. Peters, Marek Tesar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138915923
• eBook ISBN: 9781317425687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This first volume focuses on a collection of texts from the latter twenty years of Educational Philosophy and Theory, selected for their critical status as turning points or important awakenings in post-structural theory. In the last twenty years, the applications of the postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives have become less mono-focused, less narrowly concerned with technical questions and also less interested in epistemology, and more interested in ethics.

This book covers questions of genealogy, ontology, the body and the institution, giving examples of theoretical applications of post-structural theory that testify to the generative and endlessly applicable potential of this work to different fields and avenues of thought. While informed by Foucault's thinking of the political subjugation of docile bodies to individuals as self-determining beings, the chapters in this book culminate in amalgamations of different schools of educational philosophy, which explore poststructuralist approaches to education.

Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject will be key reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, philosophy, education, educational theory, post-structural theory, the policy and politics of education, and the pedagogy of education.

Chapter 1
Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject

Liberalism, Education and the Critique of Individualism

Michael A. Peters and James Marshall

Editors’ Introduction

Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject: Liberalism, Education and the Critique of Individualism is a paper written by Michael A. Peters and James Marshall. In this seminal article they think with theorists and philosophers about the philosophy of the subject. This paper also gave name to the EPAT Post-Structuralist Reader. In this paper they argue their point of the exhaustion of the philosophy of the subject and the bankruptcy of one particular set of liberal practices and institutions based on this paradigm. What they refer to as the death of the subject links to the intellectual demise of the project of liberal schooling and education. They consider the Cartesian-Kantian tradition of the epistemological subject as the fount of all knowledge and moral action. That notion, they argue, irrespective of nomenclature, has surfaced most obviously in the behavioural postulate of a renewed classical liberal economics which has guided neo-conservatives in policy arrangements to redraw the boundaries between the public and the private, in setting the parameters for easing the transition toward the so-called “post-industrial” society. The postulate of homo economicus, one of the main tenets of new right economic thinking, holds that people should be treated as ‘rational utility-maximisers’ in all of their behaviour. Thus, as they claim, individuals seek to further their own interests, defined in terms of measured net wealth positions in politics as in other aspects of their behaviour. Using Foucault they argue for the existence of different forms of power (and different forms of resistance), and they claim that this means recognising empirically the historical modes of subjection of individuals which relate directly to questions of government construed in the widest sense. This is also the necessary first stage toward recognizing the obstacles to promoting a conception of radical democracy, which emphasises effective forms of community control and participation, and towards thinking beyond the philosophy of the subject.

If there is one thing that Jürgen Habermas and his arch-rival poststructuralist critics can agree on it is the idea that the tradition of the philosophy of consciousness—of subject-centred reason—is now exhausted. Habermas (1987), in seeking to resurrect the philosophical discourse of modernity, suggests that the paradigm of the philosophy of the subject be replaced by the paradigm of mutual understanding between subjects capable of speech and action. His claim is that Hegel and Marx did not achieve this change, neither did Heidegger, nor Derrida and Foucault. They all remain, apart from Foucault, caught up in “the intention of Ursprungiphilosophie”. Foucault, in attempting to escape the metaphysics of the self-referential subject, “veered off into a theory of power that has shown itself to be a dead end” (Habermas, 1987:296). Only by replacing the paradigm of the subject—“of the relation-to-self of a subject knowing and acting in isolation”—with that of mutual understanding is it possible once again to take up the counter-discourse inherent in modernity and to lead it away from both the Hegelian and Nietzschean paths which have been proven to lead us nowhere. Such a paradigm, Habermas argues, still allows a critique of Western “logocentrism” but it is one which emerges in a determinate form to recognise that the predecessor paradigm suffered from a deficit rather than an excess of rationality. The paradigm of mutual understanding which emphasises an intersubjectivity inscribed in ordinary communication is, of course, most fully developed and worked through in Habermas’ theory of communicative action. Here validity claims immanent in ordinary talk are said to be discursively redeemable at the level of discourse.

Whether Habermas (1987) is correct in claiming that Derrida and Foucault are philosophically astray in their respective attempts to overcome the metaphysics of self-presence or to unravel the modern construction of the subject, is not the primary purpose of this paper. Whether Habermas’ own project of defending the impulse of the Enlightenment and modernity through a rational reconstruction of the universal pragmatic conditions or presuppositions inherent in the notion of a transparent speech community is a successful or viable enterprise is, likewise, not an overriding concern here. Our starting point is the exhaustion of the philosophy of the subject and the bankruptcy of one particular set of liberal practices and institutions based on this paradigm. More cryptically, to the so-called “death of the subject” corresponds the intellectual demise of the project of liberal schooling and education. Historically, liberal institutions (prisons, courts, psychiatric institutions etc), including that of the school and the modern university, have legitimated themselves and their practices by reference to the discourse of the philosophy of subject-centred reason. The Cartesian-Kantian tradition conceived of the epistemological subject as the fount of all knowledge, signification and moral action. In transhistorical terms liberal philosophers pictured the subject within a set of highly individualistic assumptions as standing separate from, and logically prior to, society and culture. These same assumptions vitiate the planning and policy documents of liberal capitalist and democratic societies. The individual is conceptualised in theory, and seen in practice, as the primitive unit of economic and political analysis, the ultimate beyond which one cannot go. These same assumptions, but in a revitalised form, now surface in the neo-liberal (and neo-conservative) critique and reform of the welfare state and of education. Underlying these reforms of education in countries like the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are a set of assumptions which reify a form of individualism. Sometimes this form of individualism is referred to as abstract individualism; more commonly it has been christened possessive individualism. The notion, irrespective of nomenclature, has surfaced most obviously in the behavioural postulate of a renewed classical liberal economics which has guided neo-conservatives in policy arrangements to redraw the boundaries between the public and the private, in setting the parameters for easing the transition toward the so-called “post-industrial” society. The postulate of homo economicus, one of the main tenets of new right economic thinking, holds that people should be treated as “rational utility-maximisers” in all of their behaviour. In other words, individuals seek to further their own interests, defined in terms of measured net wealth positions in politics as in other aspects of their behaviour.

The project of liberal mass schooling and higher education in the late twentieth-century is built on the liberal intellectual authority inherited from the Enlightenment. It is grounded in a European universalism and rationalism heavily buttressed by highly individualist assumptions. It is these assumptions and the authority which rests upon them that is now being called into question and with it both neo-conservative and left radical attempts to reform education. “Postmodernism” is the broad cultural phenomenon of Western societies which best typifies this questioning and the attempt to find new cultural and political orientations.

At one level, “postmodernism” has come to refer to a form of cultural analysis focusing on changes in forms of production and modes of consumption. It is closely related to a break with foundational philosophy and with the rejection of universalist claims of totalising social theory. Specifically, postmodernism as a critique of modernist social theory serves to radically decentre the subject, the cornerstone of both liberalism and Marxism (though in different ways).

In this respect the so-called “postmodernist” (poststructural) critique of the subject which is clearly evident in the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and others, has found favour with a number of feminist writers who have accepted and applied these insights in novel ways (e.g. see Nicholson, 1990). Flax (1990:43), for instance, acknowledges how postmodern discourses make us sceptical about beliefs derived from the Enlightenment concerning truth, knowledge and the self that are taken for granted and serve as legitimation for contemporary western culture. In her view, feminists, like other postmodernists are beginning to suspect that all such transcendental claims reflect and reify the experience of a few persons—mostly white, Western males?

Frederic Jameson (1985:115) distinguishes two clear positions on the critique of individualism. The first is an historical thesis closely connected to the changing conditions of modern capitalism:

In the classical age of competitive capitalism, in the heyday of the nuclear family and the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic social class, there was such a thing as individualism, as individual subjects. But today, in the age of corporate capitalism, of the so-called organization man, of bureaucracies in business as well as the state, of demographic explosion—today, that older bourgeois individual subject no longer exists.

The second position Jameson identifies—that of the poststructuralist critique—is regarded as more radical (ibid.):

It adds, not only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth; it never really existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of that type. Rather, this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification which sought to persuade people that they “had” individual subjects and possessed this unique personal identity.

Of the two positions the latter is more philosophically interesting and productive, for it exposes or unmasks the individualism of liberation, and its rejuvenated form in neo-liberal thinking as ideological at the stage of history when this form of ideology has achieved hegemonic proportions.

This paper in the first section provides an introduction to some of the issues surrounding the theme of the exhaustion of the philosophy of the subject. In the second section, it relates these issues to what has become known as the “communitarian critique” of different forms of liberal individualism. Yet in different ways both liberalism and the communitarian critique do not take into account the “postmodernist” critique of the subject. One seeks to develop the individual as the ultimate unit of analysis; the other substitutes a notion of the “social self”. Both, in effect, do not take into account the decentring of the subject and the consequences of such a view for notions of the individual and the “social self”. To this extent they are tied into a basic opposition (individualism versus community) which has yet to be overcome. The third and final section, carries through the analysis by examining Foucault’s theory of power as it relates to the disciplinary society and the way in which human beings are made individual subjects. It is suggested that Foucault’s notion of the subject significantly bypasses issues between liberals and communitarians.

I

The Exhaustion of the Philosophy of the Subject

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1989), responding to Jean-François Lyotard’s recent attempt to define the postmodern, goes beyond Lyotard to suggest that not only the project of the great discourse of emancipation but also, more fundamentally, the philosophical project itself—as it was inaugurated for the West by the Greeks—is either finished or no longer sustainable. It has been completed in its possibilities. Since Hegel, he maintains, its possibilities have been exhausted. Even in its post-Hegelian forms (that of Marxism and of the form represented by Nietzsche), he claims, the modern surpasses an exhaustion of the discourse of emancipation to show all the signs of the end of the philosophy of the subject and the project of Western philosophy in general. He writes (1989: 12):

The modern is, rather, the unfolding in all its forms of a finishing philosophy of the subject. And this is the case even with technoscience, to use Lyotard’s term, which is autonomous in the sense that it is its own subject. And with the postmodern, which is a retrenchment onto the little subject after the failure of the great subject (subject of history, or subject of Humanity).

Lyotard (1989), replying to Lacoue-Labarthe, disagrees. He considers it a mistake to talk of the philosophy of the subject in terms of classical Greek philosophy. In this he may have had in mind that the philosophy of the subject, echoing Foucault’s assertion of “man” being a recent invention, begins with the birth of modern philosophy on the ground tilled by Descartes and later by Kant. At any event Lyotard (1989:14) wants to disabuse Lacoue-Labarthe of the notion that the postmodern is just a retreat of the big subject into the small subject. At the same time he points to a movement in the history of philosophy, of what he calls an anti- or a non-subject philosophy, to call into question more general assertions about the end of philosophy. That the philosophy of the subject is at an end, however, is not in dispute. It is a theme which runs through much German and French modern philosophy. Seyla Benhabib (1986:343–4), for instance, writes:

No idea has been as central to the tradition of critical social theory as the belief that the exercise of human reason is essential to the attainment of moral autonomy and fulfilment, public justice and progress. This idea, which critical theory showed with the great thinkers of the bourgeois Enlightenment from Hobbes to Kant, was never really repudiated.

Benhabib (1986:344) charts a series of movements leading to an impasse: Hegel’s critique of Kant’s pure reason which emphasised the unfolding of reason in history; Marx’s critique of Hegel initiating the turn from the reflective to the productive subject; the early Frankfurt School’s appropriation of insights from both Hegel and Marx to emphasise “that the autonomous subject was not an isolated Cartesian ego, but a historically and socially situated, concrete, and embodied self”.

Yet, even combining such insights, the reinterpretation of the autonomous subject as the subject of history came to sound increasingly empty after the Holocaust and the horrors of Stalinism. It seemed that the two legacies of the Enlightenment—technical and practical reason—were incompatible and that nothing of value could be redeemed from the Enlightenment outside of the notion of instrumentality. Benhabib (1986:345) comments:

This impasse indicated that the shift from the reflective subject of idealism to the productive subject of Marxism offered no real alternatives.

Habermas’ “move” from the paradigm of the philosophy of the subject which incorporates Marx’s notion of the productive subject, to the paradigm of mutual understanding is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Critical Ontology of Ourselves
• Acknowledgements
• Citation Information
• 1 Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject: Liberalism, Education and the Critique of Individualism
• 2 Peters and Marshall on the Philosophy of the Subject
• 3 After the Subject: A Response to Mackenzie
• 4 Michel Foucault: Problematising the Individual and Constituting ‘the’ Self
• 5 Governmental, Political and Pedagogic Subjectivation: Foucault with Rancière
• 6 Derrida, Pedagogy and the Calculation of the Subject
• 7 The ‘End’ of Kant-in-Himself: Nietzschean Difference
• 8 Disciplining the Profession: Subjects Subject to Procedure
• 9 Learner, Student, Speaker: Why It Matters How We Call Those We Teach
• 10 Promoting a Just Education: Dilemmas of Rights, Freedom and Justice
• 11 Social Education and Mental Hygiene: Foucault, Disciplinary Technologies and the Moral Constitution of Youth
• Index