Deconstructing Educational Leadership

Derrida and Lyotard

Richard Niesche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415819206
• eBook ISBN: 9781136687792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard constitute two of the most notable figures of poststructuralist thought and philosophy of the postmodern period. Both worked to reveal instabilities and uncertainty, and to destabilise assumptions and self-evident traditions for the purposes of reflection, creativity and innovative thinking. This significant volume explores the key concepts central to the work of Derrida and Lyotard in relation to educational leadership, and reveals how these ideas challenge existing structures, hierarchies and models of thought.

Derrida's notions of difference and deconstruction, and Lyotard's concepts of language games, performativity and the differend, are specifically used to inform provocative and insightful critiques of the positivist assumptions and knowledge construction in the field of educational leadership. The book provides concrete examples of the application of theories to policy, literature and empirical data, and identifies ideas which continue to impact contemporary practices of educational leadership and management.

Included in the book:

- why bring Derrida and Lyotard to ELMA?
- a Lyotardian politics of the standards movement in educational leadership
- managing performance
- witnessing deconstructions of the leader-follower binary in ELMA
- limitations and critiques of Derrida and Lyotard.

This important volume in the series will be of value to all those working and researching in the field of Educational Leadership, Management and Administration.

1 Introducing Derrida and Lyotard

Introduction

Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard are considered two of the most prominent thinkers in the French-dominated post-structuralist movement. Both Lyotard and Derrida exemplify this extremely challenging and complex intellectual movement along with others such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Jean Baudrillard. However, these scholars do not represent a shared school of thought, theory or method known as ‘Post-structuralism’ or even ‘Postmodernism’. Post-structuralism is generally considered a movement of thought (Peters and Burbules 2004) that calls into question the cultural, philosophical and linguistic certainties embodied by structuralist thought and Western philosophy. However, for all the common features of post-structuralist thinkers, there are also some quite distinct differences and tensions between many of these associated ideas. In this book, Derrida and Lyotard have been grouped together in an ‘uneasy tension’ for the purpose of articulating some common measure about what is known as deconstruction. As will become apparent throughout this book, they both share similarities in challenging traditional Western thinking and forms of knowledge, but also differ in their approaches to these aims.

There is a significant challenge ahead for anyone launching into any reading of Lyotard’s or Derrida’s work, as these texts are difficult in both style and content. Derrida, in particular, presents a difficulty in terms of using a variety of literary and philosophical wordplays and devices to purposefully subvert traditional texts and writing styles. These texts will inevitably require multiple readings before one can begin to grasp the hidden meanings, interpretations and deconstructions put forward. However, I would still encourage an emphasis on reading translations of the original texts rather than an over reliance on the many available secondary interpretations.¹ The difficulty for those looking to philosophers such as Lyotard and Derrida for insights into education and educational leadership is that they had very little to say about education directly. Apart from Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard 1984), and Derrida’s reflections on the university (Derrida 1983, 1989, 2001a), there is very little mention of education issues, let alone educational leadership, management and administration. Furthermore, education is the classical modernist project of ‘empowerment’ and ‘emancipation’ that thinkers such as Derrida and Lyotard would seek to deconstruct. They do not seek to offer solutions to educational and societal problems. Rather, they aim to unsettle our taken-for-granted ways of seeing and thinking about the world. As a result, this work can be frustrating for many educationalists. In particular, the thinking and writings of Lyotard and Derrida stand in direct contrast to much of the ELMA landscape that seeks to position itself as the panacea for current educational problems.

Introducing the work of thinkers such as Lyotard and Derrida also brings with it a certain risk and tension, for an attempt to ‘summarise’ or ‘capture’ their main ideas or concepts sits at odds with both their critical projects. To infer that one can successfully encapsulate Derrida’s and Lyotard’s work into a nicely arranged set of applicable concepts when they themselves actively sought to work against the notion of a summary of key concepts, or paraphrasing and outlines (Royle 2003) is deeply problematic, yet that is the tension that a book such as this has to work with.

In addition, both Derrida and Lyotard raise serious questions concerning the status of ‘the author’ of a work or text and have sought to trouble one’s thinking when referring to proper names. What is signified by the name ‘Derrida’ or ‘Lyotard’? What is the relation to its bearer? What is the relation between the author and the text? Derrida and Lyotard question the assumption that one can make truth claims as to the signification of meaning and concepts attached to a name. Lyotard, for example, argues that the name is simply a ‘rigid designator’ that offers no sense on its own. Instead, he offers that a name gains meaning through multiple phrases and the linking of phrases designating different realities. For instance, in reference to the name ‘Stalin’, he puts forward the following:

Reality entails the differend. That’s Stalin, here he is. We acknowledge it. But as for what Stalin means? Phrases come to be attached to his name, which not only describes different senses for it (this can still be debated in dialogue), and not only place the name on different instances, but which also obey heterogeneous regimens and/or genres. This heterogeneity, for lack of a common idiom, makes consensus impossible. The assignment of a definition to Stalin necessarily does wrong to the nondefinitional phrases relating to Stalin, which this definition, for a while at least, disregards or betrays. In and around names, vengeance is on the prowl. Forever?

(Lyotard 1988b: 56)

In this characteristically challenging style, Lyotard places in question the taken-for-granted assumptions about the referent of a proper name and what it signifies. According to Lyotard, the name ‘Stalin’ only designates multiple realities through its usage of particular phrases and sentences. He argues there can be no true consensus or agreement as to what the name ‘Stalin’ refers. This also raises the question as to what one is referring to when designating the name ‘Lyotard’ to a particular text, set of concepts, or entire oeuvre. Similarly, Derrida has also questioned the meaning attached to the proper name and the texts associated with the name. For example:

Thus the name, especially the so-called proper name, is always caught in a chain or a system of differences. It becomes an appellation only to the extent that it may inscribe itself within a figuration. Whether it be linked by its origin to the representation of things in space or whether it remains caught in a system of phonic differences or social classifications apparently released from ordinary space, the proper-ness of the name does not escape spacing. Metaphor shapes and undermines the proper name. The literal [proper] meaning does not exist, its ‘appearance’ is a necessary function – and must be analysed as such – in the system of differences and metaphors.

(Derrida 1997a: 89)

Thus, in reference to the above quotes from Lyotard and Derrida, it is only through the system of differences, metaphors or ‘traces’ that one can analyse such meanings. There can be no truth or accurate meaning attached to the name ‘Lyotard’ or ‘Derrida’ and thus to ascribe particular concepts and meanings to their names as is done in the name of this book is a tension that both Derrida and Lyotard would argue requires deconstructing.

Derrida’s work, in particular, is concerned with querying and interfering with existing structures, language, signifying representations, texts and discourses. His work could be used to unsettle the notion of a ‘key concept’ that represents a static understanding of an idea. It is also inappropriate for me, as the author of this text, to presume how it will be read and understood, or misunderstood (Derrida 1988a). Such is the difficulty of tackling the work of post-structuralist and deconstructionist thought. Lyotard, like Derrida, has also questioned the notion of writing the summary or synopsis. For example, at the start of his book The Differend, he provides a playful critique of the need to save time (in response to the current performative pressure in education to save time in the name of efficiency) by issuing to the reader a ‘reading dossier’ so that one can talk about the book without actually having read it (Lyotard 1988b: xiv). Lyotard provides a parody of a certain kind of reading: that which seeks to quickly grasp the ‘meaning’ of the book. As is discussed later in this chapter, Lyotard provides a critique on paraphrasing, or what Readings calls the ‘general attack on modernist logics of conceptualization in the name of speedier circulation’ (Readings 1991: xx). I would argue that ELMA also ascribes to this logic.

What soon becomes apparent is the significant challenges in discussing the work of these two difficult and enigmatic thinkers, whose writings have often been labelled as inaccessible in terms of writing and form. However, as I hope to demonstrate over the following pages, the numerous ideas presented throughout this book do have a valuable and powerful relevance for not only education but also for the study and practice of ELMA, and the ‘field’ of ELMA will be stronger for engaging with such ideas.

Lyotard

Born in Versailles, France (1924–1998), Jean François Lyotard is still considered one of the key intellectual figures of our time (Crome and Williams 2006) and the postmodern philosopher par excellence (Bennington 1988; Best and Kellner 1991). In recent years, a backlash against ‘postmodernism’ and claims that postmodern thought as a phenomenon has had its day betray the lasting value of Lyotard’s work, particularly for those seeking to understand the contemporary cultural, social and political situation. Lyotard is known for his challenging philosophical writing style as well as his influence across the arts, humanities and social sciences. Williams (2010) claims that Lyotard was one of the great philosophical essayists of the twentieth century, and the vast number of books, articles, chapters and essays related to such areas as philosophy, art, literature, cultural studies and politics provide great weight to this claim.

Lyotard received his doctorat d’etat in 1970 from the University of Paris X-Nanterre and went on to hold various university appointments across Algeria, France and the United States. Lyotard’s work was heavily influenced by such authors as Kant, Wittgenstein, Marx, Freud, Levinas and Nietzsche, as well as contemporaries including Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault. Lyotard’s close association with the political situation in Algeria at the time resulted in a number of essays and papers (collected in Lyotard 1993a) and his involvement in the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (between 1954 and 1963), a radical Marxist group seeking to encourage revolution in the class struggles in Algeria. Lyotard’s involvement in this group was to end in 1963 when he cited various intellectual and political differences with the group over the failure of Marxism to halt the capitalist movement.² This quarrel with Marxism and the group was to constitute an important element to a number of Lyotard’s writings. Lyotard was also profoundly affected by the atrocities against the Jewish people in the Second World War and argued that new tools were required to understand those events and do justice to them. These events in Lyotard’s life along with events of 1968 in France³ were to significantly influence his philosophy and writings.

This brief biographical interlude is not intended to provide a more ‘correct’ or comprehensive examination of this philosopher’s life and work but more so to identify some significant events or factors that are an important influence on his writing and ideas. Lyotard’s earlier works were heavily influenced by political and historical events of the time and how ideologies such as Marxism, Liberalism and Socialism are insufficient for understanding such events as the Holocaust, the Algerian Revolution and the events of 1968 in France. He cites these ideologies as incapable of doing justice to those events and sought to outline the failures of those totalising ‘grand narratives’. He did not seek to celebrate the failure or crisis of grand narratives but rather was occupied with outlining the characteristics of a philosophy of justice, difference and fragmentation that required new ways of identifying wrongs and injustices.

Lyotard’s first significant book, Discourse, Figure (2011), has only recently been translated into English. In this long and challenging work, Lyotard develops the distinction between what he terms the discursive and the figural. He does this across a range of fields including psychoanalysis, art, philosophy, structural linguistics and phenomenology. In this work, and others such as Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Lyotard 1973a), Lyotard critiques theoretical discourse and the privileging of texts and discourses (discursive) over the aesthetic, or sensual experience (figural). Lyotard critiques the structuralism of Lacan’s psychoanalysis by drawing on the approaches of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Freud’s psychoanalysis. Lyotard deconstructs the opposition of discourse to the figural (sensual), not necessarily by privileging the figural over discourse but by deconstructing the representational space between structural linguistics and phenomenology. It is in Discourse, Figure that Lyotard develops his critique of structuralism and Western metaphysics, which he claims attempts to interpret the figural in discursive terms. It is Lyotard’s aim to show that:

Beneath the surface of all discourse, there is a form in which energy is captured and in relation to which its surface is agitated; if I show that discourse is not only signification and rationality, but also expression and affect, do I not destroy the very possibility of truth?

(Lyotard 2011: 10)

Rather than interpreting the figural in discursive terms, Lyotard opens the space for an articulation of Freud’s libido or libidinal forces (desire) that he develops in Libidinal Economy (2004).

Libidinal Economy and Lyotard’s Philosophy of Desire

Libidinal Economy (2004) represents the pinnacle of Lyotard’s libidinal philosophy that he also developed in two other collections of essays: Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (1973a) and Des Dispositifs Pulsionnels (1973b). Libidinal Economy is certainly one of Lyotard’s most challenging texts as he circumvents traditional academic forms of writing of style, method and philosophical concepts. In this sometimes shocking, violent and largely avant-garde book, Lyotard weaves together the work of Marx and Freud to set into motion the play of libidinal energy or intensities in looking to describe events and social reality. Drawing on Freud’s idea of the libido, these intensities are feelings and desires, or ‘affects’ that constitute a system that is unstable and ever changing.

In the beginning of Libidinal Economy, Lyotard describes in graphic detail, the opening up of the organic body as a form of critique of representation, against theorisations of the body as structure and of reason. This ‘opening of the libidinal surface’ is an opening up of the body to the multiple intensities that both flow across it and constitute it. Lyotard refers to this as the ‘great ephemeral skin’, a skin or film of polymorphous intensities. The body is opened and all its surfaces are spread out to ‘form the immense membrane of the libidinal body which is quite different to the frame’ (Lyotard 2004: 2). Lyotard describes this membrane as a band ‘made from the most heterogeneous textures’, with ‘zones that are joined end to end in a band which has no end to it, a Moebius band’, that is one sided and neither exterior nor interior (p. 3). It is across and though this patchwork band that the libido traverses and thus meet various dispositifs or apparatus that channel libidinal energy. According to Lyotard, systems and structures tend to exploit these libidinal energies by channelling them into stable structures (e.g. Marxist ideology). Lyotard uses the term dissimulation for this restricting of libidinal intensities, or ‘covering of the affect’ (p. 50). However, there is also the possibility for disrupting the system through a different reaction or reception, or the setting into motion a duplicitous system of libidinal desires and intensities. Lyotard gives this desire that generates libidinal effects, the name of the tensor. The tensor is distinguished from the semiotic sign, as it is ‘a sign which produces meaning through difference and opposition, and a sign producing intensity through force [puissance] and singularity’ (p. 52).

Through these challenging ideas, Lyotard is developing a libidinal philosophy of theory, politics and economy. He sees structures as exploiting, limiting and hiding our libidinal intensities. For example, he states the following:

Economic theory or even structural anthropology conceives these signs exclusively as terms in play in a system of communication which regulates their circulation, the need for them itself produced by the partners of the exchange,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introducing Derrida and Lyotard
• 2. Why bring Derrida and Lyotard to ELMA?
• 3. A Lyotardian politics of the standards movement in educational leadership
• 4. Managing performance: The implementation of the English Healthy Schools Programme
• 5. Witnessing deconstructions of the leader–follower binary in ELMA
• 6. Limitations and critiques of Derrida and Lyotard
• 7. Further reading and resources
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index