Marxism/Structuralism/Education (RLE Edu L)

Theoretical Developments in the Sociology of Education

Madan Sarup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136460401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This interdisciplinary textbook provides an introduction to the many theoretical developments and controversies which took place in the sociology and politics of education during the 1970s and 80s. The book

• Discusses the arguments concerning humanist and structuralist Marixsm.

• 
  
  

• Provides a clear and concise introduction to structuralism and post-structuralism (work of Derrida, Lacan and Foucault) and theorises in the ways they contribute to Marxism or are subversive of it.

• 
  
  

• Relates these theoretical perspectives to education and the practice of teachers.

• 
  
  

Chapter 1

Ideology and Schooling

‘Expressive’ and ‘Structural’ Social Totality

Humanist marxism and structuralist marxism are opposing problematics; they have different conceptions of society, history, class, ideology, and literature. It is important to realize that humanism and structuralism are traditions and that many theorists have contributed to their development. Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Jean Paul Sartre, for example, are usually placed in the humanist category; Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Pierre Macherey are considered structuralist marxists. Let me sketch in broad outline the two positions. I will take Lukács to embody humanist marxism and Althusser to represent structuralist marxism.

Humanism, to put it simply, can be defined as a theory which seeks to explain society and history by taking as its starting point human essence, the free human subject, the subject of needs, of work, the subject of moral and political action. Humanists such as Lukács see history as a process of becoming, through which the world view of a class attains its full expression.

Lukács’ main ideas are expressed in History and Class Consciousness.¹ Everything in capitalism, he argues, is made to be sold, all production is for the market. The ‘commodity form’ permeates everything. Even relationships between people take on the appearance of things. This is the meaning of reification. With superb insight Lukács also writes about the fragmentation of the work process and how it is controlled by capital. He describes how rationalization and calculation pervade every aspect of life and how capital uses these processes and techniques to have power over us.

But how is this coercive and exploitative system to be overcome? The answer is the proletariat. For Lukács the crucial link between marxism and the proletariat is class consciousness; but to fully comprehend the role of the proletariat one has to understand Lukács’ Hegelian view of history, according to which each social totality or society has a single principle. All phenomena of any one epoch (its philosophy, its art and literature) are merely expressions of this inner principle or essence. For that reason opponents call the Lukácsian humanist view (pejoratively) ‘essentialist’.

In Hegel’s theory, spirit (Geist) is continuously objectivating itself through History in a sequence of distinct stages. Later, Dilthey adapted the Hegelian idea and argued that each period, each society, had its own world outlook (Weltanschauung). These ideas were further developed by Lukács, who replaced Hegel’s unfolding Geist with the proletariat. For Lukács class consciousness is the essence of the proletariat, the ‘universal’ class. Humanism is thus often associated with historicism: the idea that there is an all-embracing teleological process in which the historical subject realizes its self-positing end. Lukács accepts this teleological view of history, in which a particular class is seen as the creative subject of history.

What, then, are the chief characteristics of humanist marxism? It can be said that it is against any deterministic or functionalist account of the social world. Humanists, reacting against the mechanistic and reductionist theories of an economistic marxism, tend to stress culture and the value of the agents. The stress is on getting inside the mind, the feelings, and the rationalities of the agents themselves. In short, priority is given to the portrayal of lived experience. Experience defines both the object and the method of inquiry. The quality of human relationships is emphasized rather than the actual structuring of the relations by external forces. Moreover, humanism tends to be voluntaristic, that is to say, it emphasizes the activist elements, the ‘class for itself’. There are, for example, some contemporary humanist marxists (like E.P. Thompson) who, as we shall see in the next chapter, focus not on the structures of exploitation but rather on forms of resistance as if they were an expression of some ‘essential’ humanity.

What is the Althusserian critique of Lukács and the humanist tradition? First it must be made clear that both Lukács and Althusser argue against any simple ‘base and superstructure’ view of society, according to which everything in society is determined by the economic ‘base’. When the forces and relations in the mode of production change, then the ‘superstructure’ (for example, politics, law, even philosophy and art) changes also. Such a mechanistic view is sometimes ascribed to Engels and Plekhanov. Lukács and Althusser are highly critical of this ‘reflectionist’ theory because of the economic reductionism that results from it. It is a theory in which the superstructure is reduced to an epiphenomenon of the economic base. In this conceptualization the movement from the base to the superstructure is always unidirectional, unilateral, and social processes tend to be seen as rigid laws. The base/superstructure metaphor is rather simplistic because there is no notion of contradiction, and it is crude because the mediations are missing.

But Althusser is also antagonistic to Lukács’ Hegelian conception of the ‘expressive totality’, in which aspects of the superstructure are phenomenal forms of an ‘essence’. In order to make the debate clearer, let me elaborate on the humanist and structuralist conceptions of social totality.

It has often been said that western marxism was from the 1930s through to the 1960s dominated by the influence of Hegel. Althusser opposes all Hegelian interpretations and refers to the Lukácsian conception of the social whole as an ‘expressive totality’. He defines this as a totality whose parts are conceived as ‘so many “total parts”, each expressing the others, and each expressing the social totality that contains them, because each in itself contains in the immediate form of its expression the essence of the social totality itself.’² At the centre of the totality is an essential contradiction, which is usually construed as the conflict between the new, dynamic forces of economic production and the restraining hand of the old social relations of production. This essential contradiction is then said to be present in, and therefore capable of being ‘read off’ from, each of the constituent parts which comprise the social totality.

Althusser contends that the social totality should be viewed as consisting of a number of distinct but interrelated ‘instances’ or ‘levels’ of practical activity. The social formation is complex, made up of the economic, the political, ideological and theoretical levels. These levels are determining and determined; there is ‘relative autonomy’ between and within the levels. Althusser insists that the social formation is not just a matter of intersubjective relations between people. We are bearers, supports, of the relations of production; and determination, in the last instance, is by the economic level. In this formulation, change results not from the working out of a basic or simple contradiction, such as that between the forces and relations of production, but from the overlapping of a number of distinct, relatively autonomous contradictions in a particular historical conjuncture. Revolutions occur when there is a fusion, a condensation of a multiplicity of contradictions. Let us now turn to a discussion of Althusser’s contribution to the marxist theory of ideology, focussing particularly on his view of education.

Ideology: The Contribution of Althusser

The term ‘ideology’ is used to designate a set of ideas, or a body of beliefs, and usually refers to some aspects of the process by which subjects know the world. But the trouble with giving any definition such as the above is that the word ‘ideology’ is now used in so many different ways that we no longer know what the speaker or writer means by it.³ One sense of ‘ideology’ refers to false consciousness, upside-down reality, ‘mere illusion’. Another sense of ‘ideology’ is the set of ideas which arises from a given set of material interests — a system of ideas appropriate to a certain class.⁴

Though Marx used the term extensively — his use of it is always concrete, specific, polemical — there is no formal analysis of it in his work. It is partly because there is no well-founded or finished theory of ideology in Marx and Engels that the area has become a contentious one. Not only are there different interpretations of what Marx meant by the term at different stages of his life, but some writers — Lukács, Gramsci, Althusser, and others — have proposed different and often contradictory ways of comprehending ideology. Giving definitions of ideology is useless, because these marxists have constructed theories of ideology which have to be understood in the context of their general contributions to the development of western marxism.⁵

The work of Lukács is usually associated with the view that ideology is a form of false consciousness imposed from above upon the individual by the dominant class. His writings, however, also contain a move from the original negative sense of ideology (as a distortion) to the view that ideology is a set of ideas which express the interests of a class. There is a shift from a discussion of ‘ideology’ to ‘class ideologies’. And so, just as there is ‘bourgeois ideology’, there is ‘marxist ideology’ which serves class interests. For Lukács ideology becomes a class view, a Weltanschauung. Ideology is identified with class consciousness — the imputed consciousness of a social class which is determined by the place it occupies in the relations of production.

This theory is being increasingly questioned by structuralist marxists like Althusser, who argue that ideology has a material existence which determines the human subject (the individual). Althusser argues that ideology is a practice producing human subjects. The subject is not the originating source of consciousness, but a product of a specific practice. In Althusser’s conception, social agents are not the constitutive subjects of their acts, but supports of the structures.

Let us now consider Althusser’s enormously influential paper ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in which these views are expressed.⁶ He begins his essay by stating that, in order to exist, every social formation must reproduce firstly, the productive forces, and secondly, the existing relations of production. The infrastructure is the economic base (the unity of the productive forces and the relations of production). The superstructure has two levels or ‘instances’. At one level there is the law and the state; at the other level there are different ideologies, the religious, legal, ethical, political, and so forth. Obviously, this is a metaphor; the upper floors could not ‘stay up’ if they did not rest on the base.⁷ There is relative autonomy in the superstructure. That is to say, there is reciprocal action (not causation) of the superstructure on the base. There are contradictions within each level, the economic, the political, the ideological, and the theoretical; but determination in the last instance is by the economic base. In other words, there is not a simple dialectic of economic base and superstructure, but a complex unity of separate and specific levels of practice which may be relatively autonomous.

Let me make this clearer. Althusser denies that the economic position of the subject acts as the origin of its ideological position, and so ideology cannot be simply ‘read off’ from the position of subjects as economic agents. Nevertheless the economy is determinant in that it determines which of the levels of the social formation occupies the dominant place in any mode of production. Althusser regards ideology as an effect of the structure, and the subjects of this structure act as mere supports for it. He insists that ideology has a material existence in the social formation and exists not as a series of ideas, but in a complex set of practices. Ideologies are not merely reflections in the psyche but are lived; they actually structure the real actions of human beings.

Althusser emphasizes that an ideology always exists in an apparatus and its practices; this existence is material. He writes of people acting according to ideas they hold, that is to say, of actions inserted into practices governed by the rituals within the material existence of an ideological apparatus. He then makes the following points: (I) there is no practice except by and in an ideology; (2) there is no ideology except by the subject or for subjects. In other words, Althusser challenges humanism by rejecting the notion of the constitutive subject and proposes, instead, the constitution of the subject by ideology.⁸ In his view ideology is a functional requirement of society which constitutes subjects.

Althusser insists that human beings cannot live without a certain representation of their world and of their relations to it. Ideology is an essential element of all societies as it secures fulfilment of certain social tasks: ‘historical materialism cannot conceive that even a communist society could ever do without ideology’.⁹ Ideology, then, is a structural feature of any society, its function is the cementing of its unity. In a class society ideology has a further function; it is a means of maintaining domination of one class over the others. Thus Althusser arrives at the concept of dominant and dominated ideologies. The dominated formulate their grievances in the language and logic of the dominant class. That is why the working class cannot liberate itself from bourgeois ideology, but needs to receive from outside the help of science.

Althusser argues that there is a radical epistemological break between ideology and science. Ideological theoretical practice is a pre-scientific mode of cognition, it formulates false problems; scientific theoretical practice, on the other hand, poses the problem in an entirely different manner. Science constitutes itself by breaking with ideology at the moment of its inception. Ideology can be unmasked by science, but ideology will always subsist.

Althusser also distinguishes between a ‘theory of ideology in general’ and ‘theories of particular ideologies’. Particular ideologies exist in concrete societies with specific forms of class struggle; they therefore have a history. ‘Ideology in general’, however, has no history; it is eternal, exactly like Freud’s concept of the unconscious.¹⁰

The School As an Ideological State Apparatus

Althusser explicitly conceives of the state as a repressive apparatus consisting of the police, the army, prisons and courts, government and administration. Making a distinction between state power and state apparatus, Althusser argues that the objective of the class struggle is state power. The proletariat must seize it and replace it with a proletarian apparatus. Ultimately the aim is to destroy the state, end state power and every apparatus.¹¹

There is one Repressive State Apparatus, but there are many Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The former functions mainly by repression and violence, the latter mainly by ideology. Many subtle combinations may be woven from the interplay of the above. No class can hold state power without exercising hegemony over and in the ISAs.¹² All ISAs contribute towards the same result: the reproduction of the relations, the capitalist relations of production. Each of the ideological state apparatuses contributes towards this single result in the way proper to it.

Althusser contends that the ISA which has been installed in a dominant position in mature capitalist social formations is the educational ideological apparatus. Indeed, the School-Family couple has replaced the Church-Family couple. After all, no other ideological state apparatus has the obligatory and free audience of all children in the capitalist social formation, eight hours a day for five days a week. Althusser asks, what do children learn at school? They learn ‘know-how’. ‘But besides these techniques and knowledges, and in learning them, children at school also learn the “rules” of good behaviour … rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination.’¹³ The school, always presented as a neutral environment,

takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years in which the child is most ‘vulnerable’, squeezed between the family state apparatus and the educational state apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a...