Education and the Fantasies of Neoliberalism

Policy, Politics and Psychoanalysis

Matthew Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367463588
• eBook ISBN: 9781000480504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Education and the Fantasies of Neoliberalism revitalizes conversations about the nature and purpose of education in a global context characterized by concerns about quality and equity in education, reflecting wider economic and political anxieties around declining productivity and social inclusion.

The book illustrates how Lacanian psychoanalytic theory offers a conceptual vocabulary for exposing and critiquing the fantasmatic nature of policy and practice, while foregrounding the tensions and contradictions they seek to conceal. Specifically, the book draws on ideas of lack, fantasy and desire from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to gain insights into the contentious but disavowed politics of reform in education. The book builds on cutting-edge work in political and psychoanalytic theory to offer unique insights that challenge and contest the simplistic and often trivializing readings of education in contemporary media and political debates.

Offering a novel perspective on education policy reform, this book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of philosophy of education and educational policy and politics.

Part 1Policy, politics and psychoanalysis

DOI: 10.4324/9781003028444-2

Policy is often thought of as a hard – in the sense of scientific and rigorous, rather than difficult or complex, though it can be these things too – topic of study or area of analysis. It is also perceived as somewhat dry, verging on dull, with its appeal limited to policy “wonks” with the specialist expertise to understand its arcane workings. Within this perspective, policy involves formulating objectives, marshaling relevant – and typically quantitative – evidence and data pertinent to these objectives, articulating the specific policy to meet the objectives, developing an implementation plan and then monitoring the policy's roll out and, finally, evaluating its impact.

The roots of such a techno-rational approach to policy lie in Enlightenment, industrial and scientific narratives of progress, emancipation, reconciliation and redemption, while its allure lies in its façade of rationality, its promises of improvement and its suggestion of control. In this sense, techno-rational policy is propelled by fantasies of empowerment. Such fantasies involve a desire for order, coherence and control, while simultaneously and paradoxically revealing the absence of these very same phenomena. In other words, whether we are dealing with the subject's or society's need to assert control, each instance betrays the constitutive role of lack and the correlative urge to suture this same lack.

As this brief discussion suggests, there is more to policy – more, we might say, that lies hidden, repressed or pulsating beneath the surface – than the techno-rational account acknowledges, entails or implies, which is one reason why bringing a psychoanalytic lens to the study and analysis of policy is so potentially fruitful and revealing. A psychoanalytic perspective helps us to see in policy various manifestations of the tensions, contradictions, silences and gaps that are all-too-familiar characteristics of the human psyche, and of the dislocations, inconsistencies and incoherencies that are inescapable aspects of any society. It also demands that we recognize the inescapable role of desire in policy and the way desire is manipulated by the seductions of fantasy with its promises of fulfilment, realization and completion that suggest the possibility of eliminating, overcoming or compensating for our lacking status.

By emphasizing the insurmountable gaps between the promises and the (im)possibilities of policy and highlighting the role of fantasy in offering the prospect of closing these gaps, a psychoanalytic perspective helps us to “dethrone” policy, removing it from its pedestal and placing it instead on the metaphorical couch for conversation, analysis and interrogation. Of course, such moves are not unique to psychoanalysis but are something it shares with other critical, deconstructive approaches to the study and analysis of policy. Indeed, we can identify a number of critical strategies that help us to challenge and contest the assumed authority of policy.

An initial critical strategy involves seeing policy as an ongoing process, rather than reifying it as a thing or object. This allow us to highlight policy's social, political and institutional dimensions and, consequently, to recognize the roles of policy actors (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012; Ozga, 2000), located in various organisations and implicated in particular aspects of the policy process, including those who conceive, make, enact, champion and resist policy. As this suggests, viewing policy as a process also invites us to discern and differentiate between the multiple, varied and overlapping stages in the policy process, including conception, formulation, enactment, resistance, review and reformulation.

A second critical strategy is to highlight the links between policy and politics. This strategy invites us to attend to the operations of power, interests and ideologies in the conception, formulation and enactment of policy. As such, we are able to suspend belief in claims that policy merely seeks to make things better, to improve practices, raise achievement levels and boost outcomes, and instead to recognize the “worldliness” of policy. Such recognition encourages us to ask questions about whose voices are heard and whose silenced; about whose interests are advanced and whose are ignored or even undermined; and about which readings of the past and which visions for the future are privileged and which are rejected, ridiculed or repressed.

A third critical strategy involves foregrounding the situatedness of policy. This requires attending to policy's location within various temporal trajectories, including the way it seeks to reject, revise or re-create the past and the ways in which it seeks to imagine, inspire and impose particular visions of the future. It also requires being aware of policy's spatial dimensions, including the connections and disconnections between institutional, local, regional, national and global scales within and across which policy unfolds.

A fourth critical strategy is to recognize and repudiate the fantasies of certainty, control, linearity and instrumentality that continue to inhabit contemporary policy making and policy discussions. A key aspect of this strategy involves identifying and challenging the “problem-solution” framing adopted by much education policy whereby policy simultaneously constructs the very problems and issues for which it positions itself as the remedy. In making this move it is helpful to attend to the growing conversation in education scholarship that foregrounds the ontological politics of education policy and critiques the instrumentalization of education by education policy and education policy research (Bacchi, 2012; Carusi, 2019; Carusi & Skudlarek, 2020; Clarke, 2019; Clarke & Phelan, 2017; Flint & Peim, 2012; Osberg & Biesta, 2021; Savage, 2020; Smeyers & Dapaepe, 2008; Webb & Gulson, 2015). In a Lacanian sense, we might say that the regulatory-symbolic and the fantasmatic-imaginary dimensions of policy are engaged in a continuous but ultimately impossible struggle to catch-up with and capture the ineffable, traumatic Real that is produced within but cannot be contained by the representational orders of policy.

The three chapters in this first section of the book all engage with questions concerning the nature of education policy and they all seek to provide examples of, and tools for, the dethronement of policy. In particular, the chapters grapple with issues thrown up by developments and agendas in education in policy, including drives for control, coherence and consistency, in what has come to be known as the neo-liberal era – though it is important to recognize that these developments and agendas, albeit with different justifications and manifestations, precede and exceed neo-liberalism as such – with its logics of competition, instrumentalism and atomization, its techniques of measurement, calculation and comparison and its drives towards ever-greater levels of performance in relation to achievement, standards and accountability.

Chapter 1 argues that neo-liberal education policy in recent years has adopted a technocratic register that masks its inevitably political nature behind the veil of respectability provided by managerial constructs such as effectiveness and efficiency, quality and standards, targets and outcomes. Such moves reflect the wider tendency of neo-liberal politics, noted in the book's introduction, to remove issues from political contestation by transforming them into matters of technical decision-making. In this way, matters of power and ideology, participation and voice, access and interest are airbrushed out of the picture, with the result that the violence in such moves typically goes unrecognized, justified as it is by appeals to consensus and commonsense, reason and rationality – notions that it is hard to disagree with. However, this strategy of reducing the political to the technical is not only anti-political; it is also anti-democratic. This chapter draws on the work of democratic political theorists, Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, to critique and challenge the depoliticization of education policy. The chapter draws on policy case studies from the United Kingdom and Australia so as to highlight how policy pre-empts politics through a utopian harmonization of difference and a reduction of the political to the merely technical and instrumental. The chapter concludes by suggesting some potential starting points for crossing, or traversing, the fantasies of education policy. Such traversal requires, above all, recognition of the inescapability of social and political antagonisms and the inevitably political nature of education policy.

Chapter 2 applies psychoanalytic theory to the analysis of the flagship education policy, the “Education Revolution”, developed in the first decade of this century by the federal Labor government in Australia and outlined in the policy document, Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools (Commonwealth of Australia, 2008). In many ways, this policy agenda represents the epitome of the techno-rational approach to policy making in education (Savage, 2020). The chapter draws on the work of political theorists, Jason Glynos and David Howarth (2007), and their synthesis of key ideas from Laclau and Mouffe's (2001) discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory into a framework of explanatory “logics”. This framework provides conceptual tools for conducting critical policy analysis in three dimensions. Specifically, it enables the analyst to elucidate the characteristics of a discursive regime on a synchronic plane; its assertion, reproduction or subversion on a diachronic plane; and its affective grip on subjects at a non-rational plane. The chapter deploys this framework in a critical analysis of the Australian Labor government's “Education Revolution” policy agenda, drawing attention to the various strategies by which it asserts its authority and legitimacy, while also highlighting the value of the framework of explanatory logics for critical analysis in relation to education policy agendas in other global contexts.

Chapter 3 examines the fantasmatic features of two touchstones of education policy in the twenty-first century in a range of global contexts, quality (i.e., excellence) and equity. For despite the seemingly obvious reasonableness of our policymakers’ rhetorical, if not actual, advocacy and promotion of these values – after all, who is likely to object to calls for more quality and greater equity in education? – it is not obvious what is being referred to when we speak of quality and equity. Nor is it obvious if, and if so how, these phenomena are related? In this chapter, I go beyond the obvious point that quality and equity far more complex than education policy formulations typically suggest, and draw on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and the work of its most prolific exponent in recent years, Slavoj Žižek, to argue that, despite their elevated place in policy agendas and debates these notions remain at once elusive and illusive, continually evading conceptual as well as practical realization. In other words, quality and equity serve as sublime objects. Such objects function as sites for the investment of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Endorsment Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Policy, politics and psychoanalysis
• PART 2 Psychosocial readings of teacher education
• PART 3 Seeing education and policy through film
• Conclusion
• Index