Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy

POSTSTRUCTURALISM, PHILOSOPHY, PEDAGOGY

Philosophy and Education VOLUME 12 Series Editor: Robert E. Floden, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, U.S.A. Kenneth R. Howe, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, U.S.A. Editorial Board David Bridges, Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K. Jim Garrison, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, U.S.A. Nel Noddings, Stanford University, CA, U.S.A. Shirley A. Pendlebury, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Denis C. Phillips, Stanford University, CA, U.S.A. Kenneth A. Strike, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, U.S.A.

SCOPE OF THE SERIES There are many issues in education that are highly philosophical in character. Among these issues are the nature of human cognition; the types of warrant for human beliefs; the moral and epistemological foundations of educational research; the role of education in developing effective citizens; and the nature of a just society in relation to the educational practices and policies required to foster it. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any issue in education that lacks a philosophical dimension. The sine qua non of the volumes in the series is the identification of the expressly philosophical dimensions of problems in education coupled with an expressly philosophical approach to them. Within this boundary, the topics—as well as the audiences for which they are intended—vary over a broad range, from volumes of primary interest to philosophers to others of interest to a more general audience of scholars and students of education.

The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy Edited by

JAMES D. MARSHALL School of Education, The University of Auckland, New Zealand

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW

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1-4020-2602-1 1-4020-1894-0

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DEDICATION To my late wife Bridget who lived with this from 1994, but did not see the final product, and to my colleagues who have stood with the project.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

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JAMES D. MARSHALL / French Philosophy and Education: World War II-1968

1

GERT BIESTA / Education after Deconstruction

27

MICHAEL PETERS / Lyotard, Marxism and Education: The Problem of Knowledge Capitalism

43

MARK OLSSEN / The School as the Microscope of Conduction: Doing Foucauldian Research in Education

57

JOHN R. MORSS / Gilles Deleuze and the Space of Education: Poststructuralism, Critical Psychology, and Schooled Bodies

85

STEPHEN APPEL / Lacan, Representation, and Subjectivity: Some Implications for Education

99

LYNDA STONE / Julia Kristeva’s ‘Mystery’ of the Subject in Process

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PREFACE

This book has been quite long in the making. In its original format, but with some different chapters, and with the then publisher, it foundered (as did other volumes in the planned series). At the in press stage, when we obviously thought it was going ahead, it was suddenly canned. Quite distraught I closed it away in a desk drawer for a year or so. But then Joy Carp of Kluwer Academic Publishers expressed an interest in it, and we were in business again. Most of the contributors to the original volume have stayed with it, only to be delayed by myself, for a variety of reasons (but see the dedication). I had been writing on Michel Foucault for a number of years but had become concerned about mis-appropriations of his ideas and works in educational literature. I was also concerned about the increasingly intemperate babble in that literature of the notion of postmodernism. Indeed at one major educational conference in North America I listened to a person expounding postmodernism in terms of ‘Destroy, Destroy, Destroy’. Like Michel Foucault I am not quite sure what postmodernism is, but following Mark Poster’s account of poststructuralism - as merely a collective term to catch a number of French thinkers – I thought that what we had to do in education was to look at what particular thinkers had said, and not become involved in vapid discussion at an abstract level on ‘-isms’. Thus the book was conceived. Jim Marshall

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank my colleagues who have contributed to this volume for their persistence and perseverance. I am most grateful to the original contributors, to Lynda Stone for coming on board, and of course to Kluwer Academic Publishers for their support. In the Introduction and Chapter One, I have drawn upon material previously published in 1995 and 1996, particularly upon chapters 1 and 2 of my Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996). I wish to thank Ho-Chia Cheuh, Jean Gibbons and Andrew Lavery for their assistance in formatting the text.

Jim Marshall

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JAMES D. MARSHALL

INTRODUCTION 1. POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM In contemporary philosophical and social thought we are being challenged by ideas and practices referred to by the terms ‘postmodern’ and ‘poststructural’. Traditional AngloAmerican analytic philosophy has been mainly hostile to these ideas. For example the recent proposal to award Jacques Derrida an honorary doctorate at the University of Cambridge was met by considerable hostility and objection (see e.g., Smith, 1992). Given that burst of outrage a comment on philosophy by George Simmel would seem to be quite appropriate: “philosophy is its own first problem”. Simmel’s point is that philosophers do not seem to agree either on what philosophy is, or on how to do philosophy, culminating in a myopic, if not paranoic tendency by them to turn their skills and methodology inwards and upon themselves to settle such disputes and arrive at the nature of philosophy. Instead Simmel described philosophy as “the temperament expressed by a certain world view” (Simmel, 1959, p. 294). But what is also at stake is the authority of philosophy and the status of academic philosophy, for if there is no grand meta-narrative such as philosophy to provide firm foundations for other forms of thought, then philosophy becomes at best but one narrative amongst others. Ludwig Wittgenstein had made this point in his approach to doing philosophy. For him philosophical puzzles arose (Wittgenstein, 1953) when language “went on holiday”. To do philosophy then was not to puzzle over some grand conceptual schema but to resolve the puzzles generated from language. Philosophy could not therefore operate from a position of authority. Because of this there was little point in philosophy as conceived by academia, according to Wittgenstein. The making of this point did not endear him to the philosophical establishment. The aim of this book is to provide an historical and a conceptual background to post-structuralism, and in part to post-modernism, for readers entering the discussions on poststructuralism. It does not attempt to be at the cutting edge of these debates nor to be advancing research in these areas. Instead it concentrates on the historical and intellectual background whilst at the same time introducing some of the key French poststructuralist thinkers. However each of the chapters also looks at the educational implications of the ideas discussed. Michel Foucault, who can be described as a poststructuralist (although he resisted all attempts to categorise him and his work [e.g., 1977, p. 114]), comes close to

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Simmel’s and Wittgenstein’s views on philosophy in interpreting Kant’s notion of the Enlightenment not as involving a universal world view, or as laying firm epistemological foundations for knowledge, but as representing an attitude towards the present (Foucault, 1984). Kant had posed the question concerning Man as to where we were at the present, of understanding the meaning of our own life. For Kant the improvement of mankind was to be achieved through the critical use of reason in its universal applications. While Foucault agreed with Kant on the importance of reason, that reason must be critical, and that we must have the courage to use reason, he disagreed with him on the notion of a universal reason. The failure by philosophers post-Kant to question the application of reason which had pretensions to universality in applications to human dilemmas had produced what Foucault called the post-Kantian slumbers. Foucault resisted the term ‘postmodern’ often claiming that he did not understand it. If postmodernism is a movement which is rapidly increasing in influence, both within and without education, it is far from clear what “it” is, as that term is used by writers in a number of different and often conflicting ways. Whilst it is an increasingly familiar term for describing intellectual tendencies or eras its use nevertheless remains controversial. The term ‘postmodern’ surfaces in the 1930s and 1940s mainly in relation to the arts, including history, and architecture (Rose, 1991). However to talk of modernism and post-modernism as periods or epochs, may be itself to adopt a modernist stance, namely that it is possible to delineate the characteristics of a period and, thereby, to be beyond that period. As periods are always past this may be to fall into a modern trap. It may be better to see it as a complex map of late 20th century thought and practice rather than any clear cut philosophic, political and/or aesthetic movement (Marshall and Peters, 1992). Is the distinction between the modern and the postmodern merely polemical or does it indicate major and important philosophical differences? If it is the latter philosophers will have to worry about it, for something like a Kuhnian style paradigm shift may be occurring in philosophy. If so some philosophers may be left behind. The paradigm shift question has been formulated explicitly, and debated, by Jean François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas. Whereas Lyotard rejoices in the shift away from post-Enlightenment thought, totalising thought, and the philosophical ‘certainty’ of meta-narratives, Habermas wishes to preserve what was important in the Enlightenment’s view of reason. Fredric Jameson begins his forward to (the [1984] translation of) Lyotard [1979]) with this observation: (postmodernism) involves a radical break, both with dominant culture and aesthetic, and with a rather different moment of socioeconomic organization against which its structural novelties and innovations are measured: a new social or economic moment (or even system). Lyotard’s (1979) well known definition is that ‘postmodern’ is an “incredulity towards metanarratives” but in the main this position is also held by poststructuralists.

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In summary then we can note an antagonism towards poststructuralism and postmodernism by both Anglo-American analytic philosophers and also by social theorists, e.g., Habermas and some marxists, who hold still to the tenets of the Enlightenment message of emancipation through critical reason. To a large extent the focus of this criticism has been on French philosophy, and on those thinkers caught by the term “poststructuralist” and who are represented in this collection. 2. POSTSTRUCTURALISM The emphasis in this volume is on poststructuralism because it is easier to catch a group of thinkers with this term than with the term ‘postmodern’. It also catches a group of thinkers/philosophers who have provided alternative ways of doing philosophy and whose work has considerable implications for education. But first something more needs to be said in general about poststructuralism. If it is very difficult to define postmodernism it is also very difficult to define ‘poststructuralism’ (and indeed structuralism) in any homogeneous manner, and to classify philosophers normally caught by the notion of poststructuralism. If it were thought that poststructuralism could be defined against, or in opposition to, the philosophical movement called structuralism which had emerged in the 1960s, unfortunately, there is no one doctrine that can be called structuralism either, and there is no homogenous set of thinkers caught by the term ‘structuralist’. To treat structuralism and structuralists homogeneously is to make a mistake which, according to Michael Peters (1996, p. 22), “has been compounded indefinitely”. If there is no one thing called structuralism to define poststructuralism against, a search for a definition might turn then to identifying some set of characteristics, or an essence. But no definition is forthcoming from this turn either, as there is little caught by the term ‘poststructuralism’ other than a widely differing, diverse and multi-faceted group of theses and thinkers. Those caught by the term do not necessarily define themselves consciously against aspects or versions of structuralism for, in some cases, their positions had developed from structuralism (e.g., Jacques Lacan), and for others their positions had been developed elsewhere. In July 1967 a cartoon by Maurice Henry appeared in La Quinzaine Littéraire, depicting Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Roland Barthes and Foucault as structuralists by their tribal costumes. But that is hardly to provide a definition (for the tribal costume depicts shared characteristics, and it is not obvious what they are), and as a definition by enumeration it was false as, arguably, Foucault had never been a structuralist and Lacan was to become a poststructuralist. Mark Poster (1988, p. 8) points out that in fact the term ‘poststructuralism’ was coined by North American academics to pull together a group of diverse thinkers. In his work on the mode of information (Poster, 1993) he draws upon Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean François Lyotard, But also caught in the net are, amongst others, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and arguably Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan. Most of these thinkers are discussed in the following chapters.

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At best we might use the terms ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’, as part of a putative definition, but they hardly lead to an homogeneous grouping able to provide a core definition. Perhaps in France we can look at the linguistic turn taken by poststructuralists. This was not the logico-linguistic turn taken by Anglo-American twentieth century philosophy. It was more like the turn taken by the later Wittgenstein who forcefully argued that the linguistic turn, in so far as it sought to furnish metanarratives which were foundational, was mistaken. Structuralism had taken a linguistic turn earlier in that language took on a life of its own in which meaning was not given by a conscious being but was given by its place in a total language structure. Poststructuralism departs from this. As Lyotard puts it in “Wittgenstein ‘After’”: The examination of language games, just like the critique of the faculties, identifies and reinforces the separation of language from itself. There is no unity to language; there are islands of language, each of them ruled by a different regime, untranslatable into others. This dispersion is good in itself, and ought to be respected (Lyotard, 1993, p. 20).

Lyotard uses the plurality of language to launch attacks on any conception of universal reason and the unity of the subject. In Foucault’s hands language or discourse constitutes the subject in Discipline and Punish through what seems to be a performatve effect (Austin, 1962) though Foucault does not use this idea himself. The subject is neither unified nor an individuated substance in the later Foucault. Instead it is said to be a form which can be filled out by different linguistic descriptions, not all of which are identical (Foucault, 1984b, p. 290). However in my view it is best to look in detail at some individual poststructuralist philosophers, their approach to philosophical issues and their approach to education, and not try to encapsulate them in any broad encompassing definition. This is an implicit theme of the collection as it prevents distortion of their differences and diversity, and contributes to the preservation of their individual and unique philosophical positions. For these reasons the introduction will be brief, though I provide a considerable background to the emergence of poststructuralism in France since World War II in chapter 1. But difference and diversity have further dimensions as these poststructuralists were not particularly friendly to one another. Their personal differences were not just promoted by versions of Parisien chic, petty jealousies, and disputes of an academic kind but, rather, they were to do with how the life of the public and general intellectual in France is to be perceived and lived. As Simmel noted philosophy is a temperament exhibited as an aspect of a world view. 3. ANTI-HUMANISM Henri Bergson, who was the first French philosopher to launch attacks against the social sciences, was influential upon Merleau-Ponty who lectured upon him. Both Sartre and

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Foucault reacted to Bergson, but in different ways, with Foucault taking an antihumanist position. Poststructuralists do share at least this feature -anti-humanism though even this was shared with others, e.g., the structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the marxist structuralist Louis Althusser. Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism was one of the antihumanist attacks in French philosophy which had begun in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The particular targets of these attacks were humanistic existentialism and the marxist existentialism of Sartre (Claude Lévi-Strauss launched almost a personal attack upon Sartre). Humanism, which purported to liberate human beings, had, according to Martin Heidegger’s critique of humanism, only oppressed them. Heidegger had a considerable influence upon French philosophy and upon thinkers as diverse and opposed as Sartre and Foucault. This anti-humanist theme of the 1960s can be characterised as involving (see chapter 1) a theme of the end of philosophy, which was to be replaced by genealogy, its universal theses were to be replaced by the historical and the concrete, and absolute truth (especially the correspondence theory of truth) was to be abandoned. The basis of this rejection is well summarised by Deleuze in his very influential book Nietzsche and Philosophy, originally published in 1962 (see chapter 1). For some commentators poststructuralists are the heirs of Nietzsche, and Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche the key Nietzschean text (see e.g., chapters 3 and 5 below by Michael Peters and John Morss respectively). We should note then the importance accorded by poststructuralists to the pessimism of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the decline of Western civilisation (this pessimism is to be found also in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein), and the critiques of humanism and its promises of development, improvement and emancipation. In the Universities in the 1950s and 1960s the philosophical curriculum followed two broad paths. The first, which most students followed, was based upon a revisionism of the philosophy of Descartes and Kant through the works of Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger, and the early teaching and translations of Kojève and Hyppolite. In general terms we are talking about humanism and marxism, and existentialism and phenomenolgy in particular. In the 1950s this was to be exemplified by the writings of Sartre and the writings and teaching of Merleau-Ponty. The second general, but less fashionable strand in France, was to be developed from Nietzsche’s reading of Kant through Heidegger and, Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski. It built also upon the ideas of philosophy of science, developed from Jean Cavaillès, but in the work of Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser. Foucault sites himself firmly in this second strand and it is this teaching which had strong influences upon the poststructuralists. Habermas (1981) notes and rues this direction of thought, seeing it as involving a return to conservatism.

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JAMES D. MARSHALL 4. MAY-JUNE 1968 AND AFTER

The French workers’ and students’ revolution in 1968 was a key event for the emergence of poststructuralism (see chapter 1). and had an enormous influence upon French intellectuals. Indeed what is called (French) poststructuralism has also been called ‘68 philosophy’. A student protest movement which had begun at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, in March soon spread to the Sorbonne and to the workers at the Renault factory at Flins. France was brought to a standstill. As the authority and stability of the state were called in question, President Charles de Gaulle finally sought assurances from the military to support the breaking of the rebellion. Fortunately this was not to be needed for it withered away in a reassertion of state power, skillfully orchestrated by de Gaulle. Whilst there are considerable differences about the interpretation of these events there is little doubt that on the students’ part it was not initially a conspiracy, that it was more than an adolescent rebellion, and more than a crisis in the universities, though it was at least that. It was certainly a political crisis involving class conflict and new forms of left communitarian structures. It can also be seen as part of world wide student rebellions and in France, in particular, against the events in Algeria. There were very well trained street fighters in the student movement then. But it also involved individualism, and might be seen as heralding neo-liberal versions of individualism. Educational reform had been a top priority for the Gaullist administration since at least 1959. But Minister of Education Christian Fouchet’s educational reforms of 1966 were seen as manifestations of the technocratic-capitalist state by some, and by others as attempts to destroy the liberal university (Posner, 1968, pp. 69-74) (See further Marshall, 1996, chapter 5). The events of May-June 1968 are important also because they pointed to inadequacies in social theory and in the practices of the democratic left. In their practice the students had shown the pressing need for new forms of social theory. This theoretical vacuum was entered by the group of thinkers who are caught by the coined term ‘poststructuralism.’ Indeed the paths taken by the philosophers whom we are interested in here may be considered as both continuing the 1968 revolt and developing theoretically the students’ and workers’ revolution. Hence the use of the term ‘68 Philosophy.’ It would be a mistake however to see these events as causing the emergence of poststructuralist philosophy, for the intellectual roots lie much deeper in Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, but May-June 1968 provided in experience the difference and diversity that poststructuralism itself exhibits. For feminists poststructuralism was to provide theoretical paths to develop themes already introduced by de Beauvoir as early as 1949 in The Second Sex (see chapter on Kristeva).

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5. THE NEW LITERATURE By May-June 1968 many seminal works had been published by poststructuralists. It was this literature that attracted the attention of North American academics and led to the coining of the term. Important works were: Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1962: Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference in 1967, and Of Grammatology in 1968; Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation first appeared in 1961, and The Order of Things in 1966; and Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits in 1966 (Lacan traversed both structuralism and poststructuralism). Julia Kristeva’s Semeiotiké appeared in 1969. But these writers did not occupy all of the philosophical stage, for in addition to Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Louis Althusser and other marxists, prominent philosophers writing in France at this time included, for example, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Serres and Raymond Aron. Poststructuralism, or ‘68 philosophy’, was then but one strand of French philosophy. 6. CRITICISMS According to Henry Giroux the post modern debate “has spurned little consensus and a great deal of confusion and animosity” (Giroux, 1995, p. ix). He notes that much of the reaction has involved rhetorical flourishes that dismiss postmodernism “as reactionary nihilism, fad, or simply a new form of consumerism”. Much of what he has said there applies to reactions against poststructuralism. Wittgenstein was a philosopher of culture (Peters and Marshall, 1999). The culture that was attacked by the thinkers in this volume was undergoing dramatic change as the meta-narratives of modernity became increasingly irrelevant to youth. There was a wide ranging breakdown in forms of authority, economic uncertainty, the proliferation of economic technologies, and the march of pedagogies permeated by principles of performativity. Poststructuralist philosophies at least tried to look at the modern world and not retreat to some ‘golden’ modern certainties. But if we take Lyotard’s notion of the differend seriously, as involving in a conflict no form of agreed judgement applicable to both arguments, then it is difficult to see how rational agreement could arise. That is not a problem for the poststructuralists but it is for the modernists. This rational impasse has in many cases led to a form of political correctness based upon the universal themes of modernism (Giroux, 1995, p. xii). Thus poststructuralism and postmodernism, Giroux says, have been seen by some people as nihilistic, stylistic nihilism and even as soft fascism. The important point here he argues is to see which side provides a more insightful understanding of how power operates in modern societies, how it is produced and developed, and how people become subjugated or remain in tutelage, to use Foucault’s term. Giroux dismisses some of these critiques but acknowledges that important critiques have been developed by Jürgen Habermas, Perry Anderson, David Harvey and Terry Eagleton. Within France important critiques have been raised by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut (1990).

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JAMES D. MARSHALL 7. STRUCTURE AND CONTENT OF THE VOLUME

Each of the authors of the chapters in this collection was requested to deal with ‘their’ philosopher in the areas of: brief biographical details; key philosophical ideas; and the applications in, or implications of their work for education (though not necessarily in that order). For some poststructuralists biographical detail is extremely important for understanding their work − e.g., Michel Foucault, who saw philosophy as work upon the self and who was to say of his major works that each was a response to a personal issue. Some of these philosophers do address educational issues very explicitly − e.g., Lyotard − but others do not − e.g., Foucault. Hence the authors have, almost of necessity, addressed the general request differently. 8. FRENCH PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION In chapter 1 I provide a wide introduction to French philosophy and education between 1945 and 1968. This is to provide the background in both philosophy and education for the authors discussed. The chapter is designed to give a general overview and not to discuss in detail any of the authors dealt with individually in later chapters. After a general introduction on the problems involved in defining poststructuralism I look at French philosophy and the status of French intellectuals, and how they differ from Anglo-American philosophy and philosophers. In particular I look at the immense influence of Jean-Paul Sartre, and at the influences of existentialism and marxism. Section 3 discusses marxism and communism, the crisis of western marxism and differences between the French Communist Party (PCF) and various marxist groups and publications. Section 4 discusses Sartre’s existential marxism in more detail and why he remains as a humanist philosopher of the Enlightenment and as a target for the antihumanism of both structuralists and poststructuralists. Section 5 develops Levi-Strauss’ account of structuralism and the basis of his attacks upon Sartre. Louis Althusser’s structuralist marxism is discussed in section 6. In section 7 the events of May-June 1968 are discussed in detail. It is argued that the students were not theoretically driven by marxist or leftist literature but they were legitimately attacking an unsatisfactory educational system, and calling in question the power of authorities to decide upon both content and pedagogy in education. What the students wanted was participation but the Gaullist government did not hold the same concept of ‘particiapation’ as that held by the students. The philosophical curriculum is examined in section 8 as an example of an outmoded curriculum and an arguably outmoded pedagogy. The final two sections open up the possibilities for a philosophy that is post structuralism.

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9. JACQUES DERRIDA Jacques Derrida attacked the account of meaning inherent in Saussure’s account. In arguing that there is no meaning outside of the text he is not committing himself to any fixed notion of meaning as in structuralism, for whereas structuralism emphases the search for stable linguistic patterns Derrida privileges différance. This coined neologicism suggests not ony what is different but also that which is deferred, and there is no longer an essential stability of signs. Gert Biesta in chapter 2 makes much of this fundamental point in trying to write about Derrida, for to stay true to Derrida how can one write about him when he (Derrida) claimed that he never wrote on anything, and that meaning is always, necessarily, inconclusive. Trying to get Derrida “right” then, is necessarily to get him “wrong”! Biesta further points out that according to Derrida we are never in a position to choose between understanding and misunderstanding because the former is always contaminated by the latter and, of course, it must be also vice versa. In his chapter Biesta explores the possible significance of Derrida’s writings for education. He does this in three steps. First, he discusses some of the problems entailed in writing about Derrida. The aim of this section is not so much to make clear why it is difficult to do so, but rather to show what is special about writing “after” Derrida. This then allows him to introduce some deconstructive “themes”. In the next section he then presents in a more traditional manner some of the central ideas and insights that are “at stake” in deconstruction. Against this background he offers ideas about what deconstruction might entail for education and educators. 10. JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD Jean-Francois Lyotard is, without doubt, a leading philosopher of the postmodern condition and a leading figure in the postmodernist debate. Yet his early work, influenced by his teacher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was on phenomenology La Phenomenologie (1954). Influenced by the work of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas Lyotard becomes concerned by the gaps between abstract universal and timeless theory and the contingencies and complexities of experience, where factors other than language must be considered. He brings to his works a creative interdisciplinary approach which draws upon a diverse group of thinkers, but which includes Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Wittgenstgein. Michael Peters charts in chapter 3 Lyotard’s early membership of the radical Marxist group Socialisme ou barbarie, where he remained for several years as head of the Algerian section, before losing faith in Marxism as a master discourse and turning to philosophy in the 1970s. This chapter charts Lyotard’s Marxist commitment, intellectual trajectory, and final break with Marxism and focuses upon his subsequent writings concerning “the postmodern condition”. This phase of his work, represented in The Postmodern Condition (1984, orig. 1979), centred squarely on the combined questions of the legitimation of knowledge and education in an age of “performativity”. It is in this context that Lyotard’s writings directly address educational questions and

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particularly those concerning the fate of educational systems under what Peters calls knowledge capitalism. For Lyotard, “the problem of capitalism” overshadows all others (including that of the State). It is a problem that consistently occupies him in his “postMarxist” writings. Under the conditions of postmodern capitalism, education, like all other spheres of life, has been subordinated to the criterion of technicity, requiring the optimalization of the cost/benefit ratio in an endless circle of performativity. In particular, capitalism in the postmodern condition has infiltrated language commodifying it as encoded messages with an exchange value and stored as information. This chapter explores these issues, recognising how Lyotard, despite his break with Marxism, remains within the ambit of a Marxist commodification thesis (albeit as a representational system) viewing it as one of the main processes of rationalisation that guides the development of the system as a whole. While he recognizes the way in which the logic of performance, aimed at maximizing the overall efficiency of the system, generates socio-economic contradictions, he parts company with Marxists on the possibility of emancipation or of salvation expected to arise automatically from these contradictions. 11. MICHEL FOUCAULT Michel Foucault is probably the best known poststructuralist for educationalists. Yet whilst his work has been used and referred to there are not a great number of books explicitly centred on educational issues yet available, in spite of the burgening Foucault industry. The exceptions are the edited collection by Stephen Ball (1990), the use of some of Foucault’s ideas by Ian Hunter (1995) in Rethinking Schools, and detailed books on Foucault, on personal autonomy and education by Marshall (1996), and a materialist reading of Foucault by Olssen (1999). But many uses of Foucault and references to his works in education have been improper because, e.g., his work on discipline cannot just be tacked onto sociological approaches to social control, or his work on freedom evoked by critical theorists concerned with emancipation. In a chapter entitled “The School as the Microscope of Conduction: Doing Foucauldian Research in Education,” Mark Olssen, drawing upon his earlier book on Foucault (1999), seeks both to present an introduction to Foucault and to the tradition of research he has inspired for students of Education. Olssen notes that a major goal for Foucault was to counterpose the philosophy of the concept against the philosophy of consciousness and hence against Sartre et al. Olssen also seeks to present an account of Foucault which bridges the divide between linguistic receptions of Foucault and historical materialism by pointing to the developing interest after 1968 in the relationship between discursive and extra-discursive dimensions of reality. In this context, Foucault’s analysis of the double relation between power and knowledge differs radically from the self-referential textuality of Derrida and his followers. The chapter provides a good introduction to some of Foucault’s fundamental ideas: power and power/knowledge; the constitution of subjects; bio-power; governmentality

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and; normalisation. He discusses the appropriation of Foucault’s works by feminists, noting also that some feminists have turned away from him. Olssen also looks at the relations between Foucault’s position(s) and marxism, and examines the differences between Foucault’s version of historical materialism and Marxist versions, noting the central rejection of the Hegelian conception of a closed totality and the dialectic. Educational research is discussed in the final section and Olssen provides a good number of references and comments upon the work of researchers in education who have contributed to the Foucaldian literature. 12. GILLES DELEUZE Gilles Deleuze was an original, complex and technical philosopher who explored such diverse philosophical sources as Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Bergson, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. Because he rejected influential and authoritarian positions he was not in the mainstream of philosophical thinking in France. He is recognised as the person who was mainly responsible for the Nietzsche revival in France with his Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962). He was equally recognised for his work with Felix Guattari on desire. Whilst Deleuze is not well known in educational discourses an interest is emerging, particularly in feminist writing. John Morss’s chapter is concerned to investigate ways in which Deleuze’s ideas “might be articulated into educational theory and practice.” But he does not stop there, he instead aligns Deleuze’s insights with ideas from critical psychology. He opens his chapter on Deleuze by introducing Deleuze’s vocabulary. Morss then comments on Deleuze’s explicit comments on education. Next drawing upon Nietzsche he links Deleuze in a thoughtful, if not original manner, with critical psychology. Finally a number of educational topics are introduced, reflecting a Deleuzean sensibility. Morss believes that the influence of psychology on educational practice “has been largely baleful” and that a form of critical psychology bolstered by some Deleuzean insights may be more helpful and productive. Morss notes that Deleuze’s ideas provide innovative possible contributions to education, but that at present any such claims rest at the level of suggestive possibilities and speculation. Nevertheless his aim is to indicate how Deleuze’s ideas “might be articulated in the context of educational theory and practice”. He sees Deleuze’s contribution to be that of a form of creativity in an unpredictable, and Heraclitean, world. Thus Deleuze’s attempts to radically rethink the social world might be more specifically applied in education. Morss provides some insights into the way that this might happen, in particular with, and within, critical approaches to psychology. Morss characterises Deleuze’s position as a blend of empiricism and pragmatism, for Deleuze had no taste for abstractions and totalising theory. Following Nietzsche he concentrates his genealogies on ethics rather than on knowledge, as in Foucault’s morewell known earlier genealogies. Deleuze was obviously concerned by the advancement of technique or the ordering and control of human beings by bureaucratic

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rationality. His reaction to education, Morss suggests, was very open and perhaps shared similarities with some of the deschoolers. In summary then Morss has seen Deleuze (here and elsewhere - see his references to his own work on Deleuze) as providing insight into education in these areas: his emphasis on creativity in an unpredictable world; subjectivity (rejecting contemporary approaches to subjectivity through interiority); desire; the development of human beings; the “reception” of totalising grand theory; and the politics of the state. 13. JACQUES LACAN Jacques Lacan was strongly influenced by structural linguistics and by Saussure, LéviStrauss and Jacobson in particular, in his radical reinterpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis. Through a series of seminars which commenced in 1953 Lacan, recognised as an excellent clinician and diagnostician, presented theoretical ideas to some of the leading French intellectuals. These ideas led to his becoming regarded as an enfant terrible and difficulties with both professional bodies and the universities (e.g., Vincennes). Lacan’s ideas from these early seminars and from conferences were later to be assembled in Ecrits (1966). His major target was the model of ego psychology which was then dominating Anglo-American psychoanalysis (Kearney and Rainwater, 1996, p. 328). However he did not reject Freud, relying on the earlier texts as opposed to the biologism of the later Freud which leads to the ego being seen as a biologically given core. Interestingly for this volume, Lacan was to marry Sylvia Bataille and his daughter Judith was a colleague at Vincennes with Foucault (She was dismissed for distributing examination material to students, prior to the examination). Stephen Appel develops these general points in chapter 6. He notes that Lacan's endeavour was to rethink Freudian developmental theory in terms of structural linguistics so as to account for the “humanisation” of biological individuals and the constitution of their “identities” through language and ideological discourse. Perhaps overly philosophical (certainly for Foucault – Macey, 1993, pp. 223-224), his writing was both highly logical and lyrical. Appel argues that the most basic notion of Lacan's is that the subject is decentred, split, without a centre, and characterised by lack. His basic idea is then that contrary to the commonsense notion of identity, what we like to believe about ourselves as selves involves a fundamental misrecognition, and e.g., the notion of autonomy is an illusion. Appel then moves on to look at some of Lacan’s central concepts. Important for the self or subject, and educationally, are Lacan’s distinguishing between need, desire and demand, and his concept of the Other, necessary for the structuring of the self as subject through the evocation of a necessary lack. Language for Lacan is prior to consciousness and entering into language and an extant symbolic order is therefore to have one's desires mediated and drives directed. It is the entry of the child into language which for Lacan marks the transition from a (mere) biological entity to a human being.

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Appel has reservations about the use of Lacan's theoretical notions in education. In many cases he see Lacan as providing a critique of optimistic liberal educators who see certain behaviour and /or attitudes as capable of being unlearned, or who see insight as sufficient for overcoming alienation and leading to ‘wholeness’. On the contrary he sees desire as being a missing link of educational theory. From Lacan we learn about the unaviodable and fragmentary notion of the self, and an unaviodable alienation from one's lacks. Lacan was antihumanism and perhaps offers hard pills for the progressive and optimisitic educator to swallow. The Scots philosopher David Hume offered hard pills to swallow also, but this he argued was in the end therapeutic. This I see as being Appel’s interpretation also of Lacan. 14. JULIA KRISTEVA Utilizing a metaphor of ‘mystery’ and Kristeva’s novels, Possessions and The Old Man and the Wolves, Lynda Stone’s chapter on the French philosopher and psychoanalyst, presents an introductory, but novel and creative, overview of her writings. The central topic is the “subject in process,” arguably her most important contribution, developed over several decades of chronological interdisciplinary writing. The chapter situates her work in both biographical contexts and also within related theoretical traditions. Then three central sections take up key concepts that constitute the subject in process: semiotic, abjection, and love. The first defines a pre-lingustic ‘potential’ affect of human beings, the second a bodily and linguistic affect of loathing, and similar to the second, a third as a basic human need. Each entails what the poststructuralist Kristeva recognizes as an unknown, an incompleteness, an emptiness. Finally the chapter closes by solving the mystery of her novel and through a concept of foreigner posits a politics out of her poetic and psychoanalytic work. The frame of the mystery or detective story is instructive as mysteries entail a secret (whodunit?) to be solved: human psychic life and social endeavours such as education might be posited as entailing a desire for ‘solution’ but different from a story, one unrealizable. The chapter explicates three central elements of the individual affect; these follow a situating in biography and relevant theory. The chapter closes with a turn to societal life, to “politics as solution.” In these three and the concluding section, some indications of application for educational thought are suggested. 15. CONCLUSION As stated earlier the intention behind this collection was to provide a sound introduction to the key positions of a number of thinkers who are being increasingly referred to, used as support, and even embraced by theorists in educational discourse. As editor my concern, shared by the contributors, has been that these thinkers have been misappropriated on occasions. Foucault protested that he didn't know what postmodernism was, and I have some sympathy with his position. Hence, I have chosen to emphasise instead, poststructuralism.

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Jim Marshall is Professor of Education, in the School of Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. REFERENCES Austin, J. L. How to doThings with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Bataille, G.. Literature and Evil. (Transl. A. Hamilton). London: Calder and Boyars, 1973. Beauvoir, S. de. The Second Sex (Transl. H. M. Parshley). New York: Vintage, 1949. Ferry, L. and A. Renaut. French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism (Transl. M. H. S. Cattani). Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Foucault, M. (1970). “Presentation”. G. Bataille. Oeuvres complête, Vol.1. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Foucaualt, M. Power/knowledge :Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (C. Gorden, Ed.) (Transl. C. Gordon and others). New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Foucault, M. “Truth and Power”. M. Foucault, Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (1977). In C. Gordon (Ed.), 1980. Foucault, M. “What is Enlightenment?” In P. Rabinow (Ed.). The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 1984a. Foucault, M. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom” (1984b) .(Transl. P. Aranov and D. McGrawth). In P. Rabinow (Ed.). M. Foucault, Ethics: subjectivity and truth. London: Penguin Books, 1997. Foucault, M. Ethics Subjectivity and T ruth. In P. Rabinow (Ed.). London: Penguin Books , 1997b. Giroux, H. “Series Foreward” . In M. A. Peters. Education and the Postmodern Condition. Westport, Con. and London: Bergin and Garvey, ix. Jameson, F. “Introduction.” In J-F Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Habermas, J. “Modernity versus Postmodernity”, New German Critique, 22 (winter 1981): 3-14. Lyotard, J.-F. The Postmodern Condition (Transl. G. Bennington and B. Massumi). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Lyotard, J.-F. (1993). Political Writings (Transl. B. Readings and P. Geiman). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Macey, D. The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Hutchinson, 1993. Marshall, J.D. Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996. Peters, M. Poststructuralism, Politics and Education. Westport,Conn: Bergin and Garvey, 1996. Posner, C. (Ed.) Reflections on the Revolution in France: 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Poster, M. Critical Theory and Poststructuralism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Rose, M.A. The Post-modern and the Post-industrial. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Simmel, G. In K.H. Wolff (Ed.), George Simmel (1858-1918). Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1959. Smith, B. The Times, May 9, 1992. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations. (Transl. G.E. M. Anscombe). Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.

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FRENCH PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION: WORLD 1 WAR II - 1968 1. INTRODUCTION In this first main chapter we will look at some of the background influences upon French intellectual life between World War II and 1968. The sections in this chapter deal with those philosophical positions, in the widest sense of the term ‘philosophical’, which provide a background to understanding the poststructuralist movement and its influences and affects, and its implications for educational discourse. Second, major changes took place in the French educational system in the late 1960s and 1970s, though not without incident, as the students’ and workers’ revolution of May-June 1968 illustrates well. It will also be important to look at those changes and the events of May-June 1968 because there are not only intellectual and theoretical connections and parallels, in spite of marked and spiteful differences, but also some poststructuralists, e.g., Lyotard, were quite involved in the events of May-June. Foucault was involved in the aftermath of those events, when he took up his position as head of department of philosophy in late 1968 at the experimental campus at Vincennes of the University of Paris. Nevertheless, whilst there are relationships between philosophical positions in the 1960s and the events of May-June 1968, the exact nature of these relationships is far from clear − as indeed are the interpretations of May-June 1968 (see below). Reading Charles Posner’s (1968) edited collection of French writers of those events against the magazine Time for the months of May-June (1968) reveals two quite different stories. Similarly, Raymond Aron who wrote in Le Figaro, and who saw himself as the only sane person at that time (White, 1984, p. 195) even though he was censored on some occasions (Poster, 1975, p. 356), is very different from reading student leader Dany the Red (Daniel and Gabrielle Cohn Bendit, 1968), and different from Henri Lefebvre (1969), and so on. in their appeals to rights, the importance of the individual and to democratic notions of shared participation and responsibility, the students were covertly, and in some cases overtly appealing to individualism, if not to humanistic notions of the subject. (Yet these change post ‘68). But in their attacks upon institutions and their structures they were clearly attacking the march of technique heralded by

1 J. D. Marshall (ed.), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy, 1-25. ©2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Martin Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology (1977) and Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society (1964). From Heidegger (and the teaching at L’École Normale Supérieure of Jean Beaufret, an expository disciple of Heidegger), there was a decidedly antihumanist theme in French philosophical work in the late 1950s and 1960s, as there was throughout French literature (Cruikshank, 1962). Marxism had run its course, except perhaps with Althusser, but it was to be discredited by the events of May-June 1968 by Le Parti Communiste Français’s (PCFs) refusal to support the students and workers until the eleventh hour (one in three French workers were on strike by May 20 − White, 1984, p.174). Yet many saw these events as heralding the birth of left social theories that emerged from the collective behaviour of both students and workers, and this in spite of individualist and humanistic themes of the subject iterated in 1968. There was an anti-humanistic theme, an anti-Eurocentric theme, in France in the 1960s. This can be interpreted as a rejection of naive traditional humanism and the humanistic subject, at the least, and was articulated initially in French intellectual consciousness by Heidegger (see e.g., Ferry and Renaut, 1990), though there were earlier attacks upon the social sciences from at least the time of Henri Bergson. Either way, whether one takes a communitarian or a neo-liberal individualistic view of the events of May-June 1968, the humanistic subject is on trial. In Claude Lévi-Strauss’ hands, structuralism was a central fork of the antihumanist attack, particularly upon the humanistic existentialism and marxist existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Humanism, which purported to liberate human beings had, in the Heideggerian critique, only oppressed them. LéviStrauss (see below) knew, in order to get his linguistically based structuralism on the intellectual and philosophical agenda, that his target was Sartre’s existentialism. By 1968 and in the hands of others, including Althusser’s marxism, structuralist thinking had adopted a strong anti-humanist position. But structuralism cannot be seen as purely French for, as Foucault suggests (in an interview with Gérard Raulet, 1983, p. 205), it should be tracked into wider notions of European formalism (for a development of this thesis see Peters, 1996, chapter 1). It might be tempting to think of post-structuralism as being neatly definable against structuralism. But, unfortunately, there is no one doctrine that can be called ‘structuralism’, just as there is no homogenous set of thinkers caught by the term ‘structuralist’. Lévi-Strauss was a linguist, Althusser a marxist, the early Lacan came from Freud, etc. This mistake, according to Michael Peters (1996, p. 22) “has been compounded indefinitely”. Therefore, it seems, there is no thing called ‘structuralism’ to define ‘post-structuralism’ neatly against. Any search for a definition of post-structuralism might turn then to some set of characteristics, or an essence. But no definition is forthcoming from this turn either, as there is little caught by the term, ‘post-structuralism’ other than a widely differing, diverse and multi-faceted group of theses and thinkers. Those caught by the term do not necessarily define themselves consciously against

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structuralism for, in some cases, their positions had developed from structuralism, and in others their positions had been developed elsewhere. In July 1967 a drawing/cartoon by Maurice Henry (Figure 1) appeared in La Quinzaine Littéraire, depicting Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Foucault as structuralists by their tribal costumes. But if Foucault has been classified as a structuralist, he strenuously resisted the cate.g.ories of structuralist, poststructuralist, modernist and post-modernism (this is part of his rejection of any attempt to cate.g.orise him or his writings). In their seminal exposition of Foucault Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) did not appear to have accepted fully Foucault’s defence against the structuralist accusations. According to them (1983, p. xv), he may best be understood by triangulating him between “...all three positions: structuralism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics.” But if so that leaves Foucault in a limbo position somewhere between the modernists and the post-modernists, and between them and the structuralists and the poststructuralists. It is also the case that Foucault’s position was anti-humanism and antimarxism. Running through French philosophy in the 1960’s were both antihumanist themes and anti-marxist themes, and structuralism was itself, in LéviStrauss’ hands, a reaction to humanism and marxism, especially existentialist marxism. In general, it could be said that the philosophical thinkers caught by the term ‘poststructuralist’ were defining themselves against the humanisticmarxist version of French philosophy, which is not a definition against structuralism per se, for that also defined itself against humanism and marxism. The anti-humanist theme of the 1960s can be characterised as involving (Ferry and Renaut, 1990, chapter 1): (1) the theme of the end of philosophy, as e.g., philosophy was to be replaced either by Althusserian marxist science or by Nietzschean genealogy; (2) the paradigm of genealogy, in either an Hegelian or a Nietzschean form; (3) the abandonment of traditional notions of truth by correspondence or coherence, and its replacement by a Heideggerian notion of truth as an unveiling, which is at the same time a concealment of the hidden side of a discourse (cf. Derrida’s notions of appearance and disappearance); and (4), the move towards the concrete and the historical, and away from the universal and from totalising theory. These criteria help capture, but do not define, the thinkers introduced and discussed in this book. But poststructuralist thinkers also reject the Hegelian dialectic. The basis of this rejection is well summarised by Deleuze in Nietsche and Philosophy originally published in 1962: Three ideas define the dialectic. The idea of a power of the negative as a theoretical principle manifested in opposition and contradiction; the idea that suffering and sadness have value, the valorisation of the ‘sad passions’, as a practical principle manifested in splitting and tearing apart; the idea of positivity as a theoretical principle and practical product of ne.g.ation itself. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy, in its polemic sense, is the attack on these three ideas. (Deleuze, 1983, p. 185f)

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In fact the term ‘post-structuralism’ was coined by North American academics (Poster, 1989, p.8) to pull together a group of diverse thinkers, amongst whom, and not all of whom are covered in this book, are Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Lucie Irigaray, and Jean-François Lyotard. Georges Bataille who was earlier and who died in 1962, and Jacques Lacan, who has been said to be a structuralist, should be added to that group. By May 1968 many seminal works had been published by the authors concerned. Amongst these were: Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1962: Derrida’s Writing and Difference in 1967, and On Grammatology in 1968; Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation first appeared in 1961, and The Order of Things appeared in 1968; and Lacan’s Écrits in 1966. Finally it should be added that members of this group were not particularly friendly to one another: Derrida who had critiqued Foucault (his former teacher) severely in 1963, was critiqued in turn by Foucault in 1971, and was referred to by Foucault as a pedant; Baudrillard had launched a vicious attack upon Foucault in 1977; Deleuze and Foucault, allies on so many issues, drifted apart for some time; Lyotard did not know Foucault well (Macey, 1993, p. 359) and had opposed Lacan at Vincennes (Lyotard, 1993, p. 68f); and a study group of several of the major players, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guatarri, which was planned in 1977, did not eventuate (Macey, 1993, p. 359), partly because of the dispute between Baudrillard and Foucault, and which issued ultimately in Baudrillard’s Oublier Foucault. These differences are not just promoted by versions of Parisien chic, petty jealousies, and disputes (just?) of an academic kind but, rather, they are to do also with how the life of the public and general intellectual in France is to be perceived and lived. In Foucault’s case, when he began his advanced studies, his targets became post-Enlightenment thinkers, epitomised in France at the time, by Sartre. In his early student years he studied Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Henri Bergson. Foucault alluded to Sartre as the last great 19th century thinker, “a man of the 19th. century trying to think in the 20th” (Foucault, 1989, p. 40). The thinkers who helped Foucault bypass those more traditional philosophical positions were Heidegger, Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot. Heidegger influenced both Sartre on the one hand, and Foucault and Derrida on the other. However it was reading Bataille and Blanchot through Sartre and then against Sartre that permitted Foucault and Derrida to reject Sartre (Eribon, 1991, p. 58). Influenced as he was by Heidegger (“My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger” − Foucault, 1984, p. 250), Foucault claimed that Nietzsche was more important (ibid), and that reading Nietzsche in the early 1950s was not merely intellectually revealing but that it caused him to break with his life and work and, in 1955, to leave France. After reading Nietzsche he felt that he had become a stranger, entrapped, and never again felt able to inte.g.rate fully into French social and intellectual life (Foucault, 1982, p.13).

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2. SOME HEIRS TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT Generally, French intellectuals do not write just for a narrow disciplinary or even for an intellectual audience alone as, for example, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish; the birth of the prison (Foucault, 1979) was read by both criminologists and criminals alike. As a member of Le Group d’Information sur les Prisons he wrote on prison riots. Independently, as un homme de gauche, he wrote upon and discussed with workers elements of the class struggle (see, e.g. the discussion with a worker named José, in Libération, May, 1973). He, like many other intellectuals wrote for the general press and appeared on radio and television. In a similar vein it should be noted that 6,000 people arrived on 7 December, 1961 to hear a debate on marxism between Sartre and Roger Garaudy (of the PCF), Jean Hyppolite, and marxist physicist Jean Vigier. Nor was academic writing the only medium for disseminating philosophical ideas in post World War II France. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had written novels which were highly philosophical (e.g., La Nausée and L’Invitée,, respectively) and Sartre, for example, was very prominent, if not dominant, in the French theatre between 1944 and the early fifties. In that period he was both friendly with and for some time intellectually attuned with Albert Camus, equally prominent in the theatre and French literature. He also knew and respected Jean Genet. Sartre and Beauvoir (also Albert Camus, though with reservations) were convinced that the theatre offered a way of presenting to mass audiences, philosophical, intellectual and aesthetic notions, particularly those of freedom and authenticity (Fullbrook and Fullbrook, 1993, pp. 147-150). Beauvoir used the novel − e.g., L’Inviteé (her first published novel [1943], and translated as She Came to Stay) - to develop with some originality themes on authenticity and the social other. But nor was the writing of French intellectuals constrained by what, in the Anglo-American traditions, we would see as disciplinary barriers. In the first case readers from the Anglo-American philosophical traditions have always had problems with the French conception of philosophy - quite clearly existentialism, phenomenology and hermeneutics did not figure strongly either in philosophical journals or in university curricula within the Anglo-American tradition in the 1950s and 1960s. But, second, what we might expect to be sociology or psychology is often very philosophical. For example the work of Pierre Bourdieu, well known to educationalists, is quite heavily philosophical by Anglo-American criteria: it is not sociology on their criteria but more like marxist social philosophy. Similarly what we might expect to be methodological or empirically based is also invaded or contaminated by philosophical or theoretical positions (see O’Farrell, 1989, chapter one). There was also a considerable overlap between literature and philosophy (Cruikshank, 1962). Philosophers were not the only intellectuals who were concerned by questions concerning the nature of human experience and were interested in metaphysical

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issues. From the time of André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine (1933) a number of writers had questioned experience and the traditional accounts of the human condition. In addition to the more overtly philosophical writers, Beauvoir, Camus and Sartre, there were, for example, Samuel Beckett (the theatre of the absurd – a term coined from Camus), Maurice Blanchot, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Raymond Queneau. Furthermore the Anglo-American theory-praxis split and the intellectualpractical split are in many cases ignored by French intellectuals, and expected by the general public to be ignored. The theory praxis split was ignored by JeanFrançois Lyotard and Alain Touraine at Nanterre in March 1968, for example. As intellectuals Beauvoir, Foucault, Jean Genet, Claude Mauriac, Simone Signoret and Sartre were heavily engaged politically, engagé, and took part together in major public protests in the 1970’s (Eribon,1991). However it should be said that Beauvoir was not always an intellectual, nor a theoretician, who was engagé (the term ‘engagé’ does not translate simply as the English ‘engaged’, as it carries stronger overtones of commitment), for according to her own memoirs she did not break from these dualisms until after World War II. Intellectuals play then a very different role in French society from their role in British or American Society. They are not expected to be narrowly and intellectually confined by ideas of a restricted disciplinary nature but, instead, to think widely in relation to the human condition, and also to act and participate in social and political matters. Here twentieth century French intellectuals stand to society in a long Enlightenment tradition from at least Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Condorcet to, more recently and as examples, Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, Jean François Lyotard, André Malraux, Claude Mauriac, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Signoret and Alain Touraine. In Britain, arguably, only Bertrand Russell in recent times has had a similar status as a public and general intellectual, who was also engagé. In the US there was John Dewey and, more recently, Noam Chomsky. The author lives in New Zealand where no intellectual has bestrode that stage or, perhaps, even could. Also the press and weekly/monthly journals are much more friendly towards intellectuals. Apart from journals such as Annales (e.s.c.), Arguments, Les Temps Modernes (the title has reference to a Charlie Chaplin film) and Socialism ou Barbarie (all mentioned in this chapter) there are a number of journals like Le Nouvel Observateur and Les Lettres Françaises, and newspapers across the political spectrum from Le Figaro and Le Monde to Liberation and L’Humanite, in which there is not only space for intellectual comment, inquiry and debate, but in which intellectuals are also taken seriously. What they say appears to matter to the French public. Briefly, and in summary at this point on how seriously intellectuals are taken in France, it is said that at Sartre’s funeral on 19 April, 1980, fifty thousand people turned out to say goodbye (Miller, 1993, p. 37)! Eribon talks of: Nouvel Observateur and Les Lettres Françaises, and

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newspapers across the political spectrum from Le Figaro and Le Monde to Liberation and L’Humanite, in which there is not only space for intellectual comment, inquiry and debate, but in which intellectuals are also taken seriously. What they say appears to matter to the French public. Briefly, and in summary at this point on how seriously intellectuals are taken in France, it is said that at Sartre’s funeral on 19 April, 1980, fifty thousand people turned out to say goodbye (Miller, 1993, 37) ! Eribon talks of: twenty or thirty thousand people following the hearse to the cemetery at Montparnasse: “the final demonstration of May 1968”, as it was frequently called. (1991, p. 280).

According to Simone de Beauvoir (1984, p. 36): “A huge crowd followed − about fifty thousand people, most of them young”. A point about the stature of intellectuals is made. (Were it even possible there is little need to count heads). The existentialist movement had itself gained credos in World War II because of involvement in the resistance, and enjoyed considerable popularity with the young after World War II. In any case the Vichy Government was totally discredited by 1944. Sartre, in particular, was seen as being something of an hero. Whether this was deserved is another matter, as he had certainly not put himself in the dangerous positions that Jean Cavaillès, the philosopher of science had - as a member of the resistance he was shot by the Nazis. Georges Canguilhem broadcast a tribute on French Radio to Jean Cavaillès on 28 October, 1969 in which he commented upon Cavaillès’ commitment to the resistance and his objections to the philosophy of the subject. It is not possible to speak of him [Cavaillès] without some sense of shame, because, if one survived him, it is because one did less than he. But if one does not speak of him, who will be able to differentiate between this unreserved commitment, this action with no attention to the rear, and the Resistance of those intellectual-resistants who talk about themselves so much because they alone are able to talk about their Resistance, it being so discreet? At the present time there are certain other philosophers who formed the idea of a philosophy without a subject. The philosophical work of Cavaillès can be invoked in support of this idea. His mathematical philosophy was not constructed with reference to any Subject that could possibly be precariously identified with Jean Cavaillès. This philosophy from which Jean Cavaillès is radically absent, demanded a form of action that led him, through the narrow paths of logic, to the passage from which one never returns. Jean Cavaillès is the logic of the Resistance lived to the point of death. May philosophers of existence and of the individual person do as well next time, if they can. (quoted in Eribon, 1991, p. 346).

Sartre’s contribution after his capture and release from a military prison was mainly intellectual − e.g., as a member of the resistance Comité National des Ecrivans and contributor to the then clandestine newspaper Les Lettres Françaises, though he had attempted with de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, to establish and then sustain a resistance group, Socialism et Liberté. Recently Sartre has come under a cloud as there would appear to be substance to the suggestion that some of his crucial existential concepts may have been inspired

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and adapted from Beauvoir, particularly from her 1939-40 manuscript of She Came to Stay (see the analysis of this novel by Fullbrook and Fullbrook [1993, chapter 5] and Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre between November 1939 and February 1940 [Beauvoir, 1991], where it is clear that Sartre read a substantial number of pages of the manuscript). The standard interpretation had been that she was intellectually dependent upon Sartre (see e.g., Deidrie Bair’s introduction to the Vintage edition (1989) of The Second Sex), but this position is being reinterpreted (see e.g., Simons, 1995). It is probably correct that humanism (particularly in the form of existentialism), and marxism were the two leading intellectual movements from World War II until 1968, though structuralism emerged by the early 1960s to challenge these more comfortable philosophical traditions. Lévi-Strauss had directly challenged Sartre and existentialism, and arguably structuralism had replaced existentialism by 1968. Sartre, Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were grouped around Les Temps Modernes, maintaining a marxist position, but often very critical of the PCF. The PCF which began attacking Sartre in 1944, maintained its position through its papers Action and Les Lettres Françaises. But in the mid 1950s this conflict with Sartre began to mellow and Sartre aligned himself with the PCF (much to Merleau-Ponty’s disgust). This was also a cause of the major acrimonius and public rift between Sartre and Camus. But for those who were expelled from the PCF, including Edgar Morin and Henri Lefebvre, Arguments served as a vehicle for open Marxist discussion and debate, and revitalised marxist thought. Morin’s Autocritique published in 1959 gives a graphic account of the life of intellectuals in the PCF, under Stalinism, his expulsion from the party, and his re-orientation to existential marxism (Poster, 1975, pp. 211-216). Arguments also published the classic works of western marxism (Poster, 1975. pp. 211-216). Socialism ou Barbarie, of which Lyotard was a member, had attacked the PCF since 1949 and attempted to separate communism from connotations of, and connections with, Stalinism and the Soviet Union (Poster, 1975, p. 202). The PCF in addition to the newspapers mentioned above, had L’Humanité, and its journal La Nouvelle Critique. 3. MARXISM AND COMMUNISM Prior to World War II, marxism had not really penetrated working-class thought in France. Somewhat ironically however, in view of Fascism’s role in Germany and Italy, it is the German occupation of 1940-44 which provides the conditions for marxism to emerge in both theory and practice in France. The PCF, after its very high profile in the Resistance, not only gained political and organisational control of the Left but, also, recruited a considerable number of intellectuals to join the almost solitary Henri Lefebvre (Anderson, 1976, p. 37). Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were for some time on the out-skirts of the PCF, locked in an almost cat and mouse game of attack and rapprochement between existentialism

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and marxism. In the journal Les Temps Modernes Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, amongst others, adopted a general leftist political orientation, that the resistance had been betrayed (Hirsh, 1981, 41) and, for abandoning revolution, the PCF became a target of their critiques. But Sartre was to align himself more fully with the PCF from the mid-1950s, causing a rift between himself and Merleau-Ponty (see Merleau-Ponty’s, Adventures of the Dialectic [1973], originally published in 1955), and with Camus (see the acrimonious publications in Les Temps Modernes in 1952). Merleau-Ponty popularised the term ‘Western Marxism’ (in Adventures of the Dialectic, 1973). Western Marxism took shifts in direction, away from the means and relations of production, towards issues of everyday life and culture. Several conditions made this shift in area of critical concern possible; some were general theoretical problems which Western Marxism had to confront, whereas others were theoretical and practical problems, some of a particularly French nature. These shifts took two forms. First there were theoretical examinations of marxist theory, in particular by Marcuse and Adorno. Second, there were practical moves towards redefining the centre of attention of critical theory away from the means and relations of production towards cultural questions − e.g., in France the work of the Arguments group, and the appearance of the journal Arguments in 1956 (conceived by Morin and Roland Barthes, with Lefebvre, still a member of the PCF, as a founding director), but ending in 1962. However, both such moves prompted further quarrelsome questions; were these new areas of proper concern for marxists? Were these thinkers really marxists, or, merely, intellectuals of the left? Many intellectuals of the left were members at one time or another of the PCF, but Sartre was never a member and Foucault was only briefly, and he soon broke away (Eribon, 1991, chapter 5). Members also of the PCF in the late 1940s early 1950s, who are of interest here, were Louis Althusser, Paul Veyne the historian and colleague of Foucault, the sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron. The praxis of the PCF was dominated by Stalin from Moscow and, within the party, the intellectuals were generally subordinate to the politicians. The role of PCF intellectuals, determined from Moscow, was essentially to defend the Soviet Union against capitalism and to use marxist doctrine to show the superiority of Soviet society over the West. Yet at a time of revolutionary fervour in France, immediately after World War II, when marxists could have been advocating revolution, the PCF was restraining its militants because of Stalin’s doctrines of stability for Europe and his support for De Gaulle. The first group of marxists to openly criticise Stalin’s Russia and to draw theoretical conclusions was the group which contributed to the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie but the major members, Castoriades and Lefort, were not members of the PCF. Lyotard was a member of both. It was, however, via a return to Hegel and the early works of Marx that Stalinism was seriously questioned as a valid interpretation of marxism. The groundwork for this renaissance was laid by the

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teaching of Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite on Hegel, and developed by attention to Marx’s Paris Manuscripts (Hyppolite, 1969). From Hegel was taken the view that reason is not absolute but dialectical, and dependent upon historical conditions in the world and, from the earlier Marx, alienation was resurrected as a fundamental marxist concept. Thereby intellectual critiques were mounted against Stalinism from marxist sources; for example Socialisme ou Barbarie saw Stalinism as a crude dehumanising form of capitalism (Poster, 1975, pp. 202-205: Hirsh, 1981, Chapter 5). Among the intellectuals disciplined for their “sins” by the PCF was Henri Lefebvre: in 1949 he was made to apologise publicly and in 1958 he was expelled from the party. Freed finally from the confines and restraints of official PCF and Stalinist doctrine Lefebvre, who was also a director of Arguments, began to develop and explore themes concerned with daily life that he had considered as far back as 1936. He develops this concept of daily life from the earlier negative notion of oppressed ordinary existence to the notion that daily family life should form the basis for understanding alienation and human potential. Alienation was not to be based upon the relations of production, but upon the relations of daily life - according to Lefebrve man would be fully human only when daily life became a festival and where alienation, fetishism and lack of human satisfaction were absent. At this basic level of human life the human was discovered and created. Lefebvre sounds somewhat romantic in this particular account, but his focus on family life is historically important as it replaces Marx’s work place as the “heart” of society. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were to write on this theme also but Lefebvre was (arguably) the most interesting and significant thinker of the Arguments group (Hirsh, 1981, p. 92). 4. EXISTENTIAL MARXISM Poster defined existential marxism as follows: a non-Leninist Marxism that conceptualises advanced industrial society in a way that points toward the possible elimination of its alienating structures; that looks to all the relations of daily life, not simply to relations of production, to make society intelligible; that picks up from existentialism the effort to capture human beings in the moment of their active creation of their world, in their subjectivity; and, finally, that rejects the attempt to have a closed theory complete within itself. (1975, p. ix)

Initially Sartre was very hostile to marxism. But this was to change and he produced a “solution” to the crisis of western marxism. Working from a phenomenological and existential base, he was to “marry” existentialism and marxism, by introducing existentialism into a background marxism where the classical marxist premises are presupposed as broad general background, rather than being stated explicitly (Barnes, 1968, p. xix). As Sartre said: ... we take the statements of Engels and Garaudy [PCF theorist and administrator] as guiding principles as indications of jobs to be done, as problems - not as concrete truths.

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It is because their assertions seem to us insufficiently defined and, as such, capable of numerous interpretations: in a word, it is because they appear to us as regulative ideas. (1968, p. 35)

Critics were quick to argue that this ‘marriage’ was between two incompatible positions. Althusser, for example, argued that Sartre had fallen into an epistemological empiricist trap which assumes that the real was given in observation. According to Althusser this was a bourgeois reading of Marx which needed to be replaced by a more structuralist reading (Hirsh,1981,chapter seven). However, crucial to this supplementation of marxism by existentialism are two requirements, Sartre says, which Marxism itself derives from Hegelianism: if such a thing as a truth can exist in anthropology, it must be a truth that has become, and it must make itself a totalisation. (1968, p. xxxiv)

But, according to Sartre, philosophy does not provide absolute Truth in the sense of a proposition, or propositions, being true for all time. Rather, philosophies are methods by which the “rising class” becomes conscious of itself in its movements towards emancipation (1968,p. 6), i.e., philosophies have themselves been shaped by socio-historical conditions. Totalisation is an important marxist concept. But how can truth both become and, also, be a totalisation? In Marx’s writings there is a clear belief that the individual can and should conceptualise the totality. Not only did Marx believe that the individual could grasp reality in conceptual terms in its totality but, also, he saw this as necessary in order to develop revolutionary theory and practice. Marx also believed that the proletarian revolution would emancipate mankind totally, as opposed to the factional liberation of bourgeois revolutions, whereby the bourgeoisie obtained a freedom which was used to exploit the proletariat (for a full discussion of this concept see Jay, 1984). This belief in the necessary roles of both reason and the intellectual poses problems for historical materialism, as it cedes to reason and the intellectual the revolutionary capacity and initiating power that, according to classical marxist theory, should reside within the proletariat. However Sartre rejects what he calls the apriori totalising of contemporary marxists, i.e., the determining for any object of its: “real” place in the total process according to classical marxist theory by establishing the material conditions of its existence, the class which has produced it, the interests of that class ... (1968, p. 36)

Sartre rejects such totalisation because it: does not derive its concepts from experience - or at least from the new experience which it seeks to interpret. It has already formed its concepts ... Its sole purpose is to force the events, the persons, or the acts considered into prefabricated moulds. (1968, p. 37)

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Sartre held that critical theory should contain two aspects to totalisation - an ontological or a metaphysical element − and an epistemological element. The ontological assumption was that human society was a structural whole but one which was built by human beings: it was to be a totality of human agency. However, epistemologically, Sartre here amends, or reinterprets, Engel’s statement: “Men themselves make their history but in a given environment which conditions them”; to read, “Men make their history on the basis of real prior conditions (among which we would include acquired characteristics, distortions imposed by the mode of work and of life, alienation, etc.), but it is the men who make it and not the prior conditions” (1968, p. 87). Thus while human society was at any one time a structural whole, it was a structural whole in an historical, and in a becoming process. Thus it was not only an existent being but also a whole which was itself becoming. In these senses then Sartre holds that knowledge is both a becoming and a totality. 5. LÉVI-STRAUSS AND STRUCTURALISM The emergence of structuralism in French intellectual life from the early 1960’s can be taken as representing a reassertion of a positivistic or at least a scientific world view against the humanism represented in existentialism, and the humanistic versions of marxism, hermeneutics and phenomenology. However positivist, or scientific sociology, which had its origins in Comte, and then with Durkheim, was not faring well in France post world war II. In effect it had been marginalised (Seidman, 1994, p. 196). Certainly Althusser’s structuralist reading of Marx, and marxism as a science, can be seen both as an attempt to settle the score with humanistic readings of Marx and as a return to scientific thinking. Structuralism can be understood as being an aspect of the methodological reaction to humanism, trying to eliminate the conception of a meaning giving transcendental subject. The structuralist approach attempts to find objective laws which govern human social activity and which do not depend upon a subject who endows words with meaning. The version of structuralism which is important in French thought is that of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist (though born in Belgium), who applied the insights of structural linguistics to the study of social life. Thereby, Lévi-Strauss had hoped to raise anthropology, and the human sciences in general, to scientific status. The general ideas were derived from the work in linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson (Poster, 1975, p. 306). By studying la langue as opposed to la parole, that is as a formal system of signs rather than as a spoken language, and in their structured interrelations, Saussure switched the level of analytic concern from the signifieds (roughly mental images, meanings) to the signifiers (roughly words). Once this shift was made signifiers were then analysed formally within the totality of a language (langue). Therefore meaning is not to be located in the thoughts expressed by the speaker or writer, nor in the

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speaking or enunciating writer or author, but in the totality of the system of signifiers. Lévi-Strauss adopted these general ideas from linguistics, and interpreted the phenomena of society as a system of messages so that not only linguistic interaction, but all social interaction was to be understood as a system of messages amenable to structural analyses. Everything that humans did or said consisted of signs, organised into structures that were distinct from lived experience: all elements of lived experience were rigorously eliminated in the drives to decentre anthropology and achieve scientific status. Thus, Lévi-Strauss, in analysing kinship, myth, ceremonies, marriage, cooking and totemic systems, using language as the paradigm for a conception of the whole of society, replaced an historically ordered sequence of human experience with a timeless and inexorable structure. Thereby language is no longer to be conceived as a means of expressing the thinking subject’s ideas or states of consciousness. From this general position anthropology is said to be decentred because 'man' as subject, as speaker, does not endow spoken words in a particular context with meaning; nor does “man” bestow a transcendent meaning upon words. Meaning, both in general and in particular contexts, is dependent only upon the position occupied by those words in the totality of words. Lévi-Strauss took structuralism from “the quiet halls of linguistic faculties to the cacophony of the philosophical marketplace” (Poster, 1975, p. 307), and to the status of serious intellectual contender for the study of man and culture. Lévi-Strauss felt compelled to challenge Sartre in the intellectual marketplace, not only to replace humanistic (including marxist) approaches to the study of society, but because Sartre, amongst others, conceived language as involving relations and struggles between thoughts and words, issuing in inadequacies of expression and gaps, between what one wished to say and what language permitted or constrained one to say. For structural linguistics that problem was a secondary problem to that of the overall coherence of a system of language. Sartre’s starting position was then a futile and incoherent starting point for the study of linguistics and, for Lévi-Strauss, the study of society and culture (Poster, 1975, p. 309). Caught in the structuralist web, at least in Henri Miller’s famous drawing were Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes and Foucault. But as we have already noted, the drawing presents an homogeneity which was not to be found in structuralist thought (Peters, 1996, chapter one). It is perhaps better to see structuralism as an aspect of formalism, for which there is a long history in European thought. Seen in this very general way, as a version of formalist thought, structuralism would also catch Jean Piaget. It is difficult to catch Piaget in this French philosophical debate, between the neo-Kantians, and Hegelians, and the post-Nietzsche and post-Heideggerian philosophers, though he did of course have views about philosophy (Piaget, 1971; see Marshall and Peters, 1986).

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Althusser’s reading of Marx was an attempt to settle the score with humanist readings of Marx, in particular with “a concept of man as an originating subject” (Althusser, 1976, p. 205). His reading of Marx, developed from the Kojève and Hyppolite translations and readings of Marx, concentrates on the scientific nature of historical materialism. Whilst he was a member of the PCF, at the time when the PCF was engaged in an effort of dialogue and reconciliation with humanists, existentialists, socialists and Christians, he rejected all humanist readings of Marx which, in the main, relied heavily upon the 1844 Manuscripts. Such passages as these in the Manuscripts possibly support the fundamental theoretical importance of the individual knowing subject: ... we must avoid postulating ‘society’ again as an abstraction vis-a-vis the individual. The individual is the social being... In his consciousness of species man confirms his real social life and simply repeats his real existence in thought ... Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual ... is just as much the totality - the ideal totality - the subjective existence of imagined and experienced society for itself: just as he exists also in the real world both as awareness and real enjoyment of human existence, and as a totality of human manifestation of life. (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p. 299)

But Althusser’s work must not be interpreted in the light of the PCF machinations and as, perhaps, a theoretical re.g.ression to Stalinism. Rather his work should be seen as a new departure in marxist thought (see his For Marx) and, within the PCF, by separating theory and practice, as providing some autonomy for the intellectuals from the political domination of Stalinism and Moscow which had been very dominant in the PCF (Poster, 1975, p. 342). Althusser writes: Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism, as it operates within historical materialism, thus means a refusal to root the explanation of social formations and their history in a concept of man with theoretical pretensions, that is, a concept of man as an originating subject, one in whom originate his needs, his thoughts, and his acts and struggles. (1976, p. 205)

The notion of man as a conscious being theorising and totalising forms of social existence, implicit in the passage quoted above from Marx, is buried by Althusser. Borrowing Gaston Bachelard’s notion of an epistemological break or rupture which has some affinities to Kuhn’s later notion of a paradigm shift (Lecourt,1975; Hacking, 1981), Althusser argues that the advent of historical materialism represents such a rupture historically. However Marx did not conceptualise the epistemological advance represented by this advent, or establish the philosophical superiority of Marxism over other social theory. This was to be Althusser’s goal for the philosophy of Marxism or dialectical materialism as it is called.

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Althusser’s approach is to demarcate historical materialism from other ethical, moral and political assumptions, by demonstrating its "strict" scientific nature. His version of science is opposed to the empiricism which he claims blurs the distinction between the real object and the object of thought. Althusser uses the term “empiricism” in a very wide sense and as a bludgeon to attack a wide variety of positions which appeal, he claims, to abstraction (Althusser and Balibar, 1970, pp. 35-41). Knowledge on that view is of the essence of the real object and to the extent that it is of the real object knowledge is seen as a real part of the real object. This blurs the distinction between the real object and thought about that object. According to Althusser this distinction, which is to be found in Spinoza and Marx (post 1857), is crucial. Armed with this distinction Althusser sees concepts, actively created by thinkers, as the pre-conditions of knowledge of any experience. Theories which failed to observe this distinction are classified by him as ideologies, as opposed to science which, he claims, observes this distinction. In a typically philosophical manner Marxism is seen as scientific in so far as it is a coherent theoretical structure the concepts of which are logically related. However Althusser seems unable to provide an acceptable distinction between science and ideology and his enterprise founders perhaps, on this theoretical impasse (Smart, 1983, p. 17), But Althusser’s contribution to marxist thought is to present Marx’s theory as a scientific structure of the economy - a structure in which the knowing subject has no part and over which he can have no control. In drawing the distinction between the real object and thought about that object, Althusser also drives a wedge between theory and practice because the test of a theory becomes one of logical coherence and not, necessarily, practice. This is an unacceptable position on the nature of knowledge, from the writer’s viewpoint, and hopefully for marxists. Foucault broke with marxism but he never broke with Althusser, his former mentor, either personally or totally philosophically. He shared with Althusser’s structuralist marxism the notion of the decentering of the subject. But he did not agree with Althusser that Marx’s work represented an epistemological break with its post-Enlightenment predecessors (Foucault, 1967, p. 14). Poststructuralism in its theoretical emphasis on the decentering of the subject has affinities then with Althusser’s version of structuralism. 7. MAY-JUNE 1968 The events of May-June 1968 had an enormous influence upon intellectuals in France. These events were described by Edgar Morin, as “the student maelstrom” (1968, p. 111), and by the then political editor of Les Temps Modernes, André Gorz as “the first major revolutionary crisis to have shaken capitalist Europe in the last thirty years” (1968, p. 251). Alain Touraine sociologist and Professor at Nanterre, in May-June said: “The May Movement

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was a thunderbolt announcing the social struggles of the future” (1971, p. 347). In response to the student uprisings, President Charles de Gaulle (who was very intent on achieving major educational reforms), said on 19 May 1968: “Les reforms, oui, la chienlit, non” (quoted in Posner, 1968, p. 87). Later he was to say that the students’ activities “were misadventures”, and that “there had been a crisis of civilization”, as opposed to a “drama of students” (quoted in André Malraux,1972). Sam White, veteran correspondent for the (London) Evening Standard was to say (1984, p. 195) that the events evoked “feelings of disgust, shame and rage”, appealing to Raymond Aron for his philosophical and authoritarian justification of his interpretation. As can be seen there were clearly major disagreements, between members of the university faculty, between the media commentators, and between the left and the establishment, about these events and what they represented. There is little doubt that it was not a conspiracy of students, or students and workers, that it was more than an adolescent rebellion, and that it was more than a crisis in the universities, though it was at least that. It was certainly, for France, a political crisis though hardly a crisis of civilisation as deemed by de Gaulle (Malraux,1972). It involved class conflict but it also involved individualism, and far from heralding a new form of left communitarian structures, May-June 1968 might be seen as heralding neo-liberal versions of individualism (for a discussion of these possibilities see Ferry and Renaut, 1990, chapter two). These events have then neither an unequivocal description nor an unequivocal explanation. Speaking on education early in these events, Premier Georges Pompidou (himself a former teacher of classics, but no doubt speaking for many Gaullist educational reformers) had said to the National Assembly (19 May 1965): It (education) stills lives for the most part on postulates bequeathed to it by the Jesuits of the 17th. century and which were only slightly modified at the end of the last century. Of course we have become aware of the increased importance assumed by the sciences and also of the accretion of new knowledge. But we have contented ourselves with adding to the syllabus ... (that which is) often increasingly abstract ... children arrive at the end of their secondary studies with a level of knowledge which is becoming more and more worthless (quoted in Capelle, 1967).

Similar comments were to be made later by the O.E.C.D. in 1971 (OECD, 1971, pp. 20-22), emphasising in part that the Government had not achieved its modernising objectives of the 1960’s. Yet the Fifth Republic on assuming office in 1958 had marked four major areas for reform. Education was one of them and changes were initiated as early as 1959. Within education the Fifth Republic aimed initially at “modernising teaching methods, improving methods of selection at the ages of eleven and thirteen, changing the conditions of the baccaleauréat examination and eventually of raising the school leaving age to sixteen” (Pickles, 1973). Later there were to be emphases on modernising the universities, on participation and

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democratisation, and on taking higher education down the more technocratic path deemed necessary by the Fifth Republic for a strong France. There can be little doubt that at the outset of the Fifth Republic, de Gaulle had a strong commitment to education. Indeed it was said that in the area of educational reforms in the first ten years of the Fifth Republic, France had been “more innovative and dynamic than most other Western European countries” (Safran, 1977). The reforms in education were proposed by Minister of Education Christian Fouchet and, some believed, initiated or led to the student revolts. In education there were those who saw the Fouchet educational reforms as even further manifestations of the technocratic-capitalist state, and they had good reason, as the technocratic wing of the Gaullist party certainly wished for major technocratic reforms of the universities, if not to destroy the liberal university (Posner, 1968, pp. 69-74). There were those - reformists - who saw the universities and the schools as being hopelessly outmoded, though not all who saw the universities as being in need of reform were technocratic-capitalist reformers (Michel Foucault was one such person, and was a member of the government committee to implement the reforms - see Marshall, 1996, chapter 5). Within those two broad factions there were considerable minor factions, locked in disagreements and internal battles. The main tensions identified by OECD up to 1968 were: (a) The Pressure of Numbers. The numbers gaining the baccalauréat and thereby an entry certificate to the Faculties of the universities had risen immensely. There were enormous classes and considerable anonymity. However the faculties which could not select tried to gain breathing space by failing large numbers at the end of the first year - up to 45% (OECD, 1971, p. 70). This was bound to cause problems. (b) Universities and les Grandes Écoles. Les Grandes Écoles were highly selective and access was highly competitive. In Foucault’s case this involved two years preparation at Lycée Henri IV and on the first occasion he failed. Whereas the university faculties were not overly concerned with their teaching les grandes écoles were very attentive to their teaching. Given their function to prepare the future political and intelligentsia elites this is hardly surprising. But they conducted little research. Whereas their failure rate and drop out rates were low, those of the faculties were high. According to OECD (1971) whilst they supported each other they also supported each others’ weaknesses. (c) Modernisation and the Institutions of Higher Education. Between industry and commerce, and commerce, there was a yawning gap with little variety. There was little attempt to meet between faculties of the universities and the world of industry and commerce. Whilst industry sought the traditionally liberally educated person from the faculties they were finding that their education was old fashioned and scholarly. Finally, from the students, there was considerable dissatisfaction over the right to discuss political issues within class, the rigid re.g.ulations concerning

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student behaviour, and the role of students in determining the structures and curricula of the universities. The Nanterre campus of the University of Paris was the site for the student uprising. Daniel Cohn Bendit - Dany the Red - was a student of Lefebvre’s at Nanterre and was certainly familiar with the ideas of Socialisme ou Barbarie (Cohn-Bendit, 1968). Cohn-Bendit led a handful of students on 22nd March 1968, detonating an already smouldering student uprising. This spread to the Sorbonne on 3rd May and, finally, to the Renault factory at Flins on 16th May. As academic authority was overturned in educational institutions so, also, was the authority of the capitalist owners in the workplace, as ten million workers went on strike, and called in question the stability and authority of the state. However, what was new in the May 1968 revolution was the organisational form of the action committees, representing a possible new society, though in embryonic form, according to some commentators. What was seen as important by leftist commentators was that these committees were already that society living out a form of social life in which democratic decision-making underlay liberated, creative action across a wide section of social life. Although May ‘68 was “a social upheaval along the lines envisaged by Sartre, Lefebvre and Castoriadis” (Hirsh, 1981, p. 140) yet, nevertheless, whilst instigators were well aware of these ideas, in general the participants were not intellectuals developing theoretical forms of organisation for society(ies) but, rather, were highly autonomous people organised into effective action committees where the alienation of hierarchical authority structures and bureaucratic technology had been bypassed, if not eliminated. If Cohn-Bendit was aware of the theories which might have le.g.itimated the “revolution” most students were not. These new organisations and structures were independent of the existing political institutions of opposition - themselves hierarchical and conservative (especially the PCF). A form of social organisation based, not upon the workplace as focus, but upon wider structures and daily living had been shown to be not merely theoretically possible but capable of realisation, though not finally without state power. Lyotard was at Nanterre and a member of the group of 22 March. In 1970 he was to move to the experimental university site at Vincennes (see Lyotard, 1993), but when Foucault had departed to Le Collège de France. Baudrillard was also at Nanterre. Foucault was in Tunis at the time but he acknowledged often and explicitly the influences of May-June. But he had also taken part in the educational reforms as a member of the Implementation Committee of 1965 (for those who saw the Fouchet reforms as the cause of May-June this was somewhat ironic, given Foucault’s later commitment as an engaged intellectual of the left), and he was to be the foundation professor of philosophy at Vincennes in 1968. Deleuze was at the University of Lyon.

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8. THE PHILOSOPHICAL CURRICULUM In the schools the philosophy curriculum had scarcely changed between 1900 and 1968. Foucault attempted to change this curriculum in his work on the 1965 Implementation Committee (Marshall, 1996). And in the Universities and until 1968 it was little different. From World War II until 1968 the formal education of philosophers in France followed two broad general curriculums. The first, which most followed, arose from the early teaching and translations of Kojève and Hyppolite, and was based upon a revisionism of the philosophy of Descartes and Kant through the works of Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger. In general terms we are talking about humanism and marxism, and existentialism and phenomenolgy in particular. This was to be epitomised later in the writings of Sartre and the writings and teaching of Merleau-Ponty (who also introduced students to Saussure and Bergson). Althusser’s teaching of structuralist marxism attracted a large number of dedicated students (Poster, 1975, p. 359). But from the AngloAmerican perspective this curriculum had a decidedly psychological/ psychoanalytical perspective (especially Freud, to be followed by Lacan), reeked of metaphysics, and lacked the “logical” foundations of a proper post-Kantian epistemology. The second general, but less fashionable strand in France, was to be developed from Nietzsche’s reading of Kant, through Heidegger and, Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski. Also, it built upon the ideas of philosophy of science, developed from Jean Cavaillès, but in the work of Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser. (Foucault sites himself firmly in this second strand). This view of philosophy of science has considerable affinities to those of Thomas Kuhn in the Anglo-American tradition (Hacking, 1981). Because Kuhn is sometimes seen as a Wittgensteinian, and Wittgenstein as heralding the end of academic philosophy, there may have been little felt compulsion for Anglo-American philosophers to pursue this French account of the philosophy of science. Here the readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger were to be crucial. Habermas, in ruing the path taken by Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Foucault and Lacan (the young conservatives in his terminology) lays the blame upon Nietzsche and his (Nietzsche’s) reading of Kant, in particular (Habermas, 1981). But in the French scene it would seem more plausible that it was Sartre’s reading in Existentialism is a Humanism of Heidegger that set problems for French intellectuals concerned by the broad humanist tradition. Sartre read Heidegger as an existentialist and appealed to him as support, if implicitly (though see Sartre, 1984, pp. 184-185). It would seem that he had misread Heidegger on that issue. Heidegger responded in his famous Letter on Humanim (Heidegger, 1949). Heidegger denied that he was ever an existentialist. Yet whilst Being and Time provoked Sartre’s existentialist reading

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of Heidegger and the adoption of the notion of a free consciousness, for Heidegger, this notion was not to be found either in that work or in his writing (Grene, 1957). Heidegger denied that he was either a humanist or an existentialist and criticised Sartre heavily. But what Heidegger had provided was a philosophical critique of humanism based upon his pessimistic view of society, the history of mankind and technique (Heidegger, 1977), and a rejection of the Enlightenment message of the development and improvement of mankind. For Heidegger Sartre had flinched from answering the ontological questions about mankind. Had he not flinched he might have reached: the devastating insight into the ultimate loneliness of individual existence, the philosophical formulation of the place of death in life, that is noteworthy of Heidegger. (Grene, 1957, p. 14)

As Miller puts it: For him (Heidegger), as for Nietzsche and Spengler, modern history was nothing less than a calamity - not the happy emergence of the harmonious human freedom anticipated by Kant, Hegel and Marx. (1993, p. 47)

Heidegger argued (1949) that humanism was inadequate in an age of technology and impending nihilism. The humanist search for an essence was mistaken, according to Heidegger, because it made human being just another species of animal. His central point is that human being is in the world, deeply entangled in a world into which 'it' has been cast, but this is a world that can be appropriated freely within the limits of facticity or contingency of that world. Heidegger first used the term ‘existentiality’ for this notion but he was later to use ‘transcendence’. It is this notion of transcendence that is important. It is not mere existence but an inner personal existence, an anticipation of its own possibilities and of going beyond the given. Yet such transcendence can never exceed the boundaries of the givens. But transcendence is also subject to forfeiture, to being seduced, for we can forget our Being because of other human beings and the distractions of everyday life. This is also an essential aspect of Being, but an aspect to be overcome if freedom is to be attained: nihilism is the final outcome of forfeiture but can be avoided through transcendence. Heidegger then attempts to identify a notion of authentic being against the scattering of everyday life. Here then are to be found the bases of the critique of humanism, and of Sartre’s version of humanism. The question of Being is unequivocally a metaphysical question for Heidegger. For Heidegger humanism did lead to a metaphysics, but an impoverished metaphysics which made man into just another species of animal, because it did not take account of the facticity of the given, and the ability of man to overcome the distractions of the others and the potential of nihilism.

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The main teacher of Heidegger at École Normale Supérieure was Jean Beaufret to whom Heidegger had written the Letter on Humanism. Beaufret was an expositor of Heidegger. Nevertheless this must have been the early Heidegger that excited Foucault and was to provide opponents of humanism with the basis of an attack upon all versions of humanism. But Foucault and Deleuze, for example, recognised the intellectual superiority of Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche then, perhaps, as Habermas had claimed, that provided the post-Kantian path. It was Deleuze (e.g., 1962) that mainly introduced Nietzsche to France, but Foucault on the other hand began reading him, and because of Heidegger, in 1953 (Eribon, 1991, p. 51). 9. AFTER STRUCTURALISM Althusser’s structuralist marxism began to displace existentialist marxism - so much so that by May-June 1968 Sartre, when invited to visit the Sorbonne with Beauvoir, felt that he had little to say to the students. Then Sartre was to shift ground and align himself with the Maoists. Sartre and Beauvoir became politically active again, but it was not as existentialist marxists. The events of May-June 1968 are important then because they pointed to inadequacies in theory and practice of the left. In their practice the students had shown the pressing need for new forms of social theory. This vacuum was entered by the group of thinkers whom we have caught with the coined term 'post-structuralism”. Indeed the paths taken by the philosophers whom we are interested in here may be considered as both continuing the 1968 revolt and developing theoretically the students’ and workers’ revolution. As we have seen education was at the centre of the revolt − in how it was to be conceived and conducted in public institutions and the form which pedagogy was to take. It would be a mistake however to see these events as causing the emergence of post structuralist philosophy, for the intellectual roots lie much deeper in Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger. But May-June 1968 can be seen as a catalyst, or a platform, or a forum for post-structuralism. For feminists post-structuralism was to provide theoretical paths to develop themes already introduced by Beauvoir as early as 1949 in The Second Sex. If some feminists were to see her as portraying women negatively she remained active in women’s liberation movements into the 1970s. Other feminists supported her, arguing that her philosophical contributions to the existentialist movement had been improperly subsumed under Sartre − in part she aided and abetted this derivative interpretation. But this interpretivist impasse was not resolved until the publication posthumously of her Letters to Sartre by her adopted daughter Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir in 1991. It is clear from her 1939/1940 letters that her work on L’Invitée begun in 1937, was very well advanced by end 1939. In that novel she explores philosophical themes, on authenticity, the social other and freedom, that distance her from Sartre. These

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feminist and philosophical issues are covered very fully in a collection edited by Margaret Simons (1995). Marxist structuralism had little chance of succeeding in any intellectual continuation, especially as Althusser had managed to stay on in the PCF, when many of his ex students and followers were expelled. But structuralism also had intellectual problems of its own. The fluid, changing form of social life experienced in 1968, was hardly compatible theoretically with formalist structuralism. As a theory of language first and, second, as a theory claimed to be capable of describing and analysing culture and society, it carried with it the seeds of its own intellectual destruction. 10. CONCLUSION In this chapter references have been made to those writers who are discussed in the following chapters, and who may be described or caught by the label 'poststructuralist'. That some individuals named above are caught by reference to movements or journals does not mean that they were either major actors or that they induced major influences. But they have been referred to in order to insert post-structuralism into the maelstrom of French philosophical thought (and wider intellectual life) between World War II and 1968. The concern was to provide a broad introduction to French philosophical life between WWII and 1968, but one which led into poststructuralism. For fuller details on this philosophical background readers are referred to major expositions such as Ferry and Renaut (1990), Hirsh (1981), Jay (1984) and Poster (1975). But little has been said in this chapter in particular about these poststructuralists. Readers should turn now to the chapters on individual thinkers which follow. Jim Marshall is Professor of Education in the School of Education, at The University of Auckland, New Zealand NOTE 1

I have used material in this chapter from my earlier book on Foucault (1996), but it has been extended considerably.

REFERENCES Althusser, L. Essays in self-criticism (Transl. G. Lock). London: New Left Books, 1976. Althusser, L. and E. Balibar. Reading Capital (Transl. B. Brewster). London: New Left Books, 1970.

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Anderson, P. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books, 1976. Barnes, H. E. “Introduction.” In J.-P. Sartre, Search for a Method (pp. vii-xxxi). New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Baudrillard, J. Forget Foucault and Forget Baudrillard: An Interview with Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987. Beauvoir, S. de. She Came to Stay. New York: Norton, 1954. (Original work published 1943). Beauvoir, S. de. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (Transl. P. O’Brien). Harmondsworth: Penguin., 1984 (Original work published 1981). Beauvoir, S. de. The Second Sex (Transl. H. M. Parshley). New York: Vintage, 1989 (Original work published 1949). Beauvoir, S. de. Letters to Sartre (Ed. & Trans. Q. Hoare). London: Radius, 1991. Capelle, J. Tomorrow’s education: The French Experience (Transl. W. D. Halls). London: Pergamon Press, 1967. Cohn-Bendit, D. and G. Cohn-Bendit. Obsolete Communism : The Left-wing Alternative (Transl. A. Pomerans). London: Deutsch, 1968. Cruikshank, J. The Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French Fiction 1935-1960. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy (Transl. H. Tomlinson). New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. (First published, 1962) . Dreyfus, H.and P. Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983. Ellul, J. The Technological Society (Transl. J. Wikinson). New York: Vintage, 1964. Eribon, D. Michel Foucault (Transl. Betsy Wing). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Ferry, L. and A. Renaut. French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism (Transl. M. H. S. Cattani). Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Foucault, M. “Intellectuals and Power.” In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.). Michel Foucault: Language, Countermemory, Practice. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977a. (Original work published 1972). Foucault. M. In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.). Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-memory, Practice (Transl. D. F. Bouchard & S. Simon). Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977b. Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Transl. A. Sheridan). New York: Vintage, 1979 (Original work published 1975). Foucault, M. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings (C. Gordon, Ed.). New York: Pantheon,”1980a. Foucault, M.. “Truth and power.” (Trans. C.Gordon). In C. Gordon (Ed.). M. Foucault: Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Pantheon., 1980b (Original work published 1977) Foucault, M. “The Minimalist Self.” In L. D. Kritzman (Ed.). M. Foucault,: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984). New York and London: Routledge, 1988a (Original work published 1983). Foucault, M. In L. D. Kritzman (Ed.). Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984. New York and London: Routledge, 1988b. Foucault, M. “The Return of Morality” (Transl. Thomas Levin and Isabelle Lorenz). In L. D. Kritzman Ed.). M. Foucault. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and other writings, 1977-1984. New York and London: Routledge, 1988c (Original work published 1984). Foucault, M. “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview.” In L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton (Ed.) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucaul. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988d (Original work published 1982).

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Foucault, M. “The Discourse of History” ( Trans. J. Johnston). In S. Lotringer (Ed.). M. Foucault: Foucault Live. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989a (Original work published 1967). Foucault, M. Foucault Live. S. Lotringer (Ed.). New York: Semiotext(e), 1989b. Foucault, M. “Foucault Responds to Sartre” (Transl. J, Johnston). In S. Lotringer (Ed.). M. Foucault, Foucault Live. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989c (Original work published 1968). Foucault M. “Rituals of Exclusion” In S. Lotringer (Ed.) M. Foucault, Foucault Live. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989d (Original work published 1971). Fullbrook, K. and E. Fullbrook. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth Century Legend. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Gorz, A. “What are the Lessons of the May Events?” In C. Posner (Ed.). Reflections on the Revolution in France: 1968. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1968. Grene, M. Heidegger. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1957. Habermas, J. “Modernity versus Postmodernity.” New German Critique, 22, (1981): 3-14. Hacking, I. The Archaeology of Michel Foucault. New York Review of Books May 14 (1981): 32-37. Heidegger, M. Letter on Humanism. Frankfurt a.m.: Klosterman, 1949. Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology: And Other Essays (Transl. W. Lovett). New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Hirsh, A. The French New Left: An Intellectual History from Sartre to Gorz. Boston: South End, 1981. Hyppolyte, J. Studies on Marx and Hegel. London: Heinemann, 1969. Jay, M. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lucacs to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Lacan, J. Écrits, London: Tavistock, 1977 . Lefebvre, H. The Explosion; Marxism and the French Revolution (Transl. A. Ehrenfeld). New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969. Lecourt, D. (1975). Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault (Transl. B. Brewster). London: New Left Books, 1975. Lyotard, J-F. Political writings (Transl. W. Readings). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Macey, D. (1993). The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Hutchinson, 1993. Malraux, A. La Condition Humaine. Paris: Gallimard, 1933. Malraux, A. Felled Oaks; Conversations with de Gaulle (Transl. I. Clephane). New York: Holt, Rhinehart Winston, 1972. Marshall, J. D. Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996. Marshall, J. D. and Peters, M. A. “New Perspectives on Piaget’s Philosophy.” Educational Theory 6. 2 (1986); 125-136. Martin, L. H., Gutman, H. and P.H. Hutton (Eds.) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Merleau-Ponty, M. Adventures of the Dialectic (Transl. J. Bien). Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Miller, J. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Morin, E. “The Student Commune.” In C. Posner (Ed.) Reflections on the Revolution in France: 1968. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1968. O.E.C.D. Review of National Policies for Education - France. Paris: O.E.C.D., 1971. O'Farrell, C. Michel Foucault: Philosopher or Historian. London: Macmillan, 1989. Peters, M. Poststructuralism, Politics and Education. Westport,CT.: Bergin and Garvey, 1996. Piaget, J. Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (Transl. W. Mays). New York: Meridean, 1971. Pickles, D. M. The Government and Politics of France. (Vol. 2). London: Methuen, 1973.

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Posner, C. Reflections on the Revolution in France: 1968. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1968. Poster, M. Existential Marxism in Post-war France: From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975. Poster, M. Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Raulet, G. “Structuralism and Poststructuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” Telos, 55 (1983): 195-211. Safran, W. The French Polity. New York: MacKay, 1977. Sartre, J-P. (1968). Search for a Method (Transl. H. E. Barnes). New York: Vintage, 1968. Sartre, J-P. War diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War (Transl. Q. Hoare). London: Verso, 1984. Seidman, S. Contested Knowledge. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Smart, B. Foucault, Marxism and Critique. London: Routledge, 1983. Simons, M. (Ed.). Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. University Park, P.A.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Touraine, A. The Movement of May (Transl. M. Mayhew). New York: Vintage, 1971. (Original work published 1968). White, S. Sam White’s Paris. Seven Oaks: New Forest Books, 1984.

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GERT BIESTA

EDUCATION AFTER DECONSTRUCTION

(A)ll sentences of the type “Deconstruction is X” or “Deconstruction is not X” a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. (Derrida, 1991, 275)

1. PROLOGUE Why should educators and educational theorists engage with deconstruction? What could be the point of them reading the complex and controversial writings of Jacques Derrida (1930-), the Algerian-born philosopher whose work has become known under this name? If deconstruction would be just another ‘philosophy’, then to engage with this particular philosophy would only be one option among many. Some educators read Dewey, others prefer Wittgenstein, and still others like Derrida. If, on the other hand, it would be true that “deconstruction is the case” (Derrida, 1990, p.85), that ‘deconstruction’ “is one of the possible names to designate ... what occurs [ce qui arrive], or cannot manage to occur [ce qui n’arrive pas à arriver]” (Derrida and Ewald, 2001, p. 67), then the relationship between deconstruction and education seems to be a different one. It is no longer, then, to read Derrida and after that to apply his ideas to education. Instead it is to find out, with Derrida, where deconstruction “occurs” in education in order then to invent an educational response. Reading Derrida, in other words, might help us to “see”’ the occurrence of deconstruction ‘in’ education. But it is neither for Derrida to tell us what to do, nor for us to simply implement his ideas. A different response is called for. In this chapter I wish to explore the possible significance of Derrida’s writings for education. I will do this in three steps. Firstly, I will discuss some of the problems entailed in writing about Derrida. The aim of this section is not so much to make clear why it is difficult to do so, but rather to show what is special about writing “after” Derrida. This will also allow me to introduce some deconstructive themes. In the next section I will present in a more traditional manner some of the central ideas and insights that are at stake in deconstruction. Against this background I will, in the final section, offer my ideas about what deconstruction might entail for education and educators.

27 J. D. Marshall (ed.), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy, 27-42. ¤ 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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GERT BIESTA 2. READING DERRIDA, WRITING AFTER DERRIDA

In more than one sense it seems that writing about Derrida is an impossible task. To begin with the obvious: Derrida has since the sixties published very many articles and very many books (see Bennington and Derrida, 1993, pp. 355-416; Nordquist, 1995), and, as Bennington has put it, continues to write at a speed “that is a little intimidating for his readers” (Bennington, 1993, p. 3). Any attempt to represent such a corpus, not to mention the colossal tower of interpretations it has evoked, is simply destined to fail. Moreover, Derrida’s work is complex and difficult to read. Derrida writes about, with, against, in and on the margins of the texts of major thinkers in the Western tradition – such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Freud and Heidegger – both explicitly and between the lines. His writing often breaks with the conventional, linear presentation of philosophical argument and contains multiple experiments with typography, punctuation and pictorial form. And even when his writing does take a more conventional shape, it is still full of word play, punning, allusion and parody, thereby setting all kinds of traps and obstacles for its readers. Yet the problem of writing about Derrida is not just a technical one. It is not just about finding a way to represent a corpus that can hardly be represented because of its scale. It is not just the problem of conveying the original meaning of an oeuvre that is complex and unconventional. For it is precisely the assumption that meaning can be grasped in its original moment, that meaning can be represented in the form of some proper, self-identical concept, that Derrida is most determinedly out to challenge. This may help us to understand why Derrida’s writing is often unconventional and oblique. Derrida’s writing is a “writing on writing” (see Derrida, 1983, p. 45) that does not want to betray itself, that does not want to restore the kind of order it puts into question. This, however, is precisely what makes writing about Derrida into a Catch-22, because getting Derrida “right”, i.e., giving the final representation of the original meaning of his oeuvre, is at the very same time not getting him right. However, this Catch-22 is not simply the last word about Derrida and deconstruction. For we might argue that the very impossibility of getting Derrida ‘right’ is precisely what opens up the possibility of writing about Derrida in the first place (see Bennington,1993, pp. 15, 38). If, after all, our writing would be identical with Derrida’s writing, then it would be impossible to recognize it as writing about Derrida. In order, therefore, to represent Derrida’s writing, in order to say the same thing as he says, in order to capture his writing in its singularity, we are obliged to say something differently. Both followers and critics of Derrida have taken this to mean that deconstruction is a kind of “hermeneutics free-for-all” (Norris, 1987, p. 139), a joyous release from all the rules and constraints of interpretation and understanding (see for example Habermas, 1987, pp. 222-223; and for Derrida’s reply Derrida,1988, pp. 156-157). This interpretation, which basically suggests that deconstruction is a skeptical position, does, however, overlook a crucial “movement” in Derrida’s writing.

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It is true that Derrida has challenged the common understanding of writing and reading as two oppositional ‘activities’, one actively producing, the other passively consuming. Derrida points to a certain complicity between writing and reading, in that – to put it simply – a text needs to be read in order to be (or become) a text. This implies that writing always entails a risk: the risk of misunderstanding. Derrida has articulated this risk in different ways, for example by arguing that no author can ever fully master the way in which his writing will be read, or that no text, not even the text of the law, prescribes an inevitable reading. If this were all there is to say, the conclusion might be justified that Derrida simply wants to invert the opposition between understanding and misunderstanding, so that the latter would take priority over the former and would henceforth become the rule. But such a reading overlooks the fact that Derrida has not only questioned the possibility of understanding as such, but first and foremost the way in which we conceive of the relationship between understanding and misunderstanding. This relationship is commonly understood as a binary opposition, an opposition of two, mutually exclusive options. The opposition implies a hierarchy in that understanding is considered to be the normal situation and misunderstanding the aberration. Understanding thus defines what “real” or “successful” reading is, while misunderstanding is conceived as the distortion of this normal situation, a distortion that comes from without. As soon as it is acknowledged, however, that misunderstanding is always possible (which is not the same as saying that it is always the case), we need to ask whether we can still hold that misunderstanding constitutes an accident, that it is a risk that befalls language from without. According to Derrida this is not the case. He argues that misunderstanding is as much a part of language, is as much on the ‘inside’ of language as understanding is (see Derrida, 1988, pp. 15-17). The relation of ‘mis’ (mis-understanding, mis-interpreting, for example) to that which is not ‘mis’ is ... that of a general possibility inscribed in the structure of positivity, of normality, of the ‘standard’. (Derrida, 1988, 157)

From this it follows that the idea of normal language as successful understanding – i.e., understanding without (the risk of) misunderstanding – is not a fact but an “ethical and teleological determination” of what ‘normal’ language is (see Derrida, 1988,p.17). The purity of ‘normal’ language is, in other words, maintained by an act of exclusion. It is not only that what is being kept outside of language (misunderstanding) in fact ‘inhabits’ the inside. Derrida argues that there would not even be an inside without this fact (see Bennington, 1998, p. 157). This reveals that deconstruction is far from an attempt to make misunderstanding the rule or the law. To quote Derrida once more: All that I recall is that this structural possibility [of misunderstanding; G.B.] must be taken into account when describing so-called normality, or so-called just comprehension or interpretation, and that this possibility can be neither excluded nor opposed. An entirely different logic is called for. (Derrida, 1988, 157; emph. in original)

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The condition of possibility of language is therefore neither to be found in “pure” understanding nor in “pure” misunderstanding. Derrida also rejects, however, the option of some higher unity (Aufhebung) of understanding and misunderstanding, as a dialectical interpretation of his writing would suggest (see Derrida, 1981a, pp. 4041). What Derrida wants to bring into view is the ultimate undecidability of this opposition (which does not imply a denial of the difference between understanding and misunderstanding; see Derrida, 1988, p. 156); an undecidability which cannot be traced back to some original, pure unity, but which itself is always already “at work”. Here we encounter the entirely different logic of “the originarity of the secondary” (Bennington, 1993, p. 40), the logic of the “supplement” (Derrida, 1976, pp. 269-316), the logic of “différance” (Derrida, 1982, pp. 1-28; see below). What does this imply for our writing about Derrida? The foregoing first of all makes clear that we are not in a position to choose between (pure) understanding and (pure) misunderstanding because the former is always already contaminated by the latter. Misunderstanding is the essential and hence necessary risk of all understanding. There is only one way to evade this risk, which is not to engage in an act of reading or interpretation at all. While this might be the only way to be absolutely respectful of the singularity of Derrida’s writing, it makes this singularity silent, unidentifiable and unrecognizable at the very same time. This means that for the singular to be possible as a singularity, it must take the risk of a “repetition in alterity” (Bennington, 1993, p. 86), the risk of misunderstanding, the risk of translation – “and for the notion of translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation” (Derrida, 1981a, p. 20). Only this repetition in alterity opens up the possibility for the singular to be recognized in its irreducible singularity. Otherwise the ineluctably singular would remain invisible and inaudible. This is what we might call ‘the law of singularity’, the inevitable dissingularization of the singular through the repetition without which it could not hope to secure its singularity (see Gasché, 1994, pp. 14-15). Reading Derrida and writing about Derrida therefore means translating Derrida – “and the question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of translation” (Derrida, 1991, p. 270). Translation, Derrida holds, is not the transmission or reproduction of an original meaning that preceded it. Not only because every translation is a possible transformation, but and even more, because the originality of the original only comes into view after it has been translated (which in turn means that the very sense of a pure original preceding translation is but an effect of translation; see Derrida, 1985). Translation might therefore best be understood as a response, a response to the singularity of the text (see Gasché, 1994, pp. 227-250). For this response to be a genuine response, it has to be singular itself (a “response without norms”; Derrida and Ewald, 1995, p. 289), and not just a repetition of the text or a response pre-programmed by the text. This implies that a genuine response has all the allure of irresponsibility: it is singular, untranslatable, and never an unconditional affirmation. And yet, for a response to be genuine and responsive it also has to be responsible in that it needs to do justice to the singularity

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of the text (not in the least because the survival of the text is dependent on this response). A text, therefore, only lives if it lives on, and it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable... Totally translatable, it disappears as a text, as writing, as a body of language [langue]. Totally untranslatable, even within what is believed to be one language, it dies immediately. (Derrida, 1979, p. 102)

How, then, to respond to Derrida’s writing? Let me begin again. 3. THE POINT(S) OF DECONSTRUCTION 3.1. From critique to deconstruction One way to understand what deconstruction is about, is to think of it as a part of the tradition of critical philosophy. This is, for example, the way in which Emmanuël Levinas suggests that we understand Derrida. He writes: May not Derrida’s work cut into the development of Western thinking with a line of demarcation similar to that of Kantianism, which separated dogmatic philosophy from critical philosophy? Are we again at the end of a naïveté, of an unsuspected dogmatism which slumbered at the base of that which we took for critical spirit? (Levinas, 1991, p. 3)

One could, of course, argue that all Western philosophy is critical philosophy and that the very point of engaging in philosophy is precisely to be critical. From Socrates and Plato, via Kant, Hegel and Marx, to Popper and the Frankfurt School we can see that Western philosophy has continuously understood itself as a critical activity. Although there clearly is a critical ‘point’ in deconstruction, it stands out both with respect to its understanding of the object of critique and with respect to its method. Deconstruction is first of all special in that its critical “work” is aimed at the very possibility of critique itself. Derrida emphasizes that deconstruction is not a critique “in a general or Kantian sense”, but that “the instance of krinein or of krisis (decision, choice, judgement, discernment) is itself ... one of the essential ‘themes’ or ‘objects’ of deconstruction” (Derrida, 1991, p. 273). Deconstruction, Derrida writes, “always aims at the trust confided in the critical, critico-theoretical agency, that is, the deciding agency”, for which reason he concludes that “deconstruction is deconstruction of critical dogmatism” (Derrida, 1995, p. 54). We can say, therefore, that the critical ‘work’ of deconstruction is first at all aimed at critical philosophy – or philosophy as critique – itself. Indeed, Derrida maintains that the central question of his writing is the question as to “from what site or non-site (non-lieu) philosophy [can] as such appear to itself as other than itself, so that it can interrogate and reflect upon itself in an original manner” (Derrida, 1984, p. 108). This, however, immediately has repercussions for the critical ‘activity’ of deconstruction itself. After all, a critique-of-critique can not make use of the critical

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‘style’ it wants to criticize. If it wants to be an effective critique, it has to find a way to be critical and self-critical at the very same time. It may seem, therefore, that what deconstruction wants to achieve is simply impossible, because it has no ground to stand on and no place to begin from. Rather than opening up the field of critique, deconstruction seems to signify the end of critique and, as for example Jürgen Habermas has argued, the beginning of conservatism – in this case a “new conservatism (Habermas, 1987). But this is not how Derrida would see it. To acknowledge that there is no safe place to stand on, that there is no absolute beginning, no simple point of departure, is not a weakness of deconstruction but rather its strength. Derrida stresses again and again that what lies at the basis of our decisions and judgements is a radical undecidability which cannot be closed off by our decisions or judgements, but “continues to inhabit the decision” (Derrida, 1996, p. 87). Derrida acknowledges that this is an aporia – but “we must not hide it from ourselves”. (Derrida, 1992b, p. 41). I will even venture to say that ethics, politics, and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of the aporia. When the path is clear and given, when a certain knowledge opens up the way in advance, the decision is already made, it might as well be said that there is none to make; irresponsibly, and in good conscience, one simply applies or implements a program. (Derrida, 1992b, p. 41)

It may seem that what Derrida is suggesting, is similar to what antifoundationalists like John Dewey and Richard Rorty and fallibilists like Karl Popper have been saying for a long time. In a sense this is true. But in another sense it is not, because Derrida is not only saying that we can never be certain, that we will never touch safe, absolute ground. He also asks what the (alleged) safe ground is from which anti-foundationalists and fallibilists proclaim their insights. He does not do this, however, in order to accuse them of a (performative) contradiction and hence of irrationality, but rather to further ‘open up’ the critical work of antifoundationalists and fallibilists (see for a more detailed discussion Biesta, 2001a; Biesta and Stams, 2001). According to Derrida, both foundationalism and anti-foundationalism rely on the same metaphysics of presence. The critical work of deconstruction is precisely aimed at this more general framework of the metaphysics of presence. But what is the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and what is the problem with this metaphysics? The answer to this question brings us to one of the most central themes in Derrida’s oeuvre. 3.2.Deconstruction and the metaphysics of presence The theme that runs through Derrida’s writing right from the beginning is the theme of the origin. Or, to be more precise: the theme of the thought of the origin, the theme of the philosophy of the origin, the theme of metaphysics. Derrida argues, that the history of Western philosophy can be seen as a continuous attempt to locate a fundamental ground, a fixed center, an Archimedean point, which serves both as

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an absolute beginning and as a center from which everything originating from it can be mastered and controlled (see Derrida, 1978, p. 279). Since Plato this origin has always been defined of in terms of presence. The origin is thought of as fully present to itself and as self-sufficient. Derrida sees the “determination of Being as presence” as the “matrix” of the history of metaphysics, which, so he adds, coincides with the history of the West in general (see Derrida, 1978, p. 279). “It could be shown,” he argues, “that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence” (ibid.) Here we should not only think of such apparent fundamentals as God or nature. Any attempt to present something as original, fundamental and self-sufficient is an example of the metaphysics of presence (see Derrida, 1978, p. 81). It includes, for example, both the idea of consciousness as a self-present origin (an idea that can be found in Descartes’ cogito), and the idea that everything is a social construction (where “the social” functions as a self-sufficient presence). It is important to notice that the “metaphysics of presence” includes more than just the determination of the meaning of Being as presence. The metaphysical gesture of Western philosophy also entails a hierarchical axiology in which the origin is designated as pure, simple, normal, standard, self-sufficient and selfidentical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident etcetera. Derrida wants to put the metaphysical gesture of Western philosophy into question. He acknowledges that he is not the first to do so. Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger have all in their own way exposed and criticized the metaphysical desire of Western thought, the desire for fixed, self-present origins (see Derrida, 1978, p. 280). But there is a crucial difference between Nietzsche’s “demolition” or Heidegger’s “destruction” (Destruktion or Abbau) of metaphysics and the ‘project’ Derrida is engaged in (see Derrida, 1991, pp. 70-271). Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and all the other “destructive discourses” wanted to make a total break with the metaphysical tradition. They wanted to end and to overcome metaphysics. Derrida tells us, however, that such a rupture is not a real possibility. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We ... can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. (Derrida, 1978, p. 280)

While Derrida wants to “shake” metaphysics, he acknowledges that this cannot be done from some neutral and innocent place outside of metaphysics. He acknowledges that we cannot step outside of the tradition, since that would leave us without any tools, without even a language to investigate, criticize and “shake” metaphysics. What is more to the point, therefore, is to say – to put it simply – that Derrida wants to shake metaphysics by showing that it is itself always already ‘shaking’. It is here that the word ‘deconstruction’ comes into play, but it is important to see what it is and what it is not. Deconstruction, to put it simply, is not the activity

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of revealing the impossibility of metaphysics. It is not something that Derrida does or other philosophers can do. Derrida explains that ‘deconstructions,’ which I prefer to say in the plural ... is one of the possible names to designate ... what occurs [ce qui arrive], or cannot manage to occur [ce qui n’arrive pas à arriver], namely a certain dislocation, which in effect reiterates itself regularly – and wherever there is something rather than nothing. (Derrida and Ewald, 2001, p. 67)

For this very reason deconstruction is “not a method and cannot be transformed into one” (Derrida, 1991, p. 273). What philosophers can do, and what Derrida has done many times in his writings, is to show, to reveal, perhaps even to witness metaphysics-in-deconstruction (see Bennington, 2000, p. 11). But basically, all deconstruction is “auto-deconstruction” (see Derrida, 1997, p. 9). What might metaphysics-in-deconstruction look like? If it has to do with the fact that any attempt to “be metaphysical” at the very same time disrupts itself – which means that we are always “in a tension between metaphysics and its undoing” (Bennington, 2000, p. 15) – then we could say that deconstruction becomes visible in those situations in which what makes something possible makes it at the very same time impossible; where, in other words, what is a condition of possibility is at the very same time a condition of impossibility. One example is this “logic” can be found in the relationship between presence and absence, about which Derrida writes that ‘presence’ is only possible because of what is not present, viz. ‘absence’. Let’s look at this example and its implications in more detail. 3.3. Deconstruction and difference One way in which Derrida hints at the occurrence of metaphysics-in-deconstruction is with something that is written as ‘différance’. Derrida develops his ideas about différance in the context of a discussion of the structuralist theory of sings, meaning and language of Ferdinand de Saussure (see Derrida, 1982, pp. 1-28). Central to de Saussure’s theory is the rejection of the idea that language is essentially a naming process, attaching words to things. According to de Saussure language should be understood as a system or a structure in which any individual element is only meaningful because it differs from other elements. In language, he holds, there are therefore only differences. These differences are, however, not differences between positive terms, that is between terms that in and by themselves refer to objects or things outside of the system and derive their meaning from that. De Saussure argues that in language there are only differences without positive terms. A dictionary is a good example of this (see Caputo, 1997). If we look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary we will be referred to other words. We can look up their meaning but we will again only be referred to still other words. Each word in the dictionary has a position relative to and different from other words. Going through the dictionary will bring us from one word to another and so on ad infinitum. But what we will never find is a word that relates to something outside the dictionary which gives the word its meaning. The difference between the words,

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then, is not the effect of their reference. Reference rather should be understood as a function of difference. Derrida argues that if there are only differences without positive terms, then this means that the “movement of signification” is only possible if each element “appearing on the scene of presence, is relating to something other than itself” (Derrida, 1982, p. 13). What is called ‘the present’, he continues, is therefore constituted “by means of this very relation to what it is not”. This “contamination” is a necessary contamination: for the present to be itself and present itself as selfsufficient, it needs what is other than itself. This puts the non-present in a double position. On the one hand it is the non-present which makes the presence of what is present possible (which at the same time means that it makes the presence of what is present impossible). Yet, it can only make this presence possible by means of its own exclusion. What is excluded, thereby in a sense returns to sign the act of its own exclusion which, as Bennington (1993, pp. 217-218) observes, immediately “outplays the legality of the decision to exclude” (see also Derrida, 1981a, pp. 41-42). If this is what can become visible when we see metaphysics-in-deconstruction, we can already get an idea of the critical potential of doing so, since at the heart of this we find a concern for what could be called the “constitutive outside” of what presents itself as self-sufficient. We can then think of Derrida’s writing as an attempt to dismantle our preconceived understanding of identity as self-sufficient presence, in order to expose us to the challenge of a hitherto concealed, excluded and suppressed otherness; an otherness which has been ignored in order to preserve the illusion of identity as self-sufficient presence. Derrida’s writing aims to reveal that the otherness which is excluded and suppressed in order to maintain the idea of pure and uncontaminated original presence, is actually constitutive of that which presents itself as such. What the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence brings into view, is that “identity presupposes alterity” (Derrida, 1984, p. 117). This already suggests that the point of deconstruction is not negative or destructive but first and foremost affirmative (see Derrida, 1997, p. 5). It is an affirmation, so we could say, of what is excluded and forgotten; an affirmation of what is other (see Gasché, 1994) – or, to be more precise, an affirmation of the otherness of what is other (see below). 3.4. The difference of différance There is, however, a complication which has to do with the question how deconstruction can bring what is excluded into view. The problem is this: if it is indeed the case that in language there are only differences without positive terms, then we have to concede that it is not possible to articulate the differential character of language itself by means of a positive term such as, e.g., differentiation either. Difference without positive terms implies that this ‘dimension’ must itself always remain unperceived. Strictly speaking, it is unconceptualizable. Derrida therefore concludes that “the play of difference, which, as Saussure reminded us, is the

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condition for the possibility and functioning of every sign, is in itself a silent play” (Derrida, 1982, p. 5). If, however, we would want to articulate that which does not let itself be articulated and yet is the condition for the possibility of all articulation – which we may wish to do in order to prevent metaphysics from re-entering the scene – we must first of all acknowledge that there can never be a word or a concept to represent this silent play. We must also acknowledge that this play cannot simply be exposed, for “one can expose only that which at a certain moment can become present” (Derrida, 1982, p. 5). And we must finally acknowledge that there is nowhere to begin, “for what is put into question is precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure” (Derrida, 1982, p. 6). All this, and more, is acknowledged in the new word or concept “which is neither a word nor a concept” (Derrida, 1982, p. 7) but a “neographism” (Derrida, 1982, p. 13) – of différance. (In French the difference between ‘différence’ and ‘différance’ is itself inaudible, which makes it an ideal candidate for hinting at the silent play of language.) The reason why Derrida introduces that “what is written as différance” (Derrida, 1982, p. 11) is not too difficult to grasp. For although the play of difference is identified as the condition of possibility of all conceptuality, we should not make the mistake to think that we have finally found the real and ultimate origin of conceptuality. (Precisely at this point Derrida goes ‘beyond’ de Saussure, in that he rejects de Saussure’s suggestion that what is most original and makes language and meaning possible is “structure” [see Derrida, 1976, p. 39]. At his point we could say that Derrida becomes post-structural, although we should be aware that in deconstruction there is never a simple “before” nor a simple “after”.) Because we are talking about the condition of possibility of all conceptuality, this condition itself cannot belong to what it makes possible. It has to come before language. Yet, the only way in which we can articulate this condition of possibility is in terms of the system that is made possible by it. We are, therefore, always already too late to articulate the condition of possibility of all articulation – which implies that what we identify as the condition of possibility of language is at the same time its condition of impossibility (see Gasché, 1986, pp. 316-317). This means that différance is not a new metaphysics. It is not an attempt to identify a new, self-sufficient origin. It rather is an attempt to indicate that whenever we would want to become metaphysical, we will not find a stable, self-sufficient point of departure. What we will find ourselves engaged in is something which may best be characterized as a “movement”. After all, any attempt to articulate what makes a system possible (which has to come “before” the system and hence is “outside” of it) already has to operate within the confines of the system made possible by it (and therefore has to be ‘inside’ at the very same time). It is for this reason that any attempt to fix conditions of possibility is bound to fail – or to be more precise: that the system is never totally delimited by its conditions of possibility since these conditions are always already part of the system. This is why Caputo (1997, p. 102) calls différance a “quasi-condition of possibility”, one which

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“does not describe fixed boundaries that delimit what can happen and what not, but points a mute, Buddhist finger at the moon of uncontainable effects”. We can now in a sense say more confidently and with more precision what we concluded before, viz., that the point of deconstruction is to open up the system – any system, not only the system(s) of language – in the name of what cannot be thought of in terms of the system and yet makes the system possible. This reveals that deconstruction is not simply an affirmation of what is already know to be excluded by the system. Deconstruction is an affirmation of what is wholly other (tout autre), of what is unforeseeable from the present. It is, as Derrida puts it, an affirmation of an otherness that is always to come, as an event which “as event, exceeds calculation, rules, programs, anticipations” (Derrida, 1992a, p. 27). In this sense it is not simply an affirmation of who or what is other, but rather of the otherness of who or what is other. Deconstruction is an opening and an openness towards an unforeseeable and incalculable in-coming of the other (see Caputo, 1997, p. 42; Biesta, 2001b). This is what Derrida calls ‘the impossible’ – which is not what is impossible but what cannot be foreseen as a possibility. 3.5. Deconstruction – in a nutshell In a nutshell (Caputo, 1997), then, we can say that the “object” of deconstruction is the metaphysics of presence – which can be present under many different guises – and that the ‘point’ of deconstruction is not simply to do away with the metaphysics of presence, but rather to open up the metaphysics of presence, to show that the condition of possibility of the metaphysics of presence is at the very same time its condition of impossibility. The point of deconstruction, in other words, is to show that presence is only possible because of its relation to absence, just as identity is only possible because of its relation to alterity. But Derrida cannot do all this by introducing a new metaphysics, such as the metaphysics of differentiation, because that would immediately close off what he wants to open up. The only lesson to learn from deconstruction, so we could say, is that we always should be vigilant, that we always should be on the look out for traces of the metaphysics of presence, for attempts to close off instead of to open up – in language, in institutions and in human practices. This is not an easy task. It is hard work which never will come to an end. The only support Derrida can give, is différance – the silent play which can never be present but should be in its place in order to prevent metaphysics from entering again. And all this because deconstruction wants to be affirmative, because it wants to be welcoming to what is other than what can be conceived. Why should we do this? What, in other words, gives deconstruction its impetus? Derrida’s answer to this question is deceptively simple: the point of deconstruction is justice. Or in an ever shorter formula: “deconstruction is justice” (Derrida, 1992a, p. 35; emph. in original). For Derrida justice is not a general principle or philosophical criterion that we simply need to apply to the situations in which we find ourselves. Justice has everything to do with our relation to the other. Derrida

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goes even as far as saying – following Levinas – that justice is our relation to the other (see Derrida,1997, p. 17). This relation, so he argues, cuts right across principles, criteria, and even laws. Derrida argues that once we relate to the other something incalculable comes onto the scene, something which cannot be reduced to concepts, principles, laws or even histories, but is always more – or can always be more. That is what gives deconstruction its movement, that is, constantly to suspect, to criticize the given determination of culture, of institutions, of legal systems, not in order to destroy them or simply to cancel them, but to be just with justice, to respect this relation to the other as justice. (Derrida, 1997, p. 18)

Some people might argue – and in fact have argued – that although deconstruction has an ambitious moral agenda, it leaves us empty-handed where it concerns the execution of this agenda. After all, so the argument goes, deconstruction does not provide us with any guidelines or criteria for moral action, nor with a vantage point for social criticism. But to ask for clarity, for guidelines and criteria, and a vantage point, is asking the wrong question. After all, the very point of deconstruction is that responsibility only begins with the acknowledgement of aporia and undecidability. Aporia and undecidability are, in other words, not a threat to responsible judgements and decisions, but only make responsible judgements and decisions possible. The lesson that deconstruction tries to teach us, in other words, is that responsible moral judgement (if it is responsible and not the execution of a program), and social critique (if it is critical and not based upon a dogmatic foundation), only become possible when we give up our longing for foundations, criteria and clarity (see Biesta, 1998; Biesta, 2001a). 4. FROM DERRIDA TO EDUCATION In the foregoing pages I have tried to make clear what deconstruction is “about” and also, and perhaps even more importantly, what it is not “about”. I have tried to make clear that we should not think of deconstruction as a method, as something that we can apply to texts or institutions in order to expose the operations of power behind the scenes. Deconstruction occurs – whether we like it or not – which implies that the critical work that follows from deconstruction consists in exposing the occurrence of deconstruction or, to be more precise, of metaphysics-indeconstruction. This all may sound rather well, at least for those with a theoretically inclined mind-set, but it may not sound particularly practical or concrete. For what would it mean to ‘expose deconstruction’ in the field of education? And what would follow from that? Rather than providing a general answer to these questions – and it may well be that it is not even possible to give a general answer – I wish to briefly discuss one possible “link” between deconstruction and education, one possible educational response to the writings of Derrida (for more responses to Derrida’s writings see Biesta and Egéa-Kuehne, 2001). It is a response developed by Gregory

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Ulmer in his book Applied Grammatology (Ulmer, 1985) and deals with the question of “educational presentation”. Ulmer argues that educational presentation – i.e., the presentation in education of knowledge, understanding, values, the curriculum, etcetera – has traditionally been understood in terms of representation: teaching as the act of representing the world outside of the classroom. In this approach the teacher is supposed to be a ‘faithful transmitter’ of some original ‘presence’ that either precedes the act of teaching or is anticipated by it. The main problem with this understanding of the process of education is that there cannot be a totally faithful transmission because “simply stated – every pedagogical exposition, just like every reading, adds something to what it transmits” (Ulmer, 1985, 162). As Derrida puts it, it is an illusion to think that one can look at a text without touching it, “without laying a hand on the ‘object’, without risking – which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught – the addition of some new thread” (Derrida, 1981b, p. 63). The traditional way to escape this predicament has been to replace representation by presentation. This is, for example, the strategy followed by many progressive educators who tried to bring “real life” into the classroom in order to overcome the ‘verbalism’ and the artificial nature of educational representation. (John Dewey’s Laboratory School is a good example of such an approach.) It can also be seen in many contemporary attempts to allow children and young people to ‘learn from life’, rather than from schooling. The idea behind such approaches is to let the world speak for itself, “in its own words, in its own voice, in its own logos” (Derrida, 1981b, p. 31). However, the assumption that the world can simply be present and can simply be presented, the assumption that we would be able to go back to the world “as it is” in and for itself, in its own original presence, is a problematic assumption. This is not only because the world never speaks for itself but always requires our descriptions. It is also because there is no original consciousness, no pre-linguistic and pre-social center of perception and experience to which the world is simply present. Parents know all too well that they first need to engage children in a “form of life” and a “language game” before they can begin to speak meaningfully with their child about the world. The foregoing shows that the traditional idea of teaching as representation and the ‘progressive’ idea of teaching as presentation both bear the traces of the metaphysics of presence. They both operate on the assumption that the full, immediate presence of ‘the world’ is possible, either as something which ‘governs’ and ‘warrants’ the educational representations or as that with which children and students should be confronted directly. What is made invisible in both cases is that the world does not speak and cannot speak for itself, that the world can never be simply present and comprehensible in its immediacy. Yet both the strategy of representation and the strategy of presentation try to pretend that the activities of the teacher and the influence of the school-context is neutral, accidental and effaceable.

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This is what lies behind the assumption that teaching can be a faithful transmission. It is also what lies behind the assumption that it would be possible to present life as it is in the classroom. Ulmer argues that these constructions of the scene of teaching precisely create the illusion of a presence outside of the scene of teaching which fixes, defines and secures the meaning – if not the truth – of what is (re)presented in education. The originality of what is presented or represented in education is, in other words, the result of the ways in which the scene of teaching is constructed. Yet it is precisely this construction of the scene of teaching which encourages “the undesirable pedagogical effect of discipleship” (Ulmer, 1985, p. 173). It is for this reason that Ulmer argues that we need a ‘new pedagogy’ which must attempt to do away with this effect, since “the least thoughtful relationship to knowledge is discipleship” (1985, p. 173). The crucial question is what such a new pedagogy might look like. How can teachers and educators question the metaphysics of presence which underlies traditional pedagogy, and how can they do this in the very “act” of their teaching? The solution, as we have seen, is not to be found in a non-representational pedagogy but rather in a pedagogy which, in a sense, is more representational that the traditional pedagogy of representation. This will be a pedagogy that does not attempt to hide away the fact that any construction of the scene of teaching, any attempt to bring the world into the classroom, either under the heading of ‘representation’ or under the heading of (progressivist) ‘presentation’, always entails inscription, translation and transformation. But it will have to be a pedagogy that at the very same time makes clear that what is presented in education is not the translation or transformation of something which is more original than the translation itself. The pedagogy Ulmer is looking for is about one which highlights what Derrida refers to as originary translation – “if this absurd expression may be risked” (Derrida, 1978, p. 237). It is a pedagogy in which, as Ulmer puts it, there is “a systematic foregrounding of the pedagogic effect itself” (Ulmer, 1985, p. 183). What makes all this so difficult is that the “pedagogic effect” cannot be articulated in a positive way. It cannot simply be presented. It is not that teachers can simply say that what is being taught is not how things really are. It is also not that teachers can simply say that the world to which their representations refer is not how the world “really’, in and for itself is – not in the least because the way in which the world is represented in the classroom is precisely how the world really is (that is, there is no outside-world). This is not a pipe – but a representation – and at the same time this is a pipe – because the representation is the most originary original. What Ulmer is suggesting, therefore, is not the same as saying that everything is a social construction, that it all depends on one’s own perspective, etcetera. It rather is a systematic attempt to foreground the undecidibility at stake in presence and representation. It is to foreground that just as presence is the condition of possibility of representation, representation is the condition of possibility of presence – which means that it is also its condition of impossibility.

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5. CONCLUSION In this chapter I have tried to give an idea of what deconstruction is about and what an educational response to Derrida’s writings might look like. There is, of course, much more to say. In this respect this chapter should be seen as an invitation to educators and educational theorists to engage in Derrida’s writings and respond educationally to what is made visible, what is exposed through these writings. There may be many reasons why educators and educational theorists may want to do this. One important reason, so I wish to suggest, lies in the fact that what motivates deconstruction – a concern for the other, or more precisely, a concern for the otherness of the other, for something which is “incalculable” – is ultimately also what motivates education. After all, education is not or not only about putting knowledge into the minds of students, putting skills into their muscles, and putting norms into their behaviour. Education is also and, so I wish to argue, first and foremost about creating opportunities to let what is new and unique come “into the world”. What it is that children, students, newcomers will bring into the world, who they will be, is something that we cannot know. It is in a fundamental sense unforeseeable and incalculable. But precisely in this respect we might think of education as the paradoxical preparation for the incalculable (see Biesta, 2001b). Because of the affinity between what drives deconstruction and what drives education, we may perhaps even come to the conclusion that ultimately deconstruction is education. Gert Biesta is professor at the University of Exeter, School of Education, U.K. and at the University of Örebro, Educational Department, Sweden. REFERENCES Bennington, G. “Derridabase”. In G. Bennington and J. Derrida, Jacques Derrida (G. Bennington. Trans.). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Bennington, G. and J. Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Bennington, G. Interrupting Derrida. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Biesta, G.J.J. Deconstruction, justice and the question of education. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 1. 3 (1993): 395-411. Biesta, G.J.J. “How can Philosophy of Education be Critical? How Critical can Philosophy of Education Be? Deconstructive Reflections on Children’s Rights”. In F. Heyting, J. White and D. Lenzen (Eds.), Methods in Philosophy of Education. London and New York: Routledge, 2001a. Biesta, G.J. “Preparing for the Incalculable. Deconstruction, Justice and the Question of Education”. In G.J.J. Biesta and D. Egéa-Kuehne (Eds.), Derrida & Education. London and New York: Routledge, 2001a. Biesta, G.J.J. and D. Egéa-Kuehne (Eds.). Derrida & Education. London & New York: Routledge, 2001b. Biesta, G.J.J. and G.J.J.M. Stams. “Critical Thinking and the Question of Critique. Some Lessons from Deconstruction”. Studies in Philosophy and Education 20. 1 (2001): 57-74. Caputo, J.D. (Ed.). Deconstruction in a Nutshell. A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997.

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Derrida, J. Of Grammatology (G.C. Spivak Trans). Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Derrida, J. Writing and difference (A. Bass, Trans). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Derrida, J. “Living on: Border lines”. In H. Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. Derrida, J. Positions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981a. Derrida, J. Dissemination (B. Johnson, Trans). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981b. Derrida, J. Margins of Philosophy (A. Bass, Trans). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. Derrida, J. “The Time of the Thesis: Punctuations”. In A. Montefiore (Ed.), Philosophy in France Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Derrida, J. “Deconstruction and the Other. An Interview with Jacques Derrida”. In R. Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Derrida, J. “Des Tours de Babel”. In J.F. Graham (Ed.). Difference in translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Derrida, J. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Derrida, J. “Some Statements about Truisms and Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms”. In D. Carroll (Ed.). The States of Theory, History, Art, and Critical Discourse. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Derrida, J. “Letter to a Japanese Friend”. In P. Kamuf (Ed.). A Derrida Reader: Between the blinds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Derrida, J. “Force of law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority”. In D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D. Carlson (Eds.). Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York and London: Routledge, 1992a. Derrida, J. The OtherHeading. Reflections on Today’s Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992b. Derrida, J. “Points... Interviews, 1994”. In E. Weber (Ed.) (P. Kamuf et al., Trans). Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1995a. Derrida, J. “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism”. In C. Mouffe (Ed.). Deconstruction and Pragmatism. London and New York: Routledge, 1995b. Derrida, J. “The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida”. In J. D. Caputo (Ed.), Deconstruction in a Nutshell. A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. Derrida, J. and F. Ewald. “A certain ‘Madness’ Must Watch over Thinking. An Interview with Jacques Derrida”. Educational Theory 45. 3 (1995): 273-291. Derrida, J. and F. Ewald. “A Certain ‘Madness’ Must Watch Over Thinking. Jacques Derrida’s Interview with François Ewald” (D. Egéa-Kuehne Trans). In G.J.J. Biesta and D. Egéa-Kuehne (Eds.). Derrida and Education). London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Gasché, R. TheTain of the Mirror. Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Gasché, R. Inventions of Difference. On Jacques Derrida. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Habermas, J. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (F. Lawrence, Trans). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Levinas, E. “Wholly Otherwise” (S. Critchley Trans). In R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (Eds.). Rereading Levinas . Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Nordquist, J. Jacques Derrida (II): A Bibliography. Santa Cruz, CA: Reference and Research Services, 1995. Norris, C. Derrida. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Ulmer, G. Applied Grammatology. Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

MICHAEL PETERS

LYOTARD, MARXISM AND EDUCATION: THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE CAPITALISM

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“One hears talk everywhere that the great problem of society is that of the state. This is a mistake, and a serious one. The problem that overshadows all others, including that of the contemporary state, is that of capital.” J-F. Lyotard ( 1993a, p. 25).

1. LYOTARD’S INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY Jean-François Lyotard is considered the pre-eminent non-Marxist philosopher of ‘the postmodern condition’ (sometimes referred to as ‘postmodernity’). His work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984) originally published in Paris in 1979, became an instant cause célèbre. The book crystallised in an original interpretation a study of the status and development of knowledge, science and technology in advanced capitalist societies. The Postmodern Condition was important for a number of reasons. It developed a philosophical interpretation of the changing state of knowledge, science and education in the most highly developed societies, reviewing and synthesising research on contemporary science within the broader context of the sociology of postindustrial society and studies of postmodern culture. Lyotard brought together for the first time diverse threads and previously separate literatures in an analysis which many commentators and critics believed to signal an epochal break not only with the so-called ‘modern era’ but also with various traditionally ‘modern’ ways of viewing the world. The Postmodern Condition taken as a single work, considered on its own merits, is reason enough for educationalists to devote time and effort to understanding and analysing Lyotard’s major working hypothesis: “that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age” (1984, p. 3). He uses the term “postmodern condition” to describe the state of knowledge and the problem of its legitimation in the most highly developed societies. In this he follows sociologists and critics who have used the term to designate the state of Western culture “following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature and the arts” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 3). Lyotard places these transformations within the context of the crisis of narratives, especially those Enlightenment metanarratives concerning meaning, truth and emancipation which

43 J. D. Marshall (ed.), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy, 43-56. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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have been used to legitimate both the rules of knowledge of the sciences and the foundations of modern institutions. By ‘transformations’ Lyotard is referring to the effects of the new technologies since the 1950s and their combined impact on the two principal functions of knowledge − research and the transmission of learning. Significantly, he maintains, the leading sciences and technologies have all been based on language-related developments − theories of linguistics, cybernetics, informatics, computer languages, telematics, theories of algebra − and their miniaturisation and commercialisation. In this context, Lyotard argues that the status of knowledge is permanently altered: its availability as an international commodity becomes the basis for national and commercial advantage within the global economy; its computerised uses in the military are the basis for enhanced State security and international monitoring. Knowledge, as he acknowledges, has already become the principal force of production, changing the composition of the workforce in developed countries. The commercialisation of knowledge and its new forms of media circulation, he suggests, will raise new ethico-legal problems between the nation-state and the information-rich multinationals, as well as widening the gap between the so-called developed and Third worlds. Lyotard provides a critical account theorising the status of knowledge and education in the postmodern condition that focuses upon the most highly developed societies. It constitutes a seminal contribution and important point of departure to what has become known − in part due to Lyotard’s work − as the modernity/postmodernity debate, a debate which has involved many of the most prominent contemporary philosophers and social theorists (see Peters, 1996). It is a book that directly addresses the concerns of education, perhaps, more so than any other single 'poststructuralist' text. It does so in a way that bears on the future status and role of education and knowledge in what has proved to be a prophetic and fruitful analysis. Many of the features of Lyotard’s analysis of ‘the postmodern condition’ − an analysis nearly twenty five years old − now appear to be accepted aspects of our experiences in Western societies. And yet Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition should not be allowed to overshadow or obscure his other works or their significance for educational theory. Lyotard has written in the order of twenty books and many scholarly articles, spanning a range of philosophical fields, themes, styles and topics.2 Nor should the focus on one text, however intellectually fashionable, obscure the emphasis on Lyotard’s on-going political and pedagogical engagement in a career spanning more than four decades. Jean-François Lyotard was born in 1924 at Versailles and he taught philosophy in secondary schools from 1949 to 1959. He taught at universities at Nanterre and Vincennes. Later he secured a post as professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII (Saint-Denis), which he held until his retirement in 1989. He was also professor of philosophy at the Collége International de Philosophie in Paris, and professor of French and Italian at the University of California at Irvine. He died in 1998.

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He had been an active member of the radical Marxist group Socialisme ou barbarie for some ten years from 1954 to 1964. Thereafter he joined another radical group, Pouvoir ouvrier, only to leave two years later. These twelve years represent the years of his active political involvement. From 1955 onwards, while a member of Socialisme ou barbarie, Lyotard was assigned responsibility for the Algerian section. His accounts of the anti-imperialist struggle in Algeria, as Bill Readings (1993: xiii) argues, “provide a useful empirical corrective to charges that poststructuralism is an evasion of politics, or that Lyotard’s account of the postmodern condition is a blissful ignorance of the postcolonial question”.3 After 1966 Lyotard discontinues his active political affiliation with any radical Marxist group and, indeed, this break, autobiographically speaking, represents intellectually, on the one hand, a break with Marxism and, on the other, a turn to philosophy. Lyotard’s break with Marxism and his turn to philosophy has to be seen against the background of French intellectual life and, in particular, the struggle in the late 1950s and early 1960s against both humanism in all its forms and Marxism. Structuralism, based upon the work in linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, and many others, first found a home in a form of cultural anthropology pursued by Claude Lévi-Strauss and developed also in the disciplines of history (early Michel Foucault), semiotics (Roland Barthes), psychoanalysis (Jaques Lacan), and Marxism (Louis Althusser). Structuralism, constituted, above all, a reaction against the phenomenological (existential or humanist) subject which had dominated French philosophy in the post-war period. Poststructuralism was inspired by a return to Nietzsche's writings and captured Gille Deleuze’s (1962) hugely influential Nietzsche et la Philosophie. Alan Schrift points out that ‘poststructuralism’ is not a theory with a uniform set of shared assumptions, rather it is “a loose association of thinkers” who draw upon a variety of sources, the most significant of which is Nietzsche. Nietzsche's critique of truth, his emphasis on interpretation and the differential relations of power and knowledge, and his attention to questions of style in philosophical discourse have become central motifs within the works of the poststructuralists, who have developed these Nietzschean themes in a number of ways: by attending to questions of language, power, and desire in ways that emphasize the content in which meaning is produced while making problematic all universal truth and meaning claims; by challenging the assumptions that give rise to binary, oppositional thinking, often opting to affirm that which occupies a position of subordination within a differential network; by questioning the figure of the humanistic human subject, challenging the assumptions of autonomy and transparent self-consciousness while situating the subject as a complex intersection of discursive, libidinal, and social forces and practices; by resisting the impulse toward claims of universality and unity, preferring instead to acknowledge difference and fragmentation (Schrift, 1995, pp. 6-7). Yet Lyotard’s position in this new French Nietzsche is not at all straightforward. In an interview with Lyotard (1994b, p. 67), Richard Beadsworth begins with the question of the importance of Nietzsche in Lyotard’s work of the 1970s and the turn to Kant and Wittgenstein, together with the sudden absence of Nietzsche thereafter.

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Lyotard resists this interpretation, suggesting that Libidinal Economy is predominantly a struggle with Freud, and while Lyotard acknowledges that he was greatly impressed by Pierre Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche in Le Cercle Vicieux, Beardsworth's attempt to ‘push Nietzsche’ is misplaced. He suggests that his relations with Nietzsche “have always been a series of beginnings” (1994b, p. 90) and signals the difference of his relation to Nietzsche compared with Deleuze, who as ‘a metaphysician of energy’, is truly inspired by Nietzsche. The place of Lyotard’s political writings in the corpus of his work is a complex question that defies any simple recounting of publication dates. For instance, Lyotard has remarked that The Postmodern Condition, in the eyes of his critics, has occluded his other works; that it was marked by a certain sociology and epistemology rather than philosophy; and that the philosophical basis of The Postmodern Condition is to be found in The Differend (1988a). While one can name the specific genres that constitute Lyotard’s writings − the philosophical, the epistemological, genres of criticism, linguistics, narrative, intellectual autobiography, and aesthetics − politics, as he says, is more complex than a genre, combining “discursive genres (but also phrase-regimes) which are totally heterogenous” (Lyotard, 1988b: 299). Lyotard (1988b), in an interview with Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman, suggests that “the essential philosophical task will be to refuse [. . . ] the complete aestheticization of the political” (ibid.) which he maintains is characteristic of modern politics. By 'aestheticization' Lyotard means an active fashioning or shaping of the community or polity according to the idea of reason. Lyotard in his Political Writings, then, addresses the crisis of “the end of the political”4, that is, “of all attempts to moralize politics which were incarnated in Marxism” (Lyotard, 1988b: 300). This means, as Readings (1993, p. xviii) suggests, that Lyotard’s political writings are characterised by a “resistance to modern universalism” by an argument against what may be called the “politics of redemption”. What we are presented with in Lyotard’s work, as an alternative, is a politics of resistance, a form of writing which offers resistance to established modes of thought and accepted opinion. The same form of writing also registers an on-going internal struggle or resistance, characterised by the differend between early and later modes of thinking and, crucially, by Lyotard’s differend with Marxism itself. Dick Veerman (1988, p. 271) asserts that Lyotard’s philosophical writings divide into two main periods: The doctoral thesis Discours,Figure (1971) opens the first period. Economie Libidinale (1974) closes it. In the intervening period Lyotard published Dérive à Partir de Marx et Freud and Des Dispositifs (both 1973), two collections of essays written between 1963 and 1973. From 1975 onwards we can speak of the second period. Amongst its most important articles and books I count the following: Instructions Païennes (1977), Au Juste: conversations with Jean-Loup Thebaud, 1979), The Postmodern Condition (1979), “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” (1982), “Judicieux dans le Différend” (1982, published 1985), Le Differend (1983), L'Enthousiasme, la Critique Kantienne de l'Historie (1986), “Grundlagenkrise” (1986), “Sensus Communis” (1987), “L'Intèrît du Sublime” (1987) and Que Peindre? (1987).5

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We can add to the first period La Phenomenologie, published in 1954 and translated into English in 1991, and we can add substantially to the second period: Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (1988c), Heidegger and ìthe Jewsî (1990), The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1991), The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985 (1992), Political Writings (1993a), Lessons of Darkness (1993b), Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant's Critique of Judgement (1994a). Already in his early works, Discours, Figure and Economie Libidinale, Lyotard signalled a conscious shift away from the doctrinaire praxis philosophy which characterised the non-PCF Marxism tradition of Socialisme ou Barbarie. The former work attempts to develop a metaphysics of truth without negation; the latter attempts to substitute Freud's economy of libidinal energy (and the notion of primary process) for Marxist political economy. In this situation there is no truth arrived at through dialectics: the supposed ethical and social truths of Marxism, based upon an appeal to an historical ideal, are no better than the falsehoods it wants to overcome. Lyotard (1974) criticises the underlying notion of the dialectic. He simply does not believe that a political, philosophical, or artistic position is to be abandoned because it is 'sublated'. It is not true, according to Lyotard, that the experience of a position means its inevitable exhaustion and necessary development into another position where it is both conserved and suppressed. Veerman (1988, p. 272) suggests that the upshot of Lyotard’s metaphysics in his first period is simply that: “we cannot take one political stand rather than another, since the correct one cannot be decided”.6 2. POLITICS AND THE TURN TO PHILOSOPHY Lyotard’s differend with Marxism and specifically with Socialisme ou Barbarie and Pierre Souyri, in particular, is recounted in “A Memorial of Marxism: For Pierre Souyri”, a rare autobiographical piece.7 He describes how, in the language of radical Marxism, dialectical logic had become a simple idiom and how “the machinery for overcoming alterity by negating and conserving it” for him had broken down, precipitating a “relapse” into the logic of identity. He writes of his own intellectual biography of the time: And what if, after all, the philosopher asked himself, there was no Self at all in experience to synthesize contradictorily the moments and thus to achieve knowledge and realization of itself? What if history and thought did not need this synthesis; what if the paradoxes had to remain paradoxes, and if the equivocacy of these universals which are also particulars, must not be sublated? What if Marxism itself were in its turn one of those particular universals which it was not even a question of going beyond − an assumption that is still too dialectical − but which it was at the very least a question of refuting in its claim to absolute universality, all the while according it a value in its own order? But what then, in what order, and what is an order? These questions frightened me in themselves because of the formidable theoretical tasks they promised, and also because they seemed to condemn anyone

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who gave himself over to them to the abandonment of any militant practice for an indeterminate time (1988c, p. 50). What was at stake for Lyotard after twelve years of a commitment to radical Marxism was whether Marxism could “still understand and transform the new direction taken by the world after the end of the Second World War” (1998c, p. 49). Capitalism had succeeded in surviving the crisis of the thirties. The proletariat had not seized the opportunity to overturn the old order. On the contrary, modern capitalism, once its market and production capacities had been restored, had set up new relations of exploitation and taken on new forms. Lyotard lists the following the new realities confronting Marxism: the reorganization of capitalism into bureaucratic or State monopolistic capitalism; the role of the modern State in the so-called mixed economy; the dynamics of the new ruling strata (bureaucratic or technocratic) within the bourgeoisie; the impact of the new techniques on work conditions and on the mentality of workers and employees; the effects of economic growth on daily life and culture; the appearance of new demands by workers and the possibility of conflicts between the base and the apparatus in worker organizations (1998c, p. 66).

While Lyotard recognises that there are several incommensurable genres of discourse in play in society, none can transcribe all others; and yet, nevertheless, one of them − that of capital − imposes its rules on others and attempts to make all discourse commensurable. As he says: “This oppression is the only radical one, the one that forbids its victims to bear witness against it. It is not enough to understand it and be its philosopher; one must also destroy it” (1998c, p. 72). Lyotard was at the University of Nanterre during the events of May 1968 and was one of the early group of Academics who 'stood' with the students. Alain Tourraine was another even though he was a target for the students. Lyotard’s political activism centered on the struggle against the modernising tendency − new selection methods and changed conditions to the baccalaureate examination - of Fouchet's reforms, which comprised the demand for democratisation and, in doing so, severely underestimated the student's desire for genuine participation.8 Themes that were to surface later in Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition find their source here: in critique of a class monopolisation of knowledge and the mercantilisation of knowledge and education; in an attack on the “heirarchic magisterial relation” of pedagogy; in the refusal of a kind of education under capitalism which merely socially reproduces students to fulfil the technical demands of the system; and in the expression of a moral ideal embodied in non-dialectical forms of dialogue as the ethical precondition for pedagogy.9 3. EDUCATION AND KNOWLEDGE CAPITALISM10 The problem of capitalism, then, is one that has occupied Lyotard since his early political involvement with Socialisme ou Barbarie, and consistently thereafter in his “post-Marxist” writings. He argues, for instance, in “A Svelte Appendix to the

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Postmodern Question” (1993d), “Capitalism is one of the names of modernity”, and continues in a vein highly reminiscent of The Postmodern Condition: capitalism has been able to subordinate to itself the infinite desire for knowledge that animates the sciences, and to submit its achievements to its own criterion of technicity: the rule of performance that requires the endless optimalization of the cost/benefit (input/output) ratio (Lyotard, 1993d, p. 27).

Lyotard thus speaks of the “penetration of capitalism into language”, “the transformation of language into a productive commodity” which reduces phrases to encoded messages with an exchange value − information which can be stored, retrieved, packaged, calculated, and transmitted. Lyotard acknowledges his debt to Marx and yet still remains within the ambit of a commodification thesis (albeit as a representational system) as one of the main processes of rationalisation which guides the development of the system as a whole: the Marxian analysis of commodity fetish as it applies to knowledge and education. He recognizes the way in which the logic of performance, aimed at maximizing the overall efficiency of the system, generates socio-economic contradictions, but he parts company with Marxists on the possibility of emancipation or of salvation expected to arise automatically from these contradictions. He jettisons what Readings (1993, p. xxiv) calls the “politics of redemption” based upon “the Marxist desire to identify alienation as a reversible ideological distortion” in order to rethink politics and resistance in “minoritarian” terms, which forgoes an authoritative reading of events based on determinate judgements, to respect the differend and “to think justice in relation to conflict and difference” that admit of no resolution. “Our role as thinkers” in the situation of postmodernity, Lyotard (1993d, p. 27) suggests, “is to deepen what language there is, to critique the shallow notion of information, to reveal an irremediable opacity within language itself”. The issue for Lyotard is one of understanding and providing a critique of capitalist forms of the insinuation of will into reason and the way this is manifest primarily in language. While Lyotard does not use the terminology of “knowledge capitalism” (which is my construction) he certainly understands the latest phase of capitalism as one dominated by technological processes that automate knowledge production and reduce education to a set of exchange values in this process. In this process education becomes commodified and he demonstrates a clear line of argument that begins with The Postmodern Condition in which he highlights the significance of language-based developments for the new wave of communication and information technology that provides the technical means for the transformation of language into a commodity. Lyotard, thus, theorises the technologization of language as the basis of “knowledge capitalism” and education is, therefore, at the cutting edge as the premier set of knowledge institutions. At the same time Lyotard provides educational theorists with a model for resistance: above all, to critique the shallow notion of information and, as he says “to deepen what language there is”. The critique he addresses clearly in The Postmodern Condition in terms of the performativity principle which, he suggests, reduces difference, ignores the

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differend, and treats all language games as commensurable, and the whole as determinable. The logic of performance, of optimizing the system’s overall performance, based on the criterion of efficiency, does violence to the heterogeneity of language games and “necessarily involves a certain level of terror: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear”. The notion of performance and its criterion of efficiency is technological, it can not provide us with a rule for judging what is true or just or beautiful. Here, then, is a trenchant critique of capitalism, of capitalism's penetration of language, and of the way thought is managed, packaged, and commodified in the new postmodern technologies which, for Lyotard, express the most recent application of capitalist rules to language.

4. THE PROBLEM OF THE LEGITIMATION OF KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATION It is a critique that leads us back to the central question of legitimation of knowledge and education. If the Enlightenment idealist and humanist metanarratives have become bankrupt and the State and Corporation must abandon or renounce them, wherein can legitimacy reside? Lyotard, in his critique of capitalism, suggests that the State has found its only credible goal in power. Science and education are to be legitmated, in de facto terms, through the principle of performativity, that is, through the logic of maximisation of the system's performance, which becomes selflegitimating. It is this account that has proved so potent in prophesying and analysing the changes to economic and social policy that have taken place in the Western world with the ascendancy of the so-called “new right”. Education, not so long ago regarded as a universal welfare right under a social democratic model, has been recast as a leading sub-sector of the economy and one of the main enterprises of the future “postindustrial” economy. Lyotard’s (1984) The Postmodern Condition provides an understanding and critique of the neo-liberal marketisation of education in terms of the systemic, self-regulatory nature of global capitalism.11 His concern is that Critical Theory, based upon the traditional critique of political economy, has been used as a way of reprogramming the system. Lyotard claims that Critical Theory has lost its theoretical standing and been reduced to a utopia. In Lyotard’s terms Critical Theory, especially in the hands of Habermas, is still committed to the universal categories of reason and the subject − albeit the minimal intersubjective subject of communication − based upon the paradigm of mutual understanding. These universal categories, established through the principle of consensus, do not respect the differend. Where Habermas adheres to an ideal of transparent communication, Lyotard investigates the differend inherent in language. Where Habermas stresses the harmonious aspects of consensus, Lyotard holds that consensus can only be established on the basis of acts of exclusion. It is hard to imagine a view of language or discourse which is more removed from Habermas’ ideal of a universal norm of

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communicative action which is said to be immanent in speech itself and which allegedly enables participants to arrive at consensus without distortion or external constraint. In the Preface to the English translation of Lyotard’s (1984) The Postmodern Condition, Fredric Jameson notes how Lyotard’s text was, among other things, “also a thinly veiled polemic against Jürgen Habermas’ concept of a ‘legitimation crisis’ and vision of a ‘noisefree’ transparent, fully communicational society” (Jameson 1984, p. vii). Jameson is alluding to the way in which Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition is, above all, a critique of Enlightenment metanarratives or grand récits. Lyotard wants to question the dogmatic basis of these metanarratives, their “terroristic” and violent nature, which in asserting certain “Truths” from the perspective of an authorised discourse, does so only by silencing or excluding statements from another. Lyotard, in a now often quoted passage, uses the term “modern” to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiii).

In contrast, he defines “postmodern” elliptically as “incredulity toward metanarratives” by which he means to point to “the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation” to which corresponds “the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution . . .” Lyotard seeks to demonstrate how the metanarrative legitimation function has been broken down and dispersed into a heterogeneity of language elements comprising incommensurable modes of discourse, each with its own irreducible set of rules. In a creative misappropriation of Wittgenstein, Lyotard develops a general conception of language as an agonistics where “to speak is to fight” and this conception is elevated as a model for understanding society in general. Lyotard’s (1984) work, historically, challenges the two grand Hegelian metanarratives − the emancipation of humanity and the speculative unity of knowledge − which underly the philosophical tradition to which Habermas belongs. Lyotard’s indirect assault is against the concept of “totality” − he elsewhere, announces “a war against totality” − and the notion of autonomy as it underlies the sovereign subject. His line of argument, therefore, is an apparent confrontation with Habermas’ notion of a rational society modelled on communicational processes where so-called validity claims immanent in ordinary conversation can be discursively redeemed at the level of discourse. In this realm and vision of a “transparent” communicational society moral and practical claims are said to be resolved rationally and consensually without distortion or coercion. Claims are said to be resolved through only the force of pure argumentation itself. For Lyotard, this conception represents the latest, perhaps last, attempt at building a “totalizing” philosophy − one which depends on driving together, albeit in an original way, the two, grand Hegelian metanarratives which, themselves, are under suspicion. The “totalizing”, emancipatory vision of a “transparent” communication society, by

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invoking a quasi-transcendentalism and ideal of consensus, is both “terroristic” and exclusory. Habermas responds to Lyotard’s charges by focusing on the alleged conservatism of the poststructuralist position. Habermas’ (1981) initial response is given in a lecture he delivers in 1980 as an acceptance of the Adorno prize. The lecture, “Modernity versus Postmodernity”, is deliberately framed within an exhaustive binary opposition that is the hallmark of classical reason. He identifies himself as the defender of “the project of modernity” against the “anti-modern” sentiments of a line of French “poststructuralist” philosophers “running from Bataille to Derrida by way of Foucault”, and he compares the critique of reason of these philosophers to the “Young Conservatives” of the Weimar Republic. Habermas’ typology distinguishes the “anti-modernism” of the “Young Conservatives” from the “premodernism” of the “old conservatives”; and from the “postmodernism” of the “neoconservatives”, while hinting at a new ideological shift which focuses on an alliance of the postmodernists with premodernists. By contrast, Habermas (1981, p. 12) situates himself (and Adorno) in a relation to the “project of modernity” to learn “from the mistakes of these extravagant programs which have tried to negate modernity”. Richard Rorty attempts to explain the difference between Lyotard and Habermas in the following terms. From Lyotard’s point of view, Habermas is offering one more meta-narrative, a more general and abstract “narrative of emancipation” from the Freudian and Marxian metanarratives. For Habermas, the problem posed by incredulity towards meta-narratives is that unmasking only makes sense if we “preserve at least one standard for (the) explanation of the corruption of all reasonable standards”. If we have no such standard, one which escapes a “totalising self-referential critique”, then distinctions between the naked and the masked, or between theory and ideology, lose their force (Rorty, 1985, p. 161).

For Habermas, to accept Lyotard’s argument would be to strip ideology-critique of its principal function. Unless there is a universal metadiscourse the possibility of legitimizing validity claims in a theoretical manner disappears. Yet for Lyotard, seemingly, the very opposite appears to be the case. Universal metadiscourses cannot theoretically effect a closure: practically and empirically they betray their own ahistoricism in the experiences of recent contemporary history (e.g., the Gulags, Auschwitz, May 1968). As van Reijen (1990, p. 97) comments, “Lyotard accuses Habermas of wanting to revive the terror of reason.” Lyotard’s (1984, p. xxv) response to this state of affairs is to emphasize legitimation by paralogy: Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy.

In contrast to the models of legitimation based on the principle of consensus Lyotard suggests a kind of legitimation based on difference understood as paralogy. Against

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the possibility of consensus either defined as dialogical agreement between rational minds (based on the narrative of emancipation) or as the logic of maximum performance, Lyotard (1984, p. 60) theorizes the legitimation of postmodern science in terms of paralogy, where “the little narrative remains the quintessential form of imaginative invention”. Paralogy includes the study of open systems, local determinism, antimethod. It is what Readings (1993, p. xxi) calls “the pragmatics of discursive legitimation” and what Lyotard (1984, p. 60) explains in the following terms: Postmodern science − by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, “fracta”, catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes − is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical.

Lyotard stands against the legitimation of education in terms of either consensus or performance. The first form of legitimation − consensus − is based on a reductive homogenisation of interests, which produces in a single overriding, transparent and dialectical conclusion, an inversion of the capitalist hierarchy of values and class positions. The other form of legitimation is an equally “monological” version based upon the performance of a system as a whole. Both forms of legitimation offer the promise of utopia (literally “no place”), in terms of a metanarrative − a single master language and reason according to which the political community must be shaped. By contrast, if we view the question of paralogy as being linked to a version of education, in accordance with Lyotard, we might begin to bear witness to the differend, to a form of education based on difference, where the little narratives, still largely unwritten, are not forced to resolve themselves into a monologue or into one reigning metanarrative. On Lyotard’s account, educational theory should seek to critique and dethrone existing metanarratives that function to legitimise education in universal terms. At the same time it must respect the culturally specific formations of plural forms of oppression at the intersections of class, race and gender as they make up a set of fragmented social bonds. Michael Peters holds positions as a Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education, the University of Glasgow, U.K. and in the School of Education, the University of Auckland, New Zealand. NOTES 1

Acknowledgement: A version of this paper was presented at AERA, Annual Meeting, Chicago, 1997 and a revised version appears in Peters (2001).

2

A full bibliography of Lyotard’s major works is given at the end of the chapter, along with a list of works discussing his philosophy. All works are given in English translation where available, otherwise the original French edition is referred. For a bibliography his work and secondary sources up until 1991

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see Nordquist (1991) and for a complete bibiliography of Lyotard’s works available on-line see http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/lyotard/index.html. 3

For a selection of Lyotard’s essays on Algeria see his Political Writings (1993) which provide something of an intellectual biography detailing, for instance, his involvement and thoughts on May 1968 and his relation to student matters. For a review of Political Writings see Peters (1994).

4

This is the title of Bill Readings’ provocative Foreword to Lyotard’s Political Writings.

5

I have referenced Lyotard’s works as they appear in the text. This accounts for any differences between my bibliography of Lyotard’s work and Veerman's. Veerman subdivides Lyotard’s writing into two periods without further comment. I guess that he separates the second period from the first in terms of a move away from questions of Marxist political theory per se towards more overtly poststructuralist concerns.

6

This is a question that Lyotard pursues throughout his second period: the question of justice. He says in The Differend (1988, p. xi), for example: “As distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments”. 7 This essay appears as an afterword in Peregrinations (1988c), pp. 45-75. Pierre Souyri was both a friend and a founding member of Socialisme ou barbarie. In the essay Lyotard explores his differend with Souyri. 8 For an historical account of the French educational reforms of this period and for differences between Lyotard’s and Foucault's responses to the changes, see James Marshall (1995). Marshall elaborates Lyotard’s involvement with the events of May 1968 at Nanterre in terms of Lyotard’s notion of “apedagogy” which, as Marshall suggests, “required reciprocal relations of a nonmanipulative kind” (p. 186). 9 For an excellent essay which explores Lyotard’s suggestion of nondialectical forms of pedagogy see Bill Readings (1995). 10

Material for this section is based upon a section of my “Introduction: Lyotard, Education and the Postmodern Condition” (Peters, 1995). 11 See my “Performance and Accountability in ‘Post-industrial Society’: The Crisis of British Universities” (Peters, 1992); “Re-reading Touraine: Postindustrialism and the Future of the University” (Peters, 1991); and “The Marketization of Tertiary Education in New Zealand” (Peters, Marshall and Parr, 1993).

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A LYOTARD BIBLIOGRAPHY Lyotard, J-F. Adorno as the Devil. Telos, 19 Spring128-137, 1974. Lyotard, J-F. Discours, figure. Paris: Klincksieck, 1971. Lyotard, J-F. Dèrive à partir de Marx et Freud. Paris: Union generale d'editions, 1973a. Lyotard, J-F. Des dispositifs pulsionnels. Paris: Union generale d'editions, 1973b. Lyotard, J-F. Economie libidinale. Paris: Minuit, 1974. Lyotard, J-F. Instructions païennes. Paris: Galilee, 1977. Lyotard, J-F. Au juste. Paris: C. Bourgois, 1979. Lyotard, J-F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Bennington G and Massumi B. Foreword by Jameson F. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984. Lyotard, J-F. Just Gaming (conversations with Jean-Loup Thèbaud). Trans. Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1985. Lyotard, J-F. Que peindre? Paris: Editions de la difference, 1987. Lyotard, J-F. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. ven den Abeele G. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1988a. Lyotard, J-F. An Interview with Jean-François Lyotard. van Reijen W and Veerman D. Theory, Culture and Society 5 277-309, 1988b. Lyotard, J-F. Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988c. Lyotard, J-F. The Lyotard Reader. Ed Benjamin A. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Lyotard, J-F. Heidegger and ‘the Jews’. Trans. Michel A and Roberts MS. Foreword by Carroll D. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Lyotard, J-F. Phenomenology. Trans. Beakley B. Foreword by Omiston GL. New York: State University of New York, 1991. Lyotard, J-F. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Bennington G and Bowlby R. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Lyotard, J-F. The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985. Trans. Pefanis J and Thomas M. Sydney: Power Publications, 1992. Lyotard, J-F. Political Writings. Trans. Readings, B. and Geiman KP. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993a. Lyotard, J-F. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Grant IH. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993b. Lyotard, J-F. Lessons of Darkness. Venice Calif.: Lapis Press, 1993c. Lyotard, J-F. A Svelte Appendix to the Postmodern Question. In Political Writings. Trans. Readings, B. and Geiman KP. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993d. Lyotard, J-F. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994a. Lyotard, J-F. Nietzsche and the Inhuman: Interview with Jean-François Lyotard by Richard Beardsworth. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7 67-130, 1994b.

OTHER REFERENCES Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1988. Deleuze, G. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris: Universitaries de France, 1962. Habermas, J. Modernity versus Postmodernity. New German Critique 22 3-22, 1981. Jameson, F. Foreword. In Lyotard J-F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Transl. Bennington G. and Massumi B. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and Manchester, University of Manchester Press, 1984.

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Kauffmann, R..L. Ed Passages, Genres, Differends: Jean-Francois Lyotard. Special issue of L'Esprit Createur, XXXI, 1, 1991. Marshall, J. Pedagogy and Apedagogy: Lyotard and Foucault at Vincennes. In Peters M. (Ed.) Education and the Postmodern Condition. Foreword by Lyotard, J-F. New York: Bergin and Garvey 167-192, 1995. Marshall, J. and Peters, M. Postmodernism and Education. In Eds Husen T and Postlethwaite TN The International Encyclopedia of Education. London: Pergamon 4639-4642, 1994. Norquist, J. Jean Francois Lyotard: A Bibliography. No. 21. Social Theory: A Bibliographic Series, Reference and Research Services, 1991. Pefanis, J. Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard and Lyotard. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991. Pefanis, J. Jean-Francois Lyotard. In Ed Murray K The Judgement of Paris: Recent French Theory in Local Context. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992. Peters, M. Re-reading Touraine: Postindustrialism and the Future of the University. Sites 23 (Spring) 6383, 1991. Peters, M. Performance and Accountability in ‘Post-industrial Society’: The Crisis of British Universities. Studies in Higher Education 17 (2) 123-139, 1992. Peters, M. Review of Political Writings, Surfaces, IV, 04. (Electronic journal), 1994. Peters, M. Ed Education and the Postmodern Condition. New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1995. Peters, M. Poststructuralism, Politics and Education. New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1996. Peters, M. 2001 Poststructuralism, Marxism and Neoliberalism: Between Theory and Politics. Maryland, Rowman and Littlefield, Peters, M. Marshall, J. and Parr, B. The Marketization of Tertiary Education in New Zealand. The Australian Universities' Review 36 34-39, 1993. Readings, B. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Readings, B. Foreword: The End of the Political. Foreword to Political Writings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press xiii-xxvi, 1993. Readings, B. From Emancipation to Obligation: Sketch for a Heteronomous Politics of Education. In Ed Peters M Education and the Postmodern Condition. New York: Bergin and Garvey 193-208, 1995. Rorty, R. Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity. In Ed Bernstein R Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985. Schrift, A. Nietzsche’s French legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Van Reijen, W. Philosophical-Political Polytheism: Habermas versus Lyotard. Theory Culture and Society 5 95-103, 1990. Veerman, D. Introduction to Lyotard. Theory, Culture and Society 5 271-275, 1988.

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1. INTRODUCTION After Foucault’s death in 1984, Jürgen Habermas commented that “within the circle of the philosophers of my generation who diagnose our times, Foucault has most lastingly influenced the zeitgeist” (Habermas, 1986, p. 107). Given that Habermas was for many years one of Foucault’s staunchest critics, this was tribute indeed. Foucault was not only to become France’s most prominent post-war philosopher but, as David Macey (1993, p. xi) has observed, “he ... successfully crossed the great divide that separates the purely academic world from the broader cultural sphere”. In order to answer the questions ‘what is it he has done?’, and ‘what significance does what he has done have for an understanding of education and for doing educational research?’, it is necessary first to position Foucault in relation to the dominant intellectual currents of his time. At one level of abstraction Foucault’s main achievement and goal was to counterpose the philosophy of the concept to the philosophy of consciousness. In this he reacted against the dominance of Sartrean existentialism instancing a dividing line that ran between a philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the subject, and of consciousness on the one hand, and an anti-humanist philosophy of concepts and structures on the other. On the one side stood Sartre and MerleauPonty. On the other stood Cavailliès, Bachelard, Koyré, Canguilhem, and Althusser (Macey, 1993, p. 33). In a different sense, and within this context, Foucault can be viewed as a theoretical sociologist, and at the same time as an historian and as a philosopher. Such representations seem plausible given Foucault’s self-chosen title of the Chair he occupied at the Collège de France as the ‘Professor of the History of Systems of Thought’. This is certainly a sense in which his writings are of interest to those writing in education. His central works comprise studies of the emergence of phenomena, events and processes which have come to be seen as taken-for-granted withinthehistory of European culture. Amongst his earlier works one was concerned with the history of madness during the classical age, and another with the birth of a

57 J. D. Marshall (ed.), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy, 57-84. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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discourse of clinical medicine during the late eighteenth century. In the 1960s he wrote on the human sciences and the nature of knowledge. In the 1970s he presented a history of the prison and of new modes of discipline as they occurred in the nineteenth century. Later in the 1970s he wrote on the history of sexuality to oppose the idea that sexuality reveals some “deep truth” about the self and to expose the fallacy of the view that the human sciences are concerned with uncovering rather than constructing the objects of their domain. In an important sense Foucault’s work seeks to uncover not the development of rationality, but the ways new forms of control and power are legitimated by complex discourses which stake a claim to rationality and which are embedded in diverse institutional sites. Foucault’s lasting contribution is as an historian and philosopher of science, but not of the sort who can be neatly labelled in terms of disciplinary home, but rather a scholar who defies neat intellectual classification and who rejects the institutional basis of disciplinary affiliation. While his works can be considered histories by virtue of their objects and temporal reference, the objectives and conceptual and theoretical resources are drawn from philosophy. According to Clare O’Farrell (1989, p. 3), a stronger case can be made to consider Foucault’s writings as philosophies rather than as histories. There is, she says, a “constancy of philosophical quest” which underpins the historical shifts in emphasis and reinterpretations he makes of his work. While I would agree with O’Farrell on this point, I would argue further that the mix of historical and theoretical concerns means they are not straightforwardly philosophical treatises either. If his work has a coherence, the best designation, in my view, is as a sociologist of knowledge and science in the traditions of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Such a sociological approach to knowledge seeks to relate patterns of thought to social situations and thereby reveal how knowledge is a product of social structures and social interaction. Foucault’s approach fits such a designation as revealed in the illumination as to how the human sciences as forms of power-knowledge have been implicated with social structures, and in the repeated effort on Foucault’s part to expose the individualist, and especially bio-medical roots of modern knowledge as expressions of power-knowledge. 2. ARCHAEOLOGY, GENEALOGY AND STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS Foucault’s relevance to education relates to his distinctive approach to the analysis of the social. Methodologically his works utilise two approaches: that of archaeology, concerned to describe the historical presuppositions of a given system of thought, and genealogy, concerned to trace the historical process of descent and emergence by which a given thought system or process comes into being and is subsequently transformed. Archaeology is concerned to analyse discursive formations as fundamental structures of knowledge. Foucault’s method of archaeology constitutes a way of analysing the superstructural dimension of language statements constitutive of discourse. A discourse is defined in terms of statements (énoncés) of “things said”.

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Statements are events of certain kinds at once tied to an historical context and capable of repetition. Foucault is interested in serious statements comprising that sub-set that have some autonomy, which contain truth claims and which belong to a single system of formation. A ‘discursive formation’ comprises the regularity that obtains between ‘objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices’ (Foucault, 1972, pp. 38,107). It is “the general enunciative system that governs a group of verbal performances” (Foucault, 1972, p. 117). Archaeological analysis is centrally concerned to uncover the rules of formation of discourses, or discursive systems. In a technical sense, it proceeds at the level of statements (énoncés) searching for rules that explain the appearance of phenomena under study. It examines the forms of regularity, i.e., the discursive conditions, which order the structure of a form of discourse and which determine how such orders come into being. It is not analysis of that which is claimed to be true in knowledge but an analysis of ‘truth games’. Discourse is thus analysed in terms of the operation of rules which bring it into being. Archaeology attempts to account for the way discourses are ordered. As Foucault (1989, p. 25) states, “my object is not language but the archive, that is to say, the accumulated existence of discourses. Archaeology, as I intend it, is kin neither to geology (or analysis of the sub-soil) nor to genealogy (as description of beginnings or sequences); it is the analysis of discourse in its modality of archive”. As such, archaeology focuses attention on the link between perception and action and why at different periods specialists in knowledge perceive objects differently. The core of archaeology is thus an attempt to establish the discursive practices and rules of formation of discourses through asking “how is it that a particular statement appeared and not another” (Foucault, 1972, p. 27). As Manfred Frank (1992, p. 107) says, “As such, he is more interested in the conditions which make it possible for the structures to arise than in the structures themselves . . . for Foucault the foundation of the constitution of an order is never a subject, but yet another order: in the last instance this would be the order of the discourse with its regard déjà codé (already coded look)”. In The Order of Things (1970), for example, Foucault seeks to uncover the regularities which accounted for the emergence of the sciences of the nineteenth century by comparing forms of thought across different historical periods (Renaissance, Classical, and Modern). Archaeology here constitutes a method for examining the historicity of science by describing rules which undergird ways of looking at the world. These rules are regularities that determine the systems of possibility as to what is considered as true and false, and they determine what counts as grounds for assent or dissent, as well as what arguments and data are relevant and legitimate. These structures of thought are termed epistemes. An ‘episteme’ refers to “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices. . . . The episteme is not a form of knowledge . . . or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the totality of relations that can be discovered for a

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given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities” (Foucault, 1972, p. 191). Robert Machado (1992, p. 14) characterises an episteme as defined by two features. The first is its depth; an ‘episteme’ relates to the nature of “deep” knowledge (savoir) and to the specific order or configuration which such knowledge assumes in a given period. This is to say that an episteme is governed by a principle prior to and independent of the ordering of discourse such as science, which is constituted of “surface” knowledge (connaissance). The second is its general global nature. In any culture, at a particular point in time, there is only one episteme which defines the conditions of possibility of all theoretical knowledge (see Foucault, 1970, p. 179). Archaeology is an historical analysis of this theoretical knowledge attempting to trace links between the different domains of life, work, and language, revealing relationships that are not readily apparent. In doing so it seeks to expose the historical a priori of the episteme as it manifests itself in the body of discourses under study. In this sense, Foucault insists that epistemes are not transcendental in the Kantian sense, neither are they origins or foundations. Rather, they are a practice to be encountered, i.e., they are time-bound and factual. Genealogy offers a specific methodology for studying and writing history, and signals the distinctive priority of historical analysis to Foucault’s methodological approach. As a method of interest to social and education research, genealogy demonstrates the potential of discourse to impact and shape life at a physical level, based upon the interaction of power and knowledge in shaping historical conditions, which in turn makes particular structures realisable and particular conceptual frameworks possible. Although Foucault developed this approach during the 1970s, as a consequence of his turn to Nietzsche, it must be viewed as a supplement, not alternative, to archaeology. As Arnold Davidson (1986, p. 227) puts it: “genealogy does not so much displace archaeology as widen the kind of analysis to be pursued. It is a question, as Foucault puts it in his last writings, or different axes whose ‘relative importance is not always the same for all forms of experience’”. Genealogical analysis aims to explain the existence and transformation of elements of theoretical knowledge (savoir) by situating them within power structures and by tracing their descent and emergence in the context of history. As such, it traces an essential, historically constituted tie between power and knowledge, and provides a causal explanation for change in discursive formations and epistemes. Because it is more historical it helps Foucault avoid succumbing to the temptations of structuralism. Yet, like archaeology, it avoids reference to a philosophical conception of the subject, radicalising Nietzsche and Heidegger’s opposition to the post-Cartesian and Kantian conceptions. Like archaeology, too, it is limited and justified as a method in terms of the fruitfulness of its specific applications. Genealogy thus asserts the historical constitution of our most prized certainties about ourselves and the world in its attempts to de-naturalise explanations for the existence of phenomena. In education, the discourse of mental testing with its particular truths regarding intellegence and children’s development are amenable to such an analysis. It analyses discourse in its relation to social structures and has an

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explicit focus on power and on bodies. It is interested in institutional analysis and technologies of power aiming to isolate the mechanisms by which power operates. Through its focus on power, also, it aims to document how culture attempts to normalise individuals through increasingly rationalised means, by constituting normality, turning them into of particular sorts. Power relations are thus pivotal. Genealogy thus shifts the model for historical understanding from Marxist science and ideology, or from hermeneutical texts and their interpretation, to an Nietzschean-inspired analysis of strategies and tactics in history. Further insights into Foucault’s methods are revealed from his lecture notes at the Collège de France, as published in the four volumes of Dits et écrits (1994a). In these volumes, Foucault reveals the importance of analytic method and the philosophy of language in relation to the analysis of discourse. In one essay, La Philosophie analytique de la politique (1994b), initially delivered in 1978 in Japan, Foucault spells out the superiority of analytical methods as used in Anglo-American philosophy compared to dialectical methodology. What characterises analytic methods is a concern not with the deep structures of language, or the “being” of language but with the everyday use made of language in different types of discourse. By extension, Foucault argues that philosophy can similarly analyse what occurs in everyday relations of power, and in all those other relations that “traverse the social body”. Just as language can be seen to underlie thought, so there is a similar grammar underlying social relations and relations of power. Hence, Foucault argues for what he calls an ‘analytico-political philosophy’. Similarly, rather than seeing language as revealing some eternal buried truth which “deceives or reveals”, the metaphorical method for understanding that Foucault utilises is that of a game: “Language, it is played”. It is, thus, a strategic metaphor, as well as a linguistic metaphor, that Foucault utilises to develop a critical approach to society freed from the theory of Marxism: “Relations of power, also, they are played; it is these games of power (jeux de pouvoir) that one must study in terms of tactics and strategy, in terms of order and of chance, in terms of stakes and objectives” (Foucault, 1994b, Vol.3, pp. 541-542). Foucault’s dependence on structural linguistics is also central to understanding the nature of his analysis. Traditionally, the rationality of analytic reason, he says, has been concerned with causality. In structural linguistics, however, the concern is not with causality, but in revealing multiple relations that Foucault calls in his 1969 article “Linguistique et sciences sociales”, ‘logical relations’ (see Foucault, 1994c, Vol.1, p. 824). While it is possible to formalise one’s treatment of the analysis of relations, it is, adds Foucault, the discovery of the “presence of a logic that is not the logic of causal determinism that is currently at the heart of philosophical and theoretical debates”. Foucault’s reliance on the model of structural linguistics provides him with a method which avoids both methodological individualism and being trapped by a concern with causalism. Structural linguistics is concerned with “the systematic sets of relations among elements” (Davidson, 1997, p. 8), and it functions for Foucault as

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a model to enable him to study social reality as a logical structure, or set of logical relations revealing relations that are not transparent to consciousness. The methods of structural linguistics also enable Foucault to analyse change. For just as linguistics undertakes synchronic analysis seeking to trace the necessary conditions for an element within the structure of language to undergo change, a similar synchronic analysis applied to social life asks the question in order for a change to occur what other changes must also take place in the overall texture of the social configuration (Foucault, 1994c, Vol.1, p.827). Hence, Foucault seeks to identify logical relations where none had previously been thought to exist or where previously one had searched for causal relations. This form of analysis becomes for Foucault a method of analysing previously invisible determinations (see Davidson, 1997, pp. 1-20). The methodological strategies common to both archaeology and genealogy were also developed in response to Marxism, which is characterised by a specific narrow conception of causality (un causalisme primaire) and a dialectical logic that has very little in common with the logical relations that Foucault is interested in. Thus he maintains: “what one is trying to recover in Marx is something that is neither the determinist ascription of causality, nor the logic of a Hegelian type but a logical analysis of reality” (Foucault, 1994c, Vol.1, pp. 824-825). Arnold Davidson (1997), in a review of Dits et ecrits to which my own analysis is indebted, points out that it is through such methodological strategies that Foucault proceeds to advance a non-reductive, holist, analysis of social life. As he puts it (Davidson, 1997, p. 11), “this kind of analysis is characterised, first, by antiatomism, by the idea that we should not analyse single or individual elements in isolation but that one must look at the systematic relations among elements; second, it is characterised by the idea that the relations between elements are coherent and transformable, that is, that the elements form a structure”. Thus, in his dissertation on the knowledge of heredity as a system of thought, submitted as part of his application for his position at the Collège de France, Foucault seeks to describe the changes, transformations, and conditions of possibility that made genetics possible, that constituted it as a science based on a series of discourses concerning breeding, just as in The Order of Things (1970) he had done for natural history and biology. What factors led to the emergence of these fields as sciences? What elements changed to make such developments possible? What made them possible as systems of thought? Thus Foucault seeks to describe the relations among elements as structures which change as the component elements change, i.e., he endeavours to establish the systematic sets of relations and transformations that enable different forms of knowledge to emerge. What saves Foucault, ultimately, from being labelled a ‘structuralist’, is because the structures he detects are not universal, transhistorical regularities, neither are they prior to the parts in the sense that they define the identity of the parts, but are themselves embedded in history and change within the context of history. It is thus the priority of historical analysis that defines Foucault’s difference from structuralism, and yet integrates a focus on structure as central to the historians craft.

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3. POWER AND POWER-KNOWLEDGE Although discourses, for Foucault are located pre-discursively in material contexts, he sees no one set of factors as directing human destiny. Rather, power is represented in terms of a multiplicity of force relations throughout the entire social formation. Foucault’s central critique of traditional approaches to power is against the “juridico-discursive” model of power which underpins not just Marxist theories but liberal theories of power as well. The three features of this model of power are (1) that power is possessed (e.g., by the state, classes, individuals); (2) that power flows from a centralised source, from top to bottom; and (3) that power is primarily repressive in its exercise. In contrast, Foucault’s alternative conception maintains: (4) that power is exercised rather than possessed; (5) that power is productive, as well as repressive; and (6) that power arises from the bottom up. (Sawicki, 1991, pp. 20-21) For Foucault, attention focuses on the ways in which individuals are incorporated to the practical and efficient system of social regulation and control by which constitutes its subjects as members. Such a process occurs, he says, through disciplinary practices of power as they operate in and through modern social institutions such as education. Such disciplinary practices constitute a technology of the political in terms of which individuals recognise themselves as members of the society and as social beings. It is through such a conception , says Nancy Fraser, that Foucault: ‘rules out’ the crude Marxist critiques of ideology and an overemphasis on the State and economy, and instead rules in ‘the politics of everyday life’. For if power circulates everywhere, even at the most mundane levels, then any effort to transform the regime must make an effort to address those everyday practices. Here we can see that while breaking with the totalizing theory of Marxism, Foucault retains his link with a critical theory of society. Foucault unpacks the presupposition of grand theorizing and addresses the plurality of forces, practices and regimes of power that exist within society. As such he subjects the micro politics of everyday life to scrutiny, often seeming to dissolve macro concerns into an analytic concentration of micro practices (Fraser, 1989, p. 26).

Although in The Order of Things (1970), discourses were seen to express the historical a priori of an episteme in his works of the later 1970s Foucault began to chart the manifold ways that they were also related to social structure. It is the fact that knowledge systems are inextricably related to issues of power, that there are always sociological implications to the production of knowledge, and that knowledge systems themselves constitute technologies of power, that Foucault is referring to in the concept of power-knowledge, a concept that he uses in his genealogical writings to theorise the interconnections between power and knowledge. As he puts it in Discipline and Punish (1977, p. 27) “[t]here is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor at the same time any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations”. One of his purposes in this regard is to focus on discourses claiming to be advancing under the

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banner of legitimate science but which have remained intimately connected to the microphysics of power. Because the different sciences interact with social structures in different ways, it is necessary, in Foucault’s view, to examine each specific discursive formation separately to be able to evaluate its claims to adequately describe reality, as well as to assess the particular ways in which interactions with social structure and with power take place (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, chapter 2). While any quest for knowledge may produce expertise and technical competence, it is never simply neutral or disinterested, but is always affected by, warped by, other factors within the social domain. In this sense, Foucault argues, the enlightenment discourses of the human sciences--medicine, psychiatry, biology, genetics, psychology--took their shape not simply from the accumulated knowledges that their researchers had produced, but from an interrelations with a series of other elements within the historical field. To show how human populations became objects of positive knowledge and to explore the bio-medical roots of modern knowledge as an expression of power-knowledge became Foucault’s principle theoretical interest. It is related to the links between power and knowledge that increasingly occupied Foucault’s attention when seeking to explain the rationale for his empirical studies on the sciences as discursive structures of disciplined knowledge. It is the human sciences, what Ian Hacking (1979) calls “immature sciences”, rather than the natural sciences, that occupied most of Foucault’s attention. In his early work, The Order of Things (1970), although he hardly ever mentions the concept of power, and gives only occasional reference to social structure, Foucault gives his most thorough and systematic critique of the contemporary human sciences. Here he argues for a radical reconstruction of the way that we understand the disciplines, and suggests a new theory of knowledge, which he expounds more systematically in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), and elaborates in terms of the interactions with the non-discursive practices of social structure in works like Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality, Vol.1 (1978a), as well as in interviews which he gave with increasing regularity in the later years of his life. In methodological terms, the central key to understanding the disciplines as discursive formations is as structures (1) which manifest definite rules and regularities; (2) where these rules and regularities are compatible with the episteme of the age in the sense of establishing limits and exclusions, and are affected by the practical constraints of institutional power and control within the social structure; (3) which determine and limit the conditions of possibility, i.e., what it is possible and legitimate to say or write, what counts as reason, argument, or evidence; (4) which are autonomous in the sense that they do not integrally represent being; (5) which are anonymous in the sense that they are not linked to or embodied in individual subjects but are themselves, ontologically, part of a discursive regularity; (6) which go through transformations and experience radical discontinuities at particular periods which are sharp but not complete; (7) which constitute forms of power that shape subjects and assist in the regulation of social life through the process of normalisation.

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The link between power and the disciplines is established upon a relation of power and truth. In Foucault’s (1980b, p. 93) words, “there can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association.” Hence truth for Foucault is ultimately political in nature and is predicted upon knowledge of power strategies operative in a given society at a particular time. In this sense power promotes truth just as it does falsity, and truth in this regard has not set humans free but has instituted subjection since, as Racevskis says (1991, p. 25), “the man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself.” 4. THE HISTORICAL CONSTITUTION OF SUBJECTS The concepts concerned with the problematic of power are utilised by Foucault to provide a novel and now influential perspective on the historical constitution of subjects. Essentially, what this involves, as Deborah Cook states, is that: the subject is ... not pregiven, just as sex and the body or man are not ‘already there’ waiting to be discovered. When Foucault speaks of the formation of the subject, he means quite literally that the subject does not exist as a determinate form with specific qualities before the practices that made up the ‘rapport à soi’ bring it into being (Cook, 1987, pp. 218-29).

For Foucault, the subject is constituted discursively and institutionally by powerknowledge organised in disciplinary blocks. There are two main mechanisms: technologies of domination or government and. technologies of self. Technologies of domination act on the body from the outside via classification and objectification. These involve the human sciences, which developed after the start of the nineteenth century and which ensure the provision of ‘expert’ and ‘authoritative’ knowledge, and an assortment of ‘dividing practices’ which objectify the subject, providing classifications for subject positions (‘mad’, ‘normal’, ‘intelligent’, ‘unintelligent’, ‘high flyer’, ‘slow developer’ etc). In education these operate through a whole range of techniques including examinations and other forms of assessment, steaming practices, and the like. Technologies of the self, Foucault’s later interest, are operated by individuals themselves who have the agency to utilise strategies of power to manage and affect their constitution as subjects through a recognition of the possible ‘subject positions’ available, and through resistance, to change history (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 208). In The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (1978a), Foucault outlines his suspicion of doctrines of liberation which rely on a conception of a “deep self” which can be uncovered through some privileged form of science. Rather, sexual discourses create subjects from without as an effect of certain regimes of power-knowledge. It is through techniques originally deriving from Christian pastoral power (such as the confession), and seeing its modern form on the psychoanalyst’s couch, says

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Foucault, that knowledge of an “inner self” is claimed. As such, The History of Sexuality constitutes a genealogy of the forms by which Europeans have recognised themselves as subjects of desire. In relation to the history of philosophical conceptions, Foucault’s view of the self is premised upon a rejection of the Cartesian and Kantian conceptions of subject-centred reason. In this, he follows Nietzsche who rejects the Cartesian Cogito as a foundation constitutive of autonomous reasoned thought. Nietzsche questioned the “strangeness” of Descartes’ indubitable beliefs − that “thinking exists” (Nietzsche, 1968, pp. 483-4). As Lash puts it: This ... Nietzsche remarks is a ‘strong belief’, at best ‘questionable’ hardly ‘indubitable’. This shaky assumption is followed by the non-sequitur that the ‘I’ exists. Even if thinking was indubitable, the argument for the ‘I’ would depend on another assumption − that there must be a ‘substance’ which thinks, which itself, observes Nietzsche, is dependent on a belief in ‘substance’ ... Nietzsche may have, with justification, added that there is no necessity that such a substance be the ‘I’ (Lash 1984, p. 12).

Foucault also rejects the Kantian conception of a constitutive subject accepting Heidegger’s (1967) critique of that notion. For Kant rational individuals impose their categorical constructions on the world, ie they constitute the world imposing categories on sense data through a priori faculties. For Foucault the categories were historically contingent rather than universal, and following Heidegger, he claimed that Kant attributed too much agency to the individual subject thus neglecting to afford sufficient significance to the context of background beliefs − the discourse for Foucault − constitutive of experience. Whilst in Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (1978a) Foucault’s emphasis was on the production of the self by others and through the human sciences, in his latter works he became interested in how “a human being turns himself or herself into a subject”(Foucault, 1982, p. 208). Hence while in Madness and Civilisation (1967) the problem was how madmen were controlled by outside forces, by The History of Sexuality the problem had become how one controls oneself through a variety of inner mental techniques and with the aid of those who are experts in revealing the truth about oneself. During the 1980s Foucault became increasingly interested in an aesthetics of self, resurrecting the Greek notion ‘to take care of oneself’. Although the self is still seen as the outcome of discourses of the human sciences and of the institutional practices of political control, Foucault argued for an ethics of ‘caring for oneself’ as a means of practising freedom. As Gilles Deleuze puts it, Foucault came to see that the self, although constituted by power, can forge “a new dimension which can be distinguished from both relations of forces, or from power”(Deleuze, 1988, p. 106). Hence, although created by power, “It was as if the external relations folded, bent over to make an interface and allowed a ‘rapport à soi’ to arise, constituted an interior which ‘hollows out’ and develops its own space” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 107).

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Suggested here is that caring for oneself involved a notion of increasing maturity through processes such as problematisation and reflection which could prevent one from being dominated by others or by aspects of oneself. In resurrecting the principle of ‘caring for oneself’ Foucault is reversing the priority of western culture as underpinned by the Delphic maxim ‘to know thyself’ which supplanted the original Greek notion based on care. Originally in the greco-roman world, says Foucault, the care of the self through improving, surpassing, and mastering oneself, was the manner in which individual liberty considered itself as ethical, and was basic to, and prior to knowing oneself (Marshall, 1996a, b). 5. BIO-POWER AND GOVERNMENTALITY Foucault’s analysis of power operates at both the inividual, institutional and national political levels. According to Colin Gordon (1991, p. 4) Foucault argued that “the same style of analysis…that had been used to study techniques and practices addressed to individual human subjects within particular local institutions could also be addressed to techniques and practices for governing populations of subjects at the level of political sovereignty over an entire society”. At the end of The History of Sexuality Vol 1 (1978a), Foucault proposes that power in modern society increasingly takes the form of bio-power. By ‘bio-power’ he is referring to the ‘macro-social’ functions of ‘power-knowledge’ in the regulation and investigation of populations. It is in this sense that Foucault has identified certain knowledges and certain attendant practices, as crucial to the construction and normalisation of modern society. In addition, certain institutions − prisons, mental hospitals, schools, etc − have functioned as apparatuses which have been instrumental in constructing the modern conception of the subject and the very idea of what it means to be normal. They are vehicles by which the population is organised, and productivity and order in modern welfare capitalist states is made possible. Bio-power emerged, says Foucault, in the seventeenth century as a coherent and powerful technology, and refers to the increasing ordering and regulation of all realms of society by the State under the guise of improving the welfare of individuals, not as individuals as such, but rather as subjects of a population. For Foucault, bio-power aims to normalise and regulate individuals through increasingly rationalised means utilising technologies such as statistics and political arithmetic. The systems of knowledge and the institutional sectors to which they have given rise in turn began to constitute systems of administrative control which replaced harsher forms of control from previous times. In this sense, says Foucault, modern states do not rely on force, but on forms of knowledge which regulate populations by describing, defining, and delivering the forms of normality and educability (Foucault, 1980a). Increasingly the State became the ultimate agent in exercise of bio-power, and as it did it constituted new forms of political rationality or governmentality. Foucault first used the concept of ‘governmentality’ in 1978 in a paper published in English in

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1979 (see Foucault, 1979) and he developed the concept further in lectures given at the Collège de France between 1976-1984. The theoretical rationale for the concept was to counter the criticisms of Marxists and liberals that his treatment of power as explicated in works such as Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality Vol 1 (1978a) dealt only with the micro-physics in terms of which subjects appeared deterministically prefigured by techniques which fashion individuals to lead docile and practical lives in a way which obliterates all possibility of resistance and autonomy. Governmentality thus refers to the global coordination of power at the level of the State as opposed to the micro-physics of power. It refers to discourses concerned with the ‘arts of government’ by which the State politically coordinates power to effect particular constructions of the subject. As Foucault puts it: The art of government ... is concerned with ... how to introduce economy, that is the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family ... (h)ow to introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family, into the management of the State. (Rabinow, 1984, p. 15)

In his lectures on the arts of government Foucault insists on the importance of a series of discourses which appeared in Europe from the late sixteenth century onwards and which provided forms of rationalisation for new administrative techniques. State reason initially distinguished “government by state” from “government by the head of a family, a nobleman, or a sovereign prince”. Then a science of policing emerged (Polizeiwissenschaft) related to the aim of completely controlling social life, and seeking to adjust the happiness of individuals to the happiness of the state. Through a complex series of political, economic and epistemological changes, and especially the decline in unity and influence of the Church, classical liberalism represented a new emergent form of governmentality which constituted for Foucault a political-epistemological revolution. What he suggests is that a genealogy of the modern State suggested two modalities of power, which can be distinguished in terms of the directions in relation to which power is exercised. First, totalising forms of power, which are aimed at increasing the power of State at the level of populations, and which characterise the “polizeiwissenschaft” of the ancien regime. This reason of State is based on a unity of knowing and governing as embodied in the conception of the State as a Leviathan where all that was happening in society could be maintained by the state (Marshall, 1996a). Second, individualising forms of power, applied to subjects of State power to which it recognises a special responsibility, and which characterise emergent liberal regimes. This conception questioned the unity of knowing and governing and maintained that the rationality of the State could not be calculative and regulative of the totality, but instead sought to situate political reason “within a potentially unknowable and unstable politico-epistemological matrix”(Marshall, 1996a). Hence liberalism represented a new reason of state, and a new individualising form of power which aimed to create subjects of certain kinds. It was both an alternative conception of how things were to be, plus a critique of what had gone before.

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In developing notions of bio-power concerned with populations as aggregates, and governmentality concerned with political rule and management, Foucault also came to argue for a conception of ontological freedom of individuals through a conception of the strategic reversibility of power relations in terms of which individual subjects, although constituted by power-knowledge, can utilise the techniques of power in achieving their own ends. Such a notion ultimately makes Foucault an optimist about the possibilities of emancipation and the ability of people to direct the course of human events, for it is through such a conception of power, together with this insistence upon the contingent nature of life that Foucault underscores the transformable character of the cultural formation. 6. NORMALISATION The way in which disciplinary practices and behaviours come to be seen as natural and self-evident is represented as a function of normalisation through disciplionary power. In this way disciplinary power seeks to establish norms. Through the macroscopic focus on micro-technologies of government Foucauldian techniques can be used to trace the different modes through which, in our culture, human beings have been made into subjects of different sorts. As Foucault (1982, p. 212) states: This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in him.

Constructs like ‘mental ability’ or ‘intellegence’, although naturalised aspects of our lives, and constituting classificatory systems that self-evidently categorise the world, must be understood within a particular discursive field.as products of the exercise of power in the past. Foucault believed that the critical task becomes to understand discursive historical practices that constitute and therefore define forms of historical experience like madness, or sexuality, or discipline, or punishment, and to understand how cultures impose limits, exclusions and restrictions on the scope of human possibility. One vehicle for the expansion of normalising power operates through science and technology which produce new forms of classification, hierarchization, and codification, as well as new technologies of subjection and coersion. Human sciences like education, psychiatry, psychology, and statistics, in this sense constitute disciplinary technologies which enables knowledge of individuals to be assumed under a type and to be classified by locating individuals and the population in relation to a unidimmensional epistemic and conceptual space. Hence, normalisation eradicates the possibility or desirability of difference. It functions in terms of educational technologies such as the normal curve, first used in the educational and psychological sciences by Galton in the second half of the nineteenth century, to classify intelligence, to situate the individual within an epistemic field or framework,

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without reducing the individual to the typical. As Foucault (1977, p. 184) states, normalising judgement produces: a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogeneous social body but also playing a part in classification, hierachization, and the distribution of rank. In this sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity, but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities, and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another.

The establishment of state education systems constituted a central institutional means of normalisation. As one of the disciplinary institutions it “secreted a machinery of control that functioned like a microscope of conduct” (Foucault, 1977, p. 73). Firstly, the school functioned as an effective mechanism of hierarchical observation. Speaking of the Military school’s in Paris in the eighteenth century, Foucault (1977, pp. 172-173) states: The very building of the École was to be an apparatus for observation; the rooms were distributed along a corridor like a series of small cells; at regular intervals, an officer’s quarters were situated, so that ‘every ten pupils had an officer on each side’; the pupils were confined to their cells throughout the night; and Paris had insisted that ‘a window be placed on the corridor wall of each room from the chest-level to within one or two feet of the ceiling’.

Secondly, schools were mechanisms for normalizing judgments and disciplinary punishments whose function was corrective (Foucault, 1977, p. 179). Thirdly, schools functioned as an apparatus of examination: The examination …is a normalising gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which ones differentiates them and judges them…the school became a sort of apparatus of uninterrupted examination that duplicated along its entire length the operation of teaching. It became less and less a a question of jousts in which pupils pitched their forces against one another and increasingly a perpetual comparison of each and all that made it possible both to measure and to judge. (Foucault, 1977, pp. 184, 186)

Discourses are shaped by teachers, experts and intellectuals who function to regulate the way individuals think about the world. Experts are able to describe and define the world in relation to what is normal and natural. Yet it is through state legislation and power that conceptions become institutionalised affecting every part of the community. It is in this way, as Foucault insists, that all of us are subject to normalising judgements. As he puts it (1977, p. 184): The power of the Norm appears through the disciplines. Is this the new law of modern society? Let us rather say that, since the eighteenth century, it has joined other powers – the Law, the Word, (Parole) and the Text, Tradition –imposing new delimitations upon them. The Normal is established as a principle of coersion in teaching with the introduction of a standardized education and the establishment of the écoles normales (teachers’ training colleges); it is established in the effort to organise a national medical profession and a hospital system capable of operating general norms of health; it is established in the standardization of industrial processes and products….Like surveillance and with it, normalization becomes one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age.

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Foucault, like Heidegger, sees the modern age as being marked by a tendency towards the total ordering of all beings through disciplinary bio-power which distorts the social order and our relations to other beings. Hence, for Foucault, like Heidegger, the continued trend to total mobilization of western society poses our greatest danger of our history, for while previous “clearings” have been incomplete, leaving spaces of ungovernability, in the present epoch human beings are being subject to greater and greater surveillance and control. 7. FOUCAULT AND FEMINISM Much of the significance of Foucault for an understanding of education can be seen in connection to the extensive feminist appropriation of his work. Diamond and Quinby (1988) note four convergences between feminism and Foucault. First, both recognise the body as the site of power; that is, as the locus of domination through which subjectivity is constituted. Second, both point to local and intermediate operations of power rather than focusing exclusively on the State or on the mode of production. Third, both highlight the crucial role of discourse in its capacity to produce and sustain hegemonic power. And fourth, both criticise western humanism for having privileged the experience of western masculine elites as they proclaim universals about truth. In this sense both attempt to dismantle ‘existing but hithertofore unrecognised modes of domination’ (Diamond and Quinby, 1988, p. x). A similar recognition of Foucault’s significance for feminism is noted by Renate Holub: Many feminist theorists have found much inspiration in the conceptual sophistication and methods of analysis of Foucault’s work. In particular his analysis of the operations of power, such as his critical studies of the institutions of medicine, prisons and science, which have identified the body as the site of power through which docility and submission are accomplished ... Moreover, Foucault’s emphasis on the functional partiality of discourses and language in the production of domination and in the marginalization and silencing of counter-discourses has also been an important source of insight for feminist theory. Language, the symbolic sphere, the tools of our intercommunicative practices are indeed implicated in the production and reproduction of hegemonic domination. Furthermore, Foucault has called into question the legitimacy of ways of telling history, metanarratives which tell a linear story instead of a discontinuous one, and metanarratives which insist on telling the story from a western point of view, on telling the true story of how and why it all happened.... Indeed, objectivity and rationality itself were dismantled by Foucault as constructions designed to secure hegemony. These are but a few Foucauldian positions which feminists could easily [sic] incorporate into their theoretical work. (Holub, 1922, pp. 200-201)

In relation to the issue of subjectivity Foucault has influenced feminists such as Judith Butler (1990), Jana Sawicki (1991, 1995) and Susan Bordo (1988) in their rejection of identity-based politics based upon the notion of an historical, prediscursive ‘I’. For Foucault identities are “self representations” or “fixations” that are neither fixed nor stable. The subject is not a ‘thing’ outside of culture, and there is no pure ‘state of nature’ to ground history either. The subject is not a substantive

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entity at all but rather a process of signification with an open system of discursive possibilities. The self is a regulated but not determined set of practices and possibilities. This has led to moves within feminism to represent identity as politicised in the process of construction. The choice of experiences that constitute the self always have political effects for identity stands in a discursive relation to other discursive elements. Thus identity is always a bounded notion. In Butler’s (1990) sense of ‘parodic repetition’ or Haraway’s (1990) sense of ‘the cyborg’ forms of repetitive signification defy and exceed dominant cultural injunctions. Such examples might include the ‘lipstick lesbian’, ‘the effeminate man’ etc. Such an injunction that established identities are cultural means that their stability and coherence can be challenged prefiguring the establishment of other identities. What has caused many feminists to turn away from Foucault, however, is that he sees, to cite Nancy Hartsock (1990), “no headquarters which set the direction” (Holub, 1992, p. 201) that is, he sees no structural source to power, and thus is unable, finally, to answer the question ‘Who is it that has power?’. It may be that a thinker like Gramsci is a corrective here, for while he, like Foucault, sees power relations as ubiquitous, “equally ubiquitous”, as Holub (1992, p. 200) expresses it, “are unequal relations of power”. For Gramsci more than Foucault power relations are hierarchically structured and related to a source. 8. FOUCAULT, MARXISM, PLURALISM Although Foucauldian method constitutes a radical sociological form of analysis, it differs markedly from Marxist or neo-Marxist forms of radical educational sociology that were pre-eminent in the 1980s. Wheras Marxist and neo-Marxist forms of analysis sought to account for the reproduction of unequal structures of power and domination, Foucault opposes the deep assumptions of such an approach because of their commitment to, and dependence upon, totalising modes of explanation. While Foucault recognises domination as integral to western capitalist societies, such power relations cannot be explained in relation to totalising discourses. Such a discourse is characterised, for Foucault, by is failure to recognise difference, as well as by its deterministic and deductivistic frame of reference. Marxism is a good example of such an approach. Not only does it direct attention to the primacy of the economy but it seeks to explain the parts of a culture as explicable and decodable parts of the whole totality or system. This was the approach of Hegel, as well as Marx, which seeks to analyse history and society in terms of totality, where the parts are an “expression” of the whole--hence the notion of an “expressive totality”. In this respect, Foucault (1972, pp. 9-10) draws a distinction between ‘total history’ and ‘general history’. The central differences are: The project of total history is one that seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle--material or spiritual--of a society, the significance common to all the phenomena of a period, the law that accounts for their cohesion . . . A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre--a principle, a meaning, a

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spirit, a world-view, an overall shape . . [G]eneral history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of dispersion . . . it speaks of series, divisions, limits, differences of level, shifts, chronological specificities, particular forms of rehandling, possible types of relation . . . The problem . . . which defines the task of general history is to determine what form of relation may be legitimately described between these different series.

What Foucault resists, in all of his studies, is the temptation to try to explain the development of particular discursive formations as a result of any single cause or principle. In opposition to the themes of totalising history with its notions of ‘the progress of reason’ and ‘the sprit of a century’ Foucault substitutes what he calls a differentiated analysis: Nothing, you see, is more foreign to me than the quest for a sovereign, unique and constraining form. I do not seek to detect, starting from diverse signs, the unitary spirit of an epoch, the general form of its consciousness: something like a Weltanschauung. …I have studied, one after another, ensembles of discourse; I have characterised them; I have defined the play of rules, of transformations, of thresholds, of remanences. I have established and I have described their clusters of relations. Whenever I have deemed it necessary I have allowed systems to proliferate. (Foucault, 1978b, p. 10)

It is the attempt to individualise discourses that defines Foucault’s methodological imperative: specifying their systematic and specific character; searching for the rules of formation for all of its concepts, methods, and theoretical postulates; examining the conditions of its transformation which are effective, at a precise time, for its operations, concepts, and theories to be formed, or discarded, or modified; and ascertaining its specific existence in relation to other types of discourse (Foucault, 1978b, pp. 8-10). In terms of the educational and sociological implications of the principle of totality as utilised by Marxism, Balibar (1992, p. 44) notes that it coveys “the idea that in the social ‘whole’, the ‘parts’ or the ‘cells’ are necessarily similar to the whole itself”. Foucault’s objection to this principle on a practical level, i.e., in terms of its implications for actual historical and social research, can be seen in regard to any number of institutional sectors. Balibar gives the example of the family which Foucault analyses in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. While typically Marxists had considered the family reductively as the consumption-hub of bourgeois society, i.e., as purely reproductive of capitalist class relations, for Foucault, the family has more positive functions. As Balibar (1992, p. 44) points out: Foucault stresses the strategic role of the family (its moralisation and its medicalisation) in the apparatus of the regulation of populations which forms one of the essential powers of the ‘bourgeois’ State; also it is important for him to show that the family is simultaneously the locus of institutional perversion . . . the hysterisation of the women’s body . . . the space which is the opposite to psychiatric space . . . the central concern in the competition between holders of professional knowledge about man . . . the means of socialising reproductive activity and, in particular, the locus of the juridical ‘recoding’ of bodily techniques in general into forms of alliance or kinship. . . It is for all these reasons that the family cannot be considered as the reduced image of the global society. (emphasis in original)

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Hence, the family does not reproduce society and the society does not imitate the family. As Balibar states (1992, p. 44) it is “not a monad pars totalis of ‘the society’” and its strategic importance lies not in its resemblance but in the specific nature of its difference. Foucault’s criticisms of the Marxist use of the concept of power is also related to totalism in that the power of dominant groups is seen in Marxism to ‘echo through successive amplifications’ throughout the whole social body (see Foucault, 1978a, p. 121; Balibar, 1992, p. 44). These insights are, of course, readily extendable to the analysis of educational systems. Foucault’s rejection of Marxist and enlightenment conceptions of causality explicitly reflects his Nietzschean heritage and his belief that Marxism had outlived its usefulness (Sheridan, 1980, p. 70; Barrett, 1988, p. 130). The ontological objection to identity underpins the post-structuralist rejection of totality and establishes difference as a central post-structuralist principle. What difference entails in this context is that an objects essential identity is not fixed within it but is established by its relations or connections to other objects. The differences that an object has with other objects in terms of the overall matrix of relations establishes the contrasts that count for establishing its identity. In this process, however, there is no final resolution or settlement as to what an object finally is since any attempted conclusion as to an objects identity introduces further changes and new differences in its matrix of relations to other objects. This opposition to totality which rejects the idea that an object has any essential identity or unity maintains that any apparent unity only exists through an objects relations to other objects. These relations are constitutive of a multiplicity revealing that any unity or essential identity is only an illusion. Because of this it is argued that an analytic of difference consistently applied reveals the falsity of any supposed unity or totality. Thus, although Foucault’s work can be broadly located within a tradition of thought beginning with Hegel, it is the rejection of the Hegelian dialectic, with its beliefs in progress, enlightenment and optimism concerning human ability to understand reality, that characterises his Nietzschean method. 9. FOUCAULT’S INFLUENCE IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH Foucault has had a major impact on the social sciences and a smaller, yet growing, impact on educational studies. In 1989 James Marshall (1989, p.98) could note that “educationalists had had little to say on the subject”. In reviewing the works influenced directly by Foucault, Marshall refers to studies by Jones and Williamson (1979), Hoskin (1979), as well as the critical psychology of Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, and Walkerdine (1984). In the few years after Marshall made this observation, the situation began to alter. Publications by Cherryholmes (1988), Ellesworth (1989), McLaren and Hammer (1989), Walkerdine (1989), Davies (1989), Marshall (1989, 1990), Ball (1990), Miller (1990), Pagano (1990), Aronowitz and Giroux (1991), Britzman (1991), Lather (1991), Giroux (1991), and Olssen (1993), to name just some, established a veritable explosion of works influenced by Foucault or by post-structuralism generally. Indeed, since 1991 the

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influence of Foucault and post-structuralism on education has continued to grow, affecting almost every area of study, although Marshall’s (1989, p. 98) observation that “it is far from clear that the theoretical radicalness of the work has been grasped” would still seem to be relevant. In addition, notwithstanding an increasing volume of literature, in many places Foucault’s ideas are still marginalised within the mainstream discourses of educational scholarship. Many of the works that appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s relating Foucault to education simply sought to explain the relevance of Foucault’s distinctive orientation to education, or of post-structuralism generally (e.g., Cherryholmes, 1988, or Marshall, 1989). Others sought some sort of integration of synthesis between post-structuralism and critical theory (Giroux, 1990; Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991; Lather, 1991; Ellesworth, 1989), proposing post-structuralism as a theory of emancipation towards a more equitable society. The appeal of Foucault, as of other post-structuralist writers, was that he problematised the meta-narratives of the enlightenment and advocated the possibility of treating all knowledge and forms of pedagogy as contingent, specific, local and historical (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991, p. 81). It permitted too the realisation of historically constituted forms of knowledge and pedagogy as ‘regimes of truth’ (Gore, 1993, Chapter 6) without resorting to ‘top-heavy’ critical meta-narratives such as Marxism. Of relevance to educational psychology, the study by Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn and Walkerdine (1984) explored the way in which psychology is involved in particular constructions of the individual and society. After mapping effects of nineteenth century individualism on psychology, the authors seek to demonstrate, utilising Foucault and other post-structuralist thinkers, the way educational psychologies such as those of Piaget contribute to the normalisation and surveillance of children. Much of the problem, it is argued, stems from the ontological conception of the individual which results from a certain model of individual and society relations which dominated the Victorian context out of which psychology developed. Such a model of the person warps both psychology’s development as well as its operations. In order to correct the individualist bias of western psychology, the authors seek to explore the applicability of various sociological theories in their attempt find a more appropriate model of ‘individualsociety’ relations as a basis to the discipline. Rejecting Marxist theories as being too totalistic, focusing on structures of the economy as mechanically determining individuals responses and actions in a rigid way reflecting class interests, the authors utilise Foucault, and other post-structuralists in order to represent individuals as constituted by dispotifs of discourse/practices with multiple sites of origin. Also with respect to educational psychology, some of my own work (Olssen, 1993), utilises Foucauldian theory in order to throw light on the origins of educational psychology by tracing it as a particular discourse to its emergence in the nineteenth century. My aim was to trace the way that educational psychology, like psychology in general, contained deep within the hard core of its scientific research programmethe political ideology of seventeenth to nineteenth century individualism.

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This derived from three sources: (1) from political and economic liberalisms, emerging in the seventeenth century (2) from the epistemological emphasis on methodological individualism, emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and (3) from the sciences of biology and evolution as they developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In each of these three areas, specific proposals (political obligation, scientific method) confounded various senses or forms of individualism − descriptive, moral, political − asserting what in essence was a metaphysic of individualism against the more social and communitarian metaphysic of the ancien regime. The implication of this was to fashion a conception of the individual as “owner and creator of his own capacities” (Macpherson, 1962), a conception which privileges nature over nurture, and which Foucault contends is fallacious in terms of both ontology and psychology. Yet without this conception of the “possessive individual” (Macpherson, 1962), sciences like mental testing and individual difference psychology would never have got off the ground or become institutionalised as powerful forms of technical control within western education systems during the twentieth century. Sciences like mental testing and educational psychology defined new ways of relating to the world, new means of administrative control, new ways of defining and talking about people etc.; in short, new means of normalisation and surveillance by which order and discipline in modern western nations is made effective. Through these new sciences, individual human subjects were represented in biologically essentialist terms, and societies were depicted as reflecting , or adapting to, the real natures of their citizens. The doctrine of ontological individualism in which the human subject was represented as pre-social, because of its dominance in European culture at the end of the nineteenth century, made possible the emergence of such a discipline as educational psychology and which in turn has major consequences for its development as an empirical science. In recent years there have been a number of more substantial analyses utilising Foucauldian approaches to educational issues. In a number of papers and books spanning several years James Marshall (1989, 1990, 1995, 1996a, b) has presented a Foucauldian analysis of liberal education principles focusing upon (1) personal autonomy, (2) notions of identity, (3) the adequacy of the liberal concept of authority, and (4) the notion of the improvement or progress of human beings through education or in society. Maintaining the Foucauldian thesis that the autos or self has been constructed politically by power-knowledge, Marshall critiques the view that education is involved in the pursuit of personal autonomy, or that rational autonomy is the aim of education. For Foucault, says Marshall, the pursuit of personal autonomy in such Enlightenment terms is a social construction and is destined to fail because it masks the fact that any such persons have been constituted by political acts. As he puts it (1996a, p. 113): The notion of a self able to deliberate upon and accept laws so as to act autonomously as opposed to following laws heteronomously is a fiction, furnished upon the western world post-Kant as the basis for moral action but, for Foucault in the cause of governmentality.

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Rather, for Foucault, says Marshall, our conception of ourselves as “free agents” is an illusion, and he argues that liberal educators like Strike, Dearden and Peters who advocate personal autonomy as a fundamental aim of education do not understand how modern power, through the technologies of domination and the technologies of the self, has produced individuals who are governable. For Marshall, the very concepts which we use to construct our identities are such as to make independence and autonomy illusory. Hence education via governmentality effects the production of a new form of subject − one who believes they are free. Such an education simply introduces a new form of social control and socialisation and new and more insidious forms of indoctrination where a belief in our own authorship binds us to the conditions of our own production and constitutes an identity that makes us governable. In that “selves” do emerge it is as “pathologised” into certain types of human beings which are discursively constructed. The human sciences have been pivotal here as technologies of the self in the construction of human subjects as autonomous. The human sciences have produced knowledge about man during the period of the Enlightenment. This, says Marshall (1996a, p. 120), entails a “messy involvement”: Man enters the scene as both speaking subject and as an object that is spoken about. As speaking subject, Man represents the very conditions of possibility of content knowledge about the object man. Foucault argues that Man as subject in the human sciences has a continuous messy involvement in knowledge about the object Man. Or, to put it another way, whereas the very conditions for the possibilities of knowledge should be separate from the contents of knowledge, or that there should be a dividing line between the transcendental and the empirical, Foucault believes that in the human sciences they are not and cannot be so divided. (emphasis in original)

In a related sense, utilising Foucault’s concept of governmentality, Marshall (1995, 1996a, b) and Peters and Marshall (1996) examine the neo-liberal notion of the autonomous chooser as embodying a particular conception of human nature, as a model of the security of the state, and as a particular model of surveillance and control. Focusing upon the massive changes in political policies regarding education, as well as other social services, which have taken place in New Zealand since 1987, he develops a Foucauldian analysis of the reforms in terms of notions such as ‘choice’, ‘quality’, ‘freedom’, and ‘autonomy’. In a way similar to his analysis of autonomy as a liberal educational goal, what is presupposed in the notion of the ‘autonomous chooser’, says Marshall, is that the notion of autonomy needed to make choices and the notion of needs and interests entailed as a result, have not been manipulated or imposed in some way upon the chooser, but are the subject’s own. A Foucauldian critique rejects such a possibility. Further work on Foucault and education has been carried out in Australia by Ian Hunter (1994, 1996), who stresses the distinctiveness of Foucault’s approach to the school as an apparatus for the social determination of subjectivity. For Foucault, says Hunter, historical phenomena are seen to emerge not as realisations of underlying principles or developmental laws but as contingent assemblages put together under

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‘blind’ historical circumstances. Foucault would not be concerned with education in reproducing labour power or ideology, says Hunter (1996, p. 47), but rather with the effects of the school through a variety of technologies of domination concerned with the disciplinary organisation of the school: special architectures; devices for organising space and time; body techniques; practices of surveillance and supervision; pedagogical relationships; procedures of administration and examination. Foucault thus forces us to consider that it is not educational principles but school premises and modes of organisation that are important for understanding the constitution of subjectivity. And rather than representing the school as an agency of the economy or of the Repressive State Apparatuses, for Foucault it is a form of disciplinary and bureaucratic governance. It arose initially, says Hunter (1996, p. 149), from the pastoral disciplines whereby the production of a self-monitoring and self-regulating subject was made into a central disciplinary objective. In the eighteenth century, says Hunter (1996, pp. 155-156), the happiness of citizens and the highest good of the State were inseparable, premised upon freedom within limits, assured property, and flourishing industry. With Kant the highest good became moral enlightenment, considered as a break from the self-incurred tutelage of medieval European society, and a commitment to self-realisation, relying on the individual’s own faculties of conscience and consciousness characteristic of the Enlightenment. For Kant the State should embody this rational and selfdetermining moral law. This begs the question as how exactly the State could fulfil the conditions of individual reason and as Hunter points out he was happy to acknowledge Frederick the Great as the democratic embodiment of the people, thus defending in the final analysis an ‘army backed enlightenment’ (Hunter, 1996, p. 156). Notwithstanding such a paradox Kant remained the champion of an ethical individualism and universalism which asserted the supremacy of the individual conscience as expressed in the categorical imperative. This meant in the final analysis that civic or governmental interests do not have a moral authority equivalent to the inner moral sense. This, says Hunter (1996, p. 157), “makes it impossible for him to reach a positive historical understanding of the separation of governmental and intellectual-spiritual spheres”, resulting in a split between the civic and the moral person. Hence, while for Kant the State must encourage the creation of rational capacities in its citizens, Kantian philosophy also contains, says Hunter (1996, p. 157): two incompatible views: a de facto acknowledgement that rational conduct is an effect of the State’s pacification and training of the population; and an unblinking faith of an intellectual elite that such conduct arises from intellectual self-reflection alone. (emphasis in original)

Herein, says Hunter (1997, p. 157) is the paradox between liberal and Marxist viewpoints: For the liberal paradox of a community of rational individuals that uses schooling to form itself, and the Marxian dialectic of ‘learning (human development) and choosing (human freedom)’, are latter-day variants of the Kantian circle. Like Kant’s, these views

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are incapable of reflecting on the school system as one of the rational, disciplinary means through which States began to form populations capable of civic conduct.

Foucault’s project, like those of Schiller, Hegel, and Marx before him, has been to challenge Kant’s presumption of the ‘morally ultimate character of self-reflective personhood’ (ibid.), seeking instead to historicise Kant by tying the development of the person to that of society. In this Foucault rejects both the Kantian, as well as the Hegelian-Marxist view of the formation of the subject. The subject is neither selfreflective nor “incorporable” to history or class. Rather, says Hunter, Foucault focuses on the specific spiritual practices and disciplines through which individuals become ethically self-concerned and seek to compose themselves as subjects of their own conduct (1997, p. 158). Thus for Foucault the reflective subject is understood as a particular practice of the person deriving from the spiritual disciplines of the greco-roman and christian cultures of the west − stoic self-testing, Christian interrogation of the flesh; the Catholic confessional; protestant self-examination; sexual austerity; fasting − these are all inventions for taking an interest in ourselves as subjects of our own conduct. From Foucault’s viewpoint, says Hunter (1996, p. 159) it is necessary to give up the idea that the subject might freely choose its own form “through a rational inspection of moral principles or competing versions of the good life”. Freedom is only possible with regards to individual action only after conduct has undergone moral problematisation, but individuals cannot freely choose the form in which they will undergo problematisation. Individuals rather will be subject to dominant modes of the culture and Hunter draws on Weber’s (1930) account of the rise of the protestant ethic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to provide a Foucauldian description of the exercise of spiritual training of the population. Fundamental to this was the transfer of power of ethical determination from the priesthood to the population. Such a transfer involved the systematic use of devices for mass spiritual problematisation. Hunter notes in particular the doctrine of predestination which he claims destroyed the certitude of salvation and encouraged the transmission of particular forms of ethical labour − practices of selfwatchfulness, self control, special forms of devotional reading and writing − through which the faithful reassured themselves of their own ethical standing: The result was a profound individualisation of Christian spirituality as ordinary members of flock were inducted into a practice of ethical life that made them ‘personally’ responsible for their own salvation. (Hunter, 1996, p. 159)

It is against this background that Hunter seeks to explain the rise of the first popular school systems in Europe by the Churches as instruments for the intensification and dissemination of Christian spiritual discipline and pastoral guidance beginning in the continental States of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reaching its height under eighteenth century pietism and puritanism. Schooling then was a specifically religious effort by the Reformed

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Churches to Christianise the European peasantries, as a method of ‘injecting religion into daily life’ (Hunter, ibid., p. 159). The object of pastoral pedagogy was not to produce ‘docile workers’ or social automatons, and it cannot be understood as religious brainwashing, as critical historians are wont to do. Rather, it was to form the capacities required for individuals to comport themselves as self-reflective and self-governing persons. What critical historians fail to understand, and what Foucault corrects, says Hunter (1996, p. 160), is that the capacities of the selfreflective person emerge only after individuals have been initiated into the arts of self-concern and self-regulation. Foucault enables us to understand then the construction of self-reflective personhood, not in Kantian terms, but “as the construction of that special pedagogical milieu in which such personhood is formed as a disciplined comportment” (1996, p. 161). The school’s function was to transmit the disciplines of ethical self-concern and ethical labour into the daily life of the laity. It was, says Hunter, because Christian pedagogy existed as a discipline, rather than as an ideology, that allowed it to slip its theological moorings and to reappear in the form of secular moral education. It effectively could become ‘humanist’ pedagogy which utilises practices of ethical labour adopted and adapted from its Christian prototype. But the self-reflective, self-regulating students that it forms are no less the product of an unconditional initiation into the discursive disciplines of conscience for all that. Based on such an analysis, Hunter suggests that a Foucauldian approach reinstates Weber against Marx. Rather than State schooling being represented as an expression of the interests and capacities of class politics, it must be seen instead, as the outcome of technical faculties of administration, and as a vehicle for the transmission of pastoral pedagogy. It was through christian pastoralism that the school disseminated the comportment of the self-reflective person, via a pedagogy of moral subjectification. Through a piecemeal series of exchanges between the state, and the Christian pastorate, the school - through its architecture, pedagogy, and administration - became employed as an instrument of social governance of citizens and the spiritual disciplining of souls. 10. CONCLUSION Foucauldian approaches to education clearly provide a distinctive view of history and historical method which marks a radical departure and rejection from both liberal and Marxist accounts of the emergence and functions of mass schooling in the western world. Against Marxist and traditional critical accounts Foucault opposes all forms of materialist reductionism or explanation in terms of economic factors. Rather his own approach stresses the multiplicity of material causes. Against liberals he displaces the ontological priority placed on the individual as the authors of their own selves and the moral individualism which such an approach entails. Criticisms of Foucault’s approach focus on the moral and epistemological relativism of his

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approach; on his approach to power, and by extension, on the consequences of the philosophical nominalism which underpins his analysis. Mark Olssen is Reader in Education, School of Educational Studies, University of Surrey, U.K. NOTE 1

In some sections this paper reproduces work already published in my book, Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education, Bergin and Garvey, New York, 1999.

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JOHN R. MORSS

GILLES DELEUZE AND THE SPACE OF EDUCATION: POSTSTRUCTURALISM, CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1 AND SCHOOLED BODIES One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. (Deleuze, 1996, p. 175)

It is only possible to justify a chapter on Deleuze in a book on educational ideas if some plausible claims can be made or examples given of innovative contributions that his work may provide. As yet, it is only in the realm of claims − of suggestive possibilities and speculations – that such a justification may be made out in the case of Deleuze. Yet these adumbrations are already striking (Edwards and Usher, 2000). The aim of this chapter is to indicate some of the ways in which Deleuze’s ideas might be articulated in the context of educational theory and practice, especially when aligned with some contributions from critical psychology. The discussion will be broad in scope, including brief mention of such topics as children’s needs and rights; disability and inclusive education; and therapeutic or counselling dimensions to educational practice, as well as topics that arise more directly from Deleuze’s own writings. Gilles Deleuze may prove to be one of the twentieth century’s most original and at the same time most systematic thinkers, someone whose work redefines what we understand by intellectual integrity in somewhat the way that Nietzsche’s did: that is to say, redefines the relationship between thought and passion. If so, the impact of his ideas on practices such as educational practices may be expected to be slow and uncertain at least at first (we have not yet even had a “Nietzschean century”). If the intellectual impact of postmodernism is likened to that of an earth-targeted comet as in the recent movie genre (Holzman and Morss, 2000, p. 3) – noticing that things return more or less to normal at the end of Deep Impact and its companions − then the impact of Deleuze may be likened more to a climate change or a cosmological event. The reverberations of the Big Bang are still, we are told, reverberating, and stating the obvious though it may be, Deleuze is certainly big. If his work has any long term effect it will surely be more of a bang than a whimper. Deleuze maintained the pursuit of some specific goals as he traversed the writings of Hume, Nietzsche, Spinoza and many others. Most generally, Deleuze’s own 85 J. D. Marshall (ed.), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy, 85-97. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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positive commitments are to a kind of empiricism and to a recognition of the role of creativity in a world that is unpredictable. It is perhaps this insistence on creativity that represents Deleuze’s most significant contribution to our thinking − about education, social life, politics, and art. This chapter will proceed on the basis that Deleuze’s writing helps us to start re-thinking educational practice in some diverse and radical ways. It frees us up, I will suggest, to ask new questions and to look at educational practices (widely defined) in some fresh ways. But setting the issues out in such a grandiose way raises some immediate questions concerning the relationship between Deleuze’s thinking and poststructuralism. If the work of Deleuze is accorded such epochal status as I indicate, what of the more general movement to which Deleuze’s work may (arguably) be taken to belong? I shall hypothetically presuppose that the most notable contributions that one can associate with the name of Deleuze tell us about what aspects or styles of poststructuralism are of the greatest significance to this project. In that sense, I shall define poststructuralism as a movement that engulfs structuralism rather than defeating and supplanting it. Its succeeding of structuralism in a chronological series of influential “isms” is perhaps the least significant feature of poststructuralism, at least as exemplified by Deleuze. If we think of structuralism as representing realities (social, linguistic, cognitive) as pure patterns, like the constellations in the night sky, then poststructuralism is the roaming space-probe, always on the move and always tearing apart any single perspective such as that from which these transient collections of stars look familiar to us. Where structuralism insists that everything is connected, poststructuralism shows (against the grain of “common sense”) that everything is unconnected, that everything is up for grabs: or that the connecting must somehow be “connecting with difference” (Morss, 2000a). Linkages are fluid and structures are always hollow. Process, flux, events – “the Heraclitean fire machine”(Deleuze, 1983, p. 30) − form Deleuze’s cosmology. Such a Heraclitean worldview in which (it almost seems) one cannot step in the same river once, let alone twice, makes the crystalline patterns of structuralism look like the fantasies of paranoia or as some masculine dream of control. The joyous science is not the science of the state-funded research grant. As this account suggests, Deleuze’s universe is populated by pre-Socratic as much as by postmodern sensibilities. The chapter begins with a discussion of the Deleuzian vocabulary and frameworks that might be of relevance (general introductions to and overviews of the work of Deleuze, with and without Guattari, may be found in Badiou, 1998; Buchanan, 1999; Goodchild, 1996; Kaufman and Heller, 1998; Patton, 1996 and Stivale, 1998). Some observations on Deleuze’s few direct comments on educational matters, and on related discussions by commentators, are then made. Next a link is drawn, through Nietzsche, with critical approaches to psychology in relation to education. Several educational topics are there presented in ways that are intended to reflect a Deleuzian sensibility, in tandem with perspectives both from critical psychology and from critical pedagogy. More is said on the former than on the latter; some observations are made elsewhere (Morss, in press) on a critical-theory approach to Deleuze, which

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suggests links with a critical pedagogy, whereas the intersections with critical psychology are largely unexplored. The influence of psychology on educational practice has been largely baleful (Henriques et al., 1984; Olssen, 1991) and postmodern forms of psychology (Morss, 2000b) show little promise of altering that trend in the foreseeable future. Critical forms of psychology, perhaps invigorated by a whiff of Deleuze, may have somewhat more chance of impacting on the ways we think about and execute our disciplining (and occasional punishing) of the world’s young. Critical psychology already considers itself informed by poststructuralism (Morss, 1996) so that the possibility is a valid one at least at first blush. 1. A CURRICULUM OF DELEUZE: EMPIRICISM, SPACE, AND A THOUSAND NIETZSCHES Deleuze’s first two major books focused on Hume and on Nietzsche. According to Deleuze, both Hume and Nietzsche in effect rejected dialectics and rationalism − the transcendental in any of its guises before or after Hegel − in favour of a respect for theparticular and the plural, and hence for difference. Both set intellectual functions firmly within a context of human life, particularly in an ethical context (as indeed did Spinoza). Hence Deleuze could argue that “philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of what there is” (Deleuze, 1991, p. 133). The rejection of orthodox rationalism (also evidenced in his admiration for Bergson) set Deleuze apart from the French intellectual mainstream no less than did his rejection of the dialectic. The continental concern with subjectivity − carried through from existentialism into poststructuralist thought by Foucault and others – fared little better. The subject is radically exteriorised in Deleuze − portrayed as the contingent, accidental effect of the play of surfaces. This in itself represents one point of contact with empiricism, a line of work which would seem to concern itself with exteriors. Poststructuralist theory in general appears rather hostile to empiricism, at least empiricism of a physicalist or positivist variety. Deleuze found it too easy to be thus dismissive of empiricism and held transcendental philosophy much more to be feared. Empiricism, he suggested, is trying to do something of genuine human importance: to accept the multiplicity of experience. Cautiously, in this connection, one could describe Deleuze as a materialist, where the materialism would be of the “sensuous” kind that Marx envisions in the first of the Theses on Feuerbach (“human sensuous activity, practice”). Certainly, empiricism can be seen as opposed to interpretation. In Deleuze’s words: “Never interpret: experience, experiment” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 87). In Nietzsche and Philosophy (Deleuze, 1983) – “an inaugurating moment of French poststructuralism” (Peters, 1997, p. 14) – Deleuze endorses Nietzsche’s affirmative, joyous account of science, devoted to the realm of “action” rather than “reaction”. It celebrates thinking as creation. This creativity means that not only is philosophy not directed to the eternal, as in a Platonic idealism, but it is also not directed to the “historical” as if this is somehow a surrogate for the ideal. Philosophy is neither

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eternal nor historical but “untimely”. For Deleuze, Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy allows an appropriately “active” analysis of change across time. Genealogy, for Deleuze, involves a recognition of the differential and the “genetic” (the productive). He contrasts genealogy with evolutionism, which tends to set change within fixed patterns and even teleological structures, describing evolutionism as “the reactive image of genealogy”. This notion of genealogy is of course familiar through its subsequent adoption by Foucault, together with several other key elements of Deleuze’s Nietzsche (such as the analysis of power). Foucault employed a sense of genealogy that focused on structures of knowledge. For Deleuze, in contrast, it is in the realm of ethics that genealogy is of most significance. Values for Nietzsche, argues Deleuze, are to be seen neither as absolute, nor relative to some cultural base – raising challenging issues for education of course. Deleuze’s Nietzsche is above all a philosopher of ethical action in the world, where ethical action is to be distinguished from the taking of responsibility, which involves guilt and hence falls into the traps of “interiority” and of ressentiment. As Foucault himself might have said, “As for being responsible or irresponsible, we don’t recognise those notions, they’re for policemen and courtroom psychiatrists” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 24). It was Foucault who contributed a Preface to the controversial 1972 collaboration of Deleuze with Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). A flamboyant expose of the impoverishment of the psychoanalytical notion of repression, Anti-Oedipus was like a fusion of Nietzsche and William S. Burroughs, exuberant and irreverent. It had the democratising spirit of the slogan “a bas les aristos” and the anarchic “schoolboy” spirit of Zero de Conduite, as two grown intellectuals in the 1960s conspired to be the young Mozart in scatological style as well as in brilliance. But this was Deleuze-and-Guattari, not Deleuze, and in some ways it was anomalous. As emphasised in Nietzsche and Philosophy, negativity is to be subordinated to the exploration of positive dimensions of existence (“laughter, roars of laughter”) – a “multiple affirmation” in the interests of “transmutation or transvaluation” (Peters, 1997, p. 6). To get seduced by critique, however exuberant, would represent a kind of ressentiment, a dangerous flirtation with the dialectic. Protection against such dangers was afforded by an insistence on plurality (to guard against the tyranny of unification) and an insistence on becoming (to guard against the tyranny of identity) – that is, by an insistence on difference both synchronous and diachronous. An educational “system” built on such principles is scarcely imaginable as yet, but arguably worth the imagining. The Logic of Sense was more characteristic of Deleuze’s sober, solo writings of the 1960s and 1970s. It discusses the important topics of depth and surface. Depth is rejected as a philosophical trope, as exemplified by the Platonic philosopher seen as rising up out the cave that keeps his fellows imprisoned, and looking down upon the human world from an impersonal height. “Depth” connotes interiority and hidden secrets, knowable to the philosopher (or the psychoanalyst) but not to the ordinary mortal. The Deleuzian philosopher must abjure both height and depth and, instead, must become an animal “on a level with the surface” − like “a tick or louse”

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(Deleuze, 1990, p. 33). Deleuze appeals to topology, a science of surfaces in which “there is no distance”. The interest in spatial imagery was to be carried much further in Deleuze’s second major collaboration with Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987; originally published in 1980). Here extensive use was made of notions of “striated” and “smooth” forms of space and the associated concept of territorialisation (Edwards and Usher, p. 42). The model of the rhizome was offered as a suggestive image of ground-level, non-linear growth, a botanical counterpart to guerilla warfare. Also, following on from the “becoming” theme of Nietzsche and Philosophy, the slightly more concrete (and substantially more controversial) ideas of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-child” were outlined. Both concepts raised questions about the societal determination of the minoritarian (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) status of the non-man. The final collaboration with Guattari, What is Philosophy?, revisits previous topics and also includes discussion of aesthetic issues. Deleuze rejects measurement and variables in favour of unconstrained variation, and rejects interiority in favour of the surface. Interiority connotes well-organised space (“this is what the inside of a philosopher’s head should be like”). Instead of mimicking this rational interior, exteriority is to be conceived in terms of “the plane of immanence … the abstract machine of which these assemblages [ie, the concepts] are the working parts”. The notion of the plane of immanence is motivated by the concern to avoid a return to a philosophy of transcendence, since for Deleuze the transcendental in any form is a vehicle of violence. 2. ZERO DE CONDUITE: DELEUZE AND EDUCATION Family, school, army, and factory are no longer so many analogous but different sites converging in an owner … but transmutable or transformable coded configurations of a single business where the only people left are administrators. (Deleuze, 1995, p. 181)

It is not difficult to indicate, in a general way, some areas in which Deleuze’s thought might connect with philosophy of education. For example, any enquiry into human subjectivity, the nature of childhood or the role of the State has inevitable implications for the study of education; and these are all issues on which Deleuze has commented. Somemore focused connections are also available however, although Deleuze has not written extensively on education topics. For example, writing in 1990, Deleuze comments on the significance of forms of continuous assessment (in French, “continuous control”),and of the bringing of business “into education at every level” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 182), as examples of “the widespread progressive introduction of anew system of domination”. “Rational economics” in education would be anathema for Deleuze, just as “dialectical economics” would be (also see Deleuze, 1998). In the collaborative works of Deleuze and Guattari contributions are often made in the form of (unanswered) questions: thus Guattari: “How do you make a class operate

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like a work of art? What are the possible paths to its singularisation, the source of a ‘purchase on existence’ for the children who compose it?” (Guattari, 1995). Interesting points can also be gleaned from Deleuze’s comments on his own university teaching at Vincennes. In 1988, Deleuze described how Vincennes had “provided exceptional conditions” for higher education: In philosophy, we rejected the principle of “building up knowledge” progressively: there were the same courses for first-year and nth-year students, for students and non-students, philosophers and non-philosophers, young and old ... They were long sessions, nobody took in everything, but everyone took what they needed or wanted, what they could use, even if it was far removed from their own discipline. (Deleuze, 1995, p. 139)

The general educational attitude one gains from Deleuze would thus be a very open one, probably bearing many similarities with radical education as conceived since the 1960s (for example by Illich or perhaps Freire). It would seem to imply the democratisation of grading processes. Certainly, colleagues of Deleuze at Vincennes were experimenting with highly flexible credit regimes (Macey, 1993, p. 229). In some respects at least, it is possible that discussions of Deleuze may revive and reinvigorate some of the already available proposals within critical pedagogy. For example, McMahon (1996) explores the classroom implications of the DeleuzoGuattarian analysis of desire in speculating about the classroom as “public space”. McMahon suggests that the classroom would function: not as a place of semination, but as an agora, a meeting place, with exchanges going on all the time, in various corners of the room and with various collages and assemblages and disseminations ... Rethinking the student centred classroom, then, does not mean a blindness towards institutional power ... What it means is to continually return to the idea that learning can be an eventfulness where the teacher is not “empowering” students (as though power were something in the student’s future), but where their learning is already an expression of their own power, energy and joy. (McMahon, 1996, p. 7)

Deleuzian-influenced doubts about “empowering” are also expressed by Erica McWilliam (1996; also McWilliam and Taylor, 1996). Strongly influenced also by feminist interrogations of the body and of pedagogy, McWilliam appeals to the AntiOedipus in order to re-define critical pedagogy. For McWilliam, critical pedagogy may be thought of as “group fantasy” that embodies desire in quite concrete ways. Thus “critical pedagogy is materialized as a social production, ie, ‘how a multiplicity of new collective arrangements against power’ ... come to be generated through the forms of cultural exchange being enacted or performed in the teaching and learning space” (McWilliam, 1996, p. 8). The affirmative Deleuzian emphasis on desiring-production also assists McWilliam in investigating the erotics of teaching: We need reminding that identity formation is the social production of a body that matters, not a troublesome excess baggage in pedagogical work ... What a radical political project does not need are models of the good teacher as virgin mother. (McWilliam, 1996, pp. 10, 15).

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The interrogation of teacher as bodily surface − “body of knowledge” with a human face − has already made reference to Deleuze and Guattari in the work of Angel (1994). Certainly Deleuze himself was a very “bodily” thinker: painfully aware of his imperfect body through its chronic ailments, narcissistically aware of his long fingernails, and surely aware of his body’s fragility in anticipating, however briefly, its final trajectory to the Parisian sidewalk. Other examples of appeals to Deleuze in educational theory are beginning to emerge. For example, Elizabeth St.Pierre (1996) has made extensive use of Deleuze in conceptualising autobiographical and ethnographic work in education. For St.Pierre, appealing in particular to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuzian articulations of space − smooth space, the nomad, the line of flight − provide potent and stimulating entry points to a personalised (but not interiorised) field of collective memories. St.Pierre’s nomad science is a kind of fieldwork, and has thus far carried the Deleuzian impulse the furthest in terms of methodology in educational thinking. As St.Pierre comments: I am very curious about the spaces we encounter and deterritorialize as we do our headwork and our legwork in the smooth fields of our lives. What mental space do you require and create to help you think differently? (St.Pierre, 1996, p. 8)

Complementary theorising on a Deleuzian “rhizoanalysis” approach to educational theory is being carried out by Donna Alvermann (see St.Pierre and Pillow, 2000). Deleuze’s vocabulary and imagery are certainly startling. There is a cinematic or more precisely a cinematographic authority about the Deleuzian vision – a “look” that can be inspiring. It is perhaps at such a “superficial” level that the influence of Deleuze is most appropriately expressed, for Deleuze frequently directs our attention to that which is patent, hidden in plain sight. We are reminded for example that children’s bodies, the subject-matter of so much educational practice, are assembled and re-assembled in many and varied ways under societal regulation (indeed “assembly” has been a daily ritual for many schoolchildren). School life must sometimes seem like a bad movie to its participants (including teachers), and the unexpected attention to the production values and cinematic techniques of this unimaginative “studio production” called education that Deleuze’s writings provides, is extremely salutary. 3. FROM DELEUZE TO THE CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION: POSSIBILITIES It was to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that Columbia University’s critical psychologist of education John Broughton turned, in summing up the aims of a critical orientation to human developmental change: “One must have chaos in one /To give birth to a dancing star” (Broughton, 1987, p. 23). Broughton’s appeal to Nietzsche was apt, because reference to the more obvious Marxist and other critical-theory origins of the critical approach to psychology was never entirely adequate (Morss, 1996). Terminology and techniques, plus credibility in certain circles, were gained by the

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employment of ideology-critique and so on, but the Frankfurt School did not supply much in the way of passion. At the same time the Freud-Marx syntheses of Fromm, Reich and Marcuse provided some impetus to critical psychology but their insufficiently critical adoption of psychoanalytic assumptions limited their value in that regard, leaving critical psychology to do its best with Lacan (Walkerdine, 1988). It was Nietzsche’s heirs, particularly Foucault, whose poststructuralist arguments were to provide critical psychology with its most effective vocabulary – or more than a vocabulary, a lingua franca. The analysis of discourses, including “discourse analysis” in some of its forms (Parker, 1992) became ubiquitous. The uncertain role of Derridean deconstruction in this discursive hegemony was discussed but not resolved (Morss, 1992,1999). The Nietzschean dimension of critical approaches to psychology might be thought of as facilitating an approach to Deleuze. Some references to Deleuze are indeed to be found in the Lacanian/Foucauldian critical psychology of the 1980s (Henriques et al., 1984) and in the innovative “polytextual” critical psychology of the 1990s (Curt, 1994). In the latter, the collective authorship discuss a Deleuzian critique of subjectivity in some detail. More recently, a collection of contributions to theoretical psychology (Morss, Stephenson and van Rappard, 2001) has significant reference to Deleuze in three of its chapters, in the context of social psychology; feminist theory; and subjectification. Although remaining unexplored in those contributions, each example of a Deleuzian contribution to psychology has educational implications. Thus, a critical rethinking of psychologist Henri Tajfel’s social identity theory, to enable it to deal with fascism as well as everyday intergroup relationships, calls for a Deleuzian sensitivity to the field-like (rather than linear) effects of its conceptual elements (Brown and Lunt, 2001). The limitations in Tajfel’s approach, even when incorporating some notions from Bourdieu, help to indicate what is required before social theory will be able to deal with “the brute realities of history, economics or political ecology” (Brown and Lunt, 2001, p. 91). Second, a feminist approach to logical inference, drawing on Deleuze, enables a rethinking of the role of rationality in the development of thinking (Falmagne, 2001). Third, in this sample, Deleuze assists in the “reintegration of sense into subjectification” (Hildebrand-Nilshon, Motzkau and Papadopoulos, 2001), a conceptual move by which the enunciation of sense “in concrete social spaces” is brought together with persons’ selftransformation into a subject (as described by Foucault) to yield a socio-political theory of contemporary existence. Some direct links to pedagogy are in fact drawn by Johanna Motzkau and her Berlin colleagues, in terms of the disciplining of the sense-making of children, and their chapter ends by citing Broughton’s Nietzschean comment (from the same source as noted above) that “critical developmental psychology cannot be contemplated or sustained without a personal, perhaps visceral commitment” (p. 299) and by their calling for a “fluid, vitalised perspective on the narration of development and logic”. Affects, as well as effects, are central to Deleuze’s worldview and his Spinozan writings on expression are highly significant for an aesthetics of education (Deleuze, 1992); and “fluid, vitalised perspective” could be a general slogan for

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Deleuze (Marks, 1998). Berlin’s critical psychologists, substantially replacing Marxism with a sophisticated blend of poststructuralism (including that of Deleuze) as the theoretical powerhouse of their programme, are generating some challenging proposals on subjectivity and social life which raise equally challenging questions on education. This work may be a contribution to a Nietzschean-poststructuralist reconsideration of education (Peters, 1997). The reconsideration of childhood prompted by these conceptual issues gives rise to some questions on “children’s rights”. Children’s rights, as distinct from human rights in general (themselves problematic from a poststructuralist viewpoint) seem to depend on some notion of children’s “needs” and hence some notions of vulnerability and dependence. But neither notion seems an adequate consideration on which to ground rights specifically for people of a certain chronological age. Many adults (in a sense, all adults) are highly dependent on the care of others and are hence as vulnerable as the average baby, or more so at least temporarily (airline passengers for example). Many adults are exploited to a much greater extent than the average small child. Some children, indeed, are murderers. In general, a Deleuzian skepticism queries the salience of chronological age and the kinds of change conceptually associated with it – the progressive “interiorisation” that has been said to characterise “cognitive development” both in the Piagetian and Vygotskian traditions, for example (Morss, 1996). Special treatment for children because they are children becomes hard to justify: if it is acceptable for an adult to strike another adult in self-defence then such should also be the case for an adult striking a child. Correspondingly, it should not be possible for one who strikes (“smacks”) a child to make a defence merely on the grounds of child status in the victim, whatever the biological relationship between the parties (unlike the present legal situation in New Zealand). “Disciplining” another person is not generally recognised as a justification for assault however minor. Such considerations merge with the more general observation that contemporary society may be moving (or moving “back”) to a chronologically less differentiated form. It is a mundane observation that adults are, globally, increasingly eating “like children” (fastfood is delivered as if to a child, is eaten with the hands and has its leftovers and packaging cleared up by others), as well as dressing “like children” (trainers, sweatpants), and that children are increasingly exposed to “adult” activities and worldviews especially through video. Indeed, “the family is an ‘interior’ that’s breaking down like all other interiors – educational, professional, and so on” (Deleuze, 1996, p. 78). The secular process of age-desegregation faces its apparently most resistant obstacle in the form of educational practice where professional expertise appears to sanction extreme forms of discriminative sequestration on grounds of chronological age. In New Zealand for example the Intermediate School with its two-year age band remains in place albeit on the defensive. Chronological age is frequently used as a vector of discrimination in western-style societies, with age-discrimination in relation to retirement from employment, recently outlawed, an obvious case; age-discrimination in relation to eligibility to vote being another. It remains an open question whether the gathering together of any group of people

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solely on the basis of chronological age − such as in an early childhood centre or a school – should not be considered prima facie discriminatory. Yet it is entirely accepted with only very minor tinkering of details. In contrast, the educational segregation of children with disabilities is widely held to be wrong and outdated (Ballard and Bray, 1991). Indeed it is widely recognised in educational circles that the alienation of any child with a disability from accepted, local cultural age-expectations constitutes a major vector of discrimination. A child with a defined disability (or indeed some other kind of difference), if segregated into a “special education” setting, runs the risk of having their access to their community’s age-expectations literally disabled. In effect, a child with a disability is defined at some point as having contravened certain age expectations. This is what in most cases, brings the child to the attention of some appropriate professional in the first place – some member of the “age police” who notes the developmental delinquency and takes some kind of action in response to it. Earlier practices of not only segregating children with disabilities from their agepeers, but also pooling them with other children of diverse ages and often diverse dis/abilities, undoubtedly disadvantaged them in many ways (although the quasivoluntary segregation of hearing-impaired children is for example sometimes defended on the grounds of cultural rights). Educational discrimination against a child with a disability prototypically involves a way of treating the child’s age which is often quite different from the way in which the childs peers’ ages are treated. Extreme examples might include the placement of an older child with an intellectual disability in a class of much younger children. Thus the strongest indicator that dis/ability discrimination is not happening would seem to be inclusion into a regime of localised age-expectations: but as noted, inclusion into a regime of ageexpectations is itself potentially discriminatory. Educational inclusion of all children irrespective of ability may benefit all children by highlighting their common state of discriminatedness on grounds of age. If so this issue of “common cause” perhaps constitutes one of the strongest arguments for educational inclusion. Along with children of refugees, immigrants or travellers, children with disabilities would surely manifest plural minority status and when they express themselves, their language would be “minor” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986). Finally, mention might be made of the therapeutic dimension of educational practice whereby counseling in education seeks to guide or support students with life tasks. Narrative approaches to therapy, currently significant in educational as well as in health domains, can be thought of as creating the possibility for stories to be retold and re-authored so that oppressive master narratives can be subverted. This approach can be expressed in Deleuzian terms, reformulating the verbal into the spatial so that it is space that is being created by the therapeutic dialog (Nichterlein and Morss, 1999). Deleuzian imagery suggests in this context that the spacemaking activism of narrative therapy must be yoked with a profound respect for the surface. The spaces in which new possibilities are generated are not deep interiors, nor are derived from them, as in a psychodynamic approach. The surface is itself the common ground on which client and therapist meet, and the sharing of the surface is

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incompatible with the traditional role of expertise in therapy or counseling. By extension, teaching is itself a practice of surfaces and not of depths. Concern for “inner” aspects of teacher or student may be misplaced and misleading, as may any concern for internal processes such as “development”. As Negotiations translator Martin Joughin notes, the “line of development” is replaced with “becoming” as “a free play of lines or flows” (Deleuze, 1996, p. 186). Deleuze helps us to remember that in education “what you see is what you get”, that the experience of education is inevitably an empirical and pragmatic affair. It is perhaps unlikely that we will ever have “Deleuze classrooms” in the way we have Montessori or Rudolf Steiner classrooms at present. But Deleuze has generated a conceptual landscape that is of immense richness and if there is a role for imagination in education, his stretching and sometimes redefining of the boundaries of sense-making will have some place. “Roars of laughter” may yet be heard in the classroom. John Morss has just completed the Honours LLB Programme, Otago Law School, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Former Senior Lecturer, Department of Education, University of Otago. NOTE 1

Acknowledgement: All of my (uncertain) explorations of Deleuze have been carried out with the companionship of Maria Nichterlein.

REFERENCES Angel, M. “Pedagogies of the Obscene: The Specular body and Demonstration”. In J. Matthews (Ed.), Jane Gallop Seminar Papers: The Teacher’s Breasts. Canberra: The Humanities Research Centre, 1994. Badiou, A. Deleuze: La Clameure de l'Eetre. Paris: Hachette, 1998. Ballard, K. and A. Bray. “Research on Intellectual Disability”. In J. R. Morss and T. Linzey (Eds.). Growing Up: The Politics o f Human Learning. Auckland: Longmans, 1991. Broughton, J. “Introduction”. In J. Broughton (Ed.), Critical Theories of Psychological Development. New York: Plenum, 1987. Brown, S. and Lunt, P. “ The Tajfel Effect”. In J. R. Morss, N. Stephenson, and H. van Rappard (Eds.), Theoretical Issues in Psychology. Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 2001. Buchanan, I. A Deleuzian Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Curt, B. Textuality and Tectonics. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994. Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: The Athlone Press, 1983. Deleuze, G. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Deleuze, G. Empiricism and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Deleuze, G. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. New York: Zone Books, 1992. Deleuze, G. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Deleuze, G. “Having an Idea in Cinema”. In E. Kaufman & K. Heller (Eds.), Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

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Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Edwards, E. and R. Usher. Globalisation and Pedagogy: Space, Place and Identity. London: Routledge, 2000. Falmagne, R. J. “The Dialectic of Critique, Theory, and Method in Developing Feminist Research on Inference”. In J. R. Morss, N. Stephenson and H. van Rappard (Eds.), Theoretical lssues in Psychology. Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 2001. Goodchild, P. Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire. London: Sage, 1996. Guattari, F. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Henriques, J., W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn and V. Walkerdine. Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity. London: Methuen, 1984. Hildebrand-Nilshon, M., J. Motzkau and D. Papadopoulos. “Reintegrating Sense into Subjectification”. In J. R. Morss, N. Stephenson and H. van Rappard (Eds.). Theoretical Issues in Psychology. Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 2001. Holzman, L. and J.R. Morss (Eds). Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice, and Political Life. New York: Routledge, 2000. Kaufman, E. and K.J. Heller (Eds.). (1998). Deleuze and Guattari: New mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. McMahon, C. “Hysterical Academies: Re-imagining Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses”. Unpublished MS, James Cook University, Queensland, Australia, 1996. McWilliam, E. “Beyond the Missionary Position: Teacher Desire and Radical Pedagogy”. Paper presented at Discourse and Cultural Practice Conference, Adelaide, Australia, March, 1996. McWilliam, E. and P. Taylor. (Eds.). Pedagogy Technology, and the Body. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Macey, D. The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Hutchinson, 1993. Marks, J. (1998). Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity. London: Pluto Press. Morss, J.R. “Making Waves: Deconstruction and Developmental Psychology”. Theory and Psychology 2. (1992): 445—465. Morss, J.R. Growing Critical. London: Routledge, 1996. Morss, J.R. “In the Presence of Derrida: “Derrida down under at Auckland”, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies 34. 2 (1999): 359-361. Morss, J.R “Connecting with Difference: Being Critical in a Postmodern World”. In T. Sloan (Ed.) Critical Psychology: Voices for Change. London: Macmillan, 2000a. Morss, J.R. “Psychology”. In Taylor, V. and C. Winquist (Eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 2000b. Morss, J.R., N. Stephenson and H. van Rappard, (Eds.). Theoretical Issues in Psychology. Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 2001. Morss, J.R., and T. Linzey (Eds.). Growing Up: The Politics of Human Learning. Auckland: Longmans, 1991. Nichterlein, M.E. and J.R. Morss, J. “Spaces in the Surface: The Reading and Writing of the Rhizome”. Paper presented at the Millennium World Conference in Critical Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia, May 1999. Olssen, M. “Producing the Truth about People”. In J.R. Morss and T. Linzey (Eds.). Growing Up: The Politics of Human Learning. Auckland: Longmans, 1991. Parker, I. Discourse Dynamics. London: Routledge, 1992. Patton, P. (Ed.). Deleuze: A critical reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Peters, M. “Nietzsche, Poststructuralism and Education: After the subject?” Educational Philosophy and Theory 29. 1 (1997). Sloan, T. (Ed.). Critical Psychology: Voices for Change. London: Macmillan, 2000.

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St.Pierre, E.A. “The Space of Nomadic Enquiry: Deterritorializing Mental Space and the Space of the Field. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York City, April, 1996. St.Pierre, E.A. and W. Pillow (Eds.). Working the Ruins – Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education. New York: Routledge, 2000. Stivale, C. J. TheTwo-fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Guilford Press, 1998. Taylor, V. and C. Winquist (Eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 2000. Walkerdine, V. The Mastery of Reason. London: Routledge, 1988.

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LACAN, REPRESENTATION, AND SUBJECTIVITY: SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION There is not much to be gained from classifying Lacan as a structuralist or a poststructuralist; as the introduction to this volume suggests, this terminological divide hides more than it reveals. Lacan’s career was a very long one, and his ideas continued to develop until the end. He was deeply influenced by, Saussure, Lévi Strauss, and Jakobson, and their structuralism is present throughout his corpus. Perhaps this is most crucially the case in the importance for Lacan of language, especially the fundamental detachment of language from reality. But, there are also conceptions which are undoubtedly after structuralism per se. Here a crucial notion is Lacan’s deconstruction of the subject; far from human beings having an essence of consciousness or being structured into clear conscious and unconscious parts, we are, he said, more like an assemblage of signifiers grouped around a proper name. These mind-bending notions will be explicated in the pages which follow. After a biographical sketch, Lacan’s project is outlined. Subjectivity, desire, Real, Imaginary, Symbolic, and symbolisation are described. The Lacanian psychoanalysis of human development is then summarised: the formation of the I through the mirror stage. Next the path of the signifier is delineated. Finally, some educational implications are submitted. I suggest that Lacan’s work can provide important correctives to the humanism which abounds in critical educational studies. But these are tools for theoretical work; I do not argue for applying Lacan’s concepts to the classroom. That is a wholly different matter which, if it can indeed be justified, is not justified in this chapter. 1. LACAN’S PROJECT Lacan undertook a very ambitious endeavour − to rethink Freudian developmental theory in terms of structural linguistics. Lacanian social theory tries to account for the ‘humanization’ (Althusser) of biological individuals, the role of language and representation in positioning human subjects, and their interpellation in specific ideological discourses (Hall, 1980, p. 159). The writing of Lacan is notoriously and purposely difficult. Hewanted not only to persuade intellectually but to affect the reader emotionally. (“The function of language”, he wrote, “is not to inform but to evoke” [Lacan, 1953, p. 86]). And he did this by writing in an allusive and punning way, thereby giving a feel for what, he 99 J. D. Marshall (ed.), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy, 99-117. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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argued, is the way the unconscious “speaks”. His early attraction to surrealism is evident in his use of language. Deeply interested in poetry and in mathematics, Lacan’s writing is both lyrical and highly logical and complex in construction. It is easy to see why Stanley Leavy, for example, describes Lacan’s work as ‘phenomenological,’ but he is wrong to call it ‘descriptive’ (Leavy, 1990, p. 438) -Lacan’s work is nothing if not theoretical. The elements of his work are articulated with one another in a complicated system, although it should be pointed out before embarking on this journey that Lacan’s work is impossible to recount in a linear fashion. Because he is “a builder of loosely moored conceptual mobiles” (Bowie, 1979, p. 122), his corpus should be considered whole. Unavoidably, therefore, concepts will be mentioned (signification, the Other, lack, desire) in what follows without proper introduction, only to be circled back upon later. This chapter will not consider the developments, schisms, and loyaties of Lacan’s career, except to say that Lacan disputed the largely American version of psychoanalysis − ego psychology − with its principle of a core, biologically given ego, and the attendant therapeutic attempts to strengthen the ego in order to enable people to become well-adjusted citizens (Roudinesco, 1990). Instead, like Freud (Appel, 1992), as well as the early analysts, and later social commentators such as Jessica Benjamin, Christopher Lasch, and Joel Kovel, Lacan saw human beings in permanent conflict with their environment, and with themselves. In French intellectual culture generally, of course, Lacan was part of the project of the “critique of the subject”. To avoid confusion it should be noted that the critique of the subject refers to a critique of the humanist, volitional agent: for Continental philosophy, the critical engagement with the Hegelian subject. When, for example, Agnes Heller speaks of the ‘death of the subject,’ she alludes to the fact that notions of both the transcendental Subject and the individual have been found wanting. Ernesto Laclau explains that “the death of the Subject (with a capital S) has been the main precondition of [the] renewed interest in the question of subjectivity” (1993, p. 1). The critique of the subject is perhaps better rendered for our purposes as the critique of subjectivism or identity. Things are, of course, never settled in philosophyʊthere is something of a backlash in France against antihumanism and the critique of identity (see Descombes; Peters). Probably the most basic notion in Lacan’s reading of Freud is that the subject is decentred. Rejecting traditional ideas of the self as a unified locus of thoughts and emotions, Lacan insisted that the human subject is split, without a centre, and characterised by lack. Freud noted several times that poets and artists have intuitively known that the ‘I’ of a sentence is split from the “I” who emits it. However, most of us most of the time accept as obvious and commonsensical that we each have an identity. Lacan’s view is a counter-intuitive one, then. It posits that, despite what we experience and what we like to believe, the common-sense self-image is méconnaisance, a misrecognition of ourselves. We are not to trust the ego, or conscious “I”, as it “neglects, scotomizes, misconstrues” (Lacan, 1948, p. 22). The ego for Lacan is thus formed on the basis of an imaginary relationship of the subject with his own body. The

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ego has the illusion of autonomy, but it is only an illusion, and the subject moves from fragmentation and insufficiency to illusory unity’ (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986, p. 56). (It is worth noting here the sense in which Freud [Future] used the word ‘illusion’ as being a belief motivated by an unconscious wish.) This imaginary relationship was to become an important element in Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology-in-general (Appel, Positioning). 2. SUBJECTIVITY We are split personalities, sequentially, often simultaneously. We may turn our back in disgust on previous selves, but they hang around our neck like lovesick shadows (Breyten Breytenbach, 1996). Lacan’s central concerns can be put as follows: “Who are we talking to in the psychoanalytic situation?; and how does speech (and desire) function in this field?” (Hayes, 1990, p. 35). The first point to make about the human subject is that it is not the same as the ego. In contradistinction to Descartes, Lacan did not say “I think, therefore I am”; rather, he said, “I think where I am not by thought, therefore I am where I do not think”. “Furthermore”, Anika Lemaire points out, “this formula leads “us to see that I “am” more surely there where “I” do not “think”.” (1970, pp. 123-24). Lacan is principally concerned with the subject who comes into being in the impossible attempt to express desire. As we shall see, the “I” exists in a primordial form (Lacan, 1949, p. 2), which at the mirror stage is constructed as the ego, and which upon the entry into language becomes the human subject. (Muller, 1985, p. 39). For Lacan there was no final way to distinguish between biology, self, and society. The human subject always makes sense of, lives, and interprets biology. It is language that makes us social; or, rather, we become social when we enter language. 2.1 Desire Psychoanalysis, for Lacan, is not a biological determinism. It is true that biological realities support the unconscious and its “basic category”, desire, (exactly as biological existence supports historical existence) but neither constitute, nor determine it (Althusser, 1964, p. 213n). Biology is always and only to be conceived of through the effects of drives, desire. Psychoanalysis for Lacan deals with the configurational arrangements of desire. Need, desire, and demand are related, but not synonymous. Need refers to biological needs like hunger, thirst, and sexual urges. Need, then, is nonrelational; it exists outside of any social relationship. Desire emerges out of need; in order to exist it requires the self-awareness involved in thinking, for example, ‘I am hungry.’ Unlike need, “desire aims not so much toward gratification as towards recognition” (Leavy, 1990, p. 442). With Hegel, Lacan said that when one desires not a specific thing (food) but the desire of another, one has become human. Hegel saw human consciousness as being relational: the consciousness of the master being structured by the meaning he has for

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the slave, and vice versa. Similarly for Lacan, the subject is structured in an intersubjective relationship with the Other. The Lacanian subject/Other relation should, however, not be thought of in the same terms as the upward spiral of the Hegelian dialectic. Bowie makes this clear in his exegesis of the following of Lacan’s ambivalent considerations of Hegel: “his is our personal Aufhebung, which transforms that of Hegel, which was his personal illusion, into an opportunity to pick out, instead and in place of the leaps of an ideal progress, the avatars of lack” (cited in Bowie, 1991, p. 97). (For a stimulating discussion of Lacan, Hegel, and dialectics, see Slavoj Zizek, 1991a). It is the Other that creates an unfillable lack in the subject, thereby ensuring that desire will remain unsatisfied, as its aims are perpetually out of its reach. The Other has several meanings in Lacan’s work. It sometimes refers to the whole domain of subjectOther interaction, sometimes it refers only to the latter term. Lacan’s term means variously: “a father, a place, a point, any dialectical partner, a horizon within the subject, a horizon beyond the subject, the unconscious, language, the signifier” (Bowie, 1979, p. 136) This seeming pot-pourri can be made sense of if it is understood that for Lacan the abyss between desire and its object is introduced by the name of the father, language, the original Other. All of the inevitable alienations throughout life are manifestations of the “otherness” first put in place by the proto-Other. Language, “the complete tease” (Bowie, 1991, p. 83), is the medium through which the subject is constituted: “What I seek in speech is the response of the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question . . . . I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object” (Lacan, 1997, p. 86). So desire is understood by Lacan in more than one way. First, desire is not directed toward a thing (objet petit a) but toward yet another lacking desire, the desire of another. Second, objects are only loved if they appear to promise the filling in of the subject’s lack; desire is, thus, narcissistic, the unachievable struggle for wholeness. Demand, in turn, is the address to a specific other person for a specific thing: it is a signification of desire. Desire, of course, cannot be specific; it is precisely what cannot be articulated by particularistic demand. The subject wants not only to have the object but to be the object of another’s desire, to be desired or recognised. Because we have (biological) needs and desire (for love), every intersubjective act is ambiguous: is it aimed at satisfying a need or at displaying love? As the reaction of the Other is always ambiguous, demand is perpetually repeated, forever incompletely addressed. Zizek uses the Hegelian phrase ‘loss of loss’ with regard to jouissance, or pleasure-driven desire and its ever-changing goals. ‘By obtaining the object, we lose the fascinating dimension of loss as that which captivates our desire’ (Zizek, 1991b, p. 86). Desire, then, exists chronologically between need and demand. At (indeed before) birth the infant has certain biological needs. Later, the child realises the incompleteness of the mother and of him or herself, and so desires what is missing. (The influence of the early Heidegger on Lacan is apparent here. The subject is intentional in that he or she wishes to speak but, because his or her desire is always deflected, cannot.) This desire

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is expressed as demand or repression. Desire is analogous to Freud’s term Wunsch, which refers to directed drives as opposed to libido, the elemental energy as yet unconnected to specific images. Desire, though, does not refer only to specific acts of wishing, but more to a “continuous force” (Sheridan, 1997, p. viii). All our demands are symbolic representations of our desire to be whole; our lack is in regard to an original state of oneness, of undifferentiated bliss. The subject/Other relationship is constituted by desire. In the encounter with the Other, the subject is continually remade; it is from the Other that the subject “receives even the message that he emits” (Bowie, 1979, p. 135). So it is lack, the deficit between need and its articulation as demand, that brings desire into being. At the entry into language the infant becomes a subject, alienated from him/herself, yet another lack. The model of desire and lack can be applied to make sense of the larger social scene. 2.2 Real, Imaginary, Symbolic In The Rome Discourse (Lacan, 1953), Lacan proposed three orders or planes of existence: the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Again, their precise meanings are not easy to pin down. Lacan argued that psychoanalysis has not taken language seriously enough, thus getting lost in symbols. Not only is language the principle medium of psychoanalytic therapy; the unconscious itself, he said in a famous aphorism, is structured like a language. As usual, Lacan’s startling formulation is precise here. Language, he meant, is prior to the unconscious. When the human subject enters language (langue, not parole), he or she is fitting into an extant Symbolic order that mediates the desire of said subject; drives are channeled by language. “The psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the Word as the law that has formed him in its image”; it is by way of “the gift of language’ that ‘all reality has come to man and it is by his continued act that he maintains it” (Lacan, 1953, p. 106). Truly, and at the risk of trivialising the issues here, for Lacan in the beginning was the Word. The Real is that which is neither Imaginary nor Symbolic. Lying beyond language, it is the reality that we cannot have direct access to, although we must assume that it exists. Our experience of it is only via the mediation of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Fredric Jameson says that the Real is History itself. One should read this as: History plus Nature plus the Unconscious, our relation to which is always characterised by lack; desire is both historical and transhistorical. The Real is that which is unspeakable, “the ineliminable residue of all articulation” (Sheridan, 1977, p. x). Lacan described the realm of the Imaginary as a preverbal (and later developmentally, nonverbal) realm of alienated phantasy. The Imaginary is characterised by identification and duality; it is narcissistic and fusionary. Early on, the child’s experience is disorganised, fragmentary, and the child is unable to distinguish between the inner and visually, in the Imaginary order; ie, Imaginary for Lacan derives from ‘image,’ not from ‘imagine.’ After entry into language, as we shall see, the child

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functions mainly in the Symbolic order of language, although the Imaginary remains ‘the enduring treasury of images’ (Leavy, 1990, p. 439). The Imaginary includes phantasies, images and nonlinguistic structures. By contrast, the Symbolic is not narcissistic, it is social; not a duality, but a triangularity. The Symbolic refers to language, the means through which desire is expressed; it is the domain of the signifier that continually restructures the subject. Coherent speech can only occur if the infant fully occupies a place in the Symbolic system of conventions. This involves, for example, being positioned by certain terms, e.g., ‘boy,’ ‘girl,’ ‘son,’ ‘daughter.’ These terms are signifiers standing in particular relationships with a central signifier, the phallus, or desire for the Other. Without suggesting that the three orders are coterminous with developmental stages, the entry of the child into language is the culmination of the journey from being a biological entity to being a human subject. This transition is achieved within “the Law of Culture”, which has the same “formal essence” as language (Althusser, 1964, p. 209). To simplify a complex theory of an unstable manifestation: the Real, necessarily inaccessible to the subject, is represented by the ever-shifting Symbolic (language), and experienced in the constantly stabilising Imaginary (images and illusion). For Lacan, the psychical developmental sequence is as follows: drives (need), desire (lack), unconscious (repression). Clearly this is all subsumed under the workings of the id. The unconscious is continually voluble, demanding to be heard. But the content of the unconscious is unacceptable to the subject and to the social order; when it reveals its existence in dreams, slips, symptoms, jokes, or phantasies, it is rejected as foolish, repugnant, or of little importance. The unconscious itself, that region of repressed tendencies and thoughts, is, to use another linguistic notion, the signifying chain along which desire passes; it is “The discourse of the Other”. And language is an “endless tautology”. 2.3 Symbolisation Language not only represents desire, it constitutes the subject. Moreover, it is not only the human mind that operates in and through language, human culture itself is representational; and these representational structures precede us and determine our fates. Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him “flesh and blood”, so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they give the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and even beyond his death. (Lacan, 1977, p. 68, emphasis added) Freud described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle a game played by his nephew. Holding onto a piece of string, the child would throw an attached cotton reel over the

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edge of his cot, uttering as he did so what sounded like the German word fort (‘gone’ or ‘away’). He would then pull back the cotton reel, joyfully saying what Freud understood to be da (‘there’). The game, according to Freud, was an attempt by the infant to cope with the anxiety raised by the absence of his mother, the cotton reel acting as what D.W. Winnicott would come to call a ‘transitional object’ for the mother. Lacan used this story to describe how language, at its very inception (or rather, at the child’s entry into language), and symbols remove the human subject from the Real. In this example, first the cotton reel and then language become substitutes for the mother. The story is, then, about self-alienation. The infant is both split off from his drives and subordinated to the Symbolic. From then on, the identity and the desire of the child are determined by the Symbolic. Again, it is important to keep in mind that subjectivity is not delusional (false consciousness) but illusional, “a necessary illusion whereby one lives, as it were, a story of one’s life, of who one is” (Mitchell, 1988, p. 83). Lacan spoke here of ‘the letter.’ The letter refers firstly to the actualisation of language: text, parole, be it in spoken words or symptoms. The second area to which the letter refers is the structure of language that preexists and determines the subject (langue). Thus his essay title, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud”. In an instance of his playfulness with language he writes, ‘lettre-l’êtrel’autre’ (the letter implies being implies the Other). The subject is a “non-unitary . . . field of effects produced by discourse; in other words . . . a by-product of meaning” (Muller, 1985, p. 34). 2.4 Lacanian Psychoanalysis Importantly, for Lacan the task of the psychoanalyst is not to somehow bring the patient in tune with reality. This is impossible, as the above pages suggest. Of course the patient wants or desires the answer from the analyst, but it is the task of the analyst to guide the patient to acknowledgment of his or her lack. The change required in the patient involves an awareness of the necessity of our incompleteness. “That is why the question of the Other, which comes back to the subject from the place from which he expects an oracular reply in some such form as Che vuoi?,’ ‘What do you want?,’ is the one that best leads him to the path of his own desire” (Lacan, 1960, p. 312). In the same way as Wilfred Bion’s analyst acts as a container, the analyst for Lacan reworks the patient’s anxiety and projects back the question that indicates (in the sense of points to) the subject’s lack. Although it is easy and almost overwhelmingly tempting to accept and cherish the ego, an image of unity, the patient’s more difficult task is to come into contact with the discourse of desire. The conscious ego of the patient speaks “empty speech” (la parole vide). Empty speech is the expression by the patient of his or her desire without knowing what it is that is being expressed. The patient talks about him/herself as an object; free associations are addressed to the Other, the psychoanalyst. It is the task of the analyst to direct the patient to what lies beneath, namely his or her impossible desire for wholeness. The analyst “takes the description of

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an everyday event for a fable addressed to whoever hath ears to hear, a long tirade for a direct interjection, or on the other hand a simple lapsus for a highly complex statement, or even the sigh of a momentary silence for the whole lyrical development it replaces” (Lacan, 1977, p. 44). Lacan rejected either optimism or pessimism and, like Freud, confronted “the irremediable” (Bowie, 1979, p. 151). The subject must come to know that “whatever his appetites may be, whatever his needs may be, none of them will find satisfaction in analysis, and that the most that he can expect of it is to organize his menu” (Lacan, 1960a, p. 269). 3. THE FORMATION OF THE I If what Freud discovered and rediscovers with a perpetually increasing sense of shock has a meaning, it is that the displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their acts, in their destiny, in their refusals, their blind spots, their end and fate, their innate gifts and social acquisitions . . . without regard for character or sex, and that willingly or not, everything that might be considered the stuff of psychology, kit and caboodle, will follow the path of the signifier (Jacques Lacan, 1972)

So far the outlines of Lacan’s theoretical apparatus have been laid out. How, though, do the I and the subject come into existence? In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Lacan (1949) can be said to follow Freud, who had said that the ego is a mental projection; a later construction, and not a hereditary entity (Freud, 1923, p. 26). 3.1 The Mirror Stage In the first months of life, the infant is largely auto-erotic. Unable to distinguish between what is internal and what is external to its body, the infant does not perceive itself as a distinct or as a unified being. Rather, it experiences itself as fragmented parts among surrounding objects. This imagery of a piecemeal body continues to manifest itself throughout life in dreams and in schizoid phantasy. The paintings of Hieronymus Bosch recreate it. Infancy is a time dominated by satisfied and frustrated needs. The infant experiences its helplessness and fragmentation. Not present from birth, the ego develops following a formative event in the early months of life, said Lacan. This is when, for the first time, the infant recognises itself in a mirror. Of course this does not necessarily have to occur literally before a mirror - the infant may recognise itself as reflected in the look or gaze of a person, typically the mother. Between six to eighteen months, then, the child perceives itself, paradigmatically in the image in a mirror, as a whole and complete person and no longer as a fragmented collection of sensation, limbs, and affects. The infant experiences triumph when it perceives that it controls its body − every movement being reproduced in its reflected image, the “Ideal-I”. Compared to the previous auto-erotic stage during which the child had an erotic relationship with its fragmented body, now it falls in love with the image of a Gestalt, a

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complete and autonomous image. However, this is in anticipation of the mastery yet to be achieved: “The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation”(Leavy, 1990, p. 442). Although the infant has poor control over its own body, it is able via the mirror stage to (mis)conceive itself as whole and self-controlled. It is here that the self-alienation of the subject begins - alienation being fundamental to identification, because for identification to occur there must be a perceiving self and a perceived self. Or to put it in more accurate Lacanian terms, every act of identification constitutes, ie, brings into existence, the I and its Other. From the time of the mirror stage onward, reality is perceived as an image - an image, what is more, that tends towards completeness. Thus are unconscious desires enmeshed with the Imaginary phantasies. The moment of self-identification is the original instance of a lifelong tendency to strive for and to cherish a unitary sense of self. “Alienating identity . . . will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development” (Lacan, 1949, p. 4) as well as all future social and cultural life. The relationship between the infant and the image is indeed an estranged one where the child, not in control of its own movements, experiences as mastery what is in fact mastery of an image. This image has a double existence: as the actual image reflected on the surface of the mirror, and as an I with “mental permanence”, “it prefigures its alienating destination” (Lacan, 1949, p. 2). It is crucial to remember that while the I is certainly not in control of identification. The content of the subject is put into place by this identification. The mirror stage, in other words, is not something done to the infant by another, but something the infant does, albeit not at all fully consciously, in the active formation of the self. This activity is a form of human labour. All relationships with external objects will have an incongruous nature, this as a result of the imaginary and alienated experience of the uridentification of the mirror stage. All identifications are, for Lacan, not only illusory, they are also ambivalent, aggressive, and narcissistic, being linked in a “correlative tension” in the “coming-into-being of the subject” (Lacan, 1948, p. 22). The infant has an ambivalent relation with his or her mirror image: it loves the complete oneness of the image, while it hates the fact that the image is external to it. If identification is, as Lacan portrays it, alienated and ambivalent, it is also conflicted in another way; it stabilises (by constituting the individual’s I) at the same time as it fragments (alienating the subject from its desire). At the mirror stage the infant comes to “see” both itself and the Other, to see itself as an Other. As the self is composed over the years of many such internalisations of misapprehensions, it is highly complex and conflictual. Although the “intersubjective dialectic” exists from the beginning, there is no possibility of the recognition necessary for full mutuality. (Indeed, Lacan said that his dog Justine was unique in that she was the only one who did not take him for someone else [Schneiderman, 1983, p. 130].) The pre-Oedipal child lives in a dyadic, symbiotic relation with the mother; this is a time of the Imaginary. This relation is upset at the Oedipus stage with the entry of a third person, the father. The Oedipus complex positions the infant in language, in the

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family, and in gender. For Lacan this did not mean the actual presence of the person of the father, but rather the introduction of the father’s name establishing his absent presence. The father here is not this or that particular father, but the symbolic father who powers the signifying chain of desire. The introduction of his name, the Law, is the introduction of the Symbolic; the entry of the child into language marks the birth of the subject. 4. THE PATH OF THE SIGNIFIER To illustrate how subjectivity fixes and shifts, Lacan used Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter”, in which the Prefect of Police in Paris approaches Dupin for assistance in recovering a compromising letter apparently written to the Queen and then stolen from her by Minister Dupin. The Queen had witnessed the theft but could not react for fear of implicating herself before the King. Although the police have thoroughly searched the minister’s apartment they have been unable to find the letter. Dupin discovers the letter which lies, as he has reasoned, in full view. He steals the letter back, replacing it with a dummy letter. The story, Lacan argued, is structured in triads: the third person, the robber, and the loser. This structure is repeated with different characters filling the three positions. What is it that determines which position characters will occupy in the triad? The location of the letter. The letter moves along ‘”signifying chain”. The robber (the minister and then Dupin) sees that the third person (the King and then the minister) has not detected the letter and has power as long as he possesses the letter. The place of the letter, and knowledge of that place, determines the possible actions of the subjects. What does the letter signify? Pointedly, the contents of the letter are never revealed in Poe’s story; we can never grasp the transcendant signifier. The letter, speech, the signifier, demand, these all refer to the positioning function of the Symbolic, to interpellation, and to the impossibility of grasping Kant’s thing-in-itself. The signifier determines the place of the subject without any need to invoke meaning or signification. It is crucial to keep in mind that Lacan was not saying that anyone who comes into contact with the letter is automatically positioned in a particular way. Rather, he showed how positioning works in an overdetermined way. When one stands in a particular relation to the letter, one will be positioned by that letter. The reading of the letter, in other words, the specific meaning for, and effect on, the subject that the letter will have, is variable and unpredictable. This is, first, because the subject is already a subject of other letters, and, second, because the letter or instance of interpellation itself has many possible meanings. Lacan employed what structural linguistics says are the basic binary elements of all symbolic systems, signifier and signified. He found it useful here to extend Saussure’s classic formulation of the sign, S/s, where the signifier is not only arbitrarily and conventionally related to the concept or signified, as Saussure would have it. Rather,

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Lacan saw the two parts of the sign being related not in a stable and predictable way, but where the signified (lower case letter, italic script, bottom position) is separated from the signifier (upper case letter, roman type, top position) by the bar that indicates disjunction, repression. The autonomy of the signifier is dependant on the resistance of the bar. So the concept and its name belong to different orders. Instead of a unity of signifier and signified (which Saussure indicated by placing the above formulaic expression in an ellipse), Lacan postulated constant signification along a signifying chain, each signified capable of behaving as a signifier. Furthermore, a signifier always signifies another signifier in relation to other signifiers. The signifier ‘dog’ only has meaning in relation to like signifiers, e.g., ‘canine,’ ‘quadruped,’ ‘animal’ and ‘pet,’ and to unlike signifiers, e.g., ‘cat.’ Language is a system of differences, and it is nonrepresentational; there is no natural connection between concept and name. Lacan insisted upon the glissement or slippage between signifiers along the signifying chain. Even an emotion is a signifier as it is an effect of desire. But it is not the case that there is no relationship between signified and signifier or between signifiers; rather, the precise nature of the relationship is finally indecipherable. The subject has no history in that it is a “subject-for-discourse” (Morley, 1980, p. 169), but each instance of positioning or interpellation occurs in a particular way at a particular social-historical moment. Signifiers are not free-floating, they are linked in some way to each other and to the signified. The bar, in other words, is permeable. It is true, though, that we can never ‘get at’ the signified. The only possible object of study, Lacan said, is the signifying chain itself. As Zizek puts it: “If we look for the “deeper, hidden meaning” of the figures appearing in a dream, we blind ourselves to the latent “dream-thought” articulated in it (Zizek, 1991b, p. 51). The subject is represented by the signifier, and this process can only provide representation for another signifier; “the signifier represents the subject for another signifier”. This movement is not only linear. Over time we construct a proliferation of chains of signification, continually substituting signifiers. Each instance of the letter has attached to it “a whole articulation of relevant contexts” (Lacan, 1957, p. 154): “In its symbolizing function speech is moving towards nothing less than a transformation of the subject to whom it is addressed by means of the link that it establishes with the one who emits it - in other words, by introducing the effect of a signifier” (Lacan, 1953, p. 83). ‘Point de capiton’ is the term Lacan used to describe the mechanisms of this articulation. It is wrong, then, to assume that Lacan was a textualist, one who believed that nothing exists but language. Rather, nothing for the subject exists separate from language. This distinguishes Lacan from “many more facile celebrations of the primacy of language” (Jameson, 1977, p. 359). If Imaginary (mis)identification is an estrangement of the self, the Symbolic is a further alienation of the subject. Lacan produced a model of intersubjective relationships (see Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986, p. 100) whereby the subject’s movement toward the Other (or Real) is continuously diverted by the axis oʊo’, the relationship between the ego and its mirror image; we experience the social world through the Imaginary. And whenever the subject attempts to speak it is frozen and

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functions as a signifier. ‘The truth is thus always being ‘purloined,’ and the subject is constantly drawn to the four corners of the scheme. This duality of symbolic Other and imaginary other is basic to the structure of the subject’ (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986, p. 101). 4.1 Metaphor and Metonymy Although what is ultimately signified is desire, meaning cannot be more than the movement from one instance of signification to another. Slips, failures, jokes and symptoms, like the elements of dreams themselves, became signifiers, inscribed in the chain of an unconscious discourse, doubling silently, i.e., deafeningly, in the misrecognition of ‘repression’, the chain of the human subject’s verbal discourse. (Althusser, 1964, p. 207-208)

Lacan again found it useful here to use linguistic concepts in order to theorise representations of the unconscious. Of course, because he saw language as constitutive of human subjectivity (or rather, saw language and subjectivity as being similarly structured), he intended for certain structural linguistic terminology to be more than just convenient ways of making his point. But as opposed to the “purely formalist textualism” (Wexler, 1987, p. 152) of many critical theorists, it must be reemphasied that signification is not simply a closed complex of cross-referenced signs; signification is always the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to give expression to desire. Signification, and thus also subject positioning, operates in one of two ways which are analogous to the unconscious mechanisms of displacement and condensation that Freud postulated in The Interpretation of Dreams. All signification operates, Lacan argued, like the linguistic tropes of metaphor and metonymy. Here he delved into the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson, who asserted that all connections between signifiers, all contiguity along the signifying chain, operate by these two linguistic tropes. Metonymy is the linguistic form where words follow one another linearly, one element being conflated into another (e.g., ‘Moscow said . . . ’). This is like the splitting of the subject where desire is always for that which is lacking. If metonymy is the desire for something else, then metaphor, the substitution of one word for another, from one signifier to another (e.g., ‘the Iron Curtain’), is the mechanism by which that desire can be expressed. The object of desire is le désir de l’Autre, said Lacan. Benvenuto and Kennedy point out that this French expression can be translated into English as both the desire of the Other (metonymy) and desire for the Other (metaphor) (1986, p. 130). Because the infant’s desire is unknown to it, it seeks to satisfy its lack in the Other by trying to identify with the mother’s desire, thereby becoming the mother’s object of desire. At the same time, the infant has possessive desires for her. Desire, in Lacanian theory, operates according to rules analogous to the linguistic rules of the signifier. Neurotic symptoms, being psychical condensations, are metaphorical; fetishism, by contrast, being a stoppage in the displacement functions of unconscious desire, is metonymic.

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5. SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION STUDIES A recent critical study of schooling has overtly made the realm of the psyche relevant to sociological analysis. Wexler has theorised that social relations in the school are premised on “emotional dynamics of identification, attachment and caring” (Wexler, 1992, p. 36), and he has described three permutations of these relations: lack of care and withdrawal from interaction; desocialisation and withdrawal from public life; and unintended assault on the self. Lacan’s own work, though, has had very little impact on critical educational studies. Lacan’s work could conceivably be employed in many directions in educational studies and I will mention a few that come to mind. He spoke once of knowledge as ‘paranoiac’ (1949, p. 2), a point which could instigate uncomfortable, but profitable, shifts in the epitemologies of philosophy of education and curriculum studies. Lacan’s ideas are very useful at turning myths on their heads. For instance, Douglas Aoki argues against the commonsensical belief that good teaching makes its meaning clear and accessible. Or one could consider Lacan’s own ideas about the training of psychoanalysts, la passe, a practice which, together with his use of short analytic hours, led indirectly to his exclusion from the International Psychoanalytic Association. He spoke too of the lack of trust psychoanalysis places in aggression even in “the most Samaritan of aid” including pedagogy (1949, pp. 6, 77). This is a warning to educationists when we are attempted to adopted high moral stances in relation to our own motives. An angle which I have found most useful is Lacan’s critique of human agency; his anti-humanistic theory of the subject is an invigorating antidote to humanistic agent of sociology of education (Appel, 1996). It has been necessary to expand upon desire at some length in this chapter, as it is an “unspoken” (Macherey, 1966) of poststructuralist accounts of education. Lacan’s theorisation of deep affective formation and form can be contrasted with, for example, Bronwyn Davies’ ideas about desire. Acknowledging that “desire is spoken into existence", Davies explicitly turns her back on psychoanalysis, finding it to be “one more individualistic discourse” (Davies, 1990, p. 504). In so doing, she loses the dynamic capacity of Lacan’s theory of subjects which constitute each other through the evocation of necessary lack. If desire is a factor in social life, but it is not conceived of via psychoanalysis, what is it, what part does it play in subjectivity, and where does it come from? To show exactly how deep (or otherwise) ‘desire’ is in her work, Davies says: “As a feminist I desire a world in which anyone’s sex/gender is made relevant only in the process of biological reproduction”(1990, p. 501). Desire is “implicated in storyline”, we are told; “it is through story that children can learn the patterns of desire appropriate for their gender” (Davies and Banks, 1992, p. 5) Clearly, what is called ‘desire’ here is little more than learned preferences. It follows, then, that such likes and dislikes can be unlearned; thus the exhortations to “write and speak utopias” (Davies, 1990, p. 515). “Positions” (Davies and Harré, 1990) thereby become personae or social character parts that we play in stories. Without the motivational trajectories of deeper,

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unsatisfiable desire, social life becomes no more than bad and good narratives, stories that we are at liberty to rewrite. Can anything be learned from Lacan about the teacher/student relationship? If we leave aside overt skills and knowledge, and concentrate upon areas of particular concern to critical sociology of education − the hidden curriculum, cultural capital, and socialisation − it is clear that there is a realm of overlap with Lacan’s notions of psychoanalysis. While not the student’s therapist, the teacher is involved in deep or transcendant change of students, and vice versa; schooling does make a difference. However, in the educational literature we see an exaggerated and ingrained trust in the possibility of insight leading to wholeness. Capitalism/patriarchy/racism have cut us off from ourselves, the story goes, but it is possible, through consciousness-raising and social solidarity, to realise full selfhood and community, ie, democracy: ‘a space where the self and other can conjoin in a discourse of mutuality and respect’ (McLaren, 1991, p. 34). Sydney Smith (1977) has called such regressive reaction to separation anxiety, ‘The Golden Fantasy’. Like Melanie Klein, Lacan saw aggression at work very early on in development. Pre-Oedipal identifications are characterised by anxiety and aggression, while postOedipal identifications are troubled by aggression and guilt toward paternal authority. It is a crucial feature of identification that aggression is released ‘in any relation to the other, even in a relation involving the most Samaritan of aid’ (Lacan, 1949, p. 6). Contrast this vacillation with the unalloyed altruism portrayed in the phantasies of critical pedagogy. Peter McLaren, for example, wonders “as a critical educator . . . what love might mean at the level of the whole society” (McLaren, 1991, p. 34). What, though, about hate in the pedagogic relationship? (See Appel, 1999). If the Lacanian theory of subjectivity is valuable to social analysis and if it is to be useful in the study of education, it becomes necessary to grasp what is entailed in the study of the subject/Other relation. While an emphasis on interpretation and signification is an advance, the focus on particular texts per se may produce readings that are asocial in that they take little account of the discursive context of each subject/text interaction. The “productivity of the text” must not come to refer only to the “capacity of the text to set the viewer “in place” in a position of unproblematic identification/knowledge” (Hall, 1980, p. 159). The reader or subject of any text is always already constituted as a subject of various and changing positions in several intersecting chains of signification. This preconstituted subject is not freely available for interpellation by any discourse that happens along. He or she bears the marks of previous interpellations that play a part in whether and how interpellation will occur. Extrapolating from Lacan’s model of signification and subjectivity, one can say that no text has only one possible message. What any particular text can mean does not refer in any direct way to particular signifieds; rather, what a text signifies changes in the process of being read. There is, therefore, no moment when the text constitutes a subject in a way that could have been predicted. Other texts and discourses constantly act on subjects; Michel Pêcheux has introduced the term ‘interdiscourse’ in this regard.

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The human subject is an interdiscourse, he says, marked throughout its life by several ideological discourses. Or, to use Freud’s term again, the subject is “overdetermined”. Accordingly, the appropriate object of study is not text/subject, but multiplicity of texts/subjects (Morley, 1980, p. 166). All depends, thus, on how reader and text, or subject and signifier, each in its complex historical and multiplicitous context, combine at a particular moment. We must not try to deduce subject position from the text. The educational literature has many examples of subject positions being ascribed reductively from educational activities and texts. Svi Shapiro says, for example: “People whose time is spent in the often mindless tasks of the classroom will be prepared for the mindless activities of the office or shop floor” (1987, p. 145). And Jean Anyon says that the hidden curriculum provides a “tacit preparation for relating to the process of production in a particular way”, a way qualitatively different for each social class (Anyon, 1987, p. 225). The nonreductive nature of subjectivity does not mean that we have to be content with a vision of a society as a systemic agglomeration of individually constituted subjects. Rather, every text has “preferred readings”, and all readers and writers, “implicated as desiring bodies” (Wright, 1984, p. 5), are “preferred readers”.’ Far from static ideologycritique, Lacan’s conceptualisation of glissement of significations, which are in turn the demands of desire, is a dynamic, complex, theoretically coherent model of explanation. Critical educational studies are replete with ideology-critique. For example, Heather Cathcart and Geoff Esland, after reviewing the “ideological substance of educational initiatives” for fourteen-to-sixteen year olds, advocate remedying the distortions by a “fuller discussion in the context of a more rigorous and less biased social and political education” (Cathcart and Esland, 1985, p. 191, emphasis added). Many neo-Marxists find it extremely difficult to transcend ideology-critique; in the field of aesthetics, for instance, Terry Eagleton too quickly reduces movements in art and art theory to the historical state of economic production. Whether or not it is made explicit in each instance, ideology-critique is underpinned by a notion of false consciousness. It should not be necessary to point out the untenability of this position. Believing in false consciousness assumes the existence, or at least the possibility, of a true consciousness held, no doubt, by the author. There is an important distinction to be made between the constitution of the subject as an original potential space and the latter moments when this subject-in-general is interpellated into specific subject positions. As Morley says, we need to focus not on “the politics of the signifier” but on the moment when the constituted subject meets specific signification - the moment of interpellation. I have argued elsewhere that psychoanalysis has conceptual tools for coming to grips with the actual processes of interpellation (Appel, 1996). Johan Muller warns against letting the agency of subjects slip into the agency of discourse (“Clare uses her “femininity” to ensnare Phil” [Muller, 1985, p. 40]). This is a useful reminder that any theory of the subject has as a basic postulate the notion that agency is the operation of subjects of and in ideological discourse. ‘Discourse,’ ideology − these are concepts that refer to the totalising function of the Symbolic

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tendency toward mystificatory closure, and to the identifications of the Imaginary where the lacking subject sees itself as complete. Although Lacan is best known for his work on language and the Symbolic, an indispensable part of his theory is the (Freudian pre-Oedipal) non-Symbolic realm of the Imaginary. If cultural practices are all those interactive practices of the human being with his or her environment, then the very first practices of the infant are also cultural and therefore (a particular crucial to theory) there are cultural practices that precede language. While this point may not seem controversial at first glance, on reflection its implications for a theory of the subject and ideology-in-general become profound. Indeed, by in effect foregrounding the Symbolic and backgrounding the Imaginary, educational analysis tends to revert to a model of individuals adapting to society. Critical educational studies have been unable to theorise about the “structural resistance to identity . . . the splitting of the ego and the inevitable mismatch of subject and culture”; it cannot account for “those aspects of subjectivity ‘beyond interpellation’’ (Donald, 1991, p. 6). This resistance is, of course, not to be conflated with the conscious, rational, resistance of actors so overstated in critical sociology of education. Rather, it is a resistance to closure that is inherent to all human practices, ie, it is structural. Probably because Lacan himself was fascinated with the Symbolic order, and because of the place of the written word in the university, Lacanian cultural analysts have largely followed the tracks of signification and meaning. However, it is clear that the Imaginary, even if undeveloped theoretically, is a nondiscursive domain of culture that is usually ignored by word-drunk academia. There is, then, an aspect of human culture that is nonideological, nondiscursive. For example, the work of Foucault demonstrates that social power can act upon the body without being first mediated by consciousness. A writer who has developed the pre/nonverbal part of Lacan’s work is Julia Kristeva, 1980). Repression is necessary for signifying practice, “signifiance”, and, says Kristeva, the “semiotic order” of channeled energy continues to challenge language and is thus kept at arm’s length at the edges of discourse. The semiotic order has the force of “negativity” and reappears as rhythms, tone, and linguistic transformations. The playful fluidity of semiotic and symbolic constitute the field of human life, interpellations being temporary moments of anchorage within that unstable field. Perhaps Kristeva’s work provides a way to transcend the fixation on ideology-critique in educational studies. Some educationists (e.g., Grumet, 1988) have described putting Kristeva to work in their pedagogical practices. Lucy Holmes (forthcoming), however, makes a convincing case that these authors have imported into their work errors which Kristeva herself has made in her reading of Lacan. For a fine description of employing Lacan in one’s pedagogy see Mark Bracher (1999). While acknowledging a debt to Althusser, the theory postulated here is postAlthusserian: the starting point of inquiries are to be the necessary failures of ideology. The necessary failure of ideology is, it can be argued, the result of the nature of desire, the missing link of educational theory. Freud (1937) spoke of three impossible

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professions: psychoanalysis, government, and education. James Donald suggests, in line with the above pages, that this “impossibility” is less a malfunction than a sign of the necessary failure of identity in the psyche and of closure in the social” (1991, p. 8). 6. CONCLUSION From Lacan we learn about the unavoidably fragmentary nature of subjectivity, how the subject lives with the alienated confrontation with his or her lack. Not only is the subject lacking, so is the Other. The unconscious attempts to speak of what is forbidden − jouissance and death; but langauge, intonation, symptoms, dreams, etc., can only indirectly represent what is in the end inexpressible − desire. Critical educational studies remains embedded in humanism. Perhaps this is in part because those of us who are attracted to education are very likely to have progressive notions, ie to believe in human progress. As crucial as it for the teacher and the student to be optimistic about the possibilites of education, in the arena of educational theory humanism is a distinct hinderance. The lessons of (post)structuralists like Lacan are hard ones to swallow, it is true. But if it is optimism that the educational theorist needs, the potential for change is there for those who know how to look. The answer to the question, where is the (post)structuralist principle of transformation? is: it resides in the arbitrary and antagonistic construction of the structure itself. However, I must end by insisting that the above several paragraphs refer to the practice of educational theory (intellectual work as such), and not necessarily to the educational practices of pedagogy (actual teaching). (I leave aside the obvious point that, in the end, this analytical distiction does not hold up). Perhaps one should also add that acceptance of the value of Lacanian theory does not commit one to support of Lacan’s practices as a psychoanalyst. Just as his use of the short analytic session and of the self-authorization of the analyst both raise the hackles of very many psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, so educationists may find his notions of subjectivity, etc. enthralling, while deciding firmly against employing, say, la passe in their classrooms. That case − that Lacan’s work can be applied to the pedagogical situation − remains a non liquet, a case yet to be proved. Stephen Appel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychotherapy and Applied Psychotherapy at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. REFERENCES Althusser, L. “Freud and Lacan”. In Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964. Anyon, J. “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work.” In Stevens E. and Wood G. (eds) Justice, Ideology, and Education: An Introduction to the Foundations of Education. New York: Random House, 1987.

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Aoki, D. S. “The Thing Never Speaks for Itself: Lacan and the Pedagogical Politics of Clarity.” Harvard Educational Review 70, (2000): 347-369. Appel, S. “Freud's ‘Pessimism’: Drives and Civilization.” South African Journal of Philosophy 11.2 (1992): 4143. Appel, S. “Why is it so Hard to Change the Educational World?” Journal of Education 21 (1996): 39-60. Appel, S. Positioning Subjects: Psychoanalysis and Critical Educational Studies. Westport, Conn. and London: Bergin and Garvey, 1996. Appel, S. “The Teacher’s Headache.” In Appel (ed). Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy. Westport, Conn. and London: Bergin and Garvey, 1999. Benvenuto, B. and Kennedy, R. The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. London: Free Association, 1986. Bion, W. R. Experiences in Groups, and Other Papers. New York: Basic Books, 1959 (1986). Bowie, M. “Jacques Lacan”. In Sturrock J. (ed). Structuralism and Since. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Bowie, M. Lacan. London: Fontana, 1991. Bracher, M. The Writing Cure: Psychoanalysis, Composition and the Aims of Education. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Breytenbach, B. “Writing the Darkening Mirror”. In Breytenbach, B. The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution. New York: Harcourt Brace. 1996. Cathcart, H. and Esland, G. “The Compliant-Creative Worker: The Ideological Reconstruction of the School Learner.” In L. Barton and S. Walker (eds). Education and Social Change. London: Croom Helm, 1985. Davies, B. “The Problem of Desire.” Social Problems 37 (1990):501-516. Davies, B. and Banks, C. “The Gender Trap: A Feminist Post-structuralist Analysis of Primary School Children’s Talk about Gender.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 24 (1992): 1-25. Davies, B. and Harré R. “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (1990): 43-63. Descombes, V. “Apropos of the Critique of ‘the Subject’ and the Critique of the Critique”. In E. Cadava , P. Connor, and J.L. Nancy (eds). Who Comes After the Subject? New York and London: Routledge, 1991. Donald, J. “On the Threshold: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies.” In Donald, J. (ed). Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991. Eagleton, T. Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1990. Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 1953, vol. 4. Strachey J. (ed) London: Hogarth, 1900. Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition 18, 1920. Freud, S. The Ego and the Id. Standard Edition 19, 1923. Freud, S. The Future of an Illusion. Standard Edition 21, 1927. Freud, S. Analysis Terminable and Interminable. Standard Edition 23, 1937. Grumet, Madeleine. Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Hall, S. “Recent Developments in Theories of Language and Ideology: A Critical Note.” In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, and P. Willis (eds). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979. London: Hutchinson, 1980. Hayes, G. “Psychoanalysis, Lacan, and Social Theory.” Psychology in Society 14 (1990): 28-46. Heller, A. “The Death of the Subject.” Thesis Eleven 25 (1990): 22-38. Holmes, L. (forthcoming) “Investigating Kristeva’s Social Theory: A Lacanian Critical Reading with Particular Reference to Education.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Auckland. Jakobson, R. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” In Jakobson, R. and M. Halle. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1956. Jameson, F. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Problem of the Subject.” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 338-395.

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Klein, M. “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms.” In Klein, M. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 19461963. London: Hogarth, 1946. Kristeva, J. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. Kristeva, J. The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Lacan, J. “Aggressivity in psychoanalysis.” In Lacan Écrits, 1948 (1977). Lacan, J. “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I.” In Lacan Écrits, 1949 (1977). Lacan, J. “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis”. In Lacan Écrits, 1953 (1977). Lacan, J. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud.” In Lacan Écrits, 1957 (1977). Lacan, J. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” In Lacan Écrits, 1960 (1977). Lacan, J. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1960a, (1977). Lacan, J. “The Seminar on Poe’s ‘Purloined letter’.” Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 38-72. Lacan, J. Écrits: A Selection. Sheridan A (ed). New York and London: Norton, 1977. Laclau, E. “Political Frontiers, Identification and Political Identities.” Conference on Ethnicity, Identity and Nationalism in South Africa: Comparative Perspectives. Grahamstown, South Africa, 1993. Leavy, S. A. “Lacan’s Words.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 59 (1990): 437-443. Lemaire, A. Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Macherey, P. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966 (1978). McLaren, P. “Critical Pedagogy: Constructing an Arch of Social Dreaming and a Doorway to Hope. Journal of Education 173 (1991): 9-34. Mitchell, J. “An Interview.” By Angela McRobbie. New Left Review 170 (1988): 80-91. Morley, D. “Texts, Readers, Subjects.” In S. Hall et al., (eds). Culture, Media, Language, 1980. Muller, J. “The End of Psychology: Review of Henriques J. et al., Changing the Subject.” Psychology in Society 3 (1985): 33-42. Pêcheux, M. Language, Semiotics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious. London: Macmillan, 1983. Peters, M. “Against Finkielkraut’s La Défaite de la Pénsee: Culture, Postmodernism and Education.” French Cultual Studies 4 (1993): 91-106. Roudinesco, E. Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Saussure, F. de. Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1915 (1959). Schneiderman, S. Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983. Shapiro, S. “If You Won’t Work Sunday, Don’t Come in on Monday.” In E. Stevens and G. Wood (eds). New York: Random House, 1987. Sheridan, A. “Translator’s Note.” In Lacan Écrits, 1977. Smith, S. “The Golden Fantasy: A Regressive Reaction to Seperation Anxiety.” International Journal of PsychoAnalysis 58 (1977): 311-324. Turkle, S. Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution. London: Burnett, 1979. Wexler, P. Social Analysis of Education. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Wexler, P. Becoming Somebody: Toward a Social Psychology of School. London and Washington D.C.: Falmer, 1992. Winnicott. D.W. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” In Winnicott, D.W. (1980) Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951 (1980). Wright, E. Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice. London and New York: Methuen, 1984. Zizek, S. “Why Should a Dialectician Learn to Count to Four?” Radical Philosophy 58 (1991a) 3-9. Zizek, S. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1991b.

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JULIA KRISTEVA’S ‘MYSTERY’ OF THE SUBJECT IN PROCESS MYSTERY Gloria was lying in a pool of blood with her head cut off. The ivory satin evening dress, the rounded arms… the shoes matching the dress—no doubt about it, that was Gloria. There was nothing missing except the head. ‘My sexual organ,’ as she laughingly used to call it, referring to the cerebral pleasure she got out of her work as a translator and the equally intense pain she suffered from her headaches…. [Indeed] that unmistakable bosom was encased, perfectly as usual, in the bodice of…[the] evening dress, on the left side of which spread a crimson stain. It looked like a knife wound (Kristeva, 1998, p. 3).1

So begins Possessions, a mystery novel from French poststructuralist philosopher and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva. A novel, this novel, is “autobiographical” (Kristeva, 1996a, p. 270), not only because elements connect to her own life story, but also because the form facilitates the therapeutic relationship. In an interview about a first novel, The Samurai, published in English in 1992 (in French in 1990), she explains, Analysis occurs when… [we analysts] are willing to compromise ourselves…. [One way] is to reveal yourself through a work of fiction that uncovers the different parts of the intimacy that allows you to understand other people, their pain, their perversity, and their desire to die, all of which resonate with your own…. [Fiction] establishes a new link with the patient, one that is endowed with both seduction and inhibition and that wagers on the patient’s ability to tolerate the intense experience of transference and countertransference. Exposing ourselves when we feel the most vulnerable is a way of relying on the greatest force of this transferential relationship, on the possibility that it will be mastered and thus beneficial to the therapy (Kristeva, 1996e, pp. 251-252).

For Kristeva, the writing of novels primarily facilitates her own transference and provides space for those of her patients. Possessions is published after a second novel from The Old Man and the Wolves (Kristeva, 1994), also a mystery, in which Kristeva introduces a heroine and a mythical country, Stephanie Delacour and Santa Varvara (Santa Barbara). In Possessions, the mystery surrounds Gloria’s murder and Stephanie seeks to solve it. In what follows, selections from these two novels frame an explication of Kristeva’s project. The frame is one of “mystery”; the principal concept of the chapter is the “subject in process”. This develops across Kristeva’s work − somewhat chronologically − in what commentators have identified as philosophical 119 J. D. Marshall (ed.), Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy,119-139. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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components: poetics, psychoanalysis and politics (Moi, 1986; Dayal, 2000). Four concepts contributing to subject in process are taken up in central sections. These are semiotic, abjection, love, and revolt. “Mystery” begins with origins; from ancient Greece the word refers to religious rites kept secret except to a few witnesses. Religious connotation continues down through Christendom with non-theological meaning appearing first in fourteenth century texts. Something secret obtains; such secrets become both private and public, personal as well as matters of state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And, those who act mysteriously do so “for the purpose of exercising undue power or influence.”3 Significantly, it has been suggested that desire to know what is secret—that is, knowledge--is the basis for the modern mystery, or detective story (Kelly, 1988). It is instructive that the genre in French is known as le roman policier literally “police regulation”, derived from the need for order and government. Knowledge, solution, order remain as does the role of a central character in the evolution of a story form first written in the 1840’s. Today sub-forms abound; according to a relatively recent sociological analysis, “the traditional whodunit, the hard-boiled private eye story, the spy novel, the thriller, and the police procedural” (Kelly, 1988, p. 181). One may clearly add to this evolution the emergence of the female detective. Pleasure is the effect for the reader of a good mystery. It results, explains American R. Gordon Kelly, from stable conventions of the “novel form” (Kelly, 1988, p. 162). These include realism and believability, accuracy of setting and of particular detail, and sympathetic characterization. Especially pertinent aspects of reader response are located in an analysis from French sociologist, Roger Caillois: First, the modern mystery is strictly fashioned in contrast to the novel in general; differences occur especially in its oppositional temporal order and importantly as contrast to the latter’s freedom and transgression of “limit and law” (Caillois, 1984, p. 1). Second, “secret” is such that the reader accompanies the detective in “a game of the mind” (Caillois, 1984, p. 14) and seeks to figure it out ahead of him! For Caillois, the mystery is both game and drama, intellectual and emotional. Kristeva employs the mystery genre shamelessly. There is a panoply of characters that include an almost-debonair policemen and his almost wily-assistant, a maidthief, and a loyal psychiatrist. Several are “ambiguous”, an epileptic student, a deaf son, and as it turns out a mad-woman speech therapist. There are three narrators, on occasion an unidentified third, more so Rilsky, the policemen, and principally Stephanie. Throughout Kristeva is ironic, making “fun” of the crisis of modern society, of the genre itself, and significantly of psychoanalysis. And, excessively playful, the story entails sufficient means, motive, and opportunity − for three murders! As indicated at the close, there is no easy solution to the killings just as there is no easy development of persons and the living of lives. Too there are no easy resolutions to societal crises and to related problems of education.

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For introductory purposes, Kristeva makes virtually no reference to education in her writings although surely proposal for societal change implies its change too. One mention however is found in an interview comment about teaching. Returned to in the final section, Kristeva suggests that a “new form of power can play in society… the power of the therapist, the power of the educator” (Kristeva, 1996a, p. 37). Another less direct reference is to her own student past (or at least that of others) from May ’68 in France. She sees in those days a model of revolt, one of the key concepts of the chapter. Similarly to Kristeva’s lack of attention to education, there has been almost no writing about Kristeva for education. The one exception is from American curriculum theorist, Wendy Atwell-Vasey for the teaching of language arts and English. Taking up a feminist perspective, she focuses on these themes for educational change: the maternal in language, the value of teacher narratives, and autobiography as method (see sum, Atwell-Vasey, 1998, p. 104). Given this lack of foundation, consideration of education that closes the chapter is speculative. But, consideration is serious precisely because of the intellectual, ethical, and political power of Kristeva’s work: Poststructuralist projects posit a dramatic change in educational theory and subsequent practice because an ethics founds reform rather than an epistemology. Three ideas are presented: One is that education like life entails “mystery”, and solutions to its problems are thusly ambiguous and tentative but not negative. Two is that a Kristevan psychoanalytic method for pedagogy suggests an openness for teachers-student relations that holds promise. Three is that educational change need involve individuals and societies. Reform efforts must take place at both micro and macro levels, both local and global, in the particular and general. 2. CONTEXTS Stephanie is, in her own musings, “a lonely hunter, a traveler, a journalist” (Kristeva, 1998, p. 11). Visiting Santa Varvara at the time when Gloria is murdered, she relates these feelings: [For] the moment I’m in the process of transition, in the middle of a kind of tranvestism…. [As] I put on another language…. I live in a state of trauma. Conscious or dreaming, I have no definable place.… It’s… like when I learned to travel through different languages, dying every time I crossed a frontier, then being reborn elsewhere…. Immature Stephanie Delacour… imagines she’s left the womb! But no, like everyone else she needs a giantess to shelter, reassure, or ultimately swallow her. Ah, there we have it, our intrepid globe-trotter’s fantasy: the folklore character with swarms of children coming out from under her skirts. Dream or nightmare? Same difference…. [The] Mother ( Kristeva, 1998, pp. 20−22).4

Character of Kristeva’s imagination − dreams, transference, they all operate − Gloria has been Stephanie’s friend. A mother, as will be seen; ironically a motherfigure perhaps? In Possessions, motherhood does play a strong role in the plot. But,

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Stephanie’s own parentage is relatively unclear in this story; in the first mystery, a symbolically significant father is central but no longer. To begin, Gloria, Stephanie and Julia Kristeva are “foreigners”. Kristeva is not French; she was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in the early forties but has lived in Paris for close to forty years. In her native country she received a middle class Catholic education that included attendance at a French kindergarten. Her first studies were in the sciences and linguistics that included reading Kant, Hegel, and Marx on the one hand and Russian formalism on the other. Along with Tzvétan Todorov, she introduced the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to the west. Following her initial education, Kristeva worked as a journalist prior to immigrating to France. At twenty-five, Kristeva arrived in Paris with a French government scholarship − and the widespread agreement is that she took the city by storm (Moi, 1985, p. 122). She studied with Lucian Goldmann, Roland Barthes and Emil Benvenieste, and as well worked at the laboratory of Claude Lévi-Strauss. She began publishing almost immediately as part of the famous Tel Quel group that she credits with introducing her to Freud; significantly, she attended the seminar of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.5 She married Tel Quel’s founder and editor, Philippe Solers, and they had a son. In her maturity, Kristeva became professor at the University of Paris VII and completed psychoanalytic training (in 1979). For several decades since she has taught, traveled and lectured widely (especially at Columbia University), practiced as an analyst − and, as well, been a very prolific writer. Today Kristeva is arguably one of the best known of contemporary French social theorists who is read alongside Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard.6 Kristeva’s intellectual background comes principally from the French structuralist revolution of the sixties. Originally from 1980, an interview comment posits roots in a project that repudiates Sartrean existentialism. Here is Kristeva: [Existentialism] was, in my view, a regression with regard to the great philosophical and aesthetic formal movements, to take only my own fields. The whole development of linguistics, of formal logic, was fundamentally ignored by Sartrean existentialism. If you’re interested… in art, the great revolution of the avant-garde, the surrealists − the entrance of psychosis into the life of the city, which modern art represents − these were also ignored…. Thus… [there] was a reaction to all that. (Kristeva, 1996c, p. 13).

Further, Kristeva writes out of influence by Hegel and in response to Lacan via André Green (see Kristeva, Interpreting Lacan, and Doane and Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the ‘Good Enough’ Mother). Lastly, she situates work in the 20th century linguistic turn, in the “discovery of the determining role of language in human life” (Kristeva, 1996d, p. 15). Kristeva is often identified by Anglo-American readers as a postmodern French feminist. This characterization leaves out two important understandings toward her work. One is that she is perhaps more appropriately known as a post-structuralist − although this too may be an American description. The other is that Kristeva does

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not name her own work particularly as feminist. Indeed she asserts important theoretical differences from the women’s movement in France and the ‘feminist’ writers group, écriture féminine, and as well from Anglo-American feminists.8 In one statement, she describes the two cross-oceanic movements, American and French, as “inherently incompatible” (Kristeva, 1996d, p. 268). Further explanation is helpful. Arleen Dallery writes that American academic feminism “emphasizes the empirical, the irreducible reality of women’s experience… [while French feminism] emphasizes the primacy of discourse, women’s discourse, without which there is no experience − to speak of” (Dallery, 1989, pp. 52-53). In the first, the project has been to remedy the silence of women’s experience in male-constructed culture. In the second, “the feminine…[is] that which is repressed, misrepresented in the discourses of western culture and thought.” The central thesis of the last is that both the preconditions and the logic of thought “require the exclusion of the feminine, the bodily, the unconscious” (Dallery, 1989, p. 53). Pertinently, as other French poststructuralists, Kristeva recognizes the feminine as part of the processes of signification of both women and men. Her “feminism” is stated thusly: [My] conception of signification allows me to participate in the debate between the ‘universalists’…[the French] and the ‘differentialists’…[the Americans]…. I want to propose a differentialist conception of the speaking subject that includes female subjects, but that considers the universal constraint as well as concrete ways to mark it with the exceptional nature of each subject…. [Further] I believe that much of what has been written in the United States about my conception has been inaccurate (Kristeva, 1996d, p. 269).

One other point about distinction concerns treatments of motherhood.9 In the American context, cultural feminists have offered theories that have not been predicated on psychoanalytic theory. An example is Sara Ruddick’s view in which motherhood is defined by whoever undertakes the practices of mothering (see Ruddick, 1989). Still another Anglo-American group does have roots in Freud but differences over psychoanalytic theory itself. In their object-relations theory, a male or female child develops differently through strong gender relations to ‘objects’ separate from itself. Herein Nancy Chodorow’s work focuses on family structure and subsequently posits changes in contemporary parenting to alter the harm done to both girls and boys in identity development (see Chodorow, 1978). In general, the Anglo-American tradition emphasizes the ego over the unconscious and is not Lacanian (see important exceptions, Mitchell and Rose, 1985; Gallop, 1985). Kristeva remarks too that Anglo-Americans stress the catastrophic in the psyche in contrast to the French interest in the erotic (Kristeva, Petit, 2002, p. 22). One notes that in the former, ‘subject,’ the central concept from Kristeva, is rarely mentioned.10

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In The Old Man and the Wolves, Stephanie steps out of the story to ‘place herself in it.’ She says, [If] the master of ceremonies should reveal himself and include himself in the story, then the narrative, whether dreamlike so far or literary, plausible or grotesque, is ipso facto transformed into a quest after mysteries, a police inquiry…. [In the process he] is forced to call his own role into question. He instructs himself to examine his links—he soon suspects they have something to do with his own family relationships…. Once the different parts of the ego have been split up among the characters of the thriller that has replaced his original epic, the investigator, the detective, may turn out to be quite a chameleon…. The erstwhile contemplative researcher may be metamorphosed into a poet…. Then the novel opens out into philosophy (Kristeva, 1994, pp. 63 −65).

In Kristeva’s idiom, the narrator, a detective or philosopher − any of us − are “split subjects”, are always subjects in process. As such, and the theory develops across her work, we must call ourselves (continually) into question. This is the psychoanalytic project; this is the life project of human beings. The central term, subject in process, appears early on, alongside the very significant concept of the semiotic, a prelinguistic aspect of experience and of identity development. The semiotic is “related” to the concept of the symbolic from Lacan but significantly influenced by others.11 In an important essay, How Does One Speak to Literature? Kristeva acknowledges her debt to Barthes’s own project on literature, and significantly, to his “historical subject.” For Barthes, literature is a mode of “practical knowledge” whose “place is transversal to the one the sciences assign themselves. It goes through them and locates itself elsewhere” (Kristeva, 1980, p. 96). It is an art, a recasting, to overturn, to operate “[for] subjects of a civilization who are alienated in their language and blocked by their history” (Kristeva, 1980, p. 96). “Through literature, writing, a certain freedom exists.” (Kristeva, 1980, p. 97). Kristeva quotes further from Barthes’s book, Writing Degree Zero (published in the fifties):12 “Writing… is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed… and holds the threat of a secret; it is anticommuncation, it is intimidating.” (Kristeva, 1980, pp. 102-103). Kristeva’s specific conception of the semiotic is developed in Revolution in Poetic Language published in 1984. Clearly reminiscent of Barthes, translater Roudiez posits that its purpose is to “investigate the workings of ‘poetic’ language… as a signifying practice… generated by a speaking subject within a social, historical field” (Roudiez, 1984, p. 1). Herein Kristeva begins both from Benveniste’s subject of enunciation as well as from particular aspects of Melanie Klein’s theory of drives (Kristeva, 1984, pp. 23, 22). Kristeva names a set of drives ‘the semiotic’ and explains their functioning thus:

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Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such, and in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the constraints imposed on this body − always already involved in a semiotic process − by family and social structures…. [The] drives, which are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks, articulate what we call a chora: a nonexpressive totality (Kristeva, 1984, p.. 25).

The chora is an articulation, explains Kristeva that is uncertain, indeterminate, mobile, provisional. Significantly the unconscious allows for “reading” this empty rhythmic space according to an ordering but not a law (Kristeva, 1984, p. 27). Such an ordering occurs prior to acquisition of language. Following from Klein, “the mother’s body… mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora” (Kristeva, p. 27). Finally as “genetic programmings,” semiotic processes are of “displacement and condensation, absorption and repulsion, rejection and stasis… as innate preconditions… for language acquisition” (Kristeva, p. 29). These drives are demonstrated in noises of infants and they become manifest by adults in dreams and in creation of specific text forms. Kristeva’s semiotic is posited prior to, alongside, and in conflict with the symbolic, the phase or space for the acquisition of ego and language. Some ambiguity occurs over whether a subject “exists” in both or only in the latter. At this point, a brief turn to Lacan helps in understanding Kristeva. Both place primary importance on the unconscious and thus deny the development of a unified self. Specifically from Lacan, commentators explain the following: The ego…[is formed] on the basis of an imaginary relationship of the subject with his own body. The ego has the illusion of autonomy… and the subject moves from fragmentation and insufficiency to illusory unity…. [Significantly the] same conflict which was determined by the fracture between the subject’s undifferentiated…[(prior to the mirror stage)] and fragmented way of being… is continued as the subject identifies with the image of the human form, that is, with other human beings (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986, pp. 56, 58; see Lacan, 1977, beginning, p. 1).

This formulation differs in significant ways from Freud’s refined contribution of the reality principle. For Lacan, the ego is not primarily adaptive but rather in conflict with the physical and social environment: “the world starts to exist for man only in projection of himself into that world.” (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1987, p. 67; see Lacan, 1981, beginning, p. 53). Kristeva acknowledges connections to and distinctions from Lacan. Similarly, they emphasize language; they emphasize the unconscious. Dissimilarly, Lacan’s beginning of signification is Saussure’s theory of the sign; Kristeva’s sign is based in Freud. For Lacan, further, the primary process of identity formation and meaning making is chronological and logical in the symbolic, while for Kristeva the semiotic as drives are primary and instinctual. Her critique of Lacan takes up his refinement of Saussure’s lalangue. She relates that his lalangue “[represents] the real from which linguistics takes its object…. [and, she concurs] “’the effects of lalangue,

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which are already there as language, go far beyond what any speaking being can utter’” (Kristeva, 1983, p. 35, citing Lacan, 1988).13 But, the problem is the homogeneity of Lacan’s structure. Her claim is that the ‘presence’ of the semiotic itself entails a heterogeneity “of the unsymbolizable, the unsignificable,” that is unresolved and which “also guarantees that the…[analytic] cure will not become a safety net whereby the subject would believe himself master of lalangue, if not of language… [and thus of himself]” (Kristeva, 1983, pp. 35,36). At this point it is important to be clear about Kristeva’s meaning of subject in process. As for Lacan, for her there is the person but there is no essential self and there is no direct, unified agency. Different from Lacan, Kristeva’s subject while egoistic through language is predicated on pre-lingustic “experience” a use of this term that reads strange in an Anglo-American context. A subject “comes to be constituted.” One theorist sums thusly: “[Subjectivity is a matter] of process… movement, dynamics, positioning, and stages; never hints of substance, attribute, essence, or… any “originary consciousness”. If anything is originary it is movement…. Being an open system, subjectivity is never achieved once and for all. For one thing, there are always aspects of experience that must be expelled” (McAfee, 2000, p. 74). Kristeva’s concept of abjection is her principal take on expelling or excess. 4. ABJECTION Returning to Possessions, for Stephanie, Gloria’s life and her death as the investigation reveals, have always had an excessive character, fitting her country of residence. The former is drawn to the place: It’s as though I were inhabited by another person, vague but impossible to get rid of…. [Someone] who likes these dirty streets… the skyscrapers reflecting only emptiness…. Santa Varvara has changed…. [They] send me here whenever some squalid incident occurs; in other words, quite often. Is it a memory of the childhood I spent here… that comes back and makes me feel like another person? Or is it a certain closeness to the worst kind of abjectness... the enlightened variety?… I prefer not to know the answer to that question (Kristeva, 1988, p. 15).

Excess is natural to life. It arises out of desire that takes on values both good and bad. How each individual deals with excess, with the abject, is a key psychoanalytic issue. Kristeva’s concept of abjection originates in Hegel’s notion of negativity and is transformed through her reading of literature and of Freud. To recap, out of the relation of the semiotic and the symbolic, a “speaking subject” emerges relative to a practice. This is “a subject in process/on trial… as is the case in the practice of the text…[in which] transformational rules are disturbed and, with them, the possibility of semantic and/or grammatical categorical interpretation” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 37). Her interpretation of Hegel poses this signifying process as organized through an

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additional term of his dialectic, that of negativity. Distinct from nothingness, it is indissoluble relation, mediation, “logical impetus beneath the thesis of negation and that of negation of negation” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 109). In Freudian terms, negativity becomes “the very movement of heterogeneous matter, inseparable from its differentiation’s symbolic function” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 113). Overall it is rendered as rejection, where a “surplus” in the relation of subject and object “destroys the pairing of opposites and replaces opposition with an infinitesimal differentiation” (Kristeva, 1984, pp. 125-126). Turning to Freud, what is psychic heterogeneity or differentiation is based in two principles, one of returning and the other of the unity of the subject, through drives and as consciousness. The process is thus ambiguous, both divided and unitary. For Kristeva, within the signifying process, what Hegel’s dialectic does not attend to is the boundary as well as crossing the boundary between “one” and “other”, the moment of shattering of the one. Freud’s contribution first is to support dialectical logic “by making expulsion… [his biological opposite of the pleasure principle] the essential moment in the constitution of the symbolic function” (Kristeva, p. 158). But as developed in Kristeva’s poetics, negation “arranges the represssed element in a different way” that is anti-symbolic and withdrawn from the unconscious, and that “takes up a position as already postivized and erotized in a language” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 163). Most importantly it “cannot be located in any ego.” She sums, “[poetic] rhythm does not constitute the acknowledgement of the unconscious but is instead its expenditure and implementation” (Kristeva, p. 164). Potentially, this is rejection of textual and societal censorship, an “opening” for revolt. Kristeva greatly extends and amplifies the conception of abjection in Powers of Horror. Still working through language, utilizing exemplars in literature, and referring both to philosophy and religion, abjection is characterized initially in terms of “experience”, as a phenomenology, and then within psychoanalysis. Here is Kristeva’s initial description utilizing one form of abjection: “Loathing of an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 2). As the archaic example, with the “skin” on milk abjection occurs through gagging and stomach spasms. This is, explains Kristeva, a nausea that separates the infant from mother and father who provide the milk. The non-linguistic response is characterized in this way: “’I’ want none of that element, sign of their desire…. But since the food is not an “other” for ‘me”, who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 3). And, here is another and perhaps the ultimate abject: The corpse… is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance…. [Corpses] show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live… The corpse… is the utmost of abjection…. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself….

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LYNDA STONE Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us (Kristeva, 1982, pp. 3, 4).

Kristeva’s phenomenology describes personal instantiations of disgust; these become, as well, social taboos. One commentator makes this point: “Although every society is founded on the abject − constructing boundaries and jettisoning the antisocial − every society may have its own abject. In all questions, the abject threatens the unity/identity of both society and the subject” (Oliver, 1983, p. 56). Taboos from abjects relate to family, to sexuality, and across culture and time to distinctions between the status and treatment of men and women. For Kristeva there is an ancient and continuing connection between abjection and the maternal. Kristeva says this in an interview: “The relation to abjection is finally rooted in the combat that every human being carries on with the mother. For in order to become autonomous, it is necessary that one cut the instinctual dyad of the mother and child and that one become something other” (Kristeva, 1996b, p. 118). Significantly, other to abjection is love. Fundamental to love is the mother-child relationship turned to subsequently. To sum, because menace comes from “inside”, abjection incorporates a founding “rejection” of the self. She writes, abjection is “experienced at the peak of its strength when the subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 5). Finally in Black Sun: Depression and Melancolia, Kristeva moves from abjection into depression and melancholia. Of note, by this time clearly she does recognize the harm done to women about abjection − located in part in taboos over the blood of menstruation and its connection to motherhood. But she also asserts that separation is necessary for everyone’s identity development in a response that is positive as well as negative to mother and father. Singularly negative for some, abjection becomes a mourning for a lost object, a “thing.” The result is this: “[Disinherited] of the… [unnameable] Thing… [this person] wanders in pursuit of continuously disappointing adventures and loves; or else retreats, disconsolate and aphasic, along with the unnamed Thing” (Kristeva, 1989a, p. 13). The subject in process, a person, seeks love. 5. LOVE Gloria’s son, Jeremy − Jerry − was born deaf. Married to Stan, a fledging artist and womanizer, she raises him ostensibly alone. And then Stan dies. By the time of her own demise, “Gloria was really a mask worn over a wound” (Kristeva, 1998, p. 123), the one who was handicapped. Consider this: For anyone else…[Jerry would] have been a burden, but for her he was her only chance. ‘To be of use to someone. To achieve the impossible. Perhaps that’s what love is’…. But self-denial is a delusion of grandeur disguising trauma…. Meanwhile Gloria

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learned all anyone needed to know about transforming a ‘handicapped’ child into a ‘normal’ one…. In the end the child came to possess Gloria…. Possession can take the form of a single love absorbing the entire universe. Absorbing you as well; whether that leaves you in the world or outside it, it makes no difference. There is no more ‘you’ (Kristeva, 1989, p. 49).

Here is the title of the story; Gloria’s need for Jerry is one of multiple “possessions”. Possessions, it is implied throughout the novel, are characteristically possible for all of us. However, also, to love without “possession” is the psychonanalytic potentiality, to love without death of self. Gloria’s possession, in other words her obsession with Jerry, is manifest of a lack of love. For her it means few friends and severe detriment to her career. In Kristeva’s Tales of Love, the concept is developed in a period of writing in which “subject” is seldom used. However, one statement in the mid-nineties offers insight into evolution of the subject in process: You are alive if and only if you have a psychic life. However distressing, unbearable, deadly, or exhilarating it may be, this psychic life − which combines different systems of representation that involve language − allows you access to your body and to other people…. Your psychic life is a discourse that acts. Whether it harms you or saves you, you are its subject (Kristeva, 1995, pp. 5-6).

Psychoanalysis offers access. Its foci are two: the life of the individual and of the society. In the essay, In Times Like These, Who Needs Psychoanalysts? she identifies depression and perversion as “’modern’ symptoms” (Kristeva, 1995, p. 44), of “residents of… [a sprawling] steel city… [who] are as anxious… neurotic, and psychotic as the Freudian unconscious would wish them to be” (Kristeva, 1995, p. 28). According to Kristeva, those who wish to change society and themselves enter analysis. On the level of the individual, Kristeva states the purpose of psychoanalysis thusly: “[It] is want of love that sends the subject into analysis, which proceeds by first restoring confidence in, and capacity for, love through the transference, and then enabling the subject to distance himself or herself from the analyst” (Kristeva, 1987a, p. 3). The result is “potential for psychic renewal, intellectual innovation, and even physical change” (Kristeva, 1987a, p. 3). Love, to emphasize, is the psychoanalytic aim and method. Stipulating definition, Kristeva begins that love “is an affliction” (Kristeva, 1987c, p. 6). As in previous writings, she provides an experiential phenomenology and moves to psychoanalysis. Available primarily through feelings and memories, for Kristeva love’s description in language is allusive. She writes, “[My] love memories… relate to an exaltation beyond eroticism that is as much inordinate happiness as it is pure suffering” (Kristeva, 1987c, p. 1). She continues, “Vertigo of identity, vertigo of words: love, for that individual, is that sudden revelation, that irremediable cataclysm,of which one speaks only after the fact”(Kristeva, 1987c, p. 3). The problem of speech is the impossibility not of the identification of two persons (me and you) but, “of what is really at stake between” (Kristeva, 1987c, p.

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3). This incompleteness reveals that of the subject itself, one of which he or she becomes aware when seeking or in love. Kristeva concludes, it is “[both] a fear and a need of no longer being limited, held back, but going beyond. Dread of transgressing not only proprieties or taboos, but also, of the self” (Kristeva, 1987c, p. 6). Initiating love is of mother and child; it is a “love of loss.” Kristeva’s view of motherhood is expressed early in the famous essay, Stabat Mater.14 It is a two-part partially juxtaposed text in which she writes about the birth of her son at the same time as she analyzes the Christian story of the virgin Mary. Here is Kristeva as a “loving” mother: Frozen placenta, live limb of a skeleton, monstrous graft of life on myself, a living dead…. Paradox: deprivation and benefit of childbirth. But the calm finally hovers over pain, over the terror of this dried branch that comes back to life, cut off, wounded…. There is him, however, his own flesh which was mine yesterday (Kristeva, 1987b, pp. 242-243). Nights of wakefulness, scattered sleep, sweetness of the child, warm mercury in my arms, cajolery, affection, defenseless body, his or mine, sheltered, protected…. Recovered childhood, dreamed peace restored… opaque joy that roots me in her bed, my mother’s, and projects him… soaking up dew from her hand, there, nearby, in the night. Alone: she, I and he (Kristeva, 1987b, pp. 246-247).

This love, she claims, is “the pleasure of the damned” (Kristeva, 1987b, p. 250). Kristeva emphasizes the primary narcissism of love: for the mother there is a return to her own mother relationship − and from a distance its idealization. For the child, there develops the mirror stage of identity development. Here is Kristeva again: “Rooted in desire and pleasure…. Its Highness the Ego projects and glorifies itself, or else shatters into pieces and is engulfed, when it admires itself in the mirror of an Idealized Other… (of me?), unworthy of him, and yet made for our indissoluble union” (Kristeva, 1987c, pp. 6-7). Moreover, narcissism “serves as a screen” for emptiness that is replicated in the arbitrariness of language. Recognition of this comes from Lacan in both the metaphor of “the gaping hole of the mirror stage” (Kristeva, 1987c, p. 23) and the unrealizability of the real. In his terms, love ties together the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. Respectively the first is the “thinkable,” the word, the law and the second is “what the self imagines in order to sustain and expand itself” (Kristeva, 1987c, p. 7). The last is what Kristeva describes as “that impossible domain… of affect” wherein what cannot be accounted for is the partial involvement of “I.” Analysis can never complete the real: there is no perfect love of self or of other, but through transference and countertransference there are aspects, insights. In Kristeva’s schema, the dynamic entails “three people,” a schema that overlaps with but in not analogous to that of Lacan. The first and second are the subject and the object of his love, the latter “the stand-in for the potential ideal” (Kristeva, 1987c, p. 13). The third position is occupied by the analyst as “a subject who is supposed to know − and know how to love” (Kristeva, 1987c, p. 13). He becomes first the object

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of love and then of separation and “death” − a reliving of the first relationship with the mother. Countertransference opens up the process, in effect, as the analyst functions as the mother. From a 1985 interview, Kristeva offers this sum: [The] mother relives her own childhood and becomes dependent again on the ideal object, that is, on the narcissistic mirage of her child. [However since] she is willing to set aside all the tokens of her own narcissism and masochism because she will be rewarded by the other’s growth, accomplishments, and future, she can subordinate herself to the ideal whom she is trying to raise and who will soon exceed her bounds (Kristeva, 1986f, p. 62).

She can separate, live with emptiness, and love. 6. REVOLT Life and mystery stories are similar: each has an ending, although life’s inevitability is reversed in the story: death typically is mystery’s beginning. Moreover as part of the genre, mystery stories have solutions, “whodunit” is determined by the central character or characters. The mystery of three murders is solved in Kristeva’s Possessions. From the story, Michael Fish (Gloria’s lover) made one mistake. He took Jerry’s picture down off the wall…. When he felt Gloria go limp, not breathing or moving, he realized her heart had stopped. Was that really what he’d intended?…. He’d wanted to frighten her, yes, but that didn’t mean… Still why not ? (Kristeva, 1998, p. 133).

Gloria is strangled during a quarrel with Michael, the nefarious art and drug dealer who is subsequently caught in Latin America after attempting to sell a fake painting. The policeman Rilsky solves a first murder. This initial death is the result of domestic discord while the second murder, manifest in the knife wound, is ‘caused’ by societal degradation. Rilsky’s lieutenant, Popov, puts it thusly: “They’re all guilty…. The politicians and the psychiatrists: the politicians because they cut the funding of public institutions and dispossess the poor, and the shrinks because they have too many ideas” (Kristeva, 1998, p. 145)! There are two suspects, escapees from St. Ambrose, Santa Varvara’s psychiatric hospital. One escapee in fact did wield the knife and his recapture by Popov resolves the second killing. This solution seemingly reached, Stephanie heads “home” to Paris, but she is uneasy. Something about attributing Gloria’s decapitation to a serial killer just does not seem right. Stephanie, Julia Kristeva, and the rest of us, are “multiple selves” (light and dark, loving and hating, always incomplete) as subjects in process. As subjects, too, we form communities. It is the nature of those unions that Kristeva turns to in a relatively recent phrase of writing. What emerges is a central concept of revolt; one related idea is that of the foreigner; turning to it briefly is instructive for understanding revolt. In a 1996 interview, Kristeva connects “foreigner” generally to her project. She writes,

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LYNDA STONE Our work produced a conception that broke free of what could properly be termed identifactory thinking. Identificatory thinking accepts the unity of man reduced to his consciousness and so enjoys dissecting human practices into psychological or sociohistorical categories that closer analysis reveals to be… [metaphysical] recapitulations (Kristeva, 1996d, pp. 259, 260]).

She continues, “[We questioned] the identity of ‘the foreigner’… in a series of representations, conflicts, and strategies” (Kristeva, 1996d, p. 260). Foreignness like emptiness, she concludes, is “intrinsic to each of us” (Kristeva, 1996d, p. 260). Developed in Strangers to Ourselves, published in both French and English in 1991, and itself related in conception to an earlier work, Nations Without Nationalism, the subject in process becomes the subject in crisis (see Kristeva, 1996d, p. 37); this leads to “foreigners”. From Strangers, she explains, [The] foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode…. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns ‘we’ into a problem, makes it impossible. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners (Kristeva, 1991, p. 1).

From Freud, in addition to a more traditional notion of how the unconscious makes us strangers to ourselves, Kristeva calls forth “uncanny strangeness.” This is the unnameable affect of “’the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’” (Kristeva, 1991, p. 83; citing Freud’s “The Uncanny” in his collected works). This other, as Kristeva puts is, “is my (“own and proper”) unconscious.” Recognition of the foreigner both within and without establishes a politics for Kristeva. Formed, she suggests, can be a community of foreigners in which locally “[we] try to help one another, all” (Kristeva, 1996a, p. 41) and globally to live well in “’puzzle’ states” comprised of various types of citizens. She concludes: “[By] being able to hear the other as tracked… by some anomaly, as I myself am…. I refuse to see in the other an enemy. And this would be a basis… of morality” (Kristeva, 1996a, p. 41). Enter now revolt—significantly not revolution. In three late texts, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (2000), Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (2002a), and Revolt, She Said (a set of interviews published also in 2002), a comprehensive political philosophy begins to emerge as Kristeva considers another aspect of community. This is the crisis of the current political state − and for her, “the lack of revolt” (Kristeva, 2000, p. 1). The first two texts continue the pattern of previous philosophical analyses: reinterpretation of Freud and utilization of the French literary tradition, centrality of language and consideration of the sacred and the profane. As introduction, the Kristeva seeks out the roots of ‘revolt’ in notions of movement and change over space and time. Her purpose is to wrest the term, “etymologically… from the overly narrow political sense it has taken in our

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time” (Kristeva, 2000, p. 3) as well as to separate ‘revolt’ from ‘revolution.’ The need for the latter is thusly well explained: The events of the Twentieth century… have shown us that political “revolts” − Revolutions − ultimately betrayed revolt…. Why? Because revolt, as I understand it − psychic revolt, analytic revolt, artistic revolt − refers to a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, change, an endless probing of appearances. The history of political revolts shows that the process of questioning has ceased (Kristeva, 2002b, p. 120).

Pertinently, in Intimate Revolt, Kristeva begins by referring to Possessions. The book is for her “a low form of revolt” (Kristeva, 2002a, p. 4).15 She continues, “It is not much, but we may have reached a point of no return, from which we will have to re-turn to the little things, tiny revolts, in order to preserve the life of the mind and of the species” (Kristeva, 2002a, p. 5). One aspect of this revolt, she asserts, is the universe of women presented through the novel: their “valorizng” of sensory experience, their endeavours at preserving bodily freedom, their efforts to better the lives of children, all matter as potential aspects of revolt. Kristeva does offer one other example of “revolt”, this one in the traditional arena of social life and politics. In an interview she reconsiders her own near-youth and the importance of May ’68. She explains that in Communist Bulgaria intellectuals were denigrated; ironically this contributed positively to her own identity. She says, “what I got… was a great respect for those who live by the mind, and I still have it” (Kristeva, p. 17). Continuing today, this is basic to her own contribution to revolt. In a word, it is “self-respect” from a mature, psychically-strong subject in process. More now on revolt as ‘solution.’ 7. SOLUTION To this point, Gloria’s final murder, the decapitation, remains unsolved. In the text, there is one very revelatory moment when a vital clue to the story’s conclusion is provided (had I missed something earlier, dear reader?). Over months at home, Stephanie has a recurring dream: Waiting merges certain dreams together, summons dreams-in-waiting to the surface. But one − is it always the same? − will not declare itself one way or the other: do these scenes belong to the dark that has reigned since Gloria’s death, or have they been there always?…. [At] last, Stephanie has pinned it down. For you’re not your ‘self’ when you’re dreaming: another ‘self’ wakens beneath the closed eyelids…. ‘I’ is just one view of all the ‘shes’ assembled in my dreams (Kristeva, 1998, p. 127).

Our foreigner, journalist, detective reveals a lost love, in which an idyllic union on exotic beaches results in a child that she chooses to keep but not to reveal to the father. Unfortunately toxoplasmosis leads to a therapeutic abortion. The text is strong here: “The terrible pain of forced delivery, a delivery of nothing…. So Stephanie had had more than her share of decapitation” (Kristeva, 1998, p. 131). She

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remembers her own desire, need, pleasure and pain when by chance a clue to the beheading is provided by Odile, an old friend of Gloria’s. All too briefly, Pauline the tutor is also an old friend who as a young girl (studying to be a surgeon) suffers the drowning of an “especially close” younger brother and a subsequent breakdown. Taking Jerry on holiday following the party, Pauline has to return home on a special errand for the boy. Already angry at Gloria for not attending to her son, Pauline overhears the quarrel with Michael in which to placate her lover “the mother” is going to send her son away. Pauline snaps again and we along with Stephanie relive her anger: “A woman who’s helpless and depressed, that’s what a mother is, what’s where the mystery lies. Like me…. Hatred also decides, strikes…. The scalpel opens the flesh…. I make the incision…. I amputate her power, remove the distinguishing marks” (Kristeva, 1998, p. 202). Stephanie has solved the final murderous act of the mystery, but what should she do? Quite simply, returning once more to Santa Varvara, she sees Jerry flourishing− free of Gloria. She visits and begins to love him. The book ends thusly: “Stephanie knew that from now on there’d be two of them living… the journalist-cum-detective and a virtual caress from the wound in Jerry’s voice (his deaf speech). Pauline’s demon already possessed Ms. Delacour” (Kristeva, 1998, p. 211), and she does nothing. Such is the ambiguous moral decision of Stephanie, like all of us, a subject in process. In her novels, Kristeva’s subject in process takes on a particularity that all persons possess. Theoretically persons are thus both specific and generic; they are concretely real and abstractly universal − sharing elements of psychic life with others. What they share also is a “mystery” of life: no one knows how her or his life will turn out. Significantly for Kristeva, within a theory of a universalist psyche there remains the mysterious: ambiguity in the unconscious and the unknown in language, revulsion in abjection and emptiness in love, lack of control in the potential of revolt. As just indicated, in late work, Kristeva connects the potential of individual psychic revolt with that of society in general. Out of crisis, she sees not anarchy but possibility (and embedded in this hope is mention of education). She writes, [It] is at this moment that recourse to a provisional and stabilizing apparatus is important… [and] to insist on the provisional… that a new form of power can play in society. This is the power of the therapist, the power of the educator, the power of a certain familial authority, a power, that is, however, relative and flexible (Kristeva, 1996a, p. 37).

As indicated in the introduction, Wendy Atwell-Vasey has considered and adapted ideas from Kristeva for education, specifically the teacher-student relation, curriculum, and pedagogy. Her project is to unite Kristeva with others in Continental and psychoanalytic theory, particularly those who focus on the body and on object relations as they influence hearing, speaking, reading and writing. Here is her feminist orientation: “Kristeva argues that… [life’s experiences] of balancing the forces of pleasure and violence in relation with other people often… [take] place within a loving relationship, of give and take, with a maternal figure” (Atwell-Vasey,

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1998, p. 87). Incorporated for Atwell-Vasey are body memory, intersubjectivity and, significantly, a loving teacher. It is an interpretation that has present utility for the kind of individual and societal revolt of which Kristeva writes.16 At the outset, three ideas for education were suggested − all of which point to a denial of ‘solution’: the ambiguity and mystery that is life itself, the potential of a Kristevan ‘education’ out of a model of psychotherapy, and a need for local and global reform − or in her idiom, “revolt”. At the close, much more might well be written about psychoanalysis for education (see Deborah P. Britzman, 1998; Elizabeth Ann Ellsworth, 1997).17 But to the focus of this chapter, difficulties from Kristeva’s work are clear: moving to a subject in process and overturning (revolting against?) a discourse of the unified self requires a break with traditional western educational theory. It also requires giving up traditional control of a student by a teacher, and of education by a society. Here a final word on revolt is useful. In Intimate Revolt, Kristeva has this to say: I am seeking experiences in which this work of revolt, which opens up psychic life to infinite re-creation, continues and recurs, even at the price of errors and impasses…. Revolt exposes the speaking being to an untenable conflict…. [Revolt] is distinguished… by the fact that the tension toward unity, being, or the authority of the law... is accompanied by centrifugal forces of dissolution and dispersion (Kristeva, 2002a, pp. 6, 7).

What further characterizes revolt is jouissance of a particular kind. From a base in semiotic drives and from signification and representation manifest in particular literary and art forms, revolt becomes “an experimental psychosis” (Kristeva, 2002a, pp. 10). Here is Kristeva one last time: “By this I mean that psychosis is the work of a subject, but a subject in process. It is through… the material of language and thought itself… that the subject reaches the hazardous regions where… [psychic] unity is annihilated” (Kristeva, 2002a, p. 10). Kristeva does not employ either a language of solution or control but the latter has closing relevance. On the level of the individual, revolt surely means giving up a struggle for ‘self-control,’ of a search for essence and stability of self. On the level of society, this surely means that persons commit themselves to the continual reexamination of values and practices: a giving up of control herein too. For education, at the very least a language other than one of traditional control is required − followed potentially by different kinds of interactions among all persons. Attention to Kristeva’s subject in process − with its inherent “mystery”− is one small revolt, one re-beginning. Lynda Stone is Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, U.S.A.

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Text sections from the novels are italicized. Other italics are from original works; some references to “us” or “we” indicate a shift of voice and universalist aspects of Kristeva’s theory. This is an excellent resource and many different interviews are cited. Incorporated is French publication and author to differentiate among them. Throughout French publication dates are also given.. Definition is taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, volume 10, edited by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, 173-174, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Frames from the mystery serve as “playful” thread throughout. As indicated Kristeva wrote novels to facilitate her psychoanalytic practice. She did not write especially to contribute to a contemporary genre of psychoanalytic fiction. Published between 1960 and 1982, Tel Quel was the principal journal of the French avant garde. It was resurrected in 1983 as L’Infini. A relatively recent article asserts that Kristeva is known in France principally at Sollers’s wife. Given approximately fifty listings in Amazon in summer 2002, she seems better known abroad than at home. See “Correcting Her Idea of Politically Correct: Feeling Misunderstood, A French Thinker Tries an Individualistic Path,” by Alan Riding, The New York Times, July 14, 2001, B9, B11. An example is Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency & Culture, edited by Nancy Fraser and Sandra Bartky, published in 1992. See two interviews from Kristeva, by Boucquey published originally in 1975 and by Meisel from 1980, Julia Kristeva, Interviews, edited by R.M. Guberman. See also a comment in the recent text, Revolt, She Said from 2002. Other interpretations of Kristeva’s work are clearly possible. One is to focus on Kristeva’s theme of motherhood; others take up literary, religious, or more traditionally philosophical foci. Space limitations prohibit attention to a considerable English-language commentary. One example is Julia Kristeva, from John Lechte; another resource is from Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. Kristeva’s first French text is Polylogue published in 1977; for early writings see also Language the Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics from [1981], 1989. See Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology [1953, 1964], 1970. See Lacan, Encore, published out of the famous seminar by Lacan from 1972-1973, appearing in English in 1998. Published in [1976, 1977, 1983], 1986, Stabat Mater appears in Kristeva’s Tales of Love. Along with the essay Women’s Time (from [1979, 1981]), 1986, it connects her views of women and motherhood to politics. About mystery stories Kristeva specifically asks, “Is that why when people stop reading, they still read detective novels: the degree zero of this aptitude for judgment that is the interrogation: our only remaining defense against the ‘banality of evil’?” (Intimate Revolt, 4). Atwell-Vasey’s text is educationally very useful and theoretically well-presented and interesting. As a philosopher working through Kristeva’s texts, however, I am uncertain about the ‘marriages’ that she posits and attune myself to distinctions. Unpacking her interpretation is a future project. Thanks to Wendy for encouragement on this effort. In addition to this chapter, see Lynda Stone, The Crisis of the Educated Subject: Insight from Kristeva for American Education, 2002. A special thanks to Jim Marshall for support and patience.

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REFERENCES Atwell-Vasey, W. Nourishing Words: Bridging Private Reading and Public Teaching. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998. Barthes, R. Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology. Translated by A. Lavers and C. Smith. Boston: Beacon, 1970. (Published in French 1953, 1964). Benvenuto, B. and Kennedy, R. The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. London: Free Association, 1986. Britzman, D.P. Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Caillois, R. The Mystery Novel. Translated by R. Yahni and A.W. Sadler. Bronxville, NY: Laughing Buddha, 1984 (Published in French 1974). Chodorow, N. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Dallery, A. “The Politics of Writing (the) Body: Écriture Féminine”. In Gender/Body/Knowledge: Femininst Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, edited by A. Jaggar and S. Bordo, 2-67. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Dayal, S. “Introduction”. In J. Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 3-45. New York: Other Press, 2000. Doane, J. and Hodges, D. From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the ‘Good Enough’ Mother. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Ellsworth, E. Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address. New York: Teachers College Press, 1997. Fraser, N. and Bartky, S. (eds) Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, & Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Gallop, J. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Kelly, R.G. Mystery Fiction and Modern Life. Jackson, M.S.: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Kristeva, J. How Does One Speak to Literature? In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Edited by L.S. Roudiez and translated by T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L.S. Roudiez, 92-123. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. (Published in French 1971, 1977). Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror:An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. (Published in French 1980). Kristeva, J. “Within the Microcosm of ‘the Talking Cure’.” In Interpreting Lacan. Edited by J.H. Smith and W. Kerrigan, 33-48. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. (Published in French 1979). Kristeva, J. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by M. Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. (Published in French 1974). Kristeva, J. “Women’s Time”. In The Kristeva Reader. Edited by T. Moi. Translated by A. Jardine and H. Blake, 187-213. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. (Published in French 1979, in English 1981). Kristeva, J. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Translated by A. Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987a. (Published in French 1985). Kristeva, J. “Stabat Mater”. In Tales of Love. Translated by L.S. Roudiez, 234-263. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987b. (Published in French, 1976, 1977, 1983). Kristeva, J. Tales of Love. Translated by L.S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987c. (Published in French 1983). Kristeva, J. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by L.S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989a. (Published in French 1987). Kristeva, J. Language the Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics. Translated by A.M. Menke. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989b. (Published in French 1981).

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Philosophy and Education 1. 2. 3.

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C.J.B. Macmillan and J.W. Garrison: A Logical Theory of Teaching. Erotetics and Intentionality. 1988 ISBN 90-277-2813-5 J. Watt: Individualism and Educational Theory. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0446-2 W. Brezinka: Philosophy of Educational Knowledge. An Introduction to the Foundations of Science of Education, Philosophy of Education and Practical Pedagogics. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1522-7 J.H. Chambers: Empiricist Research on Teaching. A Philosophical and Practical Critique of its Scientific Pretensions. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1848-X I. Scheffler: Teachers of My Youth. An American Jewish Experience. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3232-6; (Pb) 0-7923-3236-9 P. Smeyers and J.D. Marshall (eds.): Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein’s Challenge. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3715-8 J.D. Marshall: Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4016-7 W. van Haaften, M. Korthals and T. Wren (eds.): Philosophy of Development. Reconstructing the Foundations of Human Development and Education. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4319-0 N. Aloni: Enhancing Humanity. The Philosophical Foundations of Humanistic Education. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0961-5 D. Bridges: Fiction written under Oath? Essays in Philosophy and Educational Research. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1083-4 K.R. Howe: Closing Methodological Divides. Toward Democratic Educational Research. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1164-4 J.D. Marshall (ed.): Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1894-0

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