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Poststructuralism
Reference to the ‘postmodern' has become commonplace in educational research, but it is problematic in at least two respects. In the first, ‘postmoderism' has become a trendy catchword, used to excess and with a lack of precision by both its advocates and its detractors. Second, the term is rightly used about a loose and fairly broad range of developments – in art and literature, film, music and fashion design, in cultural studies as well as philosophy itself. Architecture has provided seminal and iconic examples of what postmodernism is. There is a problem in applying the term to philosophy, however, in that the thinking that has been so influential for postmodernism is not necessarily periodised in quite the way that we find in the related developments in art, etc. If it is the thinking of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-François Lyotard to which reference is to be made, then ‘poststructuralist' is the more precise and apt expression. At the same time it is worth drawing a distinction between postmodernity (as a period in time – characterised by ICT, simulation and virtuality, fragmentation and massification, and so on) and postmodernism (as this range of ideas and practices influenced by poststructuralism). None of this is to deny that, as a matter of fact, the term ‘postmodern educational theory' has become common in educational research, but it is to regret this to the extent that this usage is vague and burdened with misleading assumptions.
Misleanding assumptions are made regarding poststructuralism's connections with cultural and epistemological relativism, personal identity and narrative, language and power.
In the first place there is the assumption that postmodernism and the poststructuralist ideas behind it must somehow reject the past. The past has been characterised by its false certainties – about God, king, country, the rationality of man, progress – all of which are now called into question. In fact the possibility of certainty, of truth itself, has been exposed as a chimera, in what seems to be a thoroughgoing scepticism (see Standish, 1995). Scepticism about truth leads relativism , of both epistemological and ethical kinds, and in both individual and cultural forms. Knowledge claims and the traditions that go with them are then nothing more than the expression of power interests, however covert or unwitting these may be. What is ‘true' in one culture (or for one person) is not ‘true' for another: what is ‘true' is synonymous with what is ‘taken to be true'. So too, ethical standards are relative to cultures (or individuals), such that we have no right to criticize what they do (and you have no right to pass judgement on the values I hold) – hence the familiar complaints: ‘Aren't you being judgemental?'; ‘Aren't you bringing values in?'
Doubts of these kinds often carry with them a further set of assumptions to the effect that, if there can be no certainty and no ethical objectivity to values, then ultimately we live in a world without values. (Curiously, the reductive assertion that all is power is itself presumed to be somehow innocent of value judgement!) The consequence is a prevailing nihilism . Educational research in this vein is often characterised by a cynicism bent on exposure of the presumptions and pretensions of modernity. Sometimes such assumptions are grafted onto concerns for injustice; sometimes they provide the rationale for a commitment to releasing the ‘play' of language and thought – perhaps with suggestion of emancipation.
Manifestations of these tendencies can be seen readily enough in some of the exaggerated forms that otherwise potentially coherent kinds of educational research can take. Thus, because there is no ultimate truth, ‘constructivism' takes it that learning is a matter of the child creating her own knowledge. Similarly, ‘narrative research' is sometimes understood to involve the creation of one's life story, or perhaps, because we know that what is studied is never independent of the researcher, the construction, somewhat narcissistically, of the researcher's own life-story. (Further confusion arises here in the equivocation over ‘story' as fiction and non-fiction.) As a third example, hinted at above, arguments on the part of multiculturalists sometimes lose coherence in their pieties of ‘respect for the other' and their mantra of ‘recognition of difference'.
But if these misleading assumptions involve fallacious readings of poststructuralist thought, how are we to move towards a more accurate understanding? What are the characteristics of poststructuralism?
Poststructuralism is pervaded by a concern with the relation of language to thought, and as such it relates to the so-called linguistic concern of 20 th Century philosophy. This is a turning of philosophical attention within Anglophone traditions - for example, by J.L. Austin and by the later Wittgenstein. It involved moving away from foundationalist assumptions of the primacy of logic and towards a more subtle recognition of the varied nature of language and of its deep influence, its pervasive implication, across the range of human practices. On the Continent such sensitivities were already well developed in the work of Nietzsche, who had himself read and been impressed by similar thoughts in Emerson and Thoreau. Heidegger's thinking, in the decades following the publication of his masterwork, Being and Time ( Sein und Zeit , 1927), moved towards the emphasis on language as fundamental to our being. Language is not well understood as a means of communication - as if, as Aristotle had thought, ideas first exist in some kind of abstract form and then are coded into words in order for us to convey them to others. For in what form do those ideas first arise? Where do they come from? As Heidegger provocatively puts the matter, man does not speak language: language speaks man. Language is the wellspring for our thought and our being as human beings. With this disturbance of the relation between thoughts and words, the way is opened also to a weakening of the distinction between philosophy and literature.
Poststructuralist thought is indeed concerned with the relation of knowledge and power. Once again Nietzsche's writings lay the way for this, especially for the work of Foucault. But the point of the power-knowledge connection has less to do with the ways in which particular power interests conceal their operations under the cloak of a supposedly natural language (though, to be sure, this does happen): it is that any form of discourse enables certain ways of thinking even as it (perhaps surreptitiously) excludes others. Power, however, is not necessarily bad, and exclusion is inevitable and not necessarily to be regretted. One thing that this reveals is the inevitably partial nature of our language and thought – the impossibility of a comprehensive or total understanding. It should encourage a more subtle and discriminative thought, alert to the effects of exclusions as well as appreciative of the possibilities that specific forms of discourse enable.
Given the pervasive and essential presence of language in human life, and given the very nature of language itself (of which more below), it follows that notions of stable identity and development are unsettled. Thus, to the extent that educational theory has grounded itself in the ideas of developmental psychology, in conjunction with learning theory understood in terms of unilinear progression, it needs to be rethought. But far from justifying the excessively subjective vocabularies of self-creation, this should lead to something more like humility in recognition of the extent to which language creates us. And far from being a flight from objectivity, this will be a more rigorous recognition of the way things are. In a very real sense we are formed by the words that we have available to us, and what these words are will be determined by the kind of upbringing we have. There is then, it is true, a culturally relative aspect to this: an education in French and an education in Japanese cannot be the same (though this is emphatically not to imply that they are impermeable), and there can be no education that is linguistically or culturally neutral. But this, again far from collapsing into epistemological relativism, should lead us to a heightened sensitivity to the significance of cultural initiation, with the various kinds and degrees of richness that such initiations can put within the range of learners, and with their various forms of exclusion or neglect.
It is right to see poststructuralist thought as conditioned by antifoundationalism, but this should not occasion the assumption that certainty is thereby forfeited or that truth disappears. (One does not, incidentally, have to be a poststructuralist in name in order to take this view. Habermas's antifoundationalism, for example, has greater continuity with an Enlightenment faith in reason.) Wittgenstein devoted a set of writings to the exposure of the confusion that surrounds, on the one hand, the hyperbolic assertion of certainty and, on the other, the scepticism that is expressed in reaction to this. The much vaunted ‘suspicion towards metanarratives' is tantamount to a rejection of totalising explanations, including those that are foundationalist. Thinking of this kind is post structuralist in the manner that it undermines also the comprehensive patterns or organizing ideas that are found, for example, in Saussure's linguistics or Levi-Strauss's anthropology, or for that matter in G.E. Moore's metaphysics.
The above points illustrate that poststructuralism is by no means tied to the (critique of the) particular conditions of postmodernity, though it may be the case that these insights have been made more accessible by social change. There are, however, two concepts associated with poststructuralism that are more particularly pertinent to the times in which we live, and in view of their educational relevance it is appropriate to acknowledge these here. In the first place, there is Baudrillard's idea of the simalacrum : in the commodification and image management of postmodernity, the very distinction between what is real and what is simulated, fictive or imaginary becomes hard to sustain - a process exacerbated by the new technologies with their capacity to create virtual reality (see Baudrillard, 1983). The other is to be found in a coinage that aptly captures aspects of the contemporary world and that manifests a prescience in relation to the changes that education policy and practice have undergone in the twenty-five years that have followed its introduction: Lyotard's concept of performativity . In the light of the excesses of ‘quality' control and accountability, of obsessive demonstration of ‘efficiency and effectiveness', and of the pervasive effects of ICT, Lyotard's explanation of this idea seems particularly apt: ‘The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output: performativity' (Lyotard, 1984, p. 11). By no means his best philosophical book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge has been widely influential amongst educational researchers. It is lamentable, however, that many who have read it have failed to respond to its dark, sardonic tone and so have missed its frequent adoption of phrasings that express the very ideas it seeks to expose and warn against.
If we ask ‘Why has so much of the point of poststructuralism been missed in education? Why have the misunderstandings identified above developed?', the answer may be that readers have been hasty to slot these ideas into the ready-made categories of 1970s sociology of knowledge, of neo-Marxist exposures of the operation of power or of various versions of the politics of difference.
If so-called ‘postmodern' educational research gets some of these matters wrong, how might this be done better? It may be helpful to think of poststructuralism's importance in terms of two dominant strands of thought. The first of these, which can be thematised as a ‘negative' strand, is to be associated especially with the influence of Emmanuel Levinas; the second, ‘affirmative' strand derives especially from Nietzsche. To speak of negativity and affirmation is not to imply a polarity. Both ways of thinking are of immense value for education.
The negative strand needs to be understood in terms of an acknowledgement of the necessary limits of our thought and understanding. Our thought depends upon our language, and this, far from being something abstract, is available to us as a result of particular histories, particular patterns of usage and practice that go back in time to origins that we cannot possibly know. Moreover, any utterance, all meaning, has its place within structures of possible usage, connotation and interpretation that also extend beyond what we can know. Add to this the fact that our very being, who we are is in part to be understood in terms of the thoughts we have, which are themselves dependent on the structures just mentioned, and the extent to which our being depends upon what we are not becomes all the clearer. There is implied here an ethics and a politics, albeit that these are scarcely systematic in kind.
The affirmative strand in poststucturalism, which might be connected most clearly with the work of Gilles Deleuze, has to do with the idea that our thinking and being have typically been burdened, in the Western world, by a binary structure that gives too much weight to negativity. Its aim is to recognise and to release the kind of intensity of experience that often eludes our more self-conscious frames of mind. Nietzsche criticises the culture that confronts him, but his purpose is not destructive. He warns against the ressentiment that can so deplete the spirit and so detract from the living of life in its fullness, and that contributes so much to our petty meanness in our daily lives. Ressentiment is his term for the negativity that looks back, whether with nostalgia or with regret or remorse, or of looking forward obsessively such that the present disappears in wishful thinking for a future that never arrives. The affirmation of life that contrasts with this is sometimes amplified in Nietzsche by reference to states of intoxication or of the dance. These are states not of self-conscious assertiveness but rather of losing oneself in absorption in what one is doing, of divesting oneself of one's burdensome ego. It is not that this absorption can take only intoxicated forms: the involvement of an artist in her work, of an engineer in solving a problem, of a student in writing an essay or a teacher with her subject, might all be examples of this intensity. Indeed the teacher's role might be seen as ‘a conductor of intensity', as of an electric current that passes through subject matter, teacher and students. Such absorption is a condition for a culture's vitality and value, and for the education that sustains it.
Nietzsche has been a major influence on the work of Foucault (see, for example, Peters and Wain, 2003), but the themes of affirmation that have been adumbrated here are more evident in the work of Deleuze and in the middle phase of Lyotard. It is here especially that we can find pointers towards a revitalized educational practice (see, for example, Bearn , 2000; Blake et al. , 2000, Chapter 7; Williams, 2000).
The negative and affirmative strands of influence indicated here serve as importa nt correctives to the distortions in the interpretation of poststructuralist thought so commonly found in so-called postmodern educational research.
For further reading [Needs development] , see:
Bearn , G. (2000) The university of beauty, in: P. Dhillon and P. Standish (eds)(2000).
Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R., and Standish, P. (2000) Education in an age of nihilism , London and New York : RoutledgeFalmer.
Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R., and Standish, P. (eds)(2000) The Blackwell guide to philosophy of education , Oxford : Blackwell.
Dhillon, P., and Standish, P. (eds)(2000) Lyotard: just education , London and New York : Rouledge.
Peters, M., and Wain, K. (2003) Postmodernism and education, in: Blake et al. (eds)(2003).
Readings , B. (1996) The university in ruins , Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press.
Standish, P. (1995) Postmodernism and the idea of the whole person, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 29.1.
Williams, J. (2000) For a libidinal education, in: Dhillon and Standish (eds)(2000).
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