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The Knowing Subject and the
Practice of Freedom in Educational Research
John Schostak
BERA conference 1998
Knowledge is misleadingly the central issue within contemporary social forms. More importantly, it is the potential for abuse that claims to knowledge and to knowing offer to individuals occupying positions of power. There is an increasing focus placed by the media, the rulers of a nation's political gaze, on the mind engineers. There is a long history of the use of reductive forms of knowledge to produce mental as well as physical concentration camps under the ruse of creating the conditions for freedom. Rather than describe that history, I want to explore freedom, knowledge and knowing as conditions for educational research and action capable of disassociating itself from its current vassalage to governmental and bureaucratic power.
The critical difference I want to explore is between the subject of knowledge and the knowing subject. This is more than simply splitting hairs, it is the difference between a settled corpus of knowledge to be transmitted and memorised and the processes involved in the act of knowing itself. It is in the act that education, freedom and truth emerge, not in the corpus. The corpus of knowledge may rather be considered as distilled illusion, a by-product of a course of action, a curriculum if you will, that is finished, perfected and available for infinite repetition. The act of freedom, of knowing and of truth is its antithesis - the resistance to illusion, to perfection and to mindless repetition.
Nevertheless the corpus is indispensable. It is the machinery of society itself. This is not to suggest that improving society is merely the search for a better machinery of illusions - although that is some part of it - rather social development is a stripping away, not of illusion, but of investment in illusion. I want to explain this entanglement of words through a very eccentric dialogue with some central Lacanian concepts. I call it a dialogue in order to emphasise a multiplicity of standpoints, otherwise it would be a disciplined transmission of cult like beliefs, that is, a schooling in the ways of authorised Lacanian analysis.
The dialogue can proceed only by admitting an indefinite number of alternatives which return each speaker not to their original position but to a place of difference. If there were no place of difference there would be no dialogue. If there is only identity - position A equals position A - then there is only at best transmission from one point to another without loss of integrity, at worst it is a Hegelian contest to the death resulting in the paradigmatic struggle for recognition leading either to death or to a master-slave relationship. In either case, it is the death of the alternative. In this sense, dialogue is necessary to breathe life into democracy.
Proceeding the dialogue involves not the death of the other but the death of self - the destruction of the investment in illusion which is at the heart of all identity. What this means for the practice of freedom in educational research will be elaborated through the positions adopted by self and other in the death and life struggle of everyday life, a struggle barely witnessed, always mediated, packaged and marketed through a variety of screening processes to achieve the good life.
The Good Life and the Banquet of
Desires
Of course it began long before Freud, but in this latter half of the century talk of desire leads almost immediately to talk of psychoanalysis. The question of desire, however, marks many returns upon the question of the good life. What is it people want? How might a person conduct his or herself to achieve that? What sort of social arrangements would be conducive to achieving what is wanted? Should they want it? What will really fulfil them? Psychology, social forms, politics, economy, ethics are all implicit in this question of desire. In philosophy it all seems to have started from a banquet, Plato's to be exact (trans: Griffith 1986).
The chosen topic of discussion - to praise Eros - turns into an exploration of the education of desire. Aristophanes, provides a key image in recalling the myth of the original androgenous being composed of male and female :
All that I'm saying is that in general (and this applies to men and women) this is where happiness for the human race lies - in the successful pursuit of love, in finding the love who is a part of our original self, and in returning to our former state.
(trans: Griffith 1986: 193c)
Originally people were a whole, composed of both male and female then they were split and the two sexes feeling their loss searched for completion. Socrates explores further the more general concept loss or absence as fundamental to desire:
.. the man who desires something desires what is not available to him, and what he doesnŐt already have in his possession. and what he neither has nor himself is - that which he lacks - this is what he wants and desires.
(trans: Griffith 1986: 200)
However, desire is not simply negative, it is a positive energy when it is the initiator of positive courses of action to 'fill' the loss. It is this search for the lasting, the immortal which drives people to ever higher states of knowledge, and hence of 'knowing'. In this process, beauty, defined as the essential characteristic of the desirable, plays a critical motivating role. The education of an individual, then, is through the contemplation of various forms and 'levels' of beauty from desire of the physical beauty of another through mental beauty and what is beautiful in general until reaching the goal of education which is 'that branch of knowledge which studies nothing but ultimate beauty'. Thus a curriculum is defined as the course of reflection, discussion, analysis pursued to construct a branch and body of knowledge. Throughout the course the individual becomes a subject who is in pursuit of knowledge, indeed, one who is in pursuit of the one who knows, the master. As a curriculum it is also a curriculum vitae, a history of a journey made as well as a prospective life plan together with game plan to achieve it.
The overriding image of Socrates which arises from the narrative of the banquet, is of a person in absolute control surrounded by people who want to win his affection but can never attain what they want with any certainty. Hence, Socrates always places them into a position of 'loss' which initiates them into knowledge of themselves as being seekers. That is, they are knowing subjects who know they seek and know they do not possess the ultimate prize, but at the same time posit another as a knowing subject whose knowing and hence self-possession is complete. There is at this point an intersubjective play between the two classes of knowing subjects. It is a play of seduction. The scene is rounded off by the drunken Alcibiades recounting his failed attempts at seducing the master and both praising and reproaching Socrates for his superhuman self control. Socrates is painted as the ultimate love-object, the cause of desire, possession of whom would lead to complete satisfaction. It is essentially the Lacanian model of the objet petit a , defined as the variable or object playing the role of the cause of desire in a given individual's or group's life.
In this picture, there is already the flipside at play. Socrates is not just the master educator but the subverter, the scourge of civil society, the one driven to drink the hemlock - a different kind of last supper. He is, as a kind of shadow mirror to the mirror of ultimate beauty, the consumate libertine who drinks others under the table and never appear drunk, who seduces boys and young men without ever getting seduced. The play of paradox produces a kind of non-sense which causes fascination and is generative of a fantasy of what may be called a 'trans-sense', that is a unifying position where all that is on the surface experienced as non-sense will ultimately produce a unifying higher order sense.
It is in the experience of
non-sense at the heart of everyday life that resides alternative visions of the
good life. What do I mean by this? I mean that by
de-constructing the apparent stability and fixity of one set of taken for
granted meanings, one authorised or desired way of seeing, the play of
signifiers can fluidly re-configure into alternative ways of posing meaning,
creating significance from sense data.
The passage between one 'way of making sense and another way is a
passage through 'non-sense'.
In particular opposed to the curriculum of beauty and virtue is that of the other master libertine, de Sade, the curriculum of disgust and perversion. Again, the metaphor of the supper or banquet as a motive for educational explorations of desire is employed. Where in 'civilised society' the supper is bound by etiquette, the following of rules, and the control of emotions, feelings and actions in order to lead to a suitable conclusion (Airaksinen 1991:86):
The myth of the violation of norms and values is absolutely crucial to Sade. The sequence is always the same: first, a set of closed physical, psychological, and stylistic phrases, like a dinner table; then a plan to break out into the freedom of the void, like preparing a disgusting dish; and finally the eating of it, which results in exhaustion and satisfaction, something like vomiting.
(Airaksinen 1991:87)
Vomiting or voiding plays a role in Sade's descriptions that loss or lack played in our earlier descriptions of Plato's banquet. It could be regarded as a kind of negative fulfilment. Searching for this 'fulfilment' through voiding or vomiting, certain objects and procedures are invested with the power to bring about the desired state. As such they play the Sadean counterpart to the Alcibiades' desire to possess Socrates as being the cause of desire (object petit a ) for the prospective libertine who is in this case the knowing and searching subject.
Airaksinen tells us that 'in educational matters' it is important for the libertine to 'start from the idea of wickedness and proceed towards excitement and discharge' (1991:88). In a parody of Rousseau's Emile, Sade describes the education of Eugenie who:
loves her father and allows him to seduce her without a trace of resistance on her part. She is able to reject what Freud calls the horror of incest. From there she proceeds towards crueller ideas. By this Sade intends to demonstrate once again that all innocent moral thought represents merely the life of the unformed mind, a mind which offers no resistance whatever to the powers of the corrupt mind. The weaker spirit takes the stamp from the stronger one. As such, its original virtue is deceptive. The uneducated mind is a medium without a form of its own, and the libertine has nothing to gain from the activity of the victim. She is merely a passive being whose thoughts and actions are random and meaningless. The libertine creates his own worthless company as a shadow - a mere reflection in the mirror of his mature mind. As EugenieŐs stature grows, her independence advances.
(Airaksinen 1991:107)
However, as in the case of those searching for ways to possess Socrates, the desire to possess what is essentially a shadow, is ultimately impossible to fulfil:
The hatred Sade's heroes feel against their victims is understandable when one considers the disappointment the heroes go through when they are threatened by loneliness and the bittersweet medicine of narcissism. They hate their victims because victims never provide them with the fulfilment of desire.
(Airaksinen 1991:114)
What is there to gain from a curriculum of shadows, reflections, projections? The shadow is essentially that of the self projected onto others. The missing bit is the self itself. Self in search of self like Aristophanes' androgenous being.
Each form of curriculum is underpinned by a fantasy which constructs subject positions, courses of action, bodies of knowledge. Each produce a life plan, a curriculum vitae that is founded in the processes of education. Each has its teachers who proclaim a knowledge.
The Knowing and the Unwitting
Participants/the fantasy game
It is interesting the extent to which libertine, sage and saint may all draw upon the same techniques and fundamental assumptions concerning the nature and purpose of education, desire, freedom and the field of play open to the master players and their students and their 'subjects'. It is how they value the field of play that differs and leads to different desired outcomes.
S2
S1 Field of Play
A field of play emerges as soon as two subjects (S1 and S2) engage with each other, desire and demand something from each other. It becomes a question of the likelihood of the desire of the one being fulfilled at the expense of the other, or with the mutual benefit of the other. The field of play can be abstractly conceptualised as a net-like matrix thrown upon the world to create a stage of action. Thinking of it as rather like a draughts board each square and each piece takes on a particular value depending upon the arrangement of pieces. With every move the value of a given square and a given piece shifts. In everyday life, unlike games like draughts, one may not always be clear as to what game is being played. One has to search for clues: what's going on here? If one answers mistakenly or deceptively then believing the game to be draughts when everyone else is playing chess can lead to disaster.
Hence it is critical to ask: In what is one a participant? Ultimately, it is the fantasy.
It is the fantasy that there is an end to education that can be taught
and that mastery of this end is achievable and is in the possession of the
master teacher. This fantasy may
be conceived of as a very sophisticated web-like and web-making engine which
spreads out across all the strands it makes to create a sense of total
coverage, total mastery, total dominion - covers and creates the total field
of
play. Such a fantasy is initiated
at the very moment an individual - at whatever age - realises within his or
herself an identity formed in the recognition of self as being a participant
in
the subjective reality of others. It is the move from narcissistic to
intersubjective reality. Its point of initiation occurs with a split between
the identity recognised by others as being mine and the sense of losing one's
self
to the determination of one's self, at least in part, by others. That is to say, what is mine in the
identity recognised by others is only that which is conferred upon me by them. What is lost in this identity is
everything that others cannot see, feel, hear, experience of the my-ness of my
being. The extent to which I adopt
this identity as one which has use value for me in my exchanges of social
power, status, services and productivity with others is the extent to which I
alienate myself. It is, in other
words, the measure of what is lost at the very point of gaining a social
identity, position and power in the system of the world of others about
me. The engine of which I speak
is
thus composed of gain and loss - or in the words of the market place of
exchanges, profit and loss. In the
market place one wants always to minimise loss and maximise gain. The fantasy is to recover all losses. This is the engine which drives market
place culture, that is to say, contemporary globalising culture in all its
forms. What is it that can fill
the gap, the emptiness thrown up by the struggle for identity in contemporary
society? It is an impossible
quest. There is no external object
that can fill this internal absence since the absence is created anew whenever
a social identity is formed, recognised as 'me' and internalised for its social
and personal use value for social intercourse and commerce. Nevertheless, the complement to the
sense of social identity is necessarily implicit in adopting the identity. Let us, with Lacan call that complement
the objet a, and the sense of
lack in the self the barred S, S.
Since the objet a cannot
be realised in reality real objects have to be found which play the substitute
for it. These substitutes 'fill'
the a in the way that objects can be chosen to 'fill' the variables of any
mathematical formula. The fantasy
is thus constructed which the a
is filled and is set into relation with the barred S. Lacan playfully gives the quasi mathematical formula of S
<> a which of course is a metaphorical play on the agency of the letter
as vehicle for meanings whether sense making or nonsensical but always
causative of effects in symbolic orders.
It is a game that has again caught up its victims exemplified recently
in the work of Sokal and of course the Times Higher Educational Supplement who
try to prove the nonesensical nature of Lacan's mathematics and of course,
succeed.
Charraud (1997), as a mathematician and psychoanalyst describes the role that games theory plays in Lacan's development of his theories of subjectivity. It is at the level of the symbolic that all possible games, and strategies are potentially present. This structure of possible games and strategies prevails over both the levels of the real and the imaginary. The real, in this instance is the reality composed of the rationally imposed rules, regulations and hence legitimate calculations for moves that can be made. It defines what can 'realistically' be done or not in the governing field of play. The imaginary is structured in the face-to-face demands that the players make upon each other. In two person games and zero-sum games one strategy can usually be shown to be preferable to others. In more complex games where betrayal, trickery and cheating are all possible moves the game is actually a meeting of point, a cross roads, of two or more games. It is at this point that simple rational calculation breaks down, or at least becomes confused, deceptive, ambiguous and the question - what game is being played here? - is both critical and potentially irresolvable except as a game of the contest of games. The complexity that results is beyond an individualŐs grasp to define and calculate all possibilities. Yet there is the belief that order may be discovered. Thus:
From Adam Smith's notion of the 'invisible hand' to Hegel's concept of a 'system of needs,' Durkheim's notion of the organic division of labour, and Parsons' notion of 'generalised media,' modern social theory has emphasised this apsect of modern societies, according to which large domains of social life become functionally dependent upon one another without this being willed, desired, or even known to anyone.
(Benhabib 1986: 127)
These are perspectives where:
individuals' activities, unknown to them and often unwilled by them, result in law-like regularities, which are intelligible to an observer-thinker.
(Benhabib 1986: 31)
This implies that there are always two perspectives at work: first, the level of lived experience where the world is intersubjective and identity is socially constructed through the first and second person voices of 'I' and 'you'; and second, the level of the observer-thinker, a perspective named the Transsubjective by Benhabib, or referred to as the Other by Lacan and spoken in the voice of the third person - he/she/it/they/them. In games theory Charraud points to the need that Morgensern and ... had to posit the coercive framework of society. which functions like a transsubjective subject in order to maintain the rules and the ultimate intelligibility of the game.
Both Plato and Sade employ the transsubjective perspective whether in the form of Socrates or the master libertine educating an initiate into the rules and patterns of play veiled from the sight of the ordinary person who plays the unwitting subject/victim. Each claim to set in motion different games, the one morally superior to the other - designed rationally, scientifically, from a position of aloof observation, reflection and calculation. This scientific position claims to stand above the mere interactions of individuals who negotiate meanings and exchange conversations, goods or services face to face as in a market place, or at a banquet. Indeed:
One of the central achievements of Marxian social theory, and one anticipated by Hegel, is the discovery that the two points of view of intersubjectivity and transsubjectivity are constitutive of modern capitalist society. In this society for the first time a sphere of activity is institutionalised which operates according to laws unintended by and unknown to social agents themselves, and which can only be analysed from the transubjective standpoint of the observer. The main purpose of critical social theory is to demystify the power of this domain upon individuals' lives, and to return the control over their actions and interactions to individuals themselves. The claim is that humans should 'reappropriate' what originates from their deeds. This 'reappropriation' can take two different forms: it can be viewed as either fulfilling the implicit potential of the present or as transforming it in the name of the new.
Benhabib: 68
The power of the transsubjective as a perspective is that it offers completeness, it is totalising and brooks no alternative, indeed, to suggest that there is an alternative is to be regarded as nonsense at best, madness or evil at worst. It is the lure that attracts many a politician, philosopher and theorist to become the incarnation of the 'lawgiver' who defines what is the 'good life', and what is real, what is nonsense, madness and evil (c.f. Zuckert 1996). Transsubjective games provide both material and symbolic objects and images to be conceived of as the a, to be the lure to seduce or indeed, frighten those targeted by the lawgiver into dreams of either satisfaction, fulfilment, completion, certainty or nightmares of falling into the void, being torn apart, losing control and descending into chaos.
Adopting the position of the lawgiver has many social variants but must either be exemplars of the norm or be at odds with the norm. As an exemplar of the norm the law giver defines perfect practice. Any stylistic change would have to be defended as a legitimate variation where 'going too far' identifies what is at stake. Going too far means becoming at odds with the law giver. At this edge on one side the change seems like nonsense, mad or bad; at the other it seems like release, freedom, excitement, challenge. Only at this edge of nonsense can the possibility of new law givers arise. At one level is the trend setter who young people wish to be like. At other levels it is the corporate predator, the business or religious guru or the political leader who captivates the crowd. In each case, it may start by earning a reputation by playing the difference, whether it is between one's look and those of the others, or between one's word or insight and those of the uninitiated. Thus this difference may initially be a kind of provocation which attracts attention because it seems shocking, even nonsensical. If the attention becomes valued in some way it can be very seductive to those who desire the attention it provides. At the next level, the exponents of the look or the word establish a position and a reputation as the lawgiver, the provider of new ways and new games. consequently, it is only where nonsense emerges that the creative edge, the novel discovery, and freedom can come to being. In everyday social life there are multiplicities of games and 'law givers' for those games. Knowing which game is in play, how self and others are defined in terms of that game, how to play it, how to cheat, how to trick, how to escape can be critical to self preservation. The process of the construction of 'capture', 'captivation by' or fascination by the game must at least involve:
á intuiting the presence of a game
á formulating the positions of players
á their opportunities
á their access to knowledge
á their skill in strategy
á the overarching rules
á the possibilities of cheating/escape
á the level of play (whether global or local)
Finally, the existence of a game generates a need for the magic something by which to place a spell on the game in order to be a winner. It is here that the masters, gurus and spin doctors of the game employ what I want to call referential rhetorics.
Referential Rehetorics
The role of referential rhetorics, as I define it here, is to create a sense of the real, organise desire and weave the two together in such a manner that discourse can fascinate, dupe, appear to inform and seduce or compel action to produce real outcomes for the benefit of a winner. This means that what is at stake is the Real itself, that is, the Real beyond all linguistic reference and rational calculation, that which exists in a way which does not depend upon language or the symbolic more generally for its being. The task of referential rhetorics is to obliterate the Real. Its function includes schooling, that is moulding and fashioning minds and behaviours to meet for example desired performance criteria and to determine winners and losers. Education, however, is excluded as will be discussed in a later section.
Taking the Saussurian model of the sign in relation to the referent , an initial formulation and somewhat simplistic model can be constructed where the referent of the sign is the object or range of objects which taken with a system of such signs and referents compose a world for the speaker. The sign is in two parts: 1) the signifier is the material vehicle (the mark on the page the visual, acoustic or other sensori impression); and 2), the signified is the mental content associated with the signifier:
referent/object
Peirce offered an alternative useful formulation consisting of the relation between the Representamen (the sign) which is related to an Object through the intermediary of an Interpretant. The concept of the interpretant sits well with a hermeneutic sense of interpretation. The interpretant is the concept in the head of the receiver of the 'senders' sign which may or may not, of course, be equivalent to the concept in the sender's head. This model provides for the negotiation of meaning, possible mistakes in interpretation or even wilful misinterpretation involved in everyday talk. The interpretant in this model is critical in constructing a sense of reality through negotiation with an other. The notion of the other can be expanded to distinguish the other as living being from the other as language, cultural and social formations which exist at a level of law, logic, tradition.
Lacan provides a model of the manner in which desire is organised and woven into various realities for a child. In brief, without being too simplistic, the biological needs of the individual, if they are to be satisfied must pass through the Other. That is, someone, in the first instance say the mother, must interpret the babies cries to mean 'hunger' or 'discomfort' or as a demand for love and attention. In thus passing through the (m)other's frameworks of interpretation the baby becomes a subject in the (m)other's symbolic universe of discourse and thus also the child becomes shaped into the systems of demands and desires which pervade the world or worlds maintained in play by the discourse(s) of the Other. The process can be approached through the following diagram which echoes Lacan's schema L:
The mother who is experienced in language and the cultural resources of society defines herself and her baby within those symbolic matrices. The baby as S in the above diagram as yet has no language by which to communicate a sense of I-need. This sense of I-need appears initially as one pole in the binary relation 'me'-'mother'. At this stage, the baby is not aware of the full range of the game. It is not simply a binary game of I-demand/you-give between baby and mother. There is a 'third' layer of demand which comes not only from others such as father, grandparents, uncles and aunts but also the Law, Tradition, Society and so on[1]. Steele, drawing on Benhabib, provides a way of thinking about these distinctions by placing face-face relations within the realm of first and second person accounts and relations with the Other as society law and so on as third-person accounts:
In first-/second person accounts, we think of ourselves as agents; in third person accounts, we redescribe ourselves as others in terms that cut across the action vocabulary of the agent so that the agent's vocabulary is determined by forces of which he/she is unaware.
(Steele 1997: 8-9)
Thus the roles the developing child may adopt and the actions or moves that he or she can make are already prescribed on a board game not of his or her making, the shape and rules of which have to be discovered at the level of the reflective-observer who employs science to discover, say, the laws of the market place. Rather than one game, at the intersubjective level there are multiple games, and at the Transsubjective level, it is a game of games where only one game must win. The reality of the game of games as it moves from a binary intersubjective level to include multiple others as well as any Transsubjective organisation generated by religion, schooling, law and tradition has to be learnt . In short, it is learnt that reality is contested by alternative realities and that one has to learn the right moves to get what one wants by playing in the right game at the right time and place. Referential rhetorics are the means by which game-realities are created, negotiated, contested, distorted, subverted and so on. It is the process through which a sense of self, position, agency, strategy and objective-reality is constructed in the minds of individuals. Controlling this sense of reality through rhetoric is critical to the processes of winning and losing.
As examples of referential rhetorics , I include the following which may be found to underlie many contemporary game strategies. They are not systematically ordered nor meant to be in anyway exhaustive. they are merely suggestive and illustrative:
1. magic hand rhetorics - this is the magic hand which transforms bits into a totality. Its most powerful paradigm is to be found in the market economics of Adam Smith where the laws of supply and demand act like invisible hands to bring regulation and law into the individual decisions and actions of individuals. It is to be found in the 'laws of large numbers' beloved of statisticians, or in the feedback mechanisms of behaviourist forms of social engineering. It is the play of a mathematisation of the 'ends' of humanity - to 'perform', to increase one's 'yield' at all times for the benefit of national goals.
2 reductive neutral knowledge rhetorics - this is the language of positivistic science which attempts to eradicate value-laden terms, employing only terms that are open to measurement and manipulation through the methods of logic and mathematics. Popper and others have searched for a neutral or objective language which could represent reality without any intrusion by values, wishes and desires. It is the difference between a game played by a machine and a game played by people between people over a territory continually negotiated into existence with game rules and the ever present possibility of cheating. Do robots cheat? It is not knowledge and rationality that make us human, but the ever present possibility of lying, cheating, seducing. Neutral language rhetorics reduce humans to that of machine-like play, indeed, if they could exclude messy humans altogether they would (c.f. Noble 1995)
3 - virtual/repeatability rhetorics - in the information technology age these represent the ultimate in neutral language rhetorics which construct cyberrealities in virtual spaces. However, far from excluding desire they articulate it while at the same time as reducing living flesh to obsolescence (c.f. Kroker and Weinstein 1994).
In cyberspace games there is always the possibility of reversability through a re-play, there's always the next game where fortunes may be reversed from penury to abundance and vice-versa. Cyberspace and global realities are increasingly becoming one and the same. The issue of the relation between the courses of action and games played in cyber-global realities and those transacted in physical and hence local domains is becoming increasingly urgent.
4.
5. revealed truth, scriptural legalities and the production of fundamentalist rhetorics return as solutions in the face of the uncertainties of cyber-global realities
6. bureaucratic/management rhetorics - these are intensely popular across the Western world. They routinely go with neutral language, that is value free or positivist and objective science rhetorics which underpin technological and technicist systems. Authoritarian rhetoric and the construction of the bureaucratic overseer produces rhetorics which yearn for an ordered universe:
The well-known authoritarianism of Hegel's theory of the state, therefore, is not a matter of mere political preference. It is perfectly consistent with a transubjective ideal of freedom which assigns insight into the meaning and validity of individuals' activities of a 'third' who observes and comprehends, while excluding the standpoint of intersubjectivity
(Benhabib 1986: 98)
Bureaucracy as a means of managing democracies, is totalitarianism's way back into political ascendancy.
7. rhetorics of fatal knowings/games - these are games and knowledges which seek the destruction of alternatives because only one ultimate bureaucratic or religious order can be true.
Referential rhetorics such as these, I have said, obliterate the Real. Is there any way back? Is there any possible return of the repressed, that is, the Real?
Returning Through The Killing
Screens
The great western mythological claim that in the beginning was the word and that the word was made flesh receives its postmodern return as first that god is dead and the second, that it is the word that kills. Postmodernism is frequently conceived of as a strange perhaps nostalgic and desirous backward look while increasing fatally in speed away from whatever is marked as preceding the object of the gaze until an implosion, a shattering occurs. Here neither inside nor outside have any definition. And at that point, what is to be decided? What is to be done? It is the postmodernist pissing in the rain. It is a return that denies a start, fails an ending and chooses according to desire. What is it then, that contemporary desire chooses?
Desire has had a long history and the choice that is made is virtual more than real. That is, desire long since separated from the flesh and has neither a life nor a death but a simulation. The flesh in the image of Gibson (19..) is just useless meat at the end of a computer terminal. Or to point up the difference through another image:
Gérard Titus-Carmel (La grande Bananeraie culturelle, 1969-1970) expose sur des petites consoles de bois laqué blanc 59 bananes identiques, en matière plastique, qui copient une soixantième, mais naturelle, appelée de ce fait, à mûrir puis à se décomposer.[2]
(Dagognet 1997:14)
The living being, the banana, completes its life process, dies and rots. The plastic copies continue unchanged. The postmodern is the age of the plastic and of the uselessness of flesh, indeed the handicap of the flesh as an anchor preventing the final release into the immortal light of cyberspace. Return - or continuance - for the living being is only through sexual reproduction. For the postmodern it is through ever sophisticated simulations: from plastic bananas, to virtual bananas to simulated lifeforms that reproduce only in cyberspace. The contemporary desire is for the real to implode fully into the irreal, the vitual constructed to mathematical perfection. It is a quest, therefore for absolute mastery over destiny where every move has a calculable value, where all possible moves are known and all possible outcomes can be identified and the perfect winning strategy selected. It is the ultimate mathematically perfect market place for the satisfaction of desire.
Today we find an echo of SkinnerŐs Walden II in the politically sponsored collection and publication of league table statistics from anything to hosptial death rates to schools with the highest exam results. There are the Woodhouses, the Reynolds, the Tooleys, the Hargreaves ready and waiting to pronounce on how to manipulate the behaviours of teachers and children to perform better. How do we produce the best possible structure, strategy and process to get what we want from them; of course, all in their best interests you understand?
Elsewhere I have argued how this mentality produces what I called the paranoid curriculum (Schostak 2000; see also). Its exemplar is in the life of Shreber who was subjected by his father to a terrifyingly complete regime of physical and mental control from birth. Not surprisingly it drove him mad. It is perhaps the sheer ineptitude, incompleteness and incapacity to control anything apart from media and politician's attention that saves a nation's children from a similar fate at the hands of its political leaders and those in academia who feed their efforts.
Just as Titus-Carmel's plastic bananas supplanted the living, so contemporary schooling supplants the life of education as a creative, challenging, exciting process of discovery and invention. One might call it the plastic banana curriculum. It appears that the rational and the lived have gone their separate ways. It is this that creates conditions for desire. Can it also create the conditions for a return through the killing screens of simulated desire?
The Practice of Freedom
Transsubjectivity, as Benhabib (1986) demonstrates is incompatible with plurality; more, as I argue, it is incompatible as a social project with the potentials, positive and negative, of postmodern forms. How does one make a return to the living in education?
The practice of freedom, since it is agonistic in being freedom-from as well as freedom-to, is fundamentally political and its supporting framework is democratic. According to Lefort the democratic provides a social order in which power is an 'empty place', indeed, a negative space, a nothingness which we have met before as the loss/void associated with desire. There is here no transsubjective embodiment to act as guarantor. Drawing on Lefort, Mouffe (1993: 11-12) argues that postmodernity means:
a recognition of the impossibility of any ultimate foundation or final legitimation that is constitutive the very advent of the democratic form of society and thus of modernity itself. This recognition comes after several attempts to replace the traditional foundation that lay within God or Nature with an alternative foundation lying in Man and his Reason.
These attempts were doomed to failure from the start because of the radical indeterminacy that is characteristic of modern democracy. Nietzsche had already understood this when he proclaimed that the death of God was inseparable from the crisis of humanism.
Democracy thus provides the practical limit to the universalisation of the individual as a category, as a Lord, over the intersubjective community of others. Democracy sees strength not weakness in the variability and indeterminacy inherent in human action and communication:
Human action,..., remains perpetually caught in a dialectic where the discrepancy between intention and consequence is never eliminated. This must be the case because the source of the discrepancy is not simply that the world does not permit realisation of our purposes. This may well be. More significant, the discrepancy between action and consequence arises through the misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and misconstrual of our acts by others. To be an acting agent is to live in this interpreted world where one's own understanding of one's deeds is but one point of view, one interpretive framework, among others. ..... Human action, unlike objects and things, are not the property of their agents, or their 'work'. They do not embody or express a univocal meaning or purpose. Such a meaning or purpose can only be determined interpretatively; in this sense, human action is fundamentally indeterminate.
(Benhabib 1986: 87)
However, realising the revolution, that is, the democratic revolution where the power of elites to rule was effectively contested, has never been completed and the gains made are today very much under threat as new rulers gain augmented bureaucratic and technical powers to surveil, organise and manipulate populations whether as pupils, citizens, voters, consumers, or audiences.
The practice of freedom, thus, cannot be subjected to a transsubjectively ordained doctrine, a system of concepts, a symbolic framework however complex. The practice of freedom is a way of life that celebrates a given existing intelligent being in the context of others. Freedom involves the initiation of a series of actions or events which then can either be abandoned or projected forward as a lived condition. It is in this play of possibility that freedom is experienced, not as a simulated exercise, but as living being who, like all living things, is subject to death.
Returning through Education
Education as the practice of freedom has as its function to enable a free play of ideas and expressions in creative permissiveness, forming, de-forming, building, destroying. It is the life-death process itself. Boothby (1991) has argued that freudŐs famed death drive can be seen in Lacan to be not a drive towards physical death but the process of freedom itself. It is experienced at that point when the fragile shell of the ego anticipates and undergoes radical transformation. It is the death of the old categories, the old matrix of games necessary for creativity and the production of the new.
Fundamental to the symbolic, as conceived by Lacan, is the desire to legislate. It is symbolised by the Nom du Père and just as quickly ironised by the homophonic Non du Père and the Non dupe erre[3]. It could be argued that this punning formulation already sows the seeds of the Nom du Pere's own de-construction, its own implosion and opens the 'gap' for creativity. I have argued elsewhere (Schostak 1996) that the role of education is produce the moment where all is possible and all is de-constructable in order to generate the alternatives essential for educational dialogue and action. An initial comparison may be made with this simplistic characterisation of the therapist's role:
If we are in pain, we sometimes pay to have our language of constitution challenged by a therapist, whose job is to help us integrate the forces working behind our backs into our first-person accounts of ourselves. Third-person accounts often make unflattering redescriptions of our ethical self-understandings; however, these accounts are not views from nowhere; they ultimately appeal to a revise ethical self-understanding in which we can live.
(Steele 1997: 9)
The revised ethical self-understanding may be viewed in two ways. First, it may be what Lacan and others characterise and criticise as the result of ego-psychology. Here the task is to bring the client in line with some positive and ultimately conservative and conformist view which enables the client to handle more comfortably the contradictions and problems of everyday life. Or, it could mean that the client has de-constructed the third person accounts working behind our backs and creatively generated and explored alternatives which more successfully integrate what was previously repressed, silenced, rejected, marginalised, or treated as trash.
Education, as the practice of freedom in everyday life, is the initiation of a creative and productive series which owes nothing to any sense of universalisation of fixed knowledge and value categories. It contests any noption of a transsubjective ordering of life and is thus quite distinct from any paradigm modelling itself upon the Hegelian process where:
The past is the 'property' of universal Spirit, in the sense that the world-historical activity of labour has humanised and transformed externality, and has created history out of nature. This corresponds to the transformative process of labouring activity. Now in taking possession of this heritage, the individual must recall that what appears as a given, external reality to him is in fact his work, and has meaning and significance only in relation to his activity. This process of recollection, which brings the external into relation with the subject, presupposes labour qua valorising activity. And such a perspective is only possible insofar as consciousness adopts the standpoint of universal Spirit, or identifies itself with the 'phenomenological we.' Education consists in overcoming the standpoint of consciousness and in seeing that one is both Substance and Subject of this process.
(Benhabib 1986:53)
Education, if it is to maintain the practice of freedom, must overcome any desire to become one and the same with a Subject and Substance of some totalising History. Education is the ultimate disinvestment in illusion. It is the dynamic point of creativity, of difference and dialogue which exists, transforms, develops, produces only because there is always an alternative.
References
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Benhabib, S. (1986) Critique, Norm, and utopia. A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press
Boothby, R. (1991) death and desire. psychoanalytic theory in LacanŐs return to Freud, New York and London: Routledge
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Schostak, J. F. (1996) 'Teacher education: notes towards a radical view', in: McBride, R., Teacher Education Policy: Issues arising from Research and Experience Falmer, Lewes
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