State-formation, teaching techniques, and globalisation as aporia

Abstract

This paper conjoins Derrida's analysis of aporia and boderlines with Foucault's genealogical sensibilities to rethink the attribution of recent events in education to globalisation. Three analytical domains are linked to historicise student-teacher interaction: studies of pedagogical techniques, sociological analyses of the state, and philosophical conceptions of Being and desire. This confluence of domains makes apparent multiple efforts to transgress noncrossable borders in educational work, suggesting new conceptualisations of justice and ethical responsibility in the analysis of classroom life.

Notes

In Baker (2001a) I theorised multiple trajectories that converged to produce belief in the child as a discrete subject amenable to administration and metaphored as both past and future. The use of quotes around “the child” suggests the historical mutability. This paper draws in part on this larger historical work to elaborate (dis)continuities (conceived as holes rather than as straight lines) that have made possible the event that Smith describes.

Globalization is the term more frequently used in analyses published within the USA. Americanization as used within the USA has historically referred to “acculturation of immigrants” theses. It is used more pointedly as a term outside the USA to problematise domination. For a discussion of whether such terms are synonymous and/or are more rhetorical than substantive in the purchase they provide see essays in Bach, Broech, and Schulenberg (2003), Wagnleitner and May (2000) and Beck, Sznaider, and Winter (2003).

My conjoining of these seemingly incommensurate philosophical approaches to writing focuses on their overlapping sensibilities regarding instability in the language and logic of entities. First, my treatment of categories such as “Australia”, “America”, “Europe”, and so forth as sliding signifiers from the outset rather than in conclusion suggests an indebtedness to Derrida's analytics of aporia. Second, the casting “in historical perspective” of the micropolitics of ontological constructions suggests the analytical leverage of genealogy to the documentation of such instabilities, slides, and holes discussed herein.

I have discussed in another paper (Baker, 1999) how the perceived stability within constructs such as “Western” has become a functional delimitation that then incites the identification of instability within other constructs such as dis/ability or within cultures posited as “elsewhere”.

I have theorised the politics of canonisation in anglophone educational literature in Baker (2001a, b).

I use inherit here in its older sense, not as continuous passing down through a bloodline but as punctuated appearance of similarities. To inherit thus implies holes and is closer in meaning here to simulacra.

There is little doubt about the pervasiveness of electronic media in day-to-day activities relative to ancestors, however defined. I do not consider pervasiveness to be reducible to direct contact with such media. Even those who may have never watched, read, or heard various forms of electronic media such as motion pictures or computers may be affected by their emergence.

In Aporias Derrida (1993) explicitly discusses this in regard to a Europe/not-Europe distinction.

Levi-Strauss (1958) discusses his reliance upon structural linguistics, especially the indebtedness to functionalism rather than the historicism of single origin or culture circle theories of the early 20th century. For a discussion of the turn to “poststructural” sensibilities in ethnographic approaches in education see St.Pierre and Pillow (2000).

Foucault critiques the translation of Nietzsche's ursprung, herkunft, and erstestehung into a single term, “origin”.

See James Van Horn Melton's (1988) analysis of the messy beginnings of compulsory schooling in Prussia and Austria. What “Europe's” deployment refers to, and what it doesn't, within various texts is a site of analysis, hence a different yet similar sense of indispensability and inadequacy to Chakrabarty's operates around its deployment here.

I am reluctant to distinguish text from context here for all the reasons that Derrida elaborated in his lecture “La différance”, in addition to other ones. For Derrida, texts are not simply printed words and can include a range of artifacts, but nor are texts upward pointing signifiers that defer to an objective observer of a wider “context” for their authority. In Aporias (Derrida, 1993, p. 9) he argues that “No context can determine meaning to the point of exhaustiveness. Therefore the context neither produces nor guarantees impassable borders, thresholds that no step could pass”. In this paper it is precisely the production of “context”, of a perceived “wider” entity or grouping, whether classified in linguistic, religious, ethnic, or temporal terms, that becomes part of the probléma. For an older but eloquent elaboration of the context/text argument see Roger Chartier (1988).

The acknowledgment of “blind spots” (that occur outside of an assumed ocularcentrism) are necessary in Levinas and Lingis’ sense in Totality and infinity (1969). Preserving and honouring alterity rather than claiming to “know” definitively is an important ethical orientation that sustains “difference” without tying it back to a norm against which difference is identified as deviation and reduced to a (failed) image of the same.

See Locke's Proposals for the bringing up of children of paupers (1876) for his segregationist policies, as well as his comments regarding the defiling influence of servants in Some thoughts concerning education.

See Friedrich Kittler's (1990) analysis in Discourse networks 1800/1900 of German language, alphabetisation, and the equation of woman=nature=mother=absolute-origin-of-acculturation for a deeper and well-documented discussion of these shifts between 1800 and 1900.

Herbart opens The science of education by critiquing first Locke, then Rousseau.

For a more detailed discussion of Herbart and recapitulation theory see chapter 4 of In perpetual motion (Baker, 2001a), as well as Dunkel (1969, 1970).

I raise this repackaging of Derrida that takes place around his work not because it “proves” or “disproves” whether he should be read and not because it avoids the realisation that his works were given publicity in the main in countries now called “European”. Rather, it behooves consideration of what “wider” means and why the labeling of a “wider entity” appears necessary as either a form of attack or defense. The “wider” and more urgent question to me is not what is “European” or Euro-theory or whether the master's tools can dismantle the master's house from “within”, but a different kind of paradox: how it is that scholars “located within” the privileges of the Academy can claim to know definitively what is inside or outside any construct, that is, the question of the historicity of expertise and narrative construction that play out as confidence and as deeming “active voice” the most compelling literary style. See interviews in Derrida and Ferraris (2002), where Derrida discusses his life in Algeria.

It is important to recognise that the continuous implication of “desire” as a blockage does not confer or deny the status of such a blockage's reality or universality.

Such an approach does not avoid responsibility because “a sort of nonpassive endurance of the aporia” is the condition of responsibility and of decision (Derrida, 1993, p. 16). It instead resembles Derrida's (1993, p. 13) principled refusal to assert an easy solution via a technical responsibility.