The sociology of education as the history of the present: fabrication, difference and abjection

Abstract

The paper explores the fabrications of human kinds in pedagogical research. It examines the social and psychological sciences of education as producing independent spaces for the study of people in order to act on them and as a cultural thesis for people to act for themselves. Further, it explores the principles generated about who the child is and should be. It is argued that the making of human kinds embodies particular historically generated modes of representing the possibilities of life; and these modes function to divide, differentiate and abject particular qualities of people and populations into unlivable spaces. This comparativeness produces inequality as it strives for equality. The analysis engages educational studies in a conversation with history, philosophy, political and cultural studies that draw on particular European studies brought into the US to challenge its philosophical, analytical and social/psychological traditions.

Keywords:

• history of present
• education sciences
• social exclusion
• abjection
• critical studies

Notes

1. My use of ontic is to suggest that fabrication is not a social construction. It responds to things of the world and is also part of its materiality.

2. Adolescence existed as a word previously but was inserted into the scientific psychologies at the turn of the twentieth century. It functioned as an effect of power.

3. There are attempts to bring in this position via Hacking's discussion of human kinds into a Bourdieuian sociology, such as Rawolle and Lindgard (2008).

4. Much of the discussion related to this observation is explored in the historicizing of cosmopolitanism as principles ordering and classifying schooling in Popkewitz (2008).

5. In a historical sense, the French, German, British and American philosophies and political theories of the long nineteenth century (uneven processes that are visible in the eighteenth century and through the turn of the twentieth century) embodied different notions about the subject of reason and rationality associated with enlightenment and the notion of the cosmopolitan citizen. Epistemologically, the different enlightenments did maintain a homology in inscribing notions of progress in social and political life, producing notions of human agency that valorized the relation of the social and individual, and making possible the calculation of the present as a method to effect the future. This is discussed in general in Cassirer (1932/1951) and Dumont (1991/1994).

6. My focus is on the social science but the joining of these two registers is embodied in the institutionalization of welfare state and schooling as well.

7. The Social Question was a central concern of American Progressivism that is often missed in educational histories. Furthermore, it embodied a Protestant Reformism that involved movements in both North America and northern Europe and England (see e.g. Rodgers, 1998) and taken up in counter-enlightenment traditions of Italy and Spain as well.

8. This is discussed in Popkewitz (2011a).

9. The notion of community that US social theories translated and transmogrified from the German Gemeinschaft was about culture in which the individual devotes all his care to the development of his personality – the self-cultivation associated with Bildung. The community was a holist feeling and orientation that was subordinate to political and social authorities. This disposition is comprehensible, according to Dumont (1991/1994) in relation to Lutheranism, where the individualism is important as the person interested in God alone and the secularized world. The notion of community spread through pietism and as a reaction to secular Enlightenment, the French and the revolution. The synthesis of holism and individualism was in Herder to vindicate German culture against the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment. In the US, cosmopolitanism of the American enlightenment connected with principles of Calvinist reformism. For the Calvinist influence, see Tröhler (2011).

10. The idea of progress was thought of before, but becomes visible in its ‘modern’ configuration related to particular cosmopolitan principles of ‘reason’ and rationality linked to notions of society, individuality and human interests in the organization of social change.

11. As someone who studied Greek art, I recognize that I am merging historical nuances to make general points.

12. I discuss this in Popkewitz (2008).

13. The construction of difference in the name of rescuing the urban and rural child in a national teacher education reform program is discussed in Popkewitz (1998).

14. French sociology in the tradition of Durkheim through Bourdieu and other contemporary (re)visioning discusses its purpose as ‘critical’. See Thévenot (2011), Boltanski and Thévenot (1999). Also, see Popkewitz and Fendler (1999).

15. My interest in Ranciere is with his analytic and historical inquiry into the relation of knowledge, equality/inequality and the political; and leave aside for the moment his normative insertions, although thought-provoking, about the non-institutionalization of democracy and the attempt toward a socialist political theory of democracy. See Rancière's The Hatred of Democracy (2006).