‘Untimely meditations’: on overlooking ‘examination’ and undermining ‘meritocracy’. A review of Benign violence. Education in and beyond the Age of Reason

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Notes

1. ‘Pincer movement’? That sounds too military, too strategic by far. We need a more modest note, a hint of bathos – let’s go for the past/present relation as characterised by a ‘tweezer movement’.

2. ‘Foucault and Education: Retrospect and Prospect’, sponsored by Pedagogy, Culture & Society/University of Sheffield, 29 January 2014, at the University of Sheffield, UK. Reappraising Foucault seems fashionable, see also ‘Rethinking Foucault’ Critical Sexology Conference, 14 February 2014 at the University of Birmingham, UK. Nice timing.

3. Badiou’s notion of the ‘event’ is interestingly ‘exceptional’ in its conception. An ‘event’ is ‘an interval rather than a term’, and ‘There is no hero of the event’ (Badiou 2005, 206, 207).

4. This may sound harsh, in relation to little Michael Gove. But the social Darwinism that characterises much of our thinking (including all those ‘hard-wired’ stories from the African savannah) play versions of that game, as if anthropological diversity (so carefully and comprehensively attested) had never happened and never been written about.

5. What’s the difference? Intervention rather than mere comprehension. Both Badiou and Žižek (and Marx before them) acknowledge versions of that (Badiou 2009).

6. In relation to US Higher Education, Nealon points out that the management/professional balance is deeply skewed towards an institutionalised management, whose surveillance and control of the professional academic is ‘an entirely new form of power’ (Nealon 2012, 39).