Pedagogical postures: a feminist search for a geometry of the educational relation

Abstract

Inspired by Adriana Cavarero’s recent work on maternal inclinations as a postural term, the overall purpose of this article is to seek out a geometry of the educational relation that is alien to the masculine myth of the ‘economic man’. Drawing on Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’s critique of the marketization of education, reading their giving ‘shape and form’ to the scholastic school through the geometry of Cavarero’s ‘maternal inclinations’, the article shows how images and metaphors associated with the posture of rectitude infuse the scholastic model of the school. At the same time, we argue, it testifies to a geometry of an inclined subject and, in doing so, it offers an opening for recovering the significance of the feminine and maternal to educational theory. Affirming this opening, the paper makes a shift of emphasis from scholastic techniques to educational postures.

Keywords:

• Scholastic school
• maternal inclination
• rectitude
• geometry
• educational relation
• Adriana Cavarero

Acknowledgments

This co-authored work was supported by the Swedish National Research Council (VR) as part of the research project ‘Lived Values: A Pedagogical-Philosophical Ground Working of the Value Basis of Swedish Schools’ (2015).

Notes

1. Even if the argument put forth in this paper has some resemblances with Noddings (1984) feminine theory of an ethics of care, the paper seeks to address the fostering task of the school from the philosophy of language (Irigaray; Cavarero) rather than from moral philosophy and care ethics. Hence, and due to limited space, it will not address Noddings’ work directly.

2. The debate over essentialism in feminist theory centres around the fact that any affirmation of a female ‘essence’ risks reinstating the inequality and patriarchy that feminist theory intends to overcome. Against this background, different arguments have been put forth in order to show how to read the ‘essentialist’ elements in Irigaray’s work differently (see e.g. Margaret Whitford, Diana Fuss, Elisabeth Grosz, Gayatri Spivak and Rosi Braidotti). According to Diana Fuss (1989), there is always a ‘double gesture’ in Irigaray’s feminist writings in the sense that she simultaneously constructs and deconstructs the ‘essences’ of women. For an excellent introduction to Irigaray’s work, se Jones (2011).

3. By engaging in this kind of ‘playful imitation’, Irigaray can be said to articulate the point when the phallocentric logic no longer can uphold its presumed self-identity and neutrality, opening up the dominant linguistic order to that which is other than man (e.g. woman) (Xo 1995).

4. Both in our article here and in Cavarero’s work, inclinations always come in the plural, as a set of postures, whereas rectitude comes in the singular, as one posture.

5. What makes this image remarkable and therefore exemplary in Cavarero’s (2016) argument is that, by placing the child beside the mother and not in her arms or in her lap, da Vinci breaks with the monumental symmetry of his time, creating instead a ‘movement of a relationality’ reflected in the maternal posture. The commonplace composition of this motive at the time, Cavarero argues, would have been to create a vertical and symmetrical pyramid of the three figures in the image (ibid.). Hence, the image of regeneration and natality that the image displays offers a powerful counter-image to a western philosophical tradition more often preoccupied with death (ibid.; Arendt 1961/1993).

6. For Cavarero, the central ‘message’ of this image, contrasts profoundly to the ages of ‘sermons on moral uprightness’ (2016, 14) that have been delivered by the church, and, hence, points in another direction than the guilt and sin that masculine theologies traditionally have associated with inclinations (e.g. ‘emotional inclinations’, ‘sexual inclinations’ or ‘immoral inclinations’).

7. As part of the feminist exercise in thought performed in the paper (Irigaray, Cavarero) we have deliberately ascribed ‘positive’ conventional characteristics to the image of the mother in order to juxtaposition it to the – to our minds – equally ‘positive’ image of the scholastic school. We are at the same time fully aware of the different ways in which the mother and the maternal has been problematized and criticized within feminist philosophy (e.g. Kristeva). Within philosophy of education, there is also a tendency to ‘romanticise’ the idea of the mother as the primary care-giver, as in Nodding’s ethics of care, which has been subject to some critique (e.g. Hoagland 1991). These critical voices, however, reach beyond the scope of this paper

8. This comparison can also be done by placing the book cover of Cavarero’s Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (2017) next to the book cover of Masschelein and Simon’s In Defence of the School: A Public Issue (2013). In the first case we see the inclined postures captured in da Vinci’s oil painting of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (1503–1519); in the second case we see the erect postures in the drawing on ‘Aristotle’s Physics’ by George Lichton, a student at Leuven University (1467).

9. In this way, the scholastic school issues a far-reaching critique of the ‘classification apparatus’ that is being developed in schools today which, in the name of seeking out the ‘uniqueness’ of each child, ties the child to ‘the old’, that is, to its background, and deprives it of the ability to begin something new. This apparatus, Masschelein and Simons write, ‘turns children and young people into objects of classification and intervention and lock them into their so-called individuality and mutual differences’ (2013, 62).

10. For an retelling of Plato’s myth of the cave, see e.g. Söderbäck (2016); Jones (2011).

11. This patriarchal forgetfulness of more fundamental existential conditions in the West (as, for example, place, matter, and embodiment), Irigaray argues, has created a ‘deadly culture’ of domination, war, and violence – a culture that reproduces, she writes, ‘the forgetting of life, a lack of recognition of debt to the mother (…) of women who do the work of producing and maintaining life (…)’ (Irigaray 1993, 7).

12. In the text ’In search for the mother through the looking glass’, Fanny Söderbäck refers to a conversation with Irigaray where she (Irigaray) distinguishes between origin [origine] from beginning [commencement] (2016, 20). In order to make new beginnings or, as in this paper, a more fecund educational culture possible, dual beginnings are necessary that do not juxtapose one another but that relate to one another in difference.

13. We might of course reduce the complexity of Plato’s thinking here but, as Jones (2011) makes clear, it is nevertheless this Platon-ism and the search for one origin that it generates, that a thinker like Irigaray is seeking to work against.

14. The ‘cave/womb metaphor’ is well known within feminist philosophical critique, since it testifies to an age-old forgetfulness of the material, the mother and the bodily in the history of western philosophy (Irigaray 1985b; Jones 2011).

15. Please note that we are juxtaposing ’the cave classroom’ to ’the womb-like-classroom’. In Jan Masschelein’s latest work (forthcoming) ’the cave’ is used fictionally, as a fable, although it is nevertheless a ‘real place’ (although a ‘place without place’) – a ’milieu or chronotope’ for ‘spatial and temporal experience’ (emphases in original). In our argument, however, ‘the womb-like-classroom’ is used as a metaphor of a classroom that is not as closed off from the outside world, and not as impenetrable than the cave. The womb is used for indicating the bodily place of origin from which and through which homo educandus – women, men and animals alike – come into the world. Hence, the ‘womb-likeness’ of the classroom is used to remind us of this ‘embodiedness’ and embeddedness and, thus, of the physical conditions and gestures of the educational relation upon which the scholastic techniques depend. The feminine connotations used here in relation to ‘the womb-like-classroom’ are exaggerated of course, but the purpose is both to contest the absoluteness of the ‘erect’ and vertical posture as well as to set the inclined postures free, as to become part of a language of education that resists the language of ‘economic man’ (e.g. Cavarero).