Education and violation: conceptualizing power, domination, and agency in the hidden curriculum

Abstract

This article offers a theory of a process of violation that connects macropolitical effects to the intimate terrain of subject production. I describe power, as violation, in terms of a simultaneous process of construction and destruction, which seeks its satisfaction in an injury to the very identities it is complicit in producing. Starting from analyses of power and racism in the historical Black radical tradition, and in particular the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and in contrast to prevailing conceptualizations in critical and poststructuralist theory, I describe violation as active and motivated rather than the mere by-product of a more fundamental imperative of reproduction or normalization. This analysis foregrounds the continuous process of assault that characterizes the hidden curriculum of schooling for students of color and other marginalized students, particularly with regard to the contemporary clinical and academic discourses that work to name, know, and organize identities. I argue that the pathologization of student selves by these discourses is a more complex process than the simple circulation of norms, and that this process is always characterized by a simultaneous struggle for resistance and survival. The article describes the ways in which critical theory in education will need to become more sensitive not only to the logic of violation and to the modes of domination that it sets in motion, but also to the persistent integrity and agency of those whom it seeks to subjugate.

Keywords:

• violation
• hidden curriculum
• agency

Notes

1. The term ‘critical’ in the field of education can refer to a broad range of intellectual projects; I use it here to indicate scholarship in educational theory which, borrowing from Marxist and neo-Marxist analyses, understands social structure and processes of domination as governed by the imperative of hegemony and as produced within the historical dialectic of struggle, especially on the terrain of ideology, between dominant and subordinate classes and groups. (‘Marxist’ is not an appropriate designation for the whole of this field since much of the work that builds on the above understandings falls outside of, or moves beyond, the Marxist tradition proper.) As I describe, the work of Du Bois and Fanon challenges a narrow construction of these assumptions about power, instead suggesting for educators the possibility of a deeper analysis of domination, and a broader and richer meaning for the notion of the ‘critical’ itself.

2. Hardt and Negri (see especially Commonwealth, 2009) propose a much more fluid conception of biopolitics, which incorporates an omnipresent process of resistance in addition to the dominative force of biopower from above, and their account shares my emphasis on the persistent agency of the oppressed. However, their argument remains caught in a basic (and Foucauldian) contradiction, since they conceive of the same category (biopower) as both the essential form of domination and control and at the same time as the indispensable resource for resistance against this very control.