‘Knowledge is power’? A Lacanian entanglement with political ideology in education

Abstract

This paper explores the possibilities for critical policy analysis afforded by Lacanian discourse theory, with its emphasis on the unconscious and the agency of the letter, and considers its significance for critical policy analysis in education, in ways that complement and supplement the insights of post-structuralist discourse theory. To explore these possibilities, the paper examines the fantasies residing in neoliberal education policy’s vision of the knowledge economy, before focusing on a Lacanian analysis of the ideologies of knowledge and power manifested in the US KIPP (Knowledge is Power) charter school network, in order to think about how neoliberalism’s obsession with knowledge as control and mastery might be unsettled by what Lacan called ‘the sublimity of stupidity’ – by engagement with a psychoanalytic epistemology that recognizes how conscious knowledge may be interrupted by the unknowing of the unconscious and that places neoliberal regimes of knowledge in a dialectical relationship with non-knowledge, ignorance, stupidity and desire.

Keywords:

• charter schools
• discourse analysis
• education policy
• KIPP
• politics
• psychoanalytic theory

Notes

1. The French term jouissance literally means enjoyment, though it has sexual connotations lacking in the latter. It differs from pleasure in that it also involves suffering and can be thought of as pleasurable pain, a contradiction that captures the paradox of the human condition (Evans, 1996). In this paper I follow the convention of McGowan (2013) and others in using the English term ‘enjoyment’.

2. I am grateful to Tatiana Suspitsyana (personal communication) for this expression.

3. The symbolic, along with the imaginary and the Real, is one of Lacan’s three registers of the psyche. It is the realm of language, a social system of signification and regulation, and of the law and prohibition. As such, the symbolic mediates the individual’s relations with others and with the world. But by barring direct access to the objects of the world and to the other, the symbolic entails the experience of loss. At the same time, the symbolic mediates and constrains the subject’s very possibilities for understanding itself.

4. The imaginary register is characterized by its tendency to seek out and hold on to perceptual unities or gestalts. These same qualities are also characteristics of one of its main forms of defense involving the projection of fantasies (2006), whereby simplified and reductive, yet also harmonious and coherent, pictures of reality are deployed at the expense of engagement with more complex, but also more threatening, versions of the world.

5. As Verhaeghe and others point out, in Lacanian theory there is no such thing as a truth that can be put fully into words. The best we can hope to achieve is a half-speaking of truth, ‘le me-dire de la vérité’. But as Vighi (Evans, 1996, p. 60) reminds us, this ‘does not imply that beyond this half there is some unreachable hidden substance. We should not transcendentalize Lacan’s notion of truth. Rather, he suggests that beyond this half there is, literally, nothing – a nothing, however, which is given to experience as plus-de-jouir’ or surplus jouissance.

6. For example, see some of the comments at the following: http://thewashingtonteacher.blogspot.com.au/2009/04/no-money-for-you-dc-teachers.html

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Clarke

Until recently in the School of Education at UNSW Australia, Matthew Clarke is Chair and Professor of Education at York St John University in England. His research interests include the interface of political and psychoanalytic theory as a space for critical policy analysis, particularly in relation to the implications of neoliberal education policies for equity and for teachers’ professional identities. His forthcoming books include: The other side of education: A Lacanian encounter with education policy in 8½ words, published by Sense, and; Teacher education and the political: The power of negative thinking, co-authored with Anne Phelan and published by Routledge.