The Psychic Life of Power (1997), represents Judith Butler´s attempt to explain the specific mechanisms of how the subject is formed through submission to power, as well as the mental form that power takes. Her theorisation is based on insights from psychoanalysis, as well as her own performative theory of gender identity in which gender, as a social artifice, is produced from a productive reiteration of hegemonic norms (Butler, 1993). In order to describe how Butler’s work can be used for understanding emancipation in digital environments, it is first necessary to explain her use of the concepts of passionate attachment, foreclosure and interpellation.

Butler (1997, p.7) argues that “no subject emerges without a ‘passionate attachment’ to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent (even if that passion is ‘negative’ in the psychoanalytic sense)’’. It is the formation of this unconscious attachment through dependency that leaves the subject open to ‘subordination’ and ‘exploitation’ and which supports the order of power. Important for Butler is the notion of foreclosure, which differs from repression in that “a repressed desire may have once lived apart from its prohibition…foreclosed desire is rigorously barred, constituting the subject through a certain kind of preemptive loss.” (Butler, 1997, p.23). In Lacan’s theory this foreclosure represents a psychic exclusion that is unrepresentable within the subject’s symbolic economy (Campbell, 2001). Foreclosure is important for Butler in that it structures the passionate attachment through regulation of the objects to which the subject may or may not create such attachments.

Butler shares with Lacan, therefore, the notion of social existence as a forced choice. While in Lacan, in order to exist at all the subject must accept the fundamental alienation that comes with being inscribed into the socio-symbolic field or risk psychotic exclusion, so too in Butler, the subject only emerges through a passionate attachment to the very agency that subordinates it, and is only able to affirm an identity in the space of the socio-symbolic order through foreclosures that determine which passionate attachments are and are not possible.

Butler argues, however, that this socio-symbolic network is only sustained and reproduced through repeated performative gestures as subjects recognise themselves and affirm their places in it (see Butler, 1993). The subject’s dependency on the iterability of performative acts for its existence opens up a space for resistance and transformation, as identical resignification is impossible.Resistance and resignification is therefore part and parcel of the ‘self-subverting’ mechanism of power itself (Butler, 1997, p.93).

Butler’s theory is compelling, therefore, for theorists of critical education and the internet as it provides theoretical support for the claims of those cyberoptimists who argue that the internet provides a forum for resistance where subjects can reconfigure and displace the symbolic coordinates of their socio-symbolic existence through ‘resignification’ and ‘performative displacements’.

Butler also makes extensive use of Althusser’s notion of interpellation. This occurs as when in Althusser’s classic example an officer of the law hails a subject and the subject turns around and accepts the terms by which s/he was hailed. The individual is thus recognised as a social subject and is subjugated to the law. In this way subjects are constituted by ideological state apparatuses (ISA) such as the family, schools and the media. Butler argues that a subject interpellated by injurious terms, including racist abuse, will ‘embrace’ these terms as they are what constitute the subject socially. However, paradoxically, it is only by being occupied by this term that ultimately the subject can resist and oppose it:

In this way, a certain place for psychoanalysis is secured in that any mobilization against subjection will take subjection as its resource, and that attachment to an injurious interpellation will, by way of a necessary alienated narcissism, become the condition under which resignifying that interpellation becomes possible […] the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the passionate attachment to subjection without which subject formation – and re-formation – cannot succeed. (Butler, 1997, p.104-105)

Butler therefore differs from social theorists who claim that injurious terms fix the subject into a fixed space and are therefore necessarily debilitating. Making use of Butler’s theories, Eichhorn (2001, p.297) argues that:

[...] to be interpellated, even in an ill-fitting manner, might enable subjects to contest the grounds upon which they have been called into being, and potentially to reclaim the labels that have historically worked to entrench their subordinate status. The reclamation of queer in the context of some lesbian and gay communities stands as one example of how a derogatory label has been invested with a new meaning, in this case serving as a mobilizing slogan through its repeated use in liberatory contexts. (Eichhorn, 2001, p.297 italics in original)

Eichhorn argues that the speed and disorientation of the internet as well as the fact that virtual environments allow a wide circulation of hate speech means that it is especially favourable for a widespread repetition and recontextualisation of hate speech which can be invested with different meanings. The internet would offer heightened opportunities for countering hate speech that may not be possible in other environments due to the fact that the effects of speech is arguable less predictable online. Furthermore, subjects have a greater opportunity to talk back on the internet as the opportunity and authority to speak is less likely to be ruled out on the basis of identity (Eichhorn, 2001). Reflection on these characteristics of computer mediated communication would be an integral part of any critical digital literacy program with the aim of empowering subjects to resist interpellation.

References:

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Campbell, K. (2001). The Plague of the Subject: Psychoanalysis and Judith Butler’s ‘Psychic Life of Power’. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies , 6:1/2, 35-48.

Eichhorn, K. (2001). Re-in/citing linguistic injuries: speech acts, cyberhate, and the spatial and temporal character of networked environments. Computers and Composition , 18:3, 293-304.

SOCRATES: Well, what line do we get it from? Try and tell us exactly. And if you don’t want to use numbers, you can just show us. [He hands the slave his stick.] What line?

SLAVE: [He stares at the drawing.]Honest to god, Socrates, I don’t know!

SOCRATES: There, see that, Meno? You realize where he is now on the road towards remembering? At first, he didn’t know which line gave us an area of eight square feet…and he still doesn’t know now; but the point is, back then he thought he knew, and he answered as if he knew, without the slightest hesitation – he didn’t feel baffled. But now he does feel baffled; and as well as not knowing, he also doesn’t think he knows.

MENO: Yes, that’s right.

SOCRATES: So isn’t he better off now – as regards the thing he didn’t know?

MENO: Yes, I think he is.

Socrates then proceeds to lead the slave to the correct answer through a carefully constructed series of questions. The slave is only able to reach the correct answer because he realised the error of his first attempt and this moment of bemusement, confusion, or numbness  is, according to Socrates, the moment of aporia.

Nicholas Burbles (2000) identifies the aporia as “a crisis of choice, of action and identity, and not only of belief. When I have too many choices, or no choices, I don’t have a choice; I’m stuck. I don’t know how to go on” (Burbles, 2000, p.173). According to Burbules, there are four types of aporias:

1. the aporia of the Meno – that leaves us in numbness without a clue of how to proceed;
2. the aporia which occurs when we have lost our way and where there are too many paths to choose from;
3. the aporia in which we are unable to recognise a path that is already there;
4. finally, the aporia that occurs when we can see the path we should follow, but for whatever reason, we are unable to follow it.

It is Burbules’ assertion that the Socratic method – as demonstrated in the Meno – is manipulative. Socrates’ questions are rarely genuine and simply serve the purpose of moving the slave through a step-by-step line of reasoning (elenchus) predetermined by Socrates himself.

This authoritarian and rather manipulative style of teaching, as illustrated in the Meno and elsewhere, can be called the “conversion” model: inducing the learner to abandon a corrupt set of beliefs, to experience the crisis of aporia, and then, with the force of revelatory discovery, to be moved into the light of truth (we see this point quite literally illustrated in Plato’s famous metaphor of the cave in the Republic). Socrates’ dialectic leads the learner into a state of aporia and undertakes to lead the learner out again. […] This narrow view of teaching provides only the thinnest understanding of where questions come from, of the kinds of confusion students typically feel, and of the nature of aporia itself. By itself, it cannot support an inquiry-oriented pedagogy; it may even interfere with it. (Burbles, 2000, p.183)

So what would an inquiry-oriented pedagogy look like? According to Burbles such a pedagogy would consist in the teacher and learner asking the right kind of questions. While leading learners through an aporia via the careful use of pre-fabricated questions may move learners to a pre-determined outcome, this method in no way helps learners to be able to find their own way on their own.

Teachers can do more for learners, not by giving them maps, but by helping them to learn how to create maps, to draw lines and make connections themselves […] Teaching … is not a process of conversion but of translation: of making sufficient associations between the familiar and the foreign to allow the learner to make further associations, to find other paths, and eventually become a translator, a pathmaker, on their own. (p. 184)

The idea is therefore for teachers to ask questions that they don’t have the answers to. The teacher should thus expose his/her own doubts and join the students in a common journey of inquiry. Following on from Wittgenstein, Burbules argues that in order to get out of an aporia, it is first necessary to understand how one arrived at it. The role of the teacher is not only to share the state of aporia with the students, but to aid them in their understanding of how they got into it. “Aporia…is not a brief interstitial moment, but an ongoing condition that generates the questions and problems that move us to seek new understandings” (p.184).

Rancière also identifies the Socratic method as one of stultification in that Socrates interrogates in order to instruct (Rancère, 1991). Emancipatory education requires that teachers interrogate their students in the “manner of men, and not in the manner of scholars” (p.29) and this can only be carried out by a teacher who knows no more than the student; a teacher who has “never made the voyage before him”. Hence the title of his book: The Ignorant Schoolmaster.

References:

Burbules, N. (2000). Aporias, Webs, and Passages: Doubt as an Opportunity to Learn. Curriculum Inquiry , 30:2, 171-187.

Plato. (2005). Protagoras and Meno. London: Penguin.

Rancière, J. (1991). The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster tells the story of Joseph Jacotot – a revolutionary forced into exile in 1818 following the restoration of the monarchy after the French revolution – who settles in Flanders as a teacher of French literature. Joseph Jacotot could not speak Flemish, and his students knew no French, and in an attempt to establish “the minimal link of a thing in common (…) between himself and them” (Rancière, 1991) Jacotot chose as the class text a bilingual edition of Fénelon’s Telemachus (1699). Jacotot sets his students the task of writing a paper in French on Telemachus, and while his initial expectations of his students’ ability to perform this task were low, he was eventually astounded by the excellent quality of their production.

He had given no explanation to his “students” on the first elements of the language. He had not explained spelling or conjugations to them. They had looked for the French words that corresponded to words they knew and the reasons for their grammatical endings by themselves. They had learned to put them together to make, in turn, French sentences by themselves: sentences whose spelling and grammar became more and more exact as they progressed through the book… (Rancière, 1991, p.4)

The conclusion Jacotot draws from this experience is the “principle of the equality of all speaking beings” (p.39). All human beings, while equally intelligent, are nonetheless distinguished by varying degrees of attention. The role of an emancipatory teacher is not to transmit knowledge that the students do not possess, but to motivate students “to attend to their work so that their equal intelligence will have an opportunity to find expression” (May, 2008, p.57). Joseph Jacotot’s insight is that we need to overturn the logic of the explicative system so deeply entrenched in our education systems. It is worth quoting Rancière (1991) on this point:

Explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand. On the contrary, that very incapacity provides the structuring fiction of the explicative conception of the world. It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such. To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself. Before being the act of the pedagogue, explication is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid. (p.6)

Emancipatory education is therefore performative in that it proceeds from the premise that all students are equal. This founding premise can only be attained by a truly emancipated ‘teacher’:

Essentially, what an emancipated person can do is be an emancipator: to give, not the key to knowledge, but the consciousness of what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself. (Rancière, 1991, p.39)

Of course, for those of us who spend a large chunk of our time in classrooms with students, the assertion that all people are equally intelligent sounds optimistic, if not delusional. However, it is important to stress that ‘equality of intelligence’ here does not refer to an equal ability to attain an A grade at GCSE or A’ level in English or Mathematics, or that everyone is equally capable of formulating the theory of relativity. Equality of intelligence, according to Rancière, refers to the ability of all people to speak to and reason with one another. Rancière therefore privileges the linguistic nature of the intellect and equality is that of speech and reason (May, 2008)

It is this performative presupposition of equality that founds democratic politics and I believe it is here that we can draw a link between Rancière and Badiou’s assertion that ‘there is only one world’ (see previous post).

Bibliography:

May, T. (2008). The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Rancière, J. (1991). The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Alain Badiou in ‘The Meaning of Sarkozy’ (2008) identifies, paradoxically, the following question as one of the critical questions of our time: “How are we to assert the existence of a single world, the indivisible world of all living people, when it is asserted, often by violence, that such a world does not exist?”. (p.54)

Surely this is paradoxical when we consider the global nature of contemporary capitalism and globalisation; even more so when we consider that we live in a period in which capitalistic norms such as ‘democracy’ and ‘freedoms’ are to become those of the whole world.

However, for Alain Badiou, it is clear that:

[...] the same unleashed capitalism seeks to impose the political conviction that there are two separate worlds and not just one. There is the world of the rich and powerful, and the immense world of the excluded, subjected and persecuted. (p.54)

Whilst the world of globalisation, therefore, refers to a world marked by the free circulation of products and finance, the unified world of human subjects doesn’t exist. Subjects are not free to move around the world without restriction and there are those who have no access to the world of commodities and money. Whilst the Berlin wall separated the totalitarian East from the democratic West, new walls are being constructed between the prosperous North and the underdeveloped South.

That there is no single world of human beings is exposed every day that foreigners arrive, live and work here. Instead of welcoming them as citizens from the same world as ourselves, we seek to reinforce the idea that these ‘immigrants’ are from a world alien to our own.

They are the living proof that our democratic and developed world is not, for those in charge of the dominant capitalist order, the only world of women and men. There exist in our midst women and men who, although they live and work here like anyone else, are considered all the same to have come from another world. (p.57)

Badiou’s answer to this state of affairs is performative. He argues that we must assert firmly that “there is only one world” (p.60) whilst all the time understanding that this is not true and that there is not a single world of women and men. However, in the face of this injustice we should insist that “there is only one world”; we should decide that this is how the world is for us and act according to this motto. It is then up to us to accept the, often painful, consequences of this position. People who live in London that are different from me in terms of language, religion and culture (?!) belong to the same world and exist just as I do. They are part of the same world because there is only one world. We should not insist that they adapt and change their values to ours. To do so is to act as if they belong to a different world.

Importantly, therefore, to affirm that ‘there is only one world, is not the same as claiming that we are all the same. As Badiou affirms:

Philosophically, to say ‘there is only one world’ is to say that this world is precisely, in its very unity, a series of identities and differences. These differences, far from raising an objection to the unity of the world, are in fact its principle of existence. (p.62)

The recent events at SOAS only serve to remind us of the necessity to recognise our differences and affirm more than ever that ‘there is only one world’.

References:

Badiou, A. (2008). The Meaning of Sarkozy. London: Verso.

These posts may not be closely related to the ‘Education for Global Citizenship’ initiative; I don’t yet know enough about it to be able to judge. But they are written in the hope that by skirting around the subject, and by maintaining a healthy distance, I can begin to explain my distrust of the discourses surrounding ‘Global Citizenship’.

Critical Pedagogy

The field of Critical Pedagogy defies any clear-cut generic definition and is a diverse body of work made up of different theoretical positions with convergences as well as divergences and contradictions.

What these positions have in common are educational theories and practices that aim to open a critical space in which learners and teachers can reflect critically on ideology, power and culture (Leistyna & Woodrum, 1996) which stem from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

A useful place to start when considering critical pedagogy is the work of the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, particularly his works ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ and ‘Education for critical Consciousness’, originally published in Brazil in 1970 and 1974 respectively. Freire’s originality lies in his development of a practical emancipatory pedagogical method designed to liberate subjects from a ’banking’ model of education where education is:

[...] an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositaries and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘’banking’’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. (Freire, 1996, p.53)

This authoritarian model of education maintains an oppressive social order through a number of operations enforced by the teacher: students are passive consumers of knowledge passed on by the teacher; the learner is stripped of human agency in that s/he is not treated as a conscious being (‘corpo consciente’); the curriculum is split in an artificial manner and it is the teacher that prepares the content; learners do not ‘’develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves’’ (Freire, 1996, p.64); and finally, the banking authority ‘’sets up house inside of the student’s consciousness, instilling its own policies within the student’s worldview’’ (Bingham, 2002, p.450).

Freire’s model of a participatory education for emancipation is based on an “active, dialogical, critical and criticism-stimulating method” (Freire, 2007 p.40) to promote ‘conscientização’,or the critical awareness of the sources of oppression (Blackburn, 2000). This method is aligned with curriculum reform and the codification of cultural knowledge through the exploration of the participants’ reality through its artistic representation (see Freire, 2000). The vision of learning underlying Freire’s method is constructivist in nature where the educator takes on the role of a facilitator who grounds all class work within the context of the particpants’ reality:

Thus the educator’s role is fundamentally to enter into dialogue with the illiterate about concrete situations and simply to offer him the instruments with which he can teach himself to read and write. This teaching cannot be done from the top down, but only from the inside out, by the illiterate himself, with the collaboration of the educator. (Freire, 2007, p.43, italics are mine)

Criticisms of Freire’s model of education for cultural emancipation largely focus on the particularist notion of oppression and liberation in Freire’s work and the potential for the replication of oppression inherent in this particularist notion of power, and in Freire’s concept of the use of authority ‘on the side of freedom’ (see Gur-Ze’ev, 1998 and Blackburn, 2000).

Other criticisms of Freire question the feasibility of Freire’s emancipatory project from a psychoanalytical perspective of subjectivity and also from a notion of the formative potential of power drawing on the work of Foucault (see Foucault 1979) and Judith Butler (1997).

Subjectivity and the Formative Potential of Power

The learner in Freire’s work (and indeed in other constructivist models of education) is seen as a subject who acquires knowledge and learns unproblematically (Cho, 2007). Daniel Cho questions whether this concept of subjectivity is valid for critical pedagogy considering that critical education aims to raise awareness of social traumas such as political oppression, class conflict and economic exploitation (Cho, 2007). Cho’s argument is that any cursory look at the culture industry (see Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997) and schooling will reveal that “the learning of traumatic knowledge does not proceed without a show of resistance” (p. 703). It is doubtful whether the traumatic knowledge of oppression can be willfully learnt without resistance or negation on the part of the subject. This leads to the conundrum that whilst the kind of learning necessary in critical pedagogy is the acquisition of traumatic knowledge, this is exactly the type of knowledge that learners will tend to resist. Freire’s model of education doesn’t account sufficiently for mechanisms that might prevent the subject from learning and from emancipation.

In accordance with this cartesian vision of subjectivity in Freire, the subject passively absorbs acts of oppression imposed by the opressor (Cho and Lewis, 2005). A psychoanalytical view of subjectivity and power however, recognises that any analysis of oppressive relations needs to take the unconscious into account as relations of power persist in the unconscious and are libidinally invested. Freire’s educational project can be criticised from this perspective as it fails to consider the residual psychic life of the banking model of education.

Cho and Lewis (2005) combine the insight above with an analysis of Foucault’s theory of the formation of the subject in and through power to develop their discussion of the psychic life of the banking model and their criticism of Freire’s notion of power:

[…]for Foucault, every subjectivity is the effect of power, and as such, the relations of power whose effect is the subject must be analysed. Read together, psychoanalysis and Foucault pinpoint a problematic that Freire and Marxist educational theorists have yet to untangle: the oppressed student is a subjective effect ofoppressive power relations that persist in the unconscious. That is to say, if the student is an object of oppression, then, it cannot be missed how that student is also a subject of those forces of power, and as such, libidinally invested in oppressive power relations (Cho and Lewis, 2005, p.315)

What is needed therefore is a critical pedagogy capable of emancipating the subject from unconscious attachments to hegemonic relations of power. The basis of such a project is necessarily a theory of political subjectivity that can explain the subject’s libidinal investment in forms of power and oppression…

References:

Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1997). Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso.

Bingham, C. (2002). On Paulo Freire’s debt to psychoanalysis: authority on the side of freedom. Studies in Philosphy and Education , 21, 447-464.

Blackburn, J. (2000). Understanding Paulo Freire: reflections on the origins, concepts, and possible pitfalls of his educational approach. Community Development Journal , 35:1, 3-15.

Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cho, D. (2007). Wo we war: Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Subjectivity. Educational Philosophy and Theory , 39:7,703-719.

Cho, D., & Lewis, T. (2005). The Persistent Life of Oppression: The Unconscious, Power, and Subjectivity. Interchange , 36:3, 313-329.

Foucault, M. (1979). The history of sexuality: Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Freire, P. (2007). Education for Critical Consciousness. London: Continuum.

Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin.

Gur-Ze’ev, I. (1998). Toward a nonrepressive critical pedagogy. Educational Theory , 48:4, 463-486.

Leistyna, P., & Woodrum, A. (1996). Context and Culture: What is Critical Pedagogy? In: P. Leistyna, A. Woodrum, & S. Sherblom, Breaking Free: The transformative power of critical pedagogy (pp. 1-7). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Publishing Group.

Entrepreneurs and start-up companies will lead us out of the recession. The skilled execution of these ambitious business ideas makes me hopeful for the future. (p.20)

One of the projects described in this article is a company, set up by three 16 and 17-year-olds from a comprehensive school in North London, that sells bananas to office workers in London. They were able to secure 300 free bananas from Fyffes which were then put into paper bags purchased with their £10 donations. They then phoned the site manager at the London mayoral headquarters in London to secure an appropriate time slot to turn up and sell them. They sold enough bananas to make £114, which they donated to charity. However, there is one detail about their scheme worth focusing on. In order to brand their bananas, they set up a company name Fruit 2 Go, created a logo and made little stickers containing their logo which they then stuck onto their bananas. Now, it is perhaps a symptom of our society that we think nothing of companies branding bananas and other fruit through putting stickers on them.

In a superb article from 1987 called Learning from the Banana, Susan Willis manages to tease out some of the features of capitalism from the study of how bananas are presented as commodities in supermarkets. According to Susan Willis, the banana is the least exciting of all the fruits on offer in a modern day supermarket. Compared to the sheer variety of different apples or of oranges available, bananas – those offered in western supermarkets at least – are fairly homogeneous. Also compared with other tropical fruits such as papaya and mango, the banana is fairly commonplace, cheap and bought out of habit. Perhaps that explains why it was that Fruit 2 Go only managed to secure free bananas and not other fruits that would do justice to their name. According to Willis, the only factor distinguishing one banana from another in the modern supermarket are their stickers. Through the example of stickers on bananas, Willis masterfully unmasks just how abstracted production is from consumption in the First World:

In a society defined by consumption, where the commodity is perceived as separate from its site, moment and mode of production, commodities seem to offer themselves up spontaneously to the consumer. Have you noticed how bananas are displayed? – mounded or ranked in rows, their yellow and preferably unmarred skins spotted with brightly coloured stickers. In the absence of any clues as to how the bananas were grown, how they were packaged and shipped, how they were then marketed and distributed; finally, whose hands and labour brought them from plantation to supermarket, the logo seems to offer itself as some sort of explanation. It suggests that the multinational made each banana possible. The logo is emblematic of production without revealing anything specific about production. We’ve all chuckled over the plight of the small child who has to be taught that milk comes from cows and is not simply produced and packaged in and by the supermarket dairy case. Commodity consumption is structured in such a way that we are all put in the position of the child. While we are told that cows make milk and bananas grow on trees, the biological simplicity belies the complex reality of the highly rationalized system of production defined by multinational capitalism. The multinational is distant and unknowable while its logo is concrete and visible. This is the topsy-turvy logic of capitalism which promotes and depends upon a naive consumer. (Willis, 1987, p.594)

In our example of Fruit 2 Go, our teenage entrepreneurs have evidently gone one step further. Instead of being adorned with the stickers of the multinational “that made their production possible”, the bananas that are sold to office workers are instead festooned with the logo of Fruit 2 Go. There is now no reference at all even to the multinational involved in the production of these bananas and only to the final distributor that has helpfully wrapped them up in brown paper bags for consumption. The production of the banana in this case is even further removed from the consumer. It is difficult to imagine how the Fyffe group could possibly benefit from their arrangement with Fruit 2 Go where they supply free bananas which are then sold on to office workers at a profit. There is evidence in the article, in fact, to suggest that Fruit 2 Go were only able to secure 300 bananas free of charge, because they were taking part in a government initiative for teenagers and had promised that all proceeds of their sale would go to charity. These entrepreneurial teenagers were only able to prove that they are ready to drag the UK out of recession by starting a scheme benefitting from the kind of advantages they would not expect to receive in the ‘real world’ of business. However, Fruit 2 Go have plans for the future. They intend to “buy fruit from large companies at a discount, then sell it at offices, as part of a fruit basket” (p.23).

So, what’s wrong with this? These students have definitely gained valuable experience from the work involved in securing the free bananas, coming up with a company name and logo, securing a spot to sell at and actually getting out there and selling their bananas. It is hard to argue against the fact that this is a first-rate initiative in that it gives our school students the chance to discover and practice skills that they will find useful in the real world. It sounds almost churlish to point out that this whole exercise is based on an ideology that places a premium on encouraging our school children to learn the skills necessary to make their way successfully in the ‘knowledge society’ and that by promoting initiatives such as Make Your Mark with a Tenner, the government are promoting the idea that our brightest youngsters are those who can develop the skills and willingness to constantly adapt to a society reigned by the free market. However, my argument here is that they are only being introduced to one facet of the information they might find useful in the real world. Surely as part of the ‘social impact’ mentioned in the objectives of this initiative, there is space for reflection on aspects such as the origin of their product including where the bananas come from, who actually produced them, the quality of life of those who produced them, the absurdity of putting their own logo on these bananas and the relations between consumer and producer implicit in their practice. It is probably safe to assume that this type of critical reflection wasn’t one of the objectives encouraged in this initiative.

In an article published in January 2007 in the Brazilian daily newspaper Folha de São Paulo, the Italian psychoanalyst (who resides and works in São Paulo, Brazil) Contardo Calligaris asks why it is that, from his clinical experience as a psychoanalyst and his work in schools, adolescents in Brazil “dream small”. His argument is that even though teenagers in Brazil generally have access to a “vast proliferation of fictions and information” and are well aware that their destiny is not bound to their origin – that is, they are not required to lead their lives in the places they were born and there is no reason for them to follow in the steps of their parents – their life aspirations are limited to a life that is very similar to our own.

They dream of a daily life in the future that is, for us adults, hardly a dream at all, but the result (more or less resigned) of an accommodation to a managed life of frustrations. (Calligaris, 2007)

The example he cites is that of Greenpeace. Although many young people in Brazil are aware of Greenpeace’s actions and enjoy watching scenes of anti-whaling activists confronting whaling ships in their small inflatable dinghies on TV, none would seriously contemplate actually becoming a Greenpeace activist. The most enthusiastic might entertain the idea of studying oceanography or veterinary science at university, but with the goal of becoming a teacher or working in public service. According to Calligaris, the youth in Brazil are overly ‘reasonable’; it is as if their dreams are a compromise between their aspirations of being an ecological warrior and a profession which provides them with job security, a health plan and a decent pension.

Calligaris claims that schools can only hope to inspire our teenagers when they convey the message that students can achieve a life that approximates their dreams through study. A good school is not one that prepares our youth only for the “hard reality of life in the outside world”, but one that nurtures and encourages students to pursue their dreams. Without this, what can a school possibly offer except “study to conform”?

I have no clear idea of whether the situation Calligaris describes in Brazil is relevant to a discussion of education in the UK, however, I should imagine that in these uncertain times the preoccupations of UK teenagers are likely to become more aligned with those of an ‘emerging economy’ like Brazil. It would in fact seem – according to the leaders of the Make Your Mark initiative – that the future of our country depends on our teenagers dreaming small and aspiring to replicating our own economic models. What does that tell us about our society?

References:

Calligaris, C. (2007, January 11th). Os Sonhos dos Adolescentes. Folha de São Paulo . São Paulo, Brazil.

Teen Entrepreneurs. (2009, May 24th). The Sunday Times . London.

Willis, S. (1987). Learning from the Banana. American Quarterly , 39:4, 586-600.

The work of the Brazilian theorist and critical pedagogue, Newton Duarte, is illuminating here. In two books Vygotsky and ‘learning to learn’: a critique of neoliberal misappropriations of Vygotsky and Knowledge Society or Society of Illusions? (see references below for original titles in Portuguese) published in 2000 and 2003 respectively, Duarte focuses his attention on the pervasiveness of the slogan ‘learning to learn’ in current educational discourses and in particular on the discourses of reflection / reflective learning / reflective teaching (see Moon 1999). Duarte takes as his object of study the Jacques Delors Commission Report on Education for the Twenty-First Century (May 1998) and also the theoretical parameters that form the basis of the reworking of the Brazilian National Curriculum (1997).

Duarte identifies four theoretical positions – with implicit value statements – underlying the discourses of learning to learn and reflection in these two documents (Duarte, 2003):

1. Knowledge that is constructed by the individual by/for him or herself is more desirable than that which is transmitted by other people (teacher or students).

Duarte quotes the Spanish theorist of education, César Coll:

From a constructivist perspective, the ultimate goal of pedagogical intervention is to contribute to the student’s development of autonomy and his/her ability to learn by him/herself in a whole range of different situations and circumstances; that is, to “learn to learn”(Coll, 1994 quoted in Duarte, 2003).

Duarte’s position here is that, of course knowledge that is constructed by the student is important, as is the ability and the initiative to acquire knowledge for him/herself. However, the learning to learn discourse establishes a hierarchy in which learning for yourself is deemed more important than the learning process involving the transmission of information from one person to another. Duarte’s point is that it is equally valid to assume that an education that encourages intellectual and moral autonomy through a transmission model of education is possible, where the transmission is of socially and culturally sedimented knowledge.

2. It’s more important for the student to develop a method of acquisition, elaboration, discovery and construction of knowledge, than it is for him/her to learn knowledge that has been developed by other people. That is, it’s more important to develop a scientific method than existing scientific knowledge.

This position is clearly inseparable from the argument in position 1 and it is possible to trace this position back to the work of Piaget, especially to one of his conferences from 1947 in which Piaget affirms that the challenge facing educators is to find ways of directing adolescents, not to ready solutions, but to a method that will permit him/her to construct these solutions him/herself. (Piaget, 1947 quoted in Duarte, 2003).

3. For an activity to be truly ‘educational’ it should be aligned with the student’s own interests and necessities.

So, as well as having to construct his/her own knowledge and develop a method for this construction, this construction should be driven by the students’ interest.  This is the position that relates to the nebulous discourse of personalisation in education.

4. Education should prepare individuals to be able to accompany a society in an accelerated process of change.

Traditional education works for static societies where the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another is sufficient, however, the dynamic nature of today’s society means that knowledge is increasingly provisional and has to be constantly recycled. Individuals who are not willing or able to constantly adapt have no place in modern society.

Learning to learn is necessary, therefore, if we are to avoid becoming antiquated and consigned to the scrap heap. A dynamic economy requires flexible and dynamic individuals.

Duarte believes it is here that the true character of the discourses of learning to learn and reflection is uncovered and appears in its crudest form. Learning to learn is conceived as a vision of education concerned with producing in individuals the skills and willingness to constantly adapt to a society reigned by the free market. Within this view of education, educators are prompted to understand the world, not in order to criticise it and to develop an education committed to social equality and transformation, but instead to understand better the competencies that will be required of our students in the modern world. This is the view of education that places a premium on creativity, without ever defining it, and that calls for new models of learning for new times.

To summarise, then, I believe that whilst Newton Duarte would agree that there is much to commend an approach to education based on encouraging the individual to construct his/her own knowledge, through activities that are broadly aligned with his/her interests, and that fosters autonomy, this should not be at the expense of the transmission of socially-culturally-historically sedimented knowledge. We also need to ask ourselves whose interests are served when we accept position 4 as the goal of all education.

I believe that the value of Duarte’s work lies in the fact that through a close analysis of the discourses of learning to learn and reflection, he is able to locate and uncover the ideological constellation within which current educational discourses operate and to which they contribute. As with Zizek, Duarte teaches us to question received wisdom and to question why it is that socio-constructivism is uncritically accepted as the right educational model for today’s society.

It will not have escaped the attention of any astute reader that the positions set out above are those that permeate much of the discourse that surrounds the transformative potential of ICT in Education.

References:

Duarte, N. (2003). Sociedade do Conhecimento ou Sociedade das Ilusões? (Knowledge Society or Society of Illusions?)Campinas: Autores Associados.

Duarte, N. (2000). Vigotski e o aprender a aprender: crítica às apropriações neoliberais e pós-modernas da teoria vigotskiana. (Vygotsky and ‘learning to learn’: a critique of neoliberal misappropriations of Vygotsky) São Paulo: Editora Autores Associados.

Moon, J. (1999). Reflection in Learning and Professional Development. London: Routledge Falmer.

All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. (p.55)

Political struggle is fragmented into identity politics which serves ultimately to strengthen the liberal hegemony. What we need to do is resuscitate our common position as that of the excluded (instead of focusing on what makes us different from each other?).

In order to understand this position, we should ask the following question of capitalism: “does global capitalism contain antagonisms strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction?” Zizek identifies four possible antagonisms:

1. Ecological catastrophe

2. Inappropriateness of private property for ‘intellectual property’

3. The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments

4. New forms of social exclusion (e.g. third world slums)

The argument is that we are all in a position of exclusion in that the shared substance of our social being, what Hardt and Negri refer to as ‘commons’, is under threat. We can identify threats to each ‘commons’ relating directly to each realm of antagonism above. So, for example, the commons of external nature (e.g. the natural habitat) are threatened by pollution, exploitation and destruction; the commons of our intellectual production in the form of culture are threatened by the application of private property rules to ‘intellectual property’; also, our internal, biogenetic commons are under threat from cloning, genetic engineering etc.

What all of these antagonisms share is “an awareness of the destructive potential – up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself – in allowing the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons a free run”. (p. 54) Zizek’s claim is that the progressive enclosure of these ‘commons’ ultimately serves to exclude those who are “excluded from their own substance; a process that also points towards exploitation.” (p.54) It is important that we hold onto this reference to exclusion and inclusion as, without it, the antagonisms cited above lose their subversive dimension. So, for example, the area of biogenetics is reduced to an ethical issue (rather than a political one); the environmental question becomes one of how to achieve sustainable development; and the question of intellectual property becomes a problem for lawyers. The danger, therefore, is that these problems are reduced to issues played out in the private sphere and the trick is to expose them as universal problems related to the fundamental antagonism between those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’.

Zizek’s contention is that our “[…] ethico-political challenge is to recognise (the truth of our own position). In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance”. (p.55, italics mine)

In all of Zizek’s work there is a healthy suspicion concerning political arguments that state the obvious. For example, who in their right mind would argue against the position that “all positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected”, and so on? The lesson of Zizek’s work is that instead of accepting this wisdom at face value, we should ask why it is that this position has become the accepted discourse, even when this is plainly not what occurs in our liberal democracy. Zizek’s answer (as set out above) is that in promoting the inclusion of the excluded as minority voices, the system can absorb these challenges with the result that any threat is diluted.

Similarly, sweeping claims for the inclusive and transformative potential of ICT in education should be subjected to the same scrutiny.

Reference:

Zizek, S. (2009). How to Begin from the Beginning. New Left Review , 57:43-55.

Chat is carried out through written text as well as voice chat, and it is the voice chat that I found most uncanny about my experience in the Second Life Copacabana the last time I visited. Whilst the avatars and scene conjured up a resemblance to the real Copacabana on a typical Sunday afternoon, the voices just didn’t match. The voices I heard were those of a different world just six hours away along the Via Dutra highway to the south in the city of Sao Paulo. The accents were distinctly Paulistano, without even a trace of the Carioca accent you would expect to hear along Rio’s most famous beach, and there was a lot of the Paulistano slang I recognised from many hours spent with teenagers in classrooms in Sao Paulo.

The voices seemed to emerge from nowhere and I was completely unable to match the voices to specific avatars. This was a most bewildering and disorientating experience. The voices were completely disjointed from the scene I could see on my screen and I was transfixed. The term Uncanny is appropriate here. I can’t know for sure, but I guess the first viewers of talking pictures might have experienced similar emotions.

The acousmatic voice is a voice whose source one cannot see. It is disembodied, uncanny and eerily omnipresent. The God of the Old Testament is an example and the acousmatic voice has been used in films such as The Wizard of Oz and The Testament of Doctor Mabuse by Fritz Lang (see Dolar, 2006). What these films share is the mismatch between the the authority of the voice and its source. In The Wizard of Oz, the man behind the all-powerful voice is a powerless old man; in Doctor Mabuse the voice is being played by a gramophone. Mladen Dolar doubts we can ever identify the source of the acousmatic voice (2006, p.67):

The real problem with the acousmatic voice is: can we ever pin it down to its source? This is the process that Chion calls disacoumatization, the process of dissipating the mystery. When the voice gets attached to the body, it loses its omnipotent charismatic character  – it turns out to be banal, as in The Wizard of Oz. The aura crumbles, the voice, once located, loses its fascination and power, it has something like castrating effects on its bearer, who could yield and brandish his or her phonic phallus as long as its attachment to a body remained hidden.

Importantly, according to my reading of Mladen Dolar, my experience of Second Life served to lay bare an important truth. A truth I hadn’t been aware of before. That is, there is no such thing as disacoumatization. That there is always a mismatch between a person’s appearance and his/her voice. Here’s Zizek on this topic (quoted in Dolar, 2006, p.70):

An unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from “its” voice. The voice displays a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we can see, so that even when we see a living person talking, there is always a minimum of ventriloquism at work: it is as if the speaker’s own voice hollows him out and in a sense speaks “by itself” through him.

The apparent absurdity of this position may be difficult to swallow, however, my aim here isn’t to discuss the merit of this position, even though it makes a lot of sense to me considering my experience in Second Life. My aim here is to draw attention to the process of my learning and underline the fact that it is my experience in Second Life that has led me to reflect on Mladen Dolar’s and Slavoj Zizek’s position. My point is that one of the educational potentials of Digital Environments may lie in their potential to help us discover the truth of ‘Reality’ itself, which is always mediated by fantasy, and is in a sense, already virtual (Zizek, 1999).

References:

Dolar, M. (2006). A Voice and Nothing More. London: The MIT Press.

Zizek, S. (1999a). The Ticklish Subject:the absent centre of political ontology. London: Verso.

According to The Economist, Europe’s leading economic powers can be divided according to their adherence to two different – and opposing – economic models. On the one hand, “continental Europe still tends to favour a larger state, higher taxes, heavier regulation of product and labour markets and a more generous social safety-net” whilst the Anglo-saxon model advocates a more neo-liberal model characterised by a laissez-faire economic system with freed up, deregulated markets leaving “more power in the hands of individuals rather than the state” (the article fails to mention, however, just which individuals exactly). There has never been any doubt which model The Economist favours. While the article admits that continental Europe – France in particular – has coped better than Britain and America under the worldwide recession due mainly to tough job protection rules, generous welfare states and years of public investment in infrastructure, it is nonetheless quick to point out that these strengths could emerge as weaknesses in a recovery:

For there is a price to pay for more security and greater job protection: a slowness to adjust and innovate that means, in the long run, less growth. The rules against firing that stave off sharp rises in unemployment may mean that fewer jobs are created in new industries. Those generous welfare states that preserve people’s incomes tend to blunt incentives to take new work. That large state, which helps to sustain demand in hard times, becomes a drag on dynamic new firms when growth resumes. The latest forecasts are that the United States and Britain could rebound from recession faster than most of continental Europe. (A New Pecking Order, The Economist, May 9^th-15^th, 2009)

And it is basically to the above argument that modern day politics has been reduced. Sarkozy swept to power in France in 2006 on a platform of economic reform that promised to bring the French closer to the Anglo-Saxon model (he is now, unsurprisingly, decidedly muted in his praise for our system) whilst the American and UK governments are turning to the French model. And so the pendulum swings.

However, the untruth of this article lies in purveying the illusion that there are in fact two models to choose from. The choice between neo-liberalism and capitalism-with-a-human-face is still a choice between one economic system. The editors of The Economist show that they are well aware of this fact when they claim that “the governments of both sides of the intellectual divide could go a long way to making their models work better, without changing their underlying beliefs.” Accordingly, governments on the continent need to tinker with their employment laws and lower the costs involved in starting a new business, while the liberals need to improve their regulation of the markets and work towards an effective public sector. The article ends with the pompous sounding “(T)he pecking order may change, but pragmatism and efficiency will always count”. And it is here that the true agenda of the article is revealed.

In his book about 09/11, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek lists a number of products on the market today that are deprived of their malignant element: decaffeinated coffee, alcohol-free beer, cream without the fat, virtual sex (sex without the sex), and multiculturalism without coming up against the other in all his/her otherness. Zizek’s point is that Virtual Reality generalises the situation where products are offered completely void of their defining substance. Decaffeinated coffee has the smell of real coffee without being real coffee and Virtual Reality is felt to be reality without being real. Zizek argues that the effect of this virtualisation is that Real Reality ends up feeling virtual and he offers the media coverage of the explosion of the twin towers and its eerie similarity to a scene from a Hollywood disaster movie as an example.

Anyhow, most relevant to our discussion here is the item I have omitted from Zizek’s list above of products deprived of their defining element: politics without the politics. The final message from The Economist is that the two systems described in its article are not so different and can both work as long as they are managed with pragmatism and efficiency. Politics is reduced to the efficient and pragmatic administration of a common economic model.  This is a clear example of politics without the politics and a measure of how far we have distanced ourselves from a politics based on big ideas and a belief in grand ideological projects.

References:

A New Pecking Order. (2009, May 9th – 15th). The Economist , p. 13.

Zizek, S. (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.