Session Information
Session 2B, Post-Modern Conceptions of Education
Papers
Time:
2005-09-07
17:00-18:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Elaine Ricard-Fersing
Contribution
In this paper I focus on the "the politics of difference", a phrase now thought to be synonymous with postmodernism and the development of poststructuralist thought. In particular, I elaborate the meaning of this phrase by reference to following four aspects: A deepening of democracy through a political critique of Enlightenment values Understanding of 'governmentality' as political reason linking forms of governance and the self-regulating individual Emergent forms of postcoloniality, an emphasis on philosophies of difference and the encounter with the Other 'The multitude' and the coming of world democracy (1) The political critique highlights the increasing significance of issues of self and identity particularly in relation Enlightenment notions of a universal stable, unchanging and essentialist self that has served as the core of European conceptions of the citizen-subject. (2) The notion of power is also open to revision; just as "culture" itself has been subject to on-going poststructuralist criticism and revision. The diagnosis of "power/knowledge" and the exposure of technologies of domination based upon Foucault's analytics of power is also decidedly Nietzschean and the approach, therefore, provides a useful set of insights into the nature of government as a set of practices, the development of the "social economy" and the role of neoliberal education policy within it. (3) There are philosophical resources and an understanding of "difference" that tend to characterise the present historical phase--what we might provocatively call "postmodernity" or "postcoloniality"--better than Hegel's dualistic logic of alterity. This is one of the main lessons that so-called postcolonial theorists such as Said, Spivak, and Bhabha have learned from the French poststructuralists. (4) Derrida talks in Nietzschean terms of democracy to come. On Derrida's account of différance we might expect deconstruction to challenge heavily centralist and "structured" representationalist models of democracy in favour of a greater recognition of difference and the Other; with an emphasis on the promotion of local autonomy and greater global world democracy. What is education for democracy in these terms? How are we to understand an education of difference?
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