In my previous work (Szkudlarek 2016), I have analysed the construction of totality, invisibility, and temporality as rhetorical strategies that organise discursive structures of educational theories. In this paper, I want to focus on more detailed aspects of the rhetoric of educational theorizing, which could not be given sufficient attention in my previous analyses. The rhetorical strategies listed in the title of the paper can be (and usually are) seen as proving the weakness of educational theory, and thus as contributing to its dubious academic status. In my work, I try to see such features as ontologically significant, which means that I analyse them as related to the implication of the discourse of education in the construction of societies.

Postulational rhetoric (i.e. the frequent use of ‘should’ statements) is one of the most visible features of educational writing: the statements pronouncing what ‘should’ be done (by teachers, policy makers, parents, students, etc) seem to be specific for pedagogical texts, distinguishing them from those written by sociologists or psychologists. I will point to the possible role of this rhetoric in the construction of the field in which educational objects (teachers, students, curricula, etc) can be constructed, and of the trajectories in which they can be mobilized. In other words, I will try to show how saying that something ‘should’ exist or be done may erase that which does exist or is being done, and how it displaces elements of the social from the present to the not-yet existent (i.e. how it works as a rhetoric of invisibility); and second, how it turns that which is and is insignificant into that which is not and is desirable (a rhetoric that creates axiological objects, or values).

The notion of presumptive tautology has been introduced in the discussion concerning Jacques Ranciére’s works and it refers to his analysis of Joseph Jacotot’s pedagogy that assumed radical equity of human intelligence. By connecting this assumption to Ranciére’s critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, where the latter was accused of being tautological, I juxtapose ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ tautologies in education (i.e. the self-fulfilling assumptions of the lack of equity vs. the counter-factual assumption of equity that demands ‘verification’) as two strategies of engaging negativity, and I expand the discussion to include the works of Rousseau and Herbart, where similar ‘presumptive tautologies’ can also be identified. On the ground of these cases, I will try to address the (possibly) foundational role of presumptive tatutology and negativity in educational theory.

In the concluding section, I will relate these findings to Ernesto Laclau’s conception of ontological rhetoric, which informs my methodological approach.

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