I.

Recently, Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski sparked a debate on a “post-critical pedagogy” (2017, 2018). Taking inspiration from Latour’s essay ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’ (2004a), in this this short paper I want to contribute to this debate. More specifically, I will first elaborate on what I find problematic about the debunking style of critique (for which Latour offers the label “Made in Criticalland”, 2004a: 230) that the authors rightly attempt to overcome. Although Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski refer to Latour’s essay (several times in both 2017 and 2018), they do not deal with it in detail. I want to make more explicit what we as educators could gain from Latour’s vocabularies. This however – developing a post-critical attitude oriented towards a relativistic realism (Latour 2004b), tracing the complex messy entanglements of education with all its strange, weird and wonderful hybrid objects – seems to me incredibly hard in education. Therefore, I will explore what it makes so difficult in the third part of the paper.

By no means a “critical response to a post-critical manifesto” (Lewis 2017: 23), the style of this short paper attempts to be both adequately polemic and appreciative. Thereby, precisely because I agree with the authors that their views on education are “worth developing”, I hope to add something to “a movement in thought in educational philosophy that is better articulated collectively, in a conversation” (Hodgson, Vlieghe, Zamojski 2017: 100, 76).

II.

Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski propose “a shift from critical pedagogy to post-critical pedagogy” which however is not “an anti-critical position” (2017b: 17, 2017c: 82). What can be critical about critical pedagogy is their debunking style of critique (ibid.). In turn, I attempt to make explicit what that means and why it is critical.

The debunking style of critique consists in always already knowing what is really going on, what is behind the ‘illusio’ of the mundane world-view of those who do not have the insights in the critic’s object of study – be it “society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism” (Latour 2004a: 229) or whatever the critic might have declared as the driving force behind bare ‘doxa’ (to borrow two Bourdieusian concepts). Consider the following:

-          the Marxist criticisms of “ideology” and “false consciousness”,

-          the psychoanalytic analyses of the “unconscious”,

-          the structuralist analyses of “underlying structures”,

-          Luhmann’s analyses of “systems”,

-          the Bourdieusian distinction between “opus operatum” (empirical products of the habitus) and “modus operandi” (its underlying generative formula),

-          the Foucauldian analyses of “power” and its effects on “subjectivation”.

What is similar in all these otherwise highly diverging traditions of critique? It is precisely their debunking style: they uncover what seemed previously hidden; they reveal what was not visible for others. In doing this, they employ a standardised terminology. They explain a phenomenon somewhat mechanically (and somewhat deductive) with a terminological apparatus that is highly technical. Therefore, using their terminological apparatus is also highly ridden with prerequisites (think of all the terms one needs to learn to take part in an adequately sophisticated discussion within one of these traditions of critique!). Because these vocabularies are demanding to learn they are exclusive: only few are capable of understanding – much less formulating – critique by themselves.

... TBC

... By applying the debunking style, the critic positions herself as the one who understands in opposition to those who do not understand, “and thus reinstall[s] a regime of inequality” (Hodgson, Vlieghe, Zamojski 2017: 18). I want to add that this inequality is reinstalled twofold: the critic not only understands what is really going on (object of criticism) but also the language of describing precisely that (vocabulary of criticism). To put this negatively, her debunking style is twofold exclusive: not only others do not understand what the critic understood (object), they also have no language to understand what the critic said (vocabulary). Moreover, this exclusive dyad is also the vantage point for the debunking style’s conservative effect: Although the critic’s deepest wish is that the object of criticism disappears the critic must preserve (at least parts of) it since its disappearance would also be the disappearance of the critic’s vocabulary and therefore the critic as critic (Bröckling 2017: 384). III. Why is the shift away from a debunking style of critique, “from Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” (Latour 2004a) so difficult in education? I want to suggest that at least one reason for this is the humanistic tradition, which is – although often also criticised – still inherent in the critical tradition. More precisely, it is its notions of a strong subject and an essential normativity that hinders us. The humanistic tradition understands education as ‘Bildung’ in the Humboldtian sense: a development of the powers rooted in a strong subject. Accordingly, pedagogy should support this progress. Without a strong subject – strong in the sense that it is conceptualized with at least a certain degree of agency, autonomy and freedom of will– no pedagogical support can be imagined. If not a strong subject, what else should become object of the pedagogical support? In contrast, a subject for Latour just as “all entities […] cease to be objects defined simply by their inputs and outputs and become again things, mediating, assembling, gathering many […] folds” (Latour 2004a: 248, cf. Deleuze 1993). ... TBC

... Since Humboldt, the necessity of a normative definition of the goal of pedagogy has corresponded with the notion of Bildung. For it is not clear which powers are to be formed when Humboldt defines “the true end of Man” in “the highest and most harmonious Bildung of his powers to a complete and consistent whole” (Humboldt 1792/1996: 10). This necessity of strong normative account of education is mirrored in the current debates about posthumanist pedagogy: Friesen, for example, points out that “education, its engagements, artifacts and discourses are all unavoidably purposive and normative” (2018: 1). On the one hand, from a Latourian post-critical perspective, this normativity cannot mean to theoretically determine the end of education. On the other hand however, the post-critical pedagogue is far from being unattached to or uninterested in the world and its changes. Quite the contrary, she “is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles […], not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather” (Latour 2004a: 246). This finally also means not to become anti-critical (Hodgson, Vlieghe, Zamojski 2017: 17) but “generating more ideas than we have received, inheriting from a prestigious critical tradition but not letting it die away, or ‘dropping into quiescence’ like a piano no longer struck” (Latour 2004a: 248).

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