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"Szkudlarek, Tomasz"
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Education and Ignorance: Between the Noun of Knowledge and the Verb of Thinking
In this paper we look at the relations between knowledge and thinking through the lens of ignorance. In relation to knowledge, ignorance becomes its “constitutive outside,” and as such it may be politically organised in order to delimit the borders of the right to knowledge [the “ignorance economy,” see Roberts and Armitage (Prometheus 26 (4): 335–354, 2008)]. In this light, the notion of a knowledge-based society should be understood as a society structured along the lines of knowledge distribution: the rights of possession of and access to knowledge demand that ignorance is planned and executed as the condition of their establishment. In relation to thinking, ignorance appears differently. According to Rancière, the teacher's ignorance conditions the student's appearance as Anthropos, a being who can be asked: what do you think about it? Hence, we are dealing with the ambiguity of ignorance which seems to be both the criterion of social exclusion, and the condition of emancipation. Following this thread with reference to Heidegger's discourse on thinking, we would like to explore the possibility of comprehending knowledge and education beyond the relations of ownership and demands of productivity. Following Rancière, we may say that thinking—as displacing the notion of ignorance—stands in the position of “politics” and questions the ways knowledge societies are structured as “police orders” along the lines of knowledge possession and exclusion.
Journal Article
Postulational Rhetoric and Presumptive Tautologies: The Genre of the Pedagogical, Negativity, and the Political
In the paper I analyze two features of the genre of the pedagogical. First is a particular usage of “should” statements (which I call postulational rhetoric) where one can identify an effect of erasing present normative behavior, while that which is postulated is turned into an unattainable ideal, or a value. Second, I analyze “presumptive tautologies” in the discourse of aims of education. I focus on negative dimensions of these two features and, using theoretical insights from Laclau and Rancière, I connect them to the work of negativity in political ontology so that the relation between the pedagogical and the political can thus be re-articulated.
Journal Article
Empty signifiers, education and politics
The paper assumes that education is part of the process of discursive construction of society. The theoretical framework on which this argument is based includes Ernesto Laclau's theory of the \"ontological impossibility and political necessity of society\", and the role discourse and empty signifiers play in the establishment of political identities. Laclau's theory is supplemented here by ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Zizek and Marx, and by other traits in contemporary semiotics that relate to the notion of \"the void\" in semantic systems. My claim is that empty signifiers, crucial to the production of the totality of society, are discursively produced, among others, in pedagogical debates. This is illustrated by one historical example (Rouuseau), which gives ground for more contemporary analyses, and on the basis of the present economic discourse of educating and the idea of \"knowledge society\". The main conclusion is that education, in contemporary discourse of learning, becomes a neurotic symptom of the lack of overt domination in social relations.
Journal Article
Semiotics of Identity: Politics and Education
In this text I concentrate on semiotic aspects of the theory of political identity in the work of Ernesto Laclau, and especially on the connection between metaphors, metonymies, catachreses and synecdoches. Those tropes are of ontological status, and therefore they are of key importance in understanding the discursive “production” of identity in political and educational practices. I use the conceptions of both Laclau and Eco to elucidate the operation of this structure, and illustrate it with an example of the emergence of the “Solidarność” movement in Poland, expanding its analysis provided by Laclau. I focus on the moment when one of particular demands assumes the representation of totality, which, in Laclau, is left to “circumstantial” determination. This moment inspires several questions and needs to be given special attention if Laclau’s theory is to be used in theory of education. It is so because theory of education cannot remain on the level of the ontological (which is the core of Laclau’s achievement), but has to theorize “non-ontological” dimensions as well, that is the ontic (i.e. “content” of education), the deontic (duty, obligation, and the normative in general), as well as what I call
the deontological
—the very relation between “what there is” and “what there is not” (including that which should be) as the
locus
of education.
Journal Article
Education and the Political
The essays in this collection address the relation between education and politics in new ways. Rather than understanding education simply as the object of political decision-making, or as preparation for politics, the authors of this volume see education as implicated in social conflicts and in the political processes that produce and change social structures.
eBook
On Nations And Children: Rousseau, Poland And European Identity
The paper is an interpretation of J.-J. Rousseau's book on the government of Poland. The central part of the paper is devoted to complex relations between the notions of nature, nation, childhood, and civic education. Methodologically, the analysis involves interpretation of historical contexts and positions significant in the writing of the book, and deconstruction of its key categories. In the latter respect, the idea of \"strangeness\" of Poland is the point of departure, and the role it plays in the construction of national and European identity is the aim of analysis.
Journal Article
Introduction: Education and the Political
Even though there has been a constant interest in political issues within the community of educational scholars and researchers, the connection between educational and political theories seems still to be underestimated. There is, of course, a powerful intellectual tradition of thinking about education and politics together, starting with Plato and continuing through such giants as Rousseau and Dewey, to contemporary times.
Book Chapter
Identity and Normativity: Politics and Education
In this paper I focus on the problem of normativity as it has been identified and discussed in relation to Ernesto Laclau’s theory of identity. The main feature of this theory is that it proposes a universal structure where various forms of identification are described in the same political logic. In his analysis of populism, Laclau clearly argued that understanding how social identities are constructed is impossible when we try to theorize the “ontic” content of particular ideologies, demands, etc.; what is needed is understanding those movements in terms of their “ontological” political logic which is linked to the desire for a fullness of society (Laclau 2005).
Book Chapter