How To Imagine Something Exterior To The System: Critical Education As Problematization

Educational Theory

Volumn 48, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 521-530

  Masschelein, Jan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN   (Belgium)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0041158905     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1998.00521.x     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Alain Badiou, "Die gegenwartige Welt und das Begehren der Philosophic," in Politik der Wahrheit, ed. Rado Riha (Wien: Turia und Kant, 1997), 21.
2. Mariette Hellemans, Understanding the Challenges: Problem Solving Claims versus Claims of Justice, unpublished manuscript, Leuven, 1996, italics mine.
3. When I borrow here the term "capitalist," system from Gur-Ze'ev and McLaren, I do so to indicate above all a certain logic and not to reduce the complexity of the functioning of the society to a matter of contradiction (opposition) between labor and capital. I would prefer to refer to the logic of circulation, following Arendt, as the logic of bare life. See Jan Masscht leiri, "World and Life or Education and the Question of Meaning (of Life),"Interchange, in press. In my view, what is at stake in the critique of this logic is not horror or disgust at the alienation of modern (technological) life. Nor is it the total domination of what we may take to be the nature of the subject: his/her potential autonomy. It is rather the integrity of a human world wherein people and things have something to say to us and cannot be analyzed without remainder in cost-benefit analyses or captured in exchange relations.
4. See Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 202-7.
5. See Badiou, "Die gegenwartige Welt und das Begehren der Philosophy," 10.
6. See Henry Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
7. Jacques Ranciere, "Über den Nihilismus in der Politik," in Politik der Wahrheit, ed. Rado Riha (Wien: Turia und Kant, 1997), 123-46.
8. Jacques Rancierc, La mésentente: Philosophic et Politique (Paris: Galilee, 1995).
9. See for example, Klaus Mollenhauer, Theorien zum Erziehungsprozess (Miinchen: Juventa, 1972).
10. Wolfhgang Klafki, Aspekte kritisch-konstruktiver Erziehungswissenschaft (Weinheim: Beltz, 1976)
11. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1970), 72, italics mine.
12. In fact, this figure is exactly what Foucault criticized (as Gur-Ze'ev reminds us) as the naive and uncritical idea of a liberation from alienation and hegemony that would lead in itself to a reconciliation with some kind of positive human nature.
13. See Michel Foucault, "L'éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de libertd," Concordia 6 (1984), 100.
14. See also Jean-Francois Lyotard, "La Mainmise," Autres Temps: Les cahicrs du christianisrne social 25 (1990): 16-26.
15. Even Gur-Ze'ev, who tries to show a totally different direction, seems to understand problematization as the removal of obstacles for the "realization of. potential autonomy,""realization of. dialogical essence," or "self-realization."
16. Henry Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 32.
17. Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education (London: Heinemann, 1983), 236.
18. Using such representations as points of departure seems to me to begin doing critical pedagogy by uncritically (presup)posing particular criteria as excluded or immune from critique. However, as I will indicate; I agree with the classical theorists of critical pedagogy that we need to find in some sense an "unconditional," point of departure in order to avoid being too easily assimilated to the flexible plurality of the given system.
19. One can find a very detailed description of these categories which all apply to the current way of conceptualizing educational questions (also in critical pedagogy) in Hannah Arendt's analysis of "work,": Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), especially 136-76
20. The way in which I state this problem here has been inspired by Hellemans, Understanding the Challenges.
21. Important contributions are offered bere by Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlosung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990); The Way of Response: Martin tiuber: Selections From His Writings, ed Nabum Norbert Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1966); Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de I'essence (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1978); and to some extent, Jacques Derrida, Lécriture et la difference (Paris: Editions du Seuill, 1967).
22. However this other "meaning" as I will indicate later, does not manifest itself independently of a context-related meaning or sign-system but is inscribed in it.
23. It is an affect that is related to a practice of thinking that is totally different from the activity of knowing-See Jan Masschelein, "In Defence of Education as Problematisation: Some Preliminary Remarks on a Strategy of Disarmament," in Adult Education and Social Responsibility, ed. Danny Wildemeersch, Matthias Finger, and Theo Jansen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 3997), 133-49.
24. Therefore what is at stake here is not a problem of reference, not a question of the truth of the representation related to the affect. What is at stake is, as Lévinas pointed out, a transcendence in that the intentional object of the intention escapes any correlation that might be intended: the intended is not represented in any way!
25. See Emmanuel Lévinas, "Enigme et phéeoméene," Esprit 33 (1965): 1128-42.
26. See Rudy Visker, "De prijs van de onteigening. Levinas, God en hot trauma," in De God van denkers en dichters: Opstellen voor Samuel Iisseling, ed. Egide Berns, Paul Moyaert, and Paul van Tongeren (Amsterdam: Boom, 1997), 122-54.
27. See Miguel Abensour, "Penser I'utopie autrcment," in Cahiers de I'Herne: Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. Catherine Chalier and Miguel Abensour (Paris: L'Herne, 1991), 477-95
28. Martin Buher, "Over karakteropvoeding," in Voordrachten over opvoeding (Utrecht: Bijleveld, 1970), 69. [English: "The Education of Character" in Between Man and Man (London: Routledge, 1947).]