Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
Annual Conference
New College, Oxford
26 - 29 March 2015
Negativity, cruel optimism and the virtue of impotentiality
in education
Professor Matthew Clarke
[email protected]
Professor Anne Phelan
University of British Columbia
Introduction
The value and desirability of the positive in education seem so obvious as to not
warrant comment or question. Associated with optimism, progress, affirmation,
efficacy, encouragement and constructiveness, the positive seems to encapsulate
many of the key virtues, especially hope (Halpin, 2003), that are commonly seen as
core to the very notion of education. The negative, by contrast, is associated with
such undesirable phenomena as pessimism (or worse, cynicism), regression,
criticism, inefficiency, discouragement and destructiveness, which all to often
beleaguer education policy debates, undermine educational practice and are
certainly not seen as valuable or desirable.
In light of this, our purpose in this paper – to argue for the virtues of negativity in
education – may seem both foolhardy and forlorn. Why would anyone seek to
question the commonsense appeal of the positive and positivity in education? But
not only do we argue for the virtues of negativity, we also challenge the
unquestioned sovereignty of the positive in education. The catch – and, of course,
there has to be one – is that we are using the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in
distinctive ways that derive from political philosophy, rather than the everyday
understanding and usage of the terms outlined above, in which the positive refers to
the constructive, beneficial or optimistic, while the negative refers to the
destructive, harmful or pessimistic.
Positive and Negative in Political Philosophy
We have already gone some way to defining the terms positive and negative by
identifying synonyms with which each term is associated. That is, we have indicated
the place each term occupies in a chain of related signifiers. This is a key point. For if
we accept that meaning is always relational (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001; Saussure, 1974)
– that the meaning of any given term depends on contrasts with that which it is not
– rather than essential – involving the identification and naming of some essential
property – then the positive and the negative are each defined, not only through
their degrees of similarity to a range of potential synonyms, but also by their
difference from each other. Indeed, when it comes to symbolic signification,
similarities are at the same time differences with the implication that, as Saussure
noted, “in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure,
1974, p. 120).
In the theorization we draw on in this paper, which draws on a long tradition of
thought in political theory (Coole, 2000; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001; Stavrakakis, 2005;
Žižek, 1993), positive and negative not only differ from, but are in tension with, each
other. Specifically, the positive refers to social structures, institutions and practices –
best practice, evidence-based policy or teaching standards – “that have become
reified, ossified, totalized” (Coole, 2000, p. 10). Such positive structures tend not to
question their own grounding but instead are typically taken as the natural order of
things. In contrast, the negative is that which unsettles and disrupts the comfortable
stance of the given order of things. However, rather than seeing the negative as
merely the mirror image of the positive, their relationship is one of mutual
imbrication. Fomenting the seeds of new thinking and new directions in order to
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challenge the contemporary hegemony of received understandings, settled
questions and sedimented truths in education requires recognition of this interplay.
In this sense, tarrying with negativity is a political practice that engages with the
positive to reveal the historical and contingent nature of all knowledge and to
characterise the unstable spaces – such as the notion of impotentiality that we
discuss here – where positive and negative meet. Thinking about the meanings and
implications of such politicised practices for education is the purpose of our paper.
In thinking about negativity and the negative, it is important to recognize the
different levels on which this notion could be read. In particular, it is possible to
identify three registers or indices of negativity: “as negativity which is affirmative; as
negation which mediates positive and negative, and as surrender to positivism”
(Coole, 2000, p. 60). The first of these reads negativity as an unrepresentable but
disruptive-generative ‘force’ in the Nietzschean or Deleuzean sense. The second
reads negativity as the sustaining of a productive dialectical tension between the
negative and the positive, involving reiterated rhythms of creation and destruction.
The third, reified version is an ever-present risk in talking about negativity, and is
one against which the first two versions – where we locate this paper – are ranged
(Coole, 2000, p. 61).
In terms of our theorization of positive and negative, contemporary education could
be argued to be suffering from a surplus of the positive. This surplus positivity takes
a variety of forms and fundamentally shapes education across a rage of
spatiotemporal contexts. It includes, for example, the detailed prescriptions of
knowledge contained in national and state curricula. It can also be seen in the
delineation of teachers’ responsibilities and duties embodied in teacher professional
standards with their attempts at providing a comprehensive map of the work of
teaching. And it is evident in the synoptic evaluations that are taken as providing
definitive ‘truths’ about education performance at various levels, including student
performance through the results of standardized student assessments; school
performance as reflected in OFSTED school inspection reports and; systemic
performance as indicated by the outcomes of international testing regimes such as
PISA and TIMMS. Overall, these developments are linked by a common underlying
assumption that measurement – and hence measurability – is the sine qua non of
quality education, just as it is in the neoclassical economics that serves as the master
template for most, if not all, walks of life in the neoliberal era (Peters & Besley, 2006,
p. 32).
Education in the Neoliberal Era: Tensions, Contradictions and Cruel Optimism
The policy of providing mass education in the era of capitalist production was driven
by two related aims: “it prepared human beings for the specialist economic functions
which awaited them and for the spirit of capitalism to which they must subscribe”
(Dardot & Laval, 2013, pp. 66-67) and it sought to shape them in the image of a
common national identity (e.g. Lowe, 1999). In recent decades, as the spirit of
capitalism has metamorphosed from one characterized by a social democratic
orientation, in which states sought to provide basic levels of welfare and state
planning as part of a broad political class compromise, to a neoliberal orientation,
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characterized by an expansion of markets and an intensification of competitive
pressures, so too education has shifted from a vehicle for ameliorating deep
historical, social and economic inequalities to a mechanism for enjoining individuals
and communities to see and shape themselves as self responsibilising
entrepreneurial subjects. This is reflected in a discursive shift in the language of
policy from earlier emphases on equity as equality to neoliberal talk of equity as
equality of opportunity, where the latter is typically reduced to purely quantifiable
(and hence typically measureable through the results of high stakes tests) indicators
and increasingly conflated with excellence or quality (Gillies, 2008).
Contemporary neoliberal education policy’s trust in numbers – an item of faith it
shares with neoclassical economics – is linked to an unswerving belief in the
predominantly economic purposes of education. Indeed, as others have observed,
policy makers’ thinking about education has been largely colonized by discourses of
economics in recent decades (e.g. Stronach, 2010). It is important to recognize,
however, that neoliberalisation has been a political rather than just an economic
project: whilst its mechanisms may have been economic, “neoliberalism was
essentially a political response to the democratic gains that had previously been won
by working classes and which had become, from capitalism’s perspective, barriers to
capital accumulation” (Panitch & Gindin, 2012, p. 15). Thus, it is not surprising that
education has been a central focus of neoliberal policy makers for, as Fisher
observes, “education, far from being in some ivory tower safely inured from the real
world, is the engine room of the reproduction of social reality, directly confronting
the inconsistencies of the capitalist social field” (Fisher, 2009, p. 26).
A number of trends characterizing global neoliberal education policy can be
identified, reflecting the emphases on marketization, deregulation and competition
characteristic of the neoliberal economic worldview; and although the particular mix
of policies pursued varies between contexts, “critical policy analysis in an era of
globalization requires that we recognize the relationality and interconnectivity of
policy developments” (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010, p. 69, emphasis in original; see also,
Ball, 2012; Hirtt, 2008). These neoliberal policy developments, reflecting the
inconsistencies of the capitalist social field, to quote Fisher again, include a confusing
and contradictory mix of liberalization and control.
In terms of liberalization, policy developments include the deregulation and
decentralization of education provision and the development of new categories of
school, such as charter schools, free schools and academies, justified by ideological
claims in the name of choice and competition. These new forms of school operate
with varying degrees of managerial autonomy within and alongside the state-run
sector and frequently cater for groups of students differentiated by academic
selection and/or along class, ethnic or gender lines. The development of new forms
of schooling has been accompanied and facilitated by the reconfiguration of
education as a marketplace, within which schools vie for ‘customers’ or ‘clients’
(students and their families) through various forms of marketing, including
performance in examinations and inspections, all in the name of diversity and
responsiveness to market requirements. In effect, the imposition of competition and
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choice on schools and communities “has contributed to the increasing fragmentation
of education systems and differentiation of the sites and modes of education
according to social class” (Dardot & Laval, 2013, p. 176).
In terms of control, recent decades have witnessed an increase in state control of
curriculum and teaching through the identification of ‘core knowledge’ and the
development of ideologically driven subjects such as citizenship. Part and parcel of
curriculum reform has been a renewed instrumental vocationalism, manifested in
the development of school-industry partnerships and reflected in curricular
emphases on basic knowledge and skills such as literacy and numeracy at the
expense of more esoteric or aesthetic forms of learning, in order to prepare future
workers for the challenges of competing in the global economy. These reforms have
been consolidated and reinforced by the mandating of outcomes based curricula,
monitored via high-stakes testing and other forms of accountability, and the
promulgation of teacher professional standards linked to compulsory annual
performance reviews. Overall, these control-oriented reforms have entailed “shifting
more of the burden for educational responsibility and achievement from society to
teachers while simultaneously eroding their input in decisions regarding curriculum
content and pedagogy” (Means, 2013, p. 128).
In addition to the tension between liberalization and control, already noted above,
neoliberal education policy involves a series of contradictions. Policy makers talk of
promoting local empowerment, whilst simultaneously making the requirements of
standardization and accountability ever more onerous and restrictive (Wright, 2012);
young people are exhorted to cultivate aspirations and to invest more of themselves
in their education, both financially and emotionally, whilst at the same time, the
likelihood of ending up under- or unemployed grows ever-greater (Howker & Malik,
2010). Teachers are urged to embrace professional responsibility for not only
student learning outcomes, but also for societal wellbeing and economic success, in
the face of growing class sizes, increasingly prescriptive curriculum constraints, and
punitive top-down accountability requirements (Means, 2013). These contradictions
reflect an underlying tension in neoliberalism as a form of political economy: on the
one hand, it promotes and inculcates the desire to be successful and to consume;
but on the other hand, it restricts and denies access to the ability to consume
through the promotion of increased inequality (Kontopodis, 2012).
The inconsistencies and contradictions characteristic of neoliberalism as political
economy, as well as of neoliberal education policy, only some of which have been
briefly sketched above, are captured by Berlant’s (2011) notion of ‘cruel optimism’.
According to Berlant (2011, p. 1), “a relation of cruel optimism exists when
something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”. As she goes on to
note, “where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalizing or animating potency of an
object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving of the very
thing that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first
place” (2011, pp. 24-25).
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Berlant also captures something of the paradox and contradiction of the neoliberal
era with her descriptions of the way existence unfolds within an apparently
oxymoronic state of crisis and impasse, which she brings together in her notion of
‘crisis ordinariness’. She describes how “affective crisis wears out individuals and
spreads across days and myriad lives until publics see themselves constituted in their
precarity and in whatever enclaves and pleasures they can produce amid threat”
(2011, p. 73). In particular, this notion brings together the sense of urgency and
panic suggested by crisis and the sense of stuckness – or at best of muddling through
– suggested by impasse, in a way that reflects the tired and cynical responses of
many educators to the ongoing conjuring of crisis in education by media and
politicians.
From our perspective, Berlant’s work captures the distinctive spirit of the neoliberal
chronotope. Her notion of cruel optimism aptly describes neoliberal education
policy’s contrary mixture of exhortations to aspiration amid growing precarity, while
her insightful depiction of crisis ordinariness as a way of “thinking about the ordinary
as an impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for
adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on” evokes
the numbed fatigue many educators experience as a consequence of the deluge of
reforms comprising neoliberalism’s ‘policy pandemic’ (Vidovich, 2009), concocted in
response to the succession of manufactured crises in education. Cruel optimism also
encapsulates the sadistic recession of the ‘good life’ as a viable reality for growing
numbers of people – for whom it is increasingly being replaced by precarity and
insecurity – alongside its prolonged existence as a fantasy that also serves as an
exhortation in the neoliberal era.
Achieving the good life – or Eudaimonia in Aristotlean (2002) terms – has long served
as the normative grounding of virtue ethics, as well as the providing the guiding
philosophy of liberal capitalist societies. Yet when the good life becomes little more
than a fantasy, sustained and sheltered by an armoury of reified positive structures
and practices, the time is surely ripe to restore balance by embracing the virtues of
negativity. In the following discussion, we outline one specific example of the many
possible forms this negative virtue might adopt in order to disrupt and dislodge
some of the sedimented forms of positivity currently encrusting education.
Adventures in Negativity: From Potentiality to Impotentiality
Georgio Agamben writes that what is at stake in a neoliberal democracy and the
logic of learning that it embodies, is the question of potentiality in relation to
actuality (Lewis, 2011, p. 3). Rather than perceive the child in terms of lack or need,
as Ralph Tyler (1949) did, the child is seen as the site of infinite potentiality that can
and must be actualized through relentless and never-ending learning – just as any
latent potential in the capitalist economy must be realised through ever-increasing
growth and profitability (Blacker, 2013). This learning must also be calculable and
comparable in order to be demonstrable and hence must be repeatedly measured
via performance testing at national (e.g. SATS in England; NAPLAN in Australia;
Formative Skills Assessment (FSA) in British Columbia, Canada) and international
(e.g. TIMMS, PISA) levels.
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Learning, thought about in terms of fulfilling one’s potential, is viewed as a highly
positive disposition and young people are compelled to optimize their performance
(and by implication labour productivity and flexibility in the interests of a fastmoving economy) by investing more of themselves financially and emotionally. The
object of the test score, as an external good with its promise of the good life, now
replaces the internal good of education as ethical self-formation in the lateFoucauldian sense (Ball & Olmedo, 2013). It is not that the promise cannot be
realized by students, however, but that it is “too possible, and toxic” (Berlant, 2011,
p. 24; emphasis in text). One is never done; life becomes a matter of constantly
measuring up. What is cruel about these attachments and not just tragic, perhaps, is
that
The subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their
object/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being,
because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form
provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means
to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world (Berlant, 2011,
p. 24).
Any threat to the achievement of the object can feel like a threat to life itself. So
cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly
problematic object despite, and in some sense because of, the threat that the
attachment poses. This is because the very fear of losing the promising object, of
relinquishing the quest to attain top scores and gain access to that sought after
institution or career, “will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything”
(Berlant, 2011, p. 24). There may seem to be no other paths available for success;
no other knowledge worthy of engagement other than that which leads to specified
outcomes; no other image of self that can fulfill one’s sense of the good; no other
work that can satisfy one’s conception of the good life.
Educators are deeply implicated in this cultural state of affairs, helping students
figure out “how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism
they have for that, at least“ (Berlant 2011, p. 10). As such, teachers bear the burden
of perpetuating the “the appearance of a dependable life” and the “pretense of
significance” (Berlant, 2011, p. 10) by promoting the promise of schooling in terms of
achievement and the associated assurance of this being exchangeable at some
future point for the good life. The public/private zoning of the teacher of late
capitalist modernity is as a (wo)man of the house (who offers care, intimacy,
authority to the young) and a (wo)man of the market (who instrumentalizes
educational relations in terms of the rules of the market) (Habermas, 1991). As the
student leans toward promises contained in the educational relation with the
teacher, mediator of the object of desire – the test score – one wonders about
alternative and less harmful strategies that could be taken up in schools and that
might enable students and teachers to live with the cruel optimism that currently
characterizes the system. Such strategies might not constitute revolution but
gesture toward a freedom at the micro-political level that conserves the capacity for
carrying on while acknowledging the “instability, fragility and dear cost” of political
systems, markets and institutions like schools (Berlant, 2011, p. 2). What might slow
6
things down in the midst of the speeding up that capitalism engenders in the hyperscheduled patterns of school and home life? What might interrupt the assumption
that human activity must be intentional or goal-oriented? Put simply, perhaps, is
there a different logic of learning upon which teachers and students might draw?
Here we turn to Agamben’s notion of study. Specifically, we argue that study offers
“a provocative alternative that breaks the correspondence between human activity
and teleology” (Lewis, 2011, p. 587). Study hence offers an invaluable contrast to
today’s predominant model of learning, where the latter equates to maximising
one’s potential, which, in turn, is reduced to a deficit – to that which is not yet: the
child “not yet an adult, not yet a citizen, not yet a productive member of society”
(Lewis, 2011, p. 588). Potentiality, in the sense of an open field of possibilities, has
to be sacrificed in order for the child to realize the goals—knowledge, skills and
attributes—identified by governments, educators and educational researchers.
Potential takes the form of a stylized, generic identity ever keen on developing itself
as dictated by external needs. Caught in both a politics and an ontology of
substance—what (already) is—youth are denied “a politics of potentiality: a future
of open, unimpeded becoming” (Colebrook 2008, p. 112). Their responses are
different depending on the type and degree of vulnerability experienced (Berlant
2011, p. 20).
“Styles of response to crisis are powerfully related to the expectations of the
world they had to reconfigure in the face of tattering formal and informal
norms of social and institutional reciprocity. …statuses like class, race, nation,
gender and sexuality... operate amid the rich subjective lives of beings who
navigate the world from many copresent arcs of history and experience.
People born into unwelcoming worlds and unreliable environments have a
different response to the new precarities than do people who presumed they
would be protected”.
Youth that are already vulnerable (e.g., in terms of social class, race or gender)
respond by going into survival mode; coasting becomes the art of existence. By
contrast, youth who fully expect that they are and will continue to be protected
become self-responsibilising entrepreneurial subjects, hoarding achievement scores
for exchange at a later date while becoming increasingly attached “to life lived
without risk, in proximity to plenitude without enjoyment” (Berlant, 2011, p. 41).
Both styles restrict the affects of the young and limit rather than extend the
possibilities of subjectivity.
In study, however, the experience of potentiality is freed from the imperative to
manage, commodify, and exchange our potential within a knowledge economy. As
such, study is a curious site of freedom. Lewis (2011, p. 587) explains,
It is his [Agamben’s] theory of study that enables us to retain our
(im)potential, and in turn recognize that our very potentiality to not be is in
fact our greatest form of freedom…..the lesson of study is to become nothing
at all but rather to remain within a pure capacity to be or not to be.
Agamben (2005) is drawing on an Aristotelian understanding of “effective
potentiality” that conserves rather than sacrifices itself, somewhat like giving
7
potentiality as a gift to itself. The one who studies has knowledge, and so is in
potential, having the capacity to bring that knowledge into actuality and not bring
knowledge into actuality, to put it to work. Study is, for Agamben, interminable. Each
book leads onto another, each new reference begins a trail to another, and as the
student pursues meaning associated with other meanings, the end seems far in the
distant. Those who study have to lose their stubborn attachment to particular lines
of inquiry and to the comfort of familiar ideas. Paradoxically, it is through studying
that the student is rendered stupid, melancholic, and yet free. Freedom as the
rhythm of study is experienced as a shuttling between bewilderment and lucidity,
discovery and loss, between agent and patient (Lewis, 2011). In study the close
relation between potential and (im)potential is maintained; the impotent is included
alongside the potent; the law (of mandated curriculum or performance testing) is
not abolished nor is it left operative; nothing changes and yet everything changes.
By conserving itself in study, potential remains (impotential) but as Lewis (2011)
clarifies, the latter does not simply mean impotence.
It is an active capacity for not-doing or not-being. To experience
(im)potentiality is therefore the experience of not-writing that enables the
poet to develop proficiency through sustained reflection, planning,
speculation, imagination etc. Agamben summarizes: (im)potential “permits
human beings to accumulate and freely master their own capacities, to
transform them into ‘faculties’” (Lewis, 2011, p. 588).
The mode of existence of potentiality is therefore the potential to not-do, the
potential not to pass into actuality which Agamben terms “impotentiality” (1999, p.
183). He concludes that human faculty is “the presence of an absence” and
potentiality is the mode of existence of this privation (p. 179). Simply put, a being
able that abstains from doing (Faulkner, 2010); it is the impotentiality of potentiality
that enables free choice. It opens history to contingency, to the potential to act or
to be otherwise (cf Foucault, 1997). Freedom is not so much in the acting/realizing
one’s capabilities as in the experience of the moment before the choice: the
experience of potentiality as “I can, I cannot” (Lewis, 2014, p. 336). Potential is
maintained in a close relationship with impotential.
Despite the rhetoric of potential, neoliberal educational policy severs the relation
between potentiality and impotentiality. It does so by its efforts to determine, define
and represent the actuality of learning and learner via standardization. The student’s
potential is, in this view, a means to a predetermined end; and it can be measured.
Impotential, on the other hand, enables the emergence of what Agamben terms a
“whatever being”— indistinct and unrepresentable – who is special because it does
not fit/belong within any class or set or category: a pure singularity. Indeed, akin the
Ruti’s depiction of the demands of singularity (2012, p. 35), impotentiality “asks us to
create spaces in our lives for what is irregular, erractic, unnerving, and sometimes
even uncomfortable; it asks us to allow ourselves to be swayed by aspirations that
may lead to thoroughly awkward displays of surplus ardour, passion, and (posttheological) devotion”. Potentiality, in this view, is a means without end, and
without measure. It is a form of belonging that does not prescribe conditions for
8
belonging; a form of being that is always open to different modes of being (Lewis,
2011).
The zone of impotentiality is a zone of indistinction, of thought, wherein the student
is neither constrained by political powers nor resistant to them; rather she lives
consciously suspended between what policy wants her to be and what she might yet
become. Agamben has faith in the power of study to open the path to thought.
Studying is for him “a kind of im-potential state of educational being” (Lewis, 2013,
p. 12). It comes with no guarantees. Freedom is not so much found in the student’s
realization of his or her capabilities but in the realization of (im)potentiality as “I can,
I cannot;” it is the choice that opens history to contingency, to the potential to act or
to be otherwise. In contrast, stylized neo-liberal subjects believe themselves to be
capable of everything (“I can!); they have been rendered blind not to their
capacities but to their incapacities, not to what they can do but to what they cannot,
or can not, do; there is no realization that they have been subjected to forces and
processes over which they have lost control. It is in this manner that the cruelly
optimistic fantasy of education as the path to the good life is sustained.
Agamben’s theory of study provides a helpful interruption to the assumption that all
human activity is, or should be, goal-oriented. He helps us understand how the
predominance of “a teleological notion of human nature organized in terms of
desires, intentions, and purposes obscures the more fragile, contingent, and
precious capacity that is also an incapacity: our impotentiality” (Lewis, 2012, p. 103).
Education’s role in shaping adjustments to the structural pressures of crisis and loss
the power of the good life’s traditional fantasy bribe may be wearing out without
wearing out the need for a good life. On the one hand, we witness the rise in suicide
rates among youth across the world. Reproducing life as we have come to
understand it is literally killing some of our children. On the other hand, most
people, according to Berlant (2011), “choose to ride the wave of the system of
attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in relation of
reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it” (p. 28).
Youth, often encouraged by those closest to them, move toward the normative and
become numb with the consensual promise, misrecognizing that promise as
achievement. Not yet dead but “deadened” our many students succumb to being
“the color someone has placed inside of the lines” (p. 30); they learn to live with a
sense of ‘slight excitement’ (p. 30). Access to university or high performance on tests
(performativity) becomes the promise of the promise, a technical optimism; linking
youth to life lived without risk, close to ‘plenitude without enjoyment’ (p. 41). For
the ambitious, it destroys the pleasure of the stress of getting through the day
because the stakes are so high and the scale of potential loss is too big. For the nonambitious, they will navigate the available spaces rather than trying to carve out
their own. In each case the price paid is high. So what are the alternatives? Space
does not permit a worked out response to this question – to do so would require
book length treatment of our topic – but in the final section below we at least
attempt to identify general directions for possible lines of flight from the current
dystopia.
9
Conclusion: From Responsibiisation and Risk Management to New Registers of
Social Reciprocity?
There are vigils; there is witnessing, testimony, and yelling. But there is not yet
a consensual rubric that would shape these matters into an event (Berlant,
2011, p. 225).
Neoliberalisation has involved a number of significant shifts in educational policy and
practice across every stage and sector; but perhaps one of the most striking shifts is
from relations of shared social reciprocity, in which society made some, albeit always
faltering and inadequate, effort to assume responsibility for individuals’ educational
fate, to a mode in which individual schools and students are exhorted to cultivate
high aspirations and to assume full responsibility for maximising their own
educational potential. Within this framing, and despite the fact that educational
success continues to be deliberately rationed at institutional and societal levels
(Gillborn & Youdell, 2000) – rendering the cultivation and maintenance of these
ambitions, for many, a form of cruel optimism – ethical behavior equates to the
embrace of responsibilisation and the exercise of strategic risk management in
relation to these stakes (Peters, 2001).
Perhaps in light of this seismic shift, it is too much to expect any theory or theorist to
have the capacity to bring about equally significant change in an alternative
direction. Nonetheless, we would argue that Agamben’s provocative notion of
“impotentiality” may offer possibilities for new registers of reciprocity, based on the
creative freedom to choose to be or not to be ‘that’, in contrast to the ethic of
responsibilisation and risk management, the ethos of compliance and constraint,
that predominate in neoliberal school cultures. For significant change is not going to
come about just in response to frustration with the shortcomings and shortchanges
of the status quo. What is also needed is a widespread politics involving, not only
rejection of and resistance to a model of political economy that is punitive and
exclusionary – that, in short, is not working for the majority of people, most of the
time – but also a concerted will to construct new systems and structures based on
forms of reciprocity and relationality different from the hierarchical, instrumental
and competitive versions on offer today (Fielding & Moss, 2011). It is here that
notions like impotentiality are vital in enabling us to gain glimpses of alternative
possibilities beyond the sedimented certainties and securities of current realities.
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