Policy Futures in Education, Volume 3, Number 4, 2005
doi: 10.2304/pfie.2005.3.4.436
Education, Post-structuralism
and the Politics of Difference[1]
MICHAEL A. PETERS
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
ABSTRACT This article examines the ‘politics of difference’, a phrase now almost
synonymous with postmodernism and the critique of the Enlightenment. The article
provides a post-structuralist take on this critique arguing that a critique of Enlightenment
values can lead to a deepening of democracy and using Foucault’s notion of governmentality
to elucidate the way political reason links the form of liberal government with the selfgoverning individual. It also examines emergent forms of post-coloniality with its emphasis
on philosophies of difference and encounters with the Other and borrows the concept of the
‘multitude’ from Hardt and Negri, to talk about Derrida’s ‘coming of world demoracy’.
Every nationalism is metaphysically an anthropologism, and as such subjectivism.
Nationalism is not overcome through mere internationalism; it is rather expanded and
elevated thereby into a system. Nationalism is as little brought and raised to humanitas by
internationalism as individualism is by an ahistorical collectivism. (Martin Heidegger, Letter
on Humanism, 1999, p. 244)
Introduction
In this article I focus on ‘the politics of difference’, a phrase now thought to be synonymous with
postmodernism and the development of post-structuralist thought. In particular, I elaborate the
meaning of this phrase by reference to the following four aspects:
• a deepening of democracy through a political critique of Enlightenment values;
• an understanding of ‘governmentality’ as political reason linking forms of governance and the
self-regulating individual;
• emergent forms of post-coloniality, an emphasis on philosophies of difference and the encounter
with the Other;
• ‘the multitude’ – the coming of world democracy.
While much of what I have to say does not directly apply to ‘education’, it has a set of obvious
reference points, which I explore in the final section. My argument is that much of the political
culture of education has been, and is being, shaped by forces under discussion under these
headings.
A Political Critique of the Enlightenment
This critique highlights the increasing significance of issues of Self and identity, particularly in
relation to Enlightenment notions of a universal, stable, unchanging and essentialist Self that has
served as the core of European conceptions of the citizen-subject. I have argued previously that
with a post-Nietzschean conception of cultural studies we might also talk of a deepening of
democracy and a political critique of Enlightenment values based upon criticism of the ways that
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The Politics of Difference
modern liberal democracies construct political identity (Peters, 2001c). The major problem is that
both liberal and Marxist theory construct identity in terms of a series of binary oppositions (e.g.
we/them, citizen/alien, responsible/irresponsible, legitimate/illegitimate), which has the effect of
excluding or ‘Othering’ some groups of people. Western countries grant rights to citizens – rights
that are dependent upon citizenship – and regard non-citizens, that is immigrants, those seeking
asylum and refugees, as ‘aliens’.[2] The political critique of the Enlightenment demands that we
examine how these boundaries are socially constructed, and how they are maintained and policed.
It suggests that we must learn how these boundaries are manipulated and represented in the
service of political ends – witness the present Conservative attempt to pout the questions of
immigration at the centre of the forthcoming elections in the United Kingdom.[3] In particular, the
deconstruction of political hierarchies of value comprising binary oppositions and philosophies of
difference is highly significant for current debates on multiculturalism and feminism in education.
The exclusion of groups from citizen status equally also can take place within the nation state,
where a set of historic ‘we/they’ oppositions is used legally and politically to exclude, deny or
downgrade the ‘rights’ of minorities based on ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or disability. What
post-structuralism (if I can use this shorthand) allows is a better understanding of the mechanisms
by which traditional exclusions have occurred and a better understanding of the centrality of
questions of identity at the level of the personal and individual, the community and state. Poststructuralism promotes an understanding of the negotiated character of identity, especially in
relation to the notion of the citizen and the changing constellation of the nation state – both, after
all, relatively recent historical phenomena. It does this in a way that is not antagonistic to the
privileging of either the individual bourgeois Self that stands at the heart of liberalism and provides
the analytical power for liberal political economy or the ‘classed’ subject – the party or the
proletariat as revolutionary vanguard – that motivated the profound changes accompanying the
birth of socialism.
If there is one notion that distinguishes post-structuralism it is the notion of difference, which
various thinkers use, develop and apply in different ways. The notion of difference comes from
Nietzsche, from Saussure, and from Heidegger. For Derrida, différance is seen as plotting the
linguistic limits of the subject. These notions of difference, pointing to an anti-essentialism, have
been subsequently developed in relation to both gender and ethnicity studies (e.g. Young, 1991;
West, 1992). Ho-chia Chueh’s (2004) excellent book Anxious Identity: education, difference and politics
stands in this line of investigation. She investigates how concepts of difference and identity are at
the heart of contemporary cultural theory exemplified in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Iris
M. Young, Jacques Derrida and Chantal Mouffe, and she examines Jacques Derrida’s ideas on the
political as a means of understanding difference and identity in education. I think she would agree
with Derrida and others that through this more nuanced reading of identity and its political
construction we can deepen democracy and education for democracy.
‘Governmentality’ as Political Reason
The notion of power is open to revision; just as ‘culture’ itself has been subject to ongoing poststructuralist criticism and revision. The diagnosis of ‘power/knowledge’ and the exposure of
technologies of domination based upon Foucault’s analytics of power is also decidedly Nietzschean.
As we all know, for Foucault power is productive; it is dispersed throughout the social system, and
it is intimately related to knowledge. It is productive because it is not only repressive but also
creates new knowledge (which may also liberate). It is dispersed rather than located in any one
centre, like the state; and, it is part of the constellation of ‘power/knowledge’, which means that
knowledge, in the sense of discursive practices, is generated through the exercise of power in the
control of the body. Foucault develops this thesis through his genealogical study of the
development of modern institutions like the prison and the school, and the corresponding
emergence of the social sciences that helped devise new methods of social control. Foucault’s
studies thus provide post-Nietzschean cultural studies with a basis for examining the reproduction
of liberal subjects as individuals, indeed, their ethical self-constitution as subjects. As such, this
Foucault-inspired approach might help us unravel the inherent individualism of liberalism, which
even with the proposed reform of core assumptions, is not readily able to entertain collective
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entities, and thus, theoretically, is impoverished when it comes to questions of culture and
difference. In the same way, it may also lead us to question the privileging of ‘the social’ in
concepts of ‘family’, ‘community’ or ‘class’.
Foucault’s concept of governmentality provides both a means of mapping the ‘history of the
present’ and an understanding of the rationality of government as permitting and requiring the
practice of freedom of its subjects. In other words, government in this sense only becomes possible
at the point at which policing and administration stop – at the point at which the relations between
government and self-government coincide and coalesce. Foucault’s approach makes central the
notion of the self-limiting state, which, in contrast to the administrative (or ‘police’) state, brings
together in a productive way questions of ethics and technique through the responsibilisation of
moral agents and the active reconstruction of the relation between government and selfgovernment. It provides an analysis of neo-liberalism as an intensification of an economy of moral
regulation first developed by liberals, and not merely or primarily as a political reaction to big
government or the so-called bureaucratic welfare state of the post-war Keynesian settlement. It
theorises neo-liberalism in terms of its emphasis on ‘artificially arranged or contrived forms of the
free, entrepreneurial, and competitive conduct of economic-rational individuals’ (Burchell, 1996,
p. 23). And, further, it understands neo-liberalism through the development of a new relation
between expertise and politics, especially in the realm of welfare, where an actuarial rationality and
new forms of prudentialism manifest and constitute themselves discursively in the language of
‘purchaser–provider’, audit, performance and ‘risk management’ (Peters, 2003a).
This approach, therefore, provides a useful set of insights into the nature of government as a set
of practices, the development of the ‘social economy’ and the role of education policy within it.
Post-coloniality, Difference and the Encounter with the Other
The Hegelian dialectic is the logical machinery that underlies the development of the Marxist
understanding of imperialism and much of the early work of ‘post-colonial’ thinkers such as Frantz
Fanon. While an enormous theoretical advance and effective political strategy, it suffers from a
number of theoretical difficulties. By dividing up cultures into two separate, discrete classes
(oppressed and oppressor) it implies a false homogeneity of both parts, reifying them, and thus
tends to downplay the interconnections, the links, the fluid boundaries and exchanges. This
homogeneity of cultures can also (dangerously, in my view) portray a ‘pureness’, as though the
culture is an organic whole protected from ‘pollution’ or ‘contamination’ in coming into contact
with other cultures and social formations. A Hegelian definition of culture as a notion that defines
itself only through the power of negation is essentially reactive, asserting that both cultures are
locked in a life-and-death struggle and only one of them can ‘win’ in the end. This oppositional
logic tends to obscure relational processes between cultures – such as migration, borrowings,
hybridisations and other social processes. The Hegelian theoretical opposition tends to
underestimate both the importance of subcultures and contemporary social movements that have
the power to redefine cultures, and also fails to conceptualise the relationship between cultures and
individuals in order to take account of dissent and disagreement within cultures.
The Hegelian model of consciousness, of Self and identity, inaugurates a new way of thinking
that helped to define these concepts for leftist thinkers of modernity: not only Marx, but also
Kojève, Sartre, Lacan and Fanon. Hegel’s model of the dialectic of Self and Other, governed by the
logic of negation, informs versions of Marxism (particularly notions of ‘alienation’ and
imperialism), phenomenology (Kojève’s interpretation of ‘unhappy consciousness’), existentialism,
psychoanalysis, and philosophies of decolonisation and cultural liberation. Hegel’s account
provides the most comprehensive account of the dualistic or oppositional logic characterising
modernity – not only labour/capital, capitalism/socialism, but also coloniser/colonised,
man/woman – yet it is also a product of its age.
There are philosophical resources and an understanding of ‘difference’ that tend to characterise
the present historical phase – what we might provocatively call ‘postmodernity’ or ‘postcoloniality’ – better than Hegel’s dualistic logic of alterity. This is one of the main lessons that socalled post-colonial theorists such as Said, Spivak and Bhabha have learned from the French poststructuralists. Why would we expect a text written almost 200 years ago to have the power still to
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be able to define the present era? In postmodernity – in the post-colonial age, an age where many
peoples have won their political independence or recognition – ‘difference’ provides a better
ground for understanding identity claims and struggles.
The movement we call ‘post-structuralism’ can be interpreted, at least in part, as a philosophical
attack on the scientific pretensions of structuralism by means of Nietzsche, whose work in the
French context is used to provide a re-evaluation of Hegel’s dialectic (see Peters, 1996). Drawing
upon Nietzsche’s critique of ‘truth’ and on his analysis of the differential relations of power and
knowledge, post-structuralists have challenged the assumptions that give rise to binary and
oppositional thinking while also questioning the humanistic human subject. Post-structuralists have
located the subject in all its cultural and historical complexity at the complex intersection of
discursive, libidinal and social forces. This historicisation of the Self is a product of recognising both
the temporality and finitude of the self. The Self is seen to be discursively reproduced and
positioned. It is a communicative practice of diverse language games and multiple self-defined
narratives that draw on literary and expressive forms. Post-colonial theorists, using these insights,
have sought also to critique forms of Eurocentrism as based on the myth of a universalist, stable,
transparent humanist Self by posing an alternative radical alterity based on post-colonial
experiences, and thus exposing and opening up the European Enlightenment experience of oneness
and unity to non-Western cultural codes and interpretations.
Post-colonial studies, then, is based squarely on ‘the desire to speak to the Western paradigm of
knowledge in the voice of otherness’ (Goldberg & Quayson, 2002). This fundamental premise
recognises how interaction with subjected Others constituted the very experience of Western
modernity and today conditions the processes of globalisation. Bhabha & Comaroff (2002)
acknowledge that the novel recastings of Hegelian causality by the likes of Lukács, Althusser and
others provided ‘only limited intellectual and ideological space for evaluating or validating cultural
translation, metissage, creolization, hybridization’ (p. 20). Structural Marxism robbed ‘the agency
of the culturally endowed colonized peoples’ (p. 22) and stressed the need for more nuanced and
differentiated colonised subjects as subjects of resistance.
Indeed, Comaroff’s question to Bhabha focuses our attention on the intellectual work postcolonial theory is expected to do: ‘What does a post-colonial optic bring to the discourse about the
nature of neoliberal capitalism, of globalization, of the world post-1989?’ (p. 23). Bhabha’s answer in
terms of a ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ as a mark of the post-colonial experience reaffirms how
necessary it is to question the history of liberalism, its civilising mission and its assumed
individualism as a basis for any notion of rights and citizenship. Bhabha indicates that postcoloniality draws upon a notion of identity that is both more disseminatory and iterative than the
homogenising notion underlying liberalism. In these contexts, political and cultural citizenship may
stand opposed to one another. Certainly, both Bhabha and Comaroff wish to question the
narration of modernist nations under postmodern conditions: how, for instance, imagining a ‘new’
South Africa involved a language of modernist sovereign statehood that placed its faith in
constitutionality, equality before the law, human rights and social justice, and the future of
‘rational’ development. Perhaps, they muse together, after Hobsbawm, the African National
Congress was the last great Euronationalist movement.
The Coming of World Democracy
Standing in line with Nietzsche and Heidegger, Derrida agrees that the most important
philosophical task is to break free from the ‘logocentrism’ of Western philosophy – the selfpresence, immediacy and univocity – that clouds our view and manifests its nihilistic impulses in
Western culture. And yet, for Derrida, ‘breaking free’ does not mean overcoming metaphysics.
Deconstruction substitutes a critical practice focused upon texts for the ineffable or the
inexpressible. It does so, not by trying to escape the metaphysical character of language, but by
exposing and undermining it.
In an interview with Richard Beardsworth, Derrida talks in Nietzschean terms of ‘democracy to
come’. As Beardsworth observes, the promise of democracy is not the same as either the fact of
democracy or the regulative idea (in the Kantian sense) of democracy. On Derrida’s account of
différance we might expect deconstruction to challenge, perhaps, heavily centralist and ‘structured’
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representationalist models of democracy and to favour a greater recognition of difference and the
Other; possibly even, in conjunction with these emphases, an emphasis on the promotion of local
autonomy and greater global world democracy.
In response to Beardsworth, Derrida comments upon the ways technologisation of politicoeconomic processes alters the structure of decision making and diminishes the sites on which the
democratic used to be situated. He writes:
The site of representation and the stability of the location which make up parliament or
assembly, the territorialisation of power, the rooting of power to a particular place, if not to
the ground as such – all this is over. The notion of politics dependent on this relation
between power and space is over as well, although its end must be negotiated with. I am not
just thinking here of the present forms of nationalism and fundamentalism. Technoscientific
acceleration poses an absolute threat to Western-style democracy as well, following its
radical undermining of locality. (Derrida, 1994a, p. 66)
In relation to the disappearance of the sites of democracy and the way that both assembly and
parliament are being transformed by the media, Derrida suggests these issues do not sound the
death knell for democracy, but rather make it imperative that we begin to rethink democracy ‘from
within these conditions’ (Derrida, 1994a, p. 66).
The future of democracy must be thought in global terms. It is no longer possible to be a
democrat ‘at home’ and wait to see what happens ‘abroad’. In emphasising the call to a world
democracy, Derrida suggests the stakes of a ‘democracy to come’ can no longer be contained
within frontiers or depend upon the decisions of a group of citizens or a nation, or group of
nations. The call is for something new which is both more modest and yet also more ambitious
than any overriding concept of the universal, the cosmopolitan or the human. He distinguishes the
difference between a rhetorical sense of democracy as politics that transcends borders (as one
might speak of the United Nations) and what he calls a ‘democracy to come’, which exhibits itself
in decisions made in the name of the ‘rights of man’ insofar as this term is ‘at the same time alibis
for the continued inequality between singularities’. He indicates that we need to invent new
concepts – concepts other than those of ‘state’, ‘superstate’, ‘citizen’, and so forth – for what he has
called the ‘New International’. He says:
The democracy to come obliges one to challenge instituted law in the name of an
indefinitely unsatisfied justice, thereby revealing the injustice of calculating justice whether
this be in the name of a particular form of democracy or of the concept of humanity.
(Derrida, 1994a, p. 66)
Elsewhere, Derrida (1994b) explains what he means by deconstructing the foundations of
international law. While international law is a good thing, it is nevertheless rooted in the Western
concept of philosophy – as he says, ‘in its mission, its axiom, in its languages’ – and the Western
concept of state and sovereignty, which acts as a limit. In order to rethink the international order
and think of a ‘democracy to come’, we must deconstruct the foundations of international law and
the international organisations built upon it. The second limit is that the international organisations
are governed by a number of powerful, rich states, including the USA.
Elsewhere and most recently, he explores the tasks of the new humanities in historically
unpicking the powerful judicial performatives that have regulated the modern history and concept
of man, and, in particular, the genealogy of the ‘rights of man’ (and women) and the emergence of
the concept ‘crimes against humanity’ since the Second World War (Derrida, 2001). He argues that
the new humanities would not only treat the history of man and its impact upon the geopolitical
field of international law, but also the history of democracy and of sovereignty, bringing into
scrutiny an examination of the limits of the nation state, its supposed sovereignty and the way in
which this family of concepts is used to regulate relations between men and women, and among
different groups (see Peters, 2001a, b, 2004; Trifonas & Peters, 2004).
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri (2004), in their Multitude: war and democracy in an age of empire,
analyse the possibility of democracy emerging on a global scale for the first time. This possibility,
or what they call the ‘project of the multitude’, expresses a desire for a world of equality and
freedom. Their book, a sequel to an earlier academic best-seller Empire (Hardt & Negri, 2001),
begins at the same point to argue that global order cannot be understood in terms of an imperialist
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model based on the aggressive territoriality of the sovereignty of the nation state. Rather, a new
form of ‘network power’ has arisen – a new form of empiric sovereignty – comprised of the USA
and a number of other nation states, corporations and the world policy agencies that maintain
global order (see Peters, 2003b). ‘Multitude’ is Hardt & Negri’s term, as against ‘the people’, ‘the
masses’ or ‘the working class’, for the counter-globalisation movement that exists within empire
and already has demonstrated its power to communicate and act together (see Peters, 2003c). The
multitude is directly related to the possibility of world democracy through its discovery of the
communication commons and its democratic political organisation.
The Politics of Difference
I have barely scratched the surface and have not yet had room to comment on how these four
elements criss-cross one another or might be woven into a more coherent view or theory. I have
used the term ‘the politics of difference’ to thematise these elements and I believe I can defend this
move, especially if we allow talk of difference in relation to identity at the personal level and also
entertain the relation between the nation state and citizen in Foucauldian terms. The last point –
the coming of world democracy – concerns, if you like, ‘network identity’, a concept that indicates
that people are finding their political identities outside the borders of the nation state.
Iris Marion Young, building on post-structuralist resources, was among the first in the period of
the early 1990s to critique the standard liberal reduction of social justice to a Rawlsian model of
distributive justice with its demand for unitary moral subjectivity. Young critiques the assumption
of a homogenous public (modelled on white European norms of reason) as one that signally fails to
account for the culturally differentiated and plural network of contemporary urban life. Indeed, her
vision of the good society is one that starts from the recognition of a culturally differentiated and
group-based politics, and she strongly elaborates an emancipatory postmodern theory of
democracy.[4] Young’s work is obviously modelled on the American experience, although there is
now an emerging body of work that has begun to explore the politics of difference in territories as
different as Bosnia, post-apartheid South Africa, Belgium and Sri Lanka.
Liberal theorists predicted that with the rise of modernised democratic states the sources of
ethnic and national identity as a basis for political action would diminish, but seemingly the
contemporary scene is experiencing a revitalisation of ethnonationalism, often violent and
genocidal. Often this form of identity politics, which accepts ethnic group self-identification as the
most appropriate vehicle for social action, ends up by legitimising the very conditions of inequality
that gave rise to them in the first place (Wilmsen & McAllister, 1996). In the imperial past many
societies were divided into autonomous ethnic elements and rules paid no attention to identity so
long as taxes were paid. With modernity, liberal nation states demanded national integration based
on a ‘one-nation, one-language’ model that involved the suppression of difference and forced
assimilation and integration. More recently, with the passage of modernity, the process of
decolonisation and the renaissance of indigenous cultures, ethnic equality has been forced on the
statute books and there has been a grudging acceptance of cultural differences and a social
experimentation with forms of multiculturalism and biculturalism. The vital question is whether
contemporary states have the political and economic will to sustain non-essentialising forms of
egalitarian multiculturalism (Grillo, 1998).
These are essentially educational matters, not only in terms of the establishment of historical
truth, the development of public archives and the critical appraisal of anti-intellectualism, especially
in its nationalist guises, but also more fundamentally in terms of the promotion at all levels of a
form of citizenship that breaks once and for all with the liberal equation of ‘one nation, one
culture’. The politics of difference, then, becomes the basis for an educational research programme
and curriculum that seeks an understanding of ‘culture’ and ‘nation’ (and ‘language’) which is not
wedded to the European paradigm of modernity, sustained in one form by both left- and rightthinking Hegelians.
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The European Paradigm of Modernity
The negative spin on postmodernity emphasises a kind of cultural pessimism, fragmentation and
dissolution, given different expression by counter-Enlightenment thinkers, and different versions of
dystopia, emphasising the ravages of industrialism on the environment and, by contrast, a nostalgia
for the rural community. It recalls the dislocation and fragmentation of traditional societies,
indigenous cultures and the extended family. It describes the consequences of instrumental
rationality, which has great efficacy but no power of self-criticism. And it draws our historical
attention to the movements of great colonising forces associated with forms of imperialism and the
endless commodification of values.
Postmodernity considered as a future-oriented project, by contrast, describes the possibility for
a reconstitution of utopian thought, involving, on one influential account, a post-scarcity order,
multilayered democratic participation, world demilitarisation and a humanisation of technology
(Giddens, 1990, p. 164). This more positive, though not always celebratory, project also envisages
the possibility of a new global order based upon a universally accepted human rights culture and
the institution of the global market. Yet this project also fractures around a triumphal neo-liberal
free-trade, free-finance global version embraced by the likes of Francis Fukuyama, who thinks we
have reached the ‘end of history’ and models globalisation on the self-regulating individual, and an
internationalist third way version (Fukuyama, 1992).
Both dystopian and utopian versions tend to highlight the Eurocentrism at the heart of
conceptions of modernity that, if left unexamined, can distort conceptualisations of cultural
postmodernity. Enrique Dussel (1998), adopting this line of thinking, suggests that there are two
opposing paradigms which characterise modernity, the Eurocentric and the planetary. The first, he
suggests, describes modernity as exclusively European, developing in the Middle Ages and, over
time, spreading to the rest of the world; the second, as he argues, ‘conceptualises modernity as the
culture of the center of the “world-system”, of the first world-system, through the incorporation of
Amerindia, and as a result of the management of this “centrality”’. As Dussel goes on to explain: ‘In
other words, European modernity is not an independent, autopoietic, self-referential system, but
instead is part of a world-system: in fact, its center’ (Dussel, 1998, p. 4).
To illustrate the first formulation – the Eurocentric paradigm of modernity – Dussel refers to
Weber’s classic formulation of modernity, quoting from the introduction to The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism that extraordinary passage pointing to the West’s cultural specificity:
to what combination of circumstances should the fact be attributed that in Western
civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as
we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value. (Cited
in Dussel, 1998, p. 3)
This line of thinking suggests Europe had the unique cultural ingredients that combined in a single
comprehensive unified ethos, designated by Weber as ‘rationalization’, to allow it to supersede all
other cultures. The thought is given its ultimate philosophical expression, as Dussel notes, in
Hegel’s The Philosophy of History, where he suggests that the spirit of the New World is the German
spirit, which aims to realise absolute truth as unlimited self-determination
(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/hiconten.htm
[accessed Jan 6, 2006]).
In this light I would argue that postmodernism is an exploration of the margins, the borders and
limits of the culture of modernity. It is, above all, a central questioning of all forms of
foundationalism and the absolutist and ahistorical categories and values, sustained and propagated
through the symbolic unifying power of the grand narratives, by which ‘man’, ‘reason’, ‘history’
and ‘culture’ were first projected in universalist European terms. Yet postmodernism is more than
an internal deconstruction of modernism and its interpretation of classical reason. Not only does it
challenge the overly rationalist and elitist pretensions of modernism and modernity by exposing the
gender, ethnic, class and sexual biases written into its founding, legitimating ‘myths’ or
metanarratives, but it also seeks an entirely new problematic for understanding the social
construction and self-constitution of individuals as social and cultural subjects.
In Wittgenstein’s notion of culture we have a concept that challenges modern constitutionalism
by criticising the underlying concept of a single unified culture (or nation) as internally uniform and
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geographically separate; a ‘one nation – one State’ promoted through a national curriculum and
established through fostering the connection between national identity and values. Wittgenstein’s
notion emphasises a view of cultures ‘as overlapping, interactive and internally differentiated’
(Tully, 1995, p. 9). Cultures overlap geographically; they are mutually defined through complex
historical patterns of historical interaction, and they are continuously transformed in interaction
with other cultures. Thus, James Tully (1995) explains:
The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is thus aspectival rather than essential: like
many complex human phenomena, such as language and games, cultural identity changes as
it is approached from different paths and a variety of aspects come into view. (p. 11)
He goes on to argue:
As a consequence of the overlap, interaction and negotiation of cultures, the experience of
cultural difference is internal to a culture. This is the most difficult aspect of the new view of
culture to grasp. On the older, essentialist view, the ‘other’ and the experience of otherness
were by definition associated with another culture ... On the aspectival view, cultural
horizons change as one moves about, just like natural horizons. The experience of otherness
is internal to one’s own identity, which consists in being oriented in an aspectival
intercultural space. (p. 13)
The aspectival notion of culture is Wittgensteinian and he suggests that Wittgenstein’s philosophy
provides an alternative world view to the one that informs modern constitutionalism. He is worth
quoting in full:
First, contrary to the imperial concept of understanding in modern constitutionalism ... it
provides a way of understanding others that does not entail comprehending what they say
within one’s own language of redescription, for this is now seen for what it is: one heuristic
description of examples among others; one interlocution among others in the dialogue of
humankind. Second, it furnishes a philosophical account of the way in which exchanges of
views in intercultural dialogues nurture the attitude of ‘diversity awareness’ by enabling the
interlocutors to regard cases differently and change their way of looking at things. Finally, it
is a view of how understanding occurs in the real world of overlapping, interacting and
negotiated cultural diversity in which we speak, act and associate together ... Wittgenstein’s
philosophy explains why we must listen to the description of each member of the crew, and
indeed enter the conversation ourselves, in order to find redescriptions acceptable to all
which mediate the differences we wish each other to recognise. This is a way of doing
philosophy and reaching mutual understanding fit for a post-imperial age of cultural
diversity. (Tully, 1995, p. 111)
Tully explains that Wittgenstein provides us with a pragmatically based concept of culture (and
nation), free from forms of ethnic solidarity as a basis for governance and social action, and no
longer controlled by unreasonable political demands for cultural and national homogeneity.
When we talk about the Other in education, to whom or to what are we really referring?[5]
How is Otherness presented or represented in education? Is it the ‘alienated’ student? The ‘raced’
or gendered student? The cultural Other? The post-colonial subject in the process of education? Is it
the non-Western per se, whether it is constructed as Other in the form of subject, curriculum,
place, philosophy or people? Is education itself an instrument of Othering? To what extent does
Western-styled education whitewash, exoticise, naturalise or sexualise the Other? What is the basis
of differences between Self and Other, and what role does education play in this division? Are all
examples of coming to terms with and theorising the Other in education, even those accounts that
harbour political intentions of emancipation and empowerment, condemned to repeat the mistakes
of cultural imperialism? Are there ways by which the binary opposition of Self and Other –
especially as they have been historically invested in colonial experiences of education – can be
overcome or deconstructed or redrawn so as to avoid the deep conceptual differences and
prejudgements between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘primitive’, between those
inside the gates and those outside the gates?
We should be concerned not only with conceptual analysis but also its political economy of the
present. In education, is globalisation anything more than a contemporary form of westernisation
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Michael A. Peters
that reconstitutes difference in the commodity form? I would like to suggest, more positively, that
the location of Otherness is constructed and fashioned out of our own discomfort with our Selves.
As a series of tropes and aporias that constitute us, this discomfit can be represented as another
time, another place, another people that help us to monitor the shifting boundaries of the Self and,
on occasions and with imagination, to step outside ourselves to view ourselves as Others –
ourselves as Others. Is this (an)Other education?
Notes
[1] A version of this article was presented as a keynote address at the conference ‘Marxism and Poststructuralism in Education’, Pingtang Teacher’s College, Taiwan, October 6-7, 2004.
[2] While advocates of neo-liberal globalisation based on the ‘free’ market and ‘free’ trade have accepted
the mobility of capital and goods, they have not yet come to terms with the mobility of labour or of
people. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2002) in ‘Resident Alien’ begins with the proposition that:
‘Large scale movements of people – renamed “diaspora” – are what defines our time’ – both the
ethics of hospitality and the migrant in metropolitan space.
[3] Immigration figures are revealing in this panic debate: 28% of the roughly 140,000 immigrants in 2003
settling in the United Kingdom were from Europe, the Americas and Oceania; 32% were from Africa;
those from the Indian subcontinent made up 21%; and the rest of Asia comprised 18%. For more
detailed information see the ESRC Factsheet at
http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/facts/index1.aspx (accessed January 6, 2006).
[4] See Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(1), 2006, for a special issue devoted to a discussion of her
work and her reply to her discussants.
[5] The following two paragraphs are taken from my foreword to Ho-chia Chueh’s (2004) book, Anxious
Identity.
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MICHAEL A. PETERS is Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. He holds posts as Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow, Adjunct Professor of
Education at the University of Auckland and Adjunct Professor of Communication Studies at the
Auckland University of Technology. He is executive editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory
(Blackwell) and co-editor of two international online-only journals, Policy Futures in Education and ELearning (Triangle). He has research interests in educational theory and policy, and in
contemporary philosophy. He has published over 30 books and edited collections in these fields,
including most recently: Deconstructing Derrida (with Peter Trifonas; Palgrave, 2004); Education,
Globalisation and the State in the Age of Terrorism (Boulder, Paradigm Press, 2004); Poststructuralism
and Educational Research (with Nick Burbules; Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham and Oxford:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Critical Theory and the Human Condition (2003); Futures of Critical
Theory (2003); and Poststructuralism, Marxism and Neoliberalism: between theory and politics (Lanham
and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).
Correspondence: Professor Michael A. Peters, Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, 358 Education Building, 1310 South 6th Street, MC 708, Champaign, IL 61820,
USA ([email protected]).
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