Abstract
The philosophical underpinning of policy futures has been explicitly and implicitly examined in education in the past decades. This idea encompasses a number of notions that emerge as potential and productive outputs of ‘thinking with philosophy and policy’. It is this thinking that this short paper is concerned with and attempts to articulate. In thinking with policy, we need to always historicise and work with a genealogy of ideas that have led to the contemporary conditions and future shapings – our educational futures. This idea of ‘historicising’, perhaps in a Foucauldian sense of the histories of the present, may also be understood as an idea of past developments, articulations and thoughts that lead to policy statements and the emergence of hegemonic and subjugated policy discourses. However, are discourses enough? Do they provide us with enough opportunities to explore and exemplify what policy is and what it will look like, what shapes it comes in and what potential impacts it might have? In this sense, perhaps it is important not only to ‘historicise’, but also to ‘materialise’, and to focus on the future potential of the linguistic turn by re-fashioning the identity of policy futures, through a movement that is known as ‘new materialism’, ‘post-humanism’ and ‘new empiricism’ (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2012). Indeed, contemporary concerns lead us to think differently than in the past: in 2016, the dream of the European Union and its attempts to maintain a uniting policy network is being challenged; refugee crises and immigration have once more become major policy problems, shaping the direction of nations; and education policy repeatedly finds its way into election campaigns and string statements around the world.
So, thinking of philosophy and policy together, no matter how complex their relationship may be, is a productive space. It is a space in which the human subject can be challenged, a space where the tension in the growth of the human subject as an intellectual, gaining more-than-human and social capital at the same time, is at the heart of any inquiry. Policy that operates on a knowledge base of ‘what works’ in education will always decay, and the production of policy futures will need to constantly secure ways for new policies to evolve, as ideas, contexts, discourses and materials change. Policy, at times, gets caught up in positivist discourses, of easy, nice solutions, trying to return to the era of objective truth and simplistic answers. The idea of ‘evidence’ in policy thus becomes the most prevalent concern: how do we define, collect, categorise and use it to shape our policy futures? Policy exerts its power within the norms of particular contexts. It is the actors in those contexts who believe what is ‘correct’ and what is ‘right’, thus feeling compelled, in one way or another, to continue perpetuating their own status as ‘winners’, and consequently shaping policy futures, uncritically. Such a vision may seem bleak or not particularly open for challenge or resistance. However, despite the appearance of ‘business as usual’ in shaping policy, it is often the smallest cracks in the system that make it possible for particular challenges/challengers to open frontiers to new changes, ontologies and epistemologies. Perhaps to ‘materialise’ and to ‘historicise’, alongside one another, is one response to particular performances of policy that sit outside of normative and normalising possibilities? And perhaps, as more cracks appear, further openings will lead to policy futures that challenge the stasis of business as usual?
Within the modern Continental tradition, it was the Cartesian world that kept policy united both politically, and in terms of the order and ontology of arrangements. This Cartesian world also cultivated and re-developed its time-tested principles and practices of shaping policy – the instruments themselves – including the conceptual frameworks and ethics of the concepts, politics and philosophy in policy futures (Peters and Tesar, 2016). In a landscape where policy is confronted by the dangerous, mostly gloomy and expansionist world of homogeneity, unification and traditionalism, and by the mechanistic repetition and treatment of policy in public spaces, policy futures continually strive to prove a commitment to idiosyncrasy, entanglements and a blurring of policy/philosophy binaries. In other words, the traditional way we looked at policy was instrumental, as a human self-affirmation, which is visible in both our contemporary conditions, and in the way that policy is continuously re-written, or de-written, in a time when our subjectivities are very much connected with the time of being in the anthropocene.
In a certain way, it was also very much policy, and its futures, that produced the reliance on a rather equivocal self-affirmation. We need not contemplate whether there is anything soothing about it, as it does allow for some positive developments. However, particularly in Western policy discourses, it has also led to embracing certain stereotypes that grew from a feeling that policy making and policy makers have human knowledge that is beyond question. There is a certain idea of ‘non-time’ and ‘non-history’ of policy and its futures in Western culture and discourses. Human subjects have become too used to, too comfortable with, any kind of policy that perpetuates ideals, power and ideology, individualism, enlightenment and humanism. They have become too used to the status quo of current policy makings and doings.
But what are the alternatives? Perhaps to historicise and materialise at the same time, to think policy through a philosophical lens and to consider philosophy as a grounding, and an often missing, element of policy might be useful? Would the world and its landscapes explode and collapse upon itself in a rather frenzied fashion if that were to occur? Such ideas give rise to a refreshing belief that policy makers, leaders and all actors responsible for education policy might no longer be the pinnacle of everything that exists and is created in the educational policy world. There was perhaps a time when they were able to be seen as capable of objectively describing, explaining and controlling everything that occurred, possessing the one and only truth about the world and the policies required. That policy time has long gone – and with it, the cult of depersonalised objectivity, objective knowledge amassed and (technologically) exploited into the form of policy. That era of belief in automatic progress, brokered by the scientific method as shaping policy thinking, could be a thing of the past. But could it really? Are we not currently in an era of systems, institutions, mechanisms and statistical averages? Is this not an era of freely transferable, existentially grounded information, ontologies and epistemologies? And are we not in an era of ideologies, doctrines and particular interpretations of reality; an era where the goal is to find a universal policy for the world, which leads to and unlocks the universal path to prosperity? Perhaps, then, if we, and all stakeholders, allowed ourselves to ‘historicise and ‘materialise’ together, it might provide a philosophical grounding to challenge the encroaching objectivism?
Auckland, March 2016